Girl Groups Girl Culture

Then He Kissed Me, He's A Rebel, Chains, Stop! In the Name of Love all these songs capture the spirit of an era and an image of girlhood in post-World War II America that still reverberates today. While there were over 1500 girl groups recorded in the '60s--including key hitmakers like the Ronettes, the Supremes, and the Shirelles - studies of girl-group music that address race, gender, class, and sexuality have only just begun to appear. Warwick is the first writer to address '60s girl group music from the perspective of its most significant audience--teenage girls--drawing on current research in psychology and sociology to explore the important place of this repertoire in the emotional development of young girls of the baby boom generation. Girl Groups, Girl Culture stands as a landmark study of this important pop music and cultural phenomenon. It promises to be a classic work in American musicology and cultural studies. Review: ...[Warwick's] thoroughness lends the book-which flies in the face of the notion that producers are musical gods-a sense of much-needed authority. Through [her] Marxist feminist lens, even thin-voiced Diana Ross seems worthy of a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T. --Harp Magazine This eminently readable and groundbreaking book is a must for all girl group fans, and anyone interested in the social history of music and culture during the 1960s. --Readings, Australia Warwick is on solid ground with her arguments, and this book makes strong contributions to popular musicology. Her work on female identity in a popular-music context is particularly innovative. Highly Recommended. --CHOICE