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Of course Janis was special, but there have been other singers endowed with "specialness." She was a great interpretive singer, but there have been many great interpreters. Yet no popular singer of modern times had quite the impact Janis did. Why?
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Part of the answer lies in the fact that Joplin, almost alone among entertainers, was by example making it OK for women to look, sound and act unpretty (read "unfeminine") while at the same time making it all right for them to express sexuality from a posture of strength instead of merely through coyness the way white female pop singers were (and for the most part still are) expected to.
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"In the sweep of her expression, she changes sentiments and sounds that might have seemed undesirable into one inimitable force, both masterful and wild... Through her persona, Joplin proved that traits commonly considered unappealing in women - loud flash instead of elegance, messy charisma over coy acquiescence - could form the basis of a new, heroic female charisma."
- Ann Powers, liner notes to the Janis Joplin 3-CD set, Columbia Legacy, 1993
"Janis Joplin broke down a lot of doors for women in music who'd previously been expected to be dainty wallflowers singing sanitized pop. Now that her catalog has been restored...see where it all began - when Girl Power was truly a struggle and not a marketing ploy."
- Dave Gil de Rubio, The Island Ear, Oct. 1999.
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This is not to say that Janis Joplin made the sole female challenge to pop norms during rock's "golden age." Patti Smith, for example, didn't mind appearing unpretty and singing harshly about revolution and other tough subjects. But unlike Joplin, Smith's poetic and mostly sex-neutral lyrics were not offered as a challenge to the audience to accept the singer as feminine on her own terms. That simply wasn't the point of Smith's music or her persona.
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Patti Smith, early 1970's. Photo © by Lynn Goldsmith
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Joni Mitchell's talent is and always was more purely musical than that of the lay-it-all-on-the-line singers like Joplin and Smith. And Mitchell has repeatedly made it clear that she dislikes being talked of in terms of her femaleness, and rightly considers any term like "greatest female artist" or "greatest female songwriter" as an insult to herself and to other artists who happen to be female. "One thing that I do get tired of all the way along is the 'Women of Rock' articles... My favorite compliments have come from the black community. A blind black piano player said to me, 'Joan, you make genderless, raceless music.'"
- Interview with Jody Denberg, KGSR-FM, Sept. 1998. Full text
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On the folkier side of town, Bonnie Raitt's tradition-steeped blues found a devoted audience, but super-stardom eluded her until she moved into a slicker, more adult-contemporary mode in the 90s.
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Those are just a few of the female artists that challenged the norms of pop. But of them all, Janis Joplin's light blazed the most brightly (albeit the most briefly). Joplin had the advantage of an unprecedented combination of factors: her presence in San Francisco and intimate association with the new and influental
psychedelic blues-rock
style as it was being invented by her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company (along with a few other pioneering acts like Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors); inspired song selection by her partners in Big Brother and by Joplin then and later; an amazing instrument and mesmerizing stage presence; the timely mass-culture influence of the summer-of-love hippie generation that more or less created her and that, to many, she iconized; and a seething, knock-down sexuality on stage that America hadn't seen in a white female performer since Mae West.
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"Joplin belonged to that select group of pop figures who mattered as much for themselves as for their music; among American rock performers she was second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation's mythology. She was also the only woman to achieve that kind of stature in what was basically a male club, the only '60s culture hero to make visible and public women's experience of the quest for liberation, which was very different from men's."
- Ellen Willis, liner notes to the JANIS JOPLIN 3-CD Box Set (Columbia Legacy, 1993)
"The new rock was more than music. Listening alone couldn't convey the whole experience - all the senses were involved...She knew the blues, and wanted her audience to know them through her. If the audience sought to have all its senses aroused at a concert, then Janis, as
trance enhancer, brought total commitment to her music. Hers was not a music born merely of the vocal cords anyway, but an ensemble piece within her
physical presence alone...She delved deep within herself, so that pieces of her soul seemed to dance along the harmonies and ride the tidal waves of sound that
defined her voice."
- Laura Joplin, LOVE, JANIS p. 153 (Villard Books, 1993)
Though Joplin's sound and style could, at their best, transcend artfulness and penetrate to the listener's soul, she had created them through a combination of inspiration, determined study, and practice. She wore her influences on her sleeve, freely crediting the great artists like Bessie Smith and Leadbelly from whom she drew. But the fact remains that the totality of Janis Joplin the performer was something neither the public nor the music establishment of the era had seen before.
And though Joplin's life and works profoundly affected many among her audience, from an artistic standpoint no female pop singer has picked up where Janis Joplin left off at her untimely death.
Halley DeVestern, who has sung Janis's classic songs on tour with Big Brother and the Holding Company, believes that in mainstream pop music it is no female singer at all, but rather...
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Halley DeVestern with Big Brother and the Holding Company, 1999
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Left: Axl Rose. Right: Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes (photo by Jennifer Sultan)
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...Guns n Roses' male singer Axl Rose who picked up Janis's style and ran with it more than anyone else. Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes is another male singer who displays a strong Joplin influence.
Now and then someone comes along who is hailed as the next Janis Joplin, or the inheritor of her style or tradition. But it's never true. Just as there won't be a "new Bob Dylan," there won't be a new Janis Joplin. She was uniquely of her time.
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"I know I don't (at all) sound like Janis Joplin, and yet, whenever we do 'Piece of My Heart,' people just 'hear her' and tell me I sound more like her than anyone else they've ever heard. I take it for what it is... Joplin's impression on people's ears will outlast my own singing career, I'm sure! But it is a very interesting phenomenon that seems distinct to Janis."
- Melissa Mentus, singer and songwriter, Cats Like Angels
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Yet we may wonder why such a profoundly influential artist - whose songs, played in jukeboxes and sung by cover bands all across America, draw both cheering and weeping from generations of women (and sometimes men) to this day - has no direct musical descendents!
If Janis's legacy has come to a dead end, it can be explained to some degree by changing musical tastes. It may well be that at the turn of the millenium people simply aren't going to come out in droves to hear a white soul singer experiment with her chops and song choices, go on stage unafraid to sound unpretty, cover inspired open-it-up numbers as Janis did with songs like "Cry Baby" and "Piece of My Heart" and wring every drop of beauty and heartbreak out of them.
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"In Seattle Women I have had over twenty-five women come through the group and
every one of them has the balls of a 'Joplin'......but they are even
better.......they aren't fatal victims of drugs and alcohol and are still
alive to talk about it. Janis Joplin was carrying on the tradition of Big
Mama Thornton who was carrying on the tradition of Bessie Smith who was
carrying on the tradition of Ma Rainey.........maybe it ain't going on in
pop music but it sure is still happening in the blues........strong women
with a strong message......"
- Kate Hart, blues singer and founder of Seattle Women in Rhythm and Blues
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"We, as a culture, rarely look anymore to our artists to be challenged. We look to them to be entertained. In the words of Kurt Cobain, 'Here we are now, Entertain us.'"
- singer and songwriter Stefanie Fix
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Stefanie Fix
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Although such a singer may find an audience, she is unlikely to become a pop superstar or a cultural icon. The world - the dominant Western musical culture, anyway - has moved on.
In another sense, the rebellion signified by Janis' music and persona did progress, but in nonmusical areas like comedy (Sandra Bernhardt, Roseanne Barr, Whoopi Goldberg), performance art (Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley), and theater, and of course in the "real" world, which has witnessed sexual liberation, the advance of women's rights and status at home and in the workplace, and the increasing visibility and acceptance of lesbians in straight society.
But after bursting into the pop mainstream in the person of Janis Joplin, the tradition of the sock-it-to-'em female blues singer retreated to its natural home in the circumscribed world of the blues.
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SONGS
Another aspect to the question of Janis's legacy is the fact that in what's left of today's rock music market, singers are mostly expected to write their own material. Great singing ability is no indicator of songwriting ability, so we hear fantastic singers who may be vocally on a par with or even superior to Janis Joplin, but who don't break into the pop mainstream because they don't sing songs that stick with you after you hear them. Blues singers, safe in their niche, typically do not feel this pressure to write their own songs.
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It's true that some of today's pop artists have, whether consciously or not, built on what Janis did in her life and art. Polly Jean Harvey, Tori Amos, Courtney Love and Katell Keineg are a few recent examples of songwriter-performers who have (for example) on occasion discovered and trusted their audiences with the beauty in ugliness.
In "Blood Roses" (from Boys for Pele, Atlantic, 1996) Tori Amos, whose vocal control is impeccable when she wants it to be, used both a sinister hiss and a throaty hiccup to magnify the emotions behind the words. On the same album the highly image-conscious singer even tried to undermine her own carefully constructed pixie-goddess persona by including a photo of herself with a piglet suckling at her breast - a gesture that was widely criticized as self-conscious outrageousness but that, I believe, was a (not very successful) attempt by Amos to stress that the earthiness reflected in her sexually explicit lyrics is part of her real physical self too.
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PJ Harvey's harsh moans and shouts are wonderfully effective on her 1992 album Dry (Island) in songs like "Samson and Delilah" and "Sheela-Na-Gig." and also on her more restrained 1995 release To Bring You My Love, especially in the title song. And although on the cover of her 4-Track Demos collection (1993) she appears half-naked in a sexy pose, on the back she is photographed scowling and wrapped to her neck in unsexy plastic.
(This picture is neither of those described, it's just an arty photo of Polly Jean Harvey that I happen to like!)
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On their breakthrough "Live Through This" album (1994), Courtney Love and Hole were the first (and as yet only) female-point-of-view band to successfully graft the angry screaming and raw lyrics of riot-grrl punk onto well-crafted, accessibly melodic pop-rock songs and achieve commercial success with the formula. But the makeup-smeared, beaten quality of Love's image in the videos from that album didn't pose any kind of challenge to society. Rather, she seemed merely to be playing with whorishness.
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A less well known artist with an unusual and impressive style is Katell Keineg, who released a debut album on Elektra in 1994 called "O Seasons O Castles." She possesses an unusual vocal quality that takes some getting used to, and on some of the tracks she made no effort to prettify her tone and even squawked with abandon in the song "Bop."
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Yet on their most recent recordings these artists have backtracked, as if their dalliance with even a restrained vocal ugliness had become too frightening or disturbing. Though we can't know what Janis Joplin would have gone on to do had she lived, she certainly gave no sign of fear during her short, busy career, and on the posthumously released album "Pearl" Joplin was still pushing.
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So I would venture to propose that although Janis Joplin had a unique and powerful voice and a great talent, perhaps what distinguished her from other talented and powerful singers was, more than anything else, her bravery. And that bravery went beyond the fact of her femaleness in a male-dominated culture. It was something Joplin possessed in far greater measure than the average human being.
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Some might suggest that a person who lost herself in drugs and alcohol as much as Joplin did, even unto death, couldn't have been all that brave. But I would argue the opposite: that the weaknesses that caused her self-destructive dependencies were of one essence with her overpowering desire to achieve greatness on every level. The brave are often foolish, and often die young.
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RESOURCES
Official Janis Site maintained by the Joplin family. Highly recommended for any fan!
Love, Janis by Laura Joplin (1992). Biography by Janis's younger sister, including letters home. An insightful biography with a perspective on Janis's childhood and youth that you can't get anywhere else. New paperback version is available at major Internet vendors.
Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols (1999). A well-researched (if somewhat breathless) biography by a contemporary with an obvious and sincere emotional connection to Janis's life and times. Excellent on the Haight-Ashbury culture. Gives a great feel for the times. The author has a bit of an agenda - namely, to prove that "Janis was a lesbian" - but that's actually the least interesting aspect of the book. Overall, very worth reading.
The official Big Brother and the Holding Company website includes several valuable essays by Sam Andrew, Big Brother guitarist and Janis's closest musician friend. It also provides links to other Janis Joplin websites.
Wanna cry? Watch the video called JANIS, released in 1974. Leonard Maltin complains that this documentary "ignores the singer's dark side" because the family cooperated in the filming. But who needs to see the dark side when you know the tragic ending of the story? I cried. Available at major Internet vendors.
GET IT WHILE YOU CAN is my Amazon.com affiliate store, where you can find all the Janis CDs, books and videos you want with one click.
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