Sex Roles DOI 10.

1007/s11199-014-0362-z

BOOK REVIEW

The Real Hot Mess: The Sexist Branding of Female Pop Stars
Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars. By Kristin J. Lieb, New Y ork, Routledge, 2013. 194 pp. $29.95 (paperback) ISBN:978-0-415-89490-6
Jane Caputi

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

I regularly teach an interdisciplinary undergraduate class, Introduction to Sexuality and Gender Studies and it is not easy to find the right books to use. One needs not only a core, survey-type text, but also additional books that delve into specialty areas, simultaneously providing grounding in core definitions and theoretical concepts and putting them to a most interesting application. Gender , Branding and the Modern Music Industry is focused on female pop stars in the United States music industry. It is an ideal book for use in this class and I am sure it will be equally useful for others teaching courses with a U.S. focus in Communication and Multimedia, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Popular Culture Studies and some Sociology and Marketing classes. Some years ago, bell hooks, in an interview with Sut Jhally (1997), noted the benefits of teaching critical theoretical paradigms while putting them into the context of popular culture, which makes these paradigms not only easier to grasp, but more exciting to students. Gender , Branding, and the Modern Music Industry ably accomplishes this goal, while taking in a number of theoretical paradigms and research methods. It also includes the author s incorporation of information gained through her interviews with key players in the music industry in the United States. And it remains an easily graspable and digestible work. The theoretical grounding for Gender , Branding, and the Modern Music Industry is drawn from a number of intersecting academic fields, including communication and multimedia studies, women and gender studies, sociology, popular culture and marketing. Kristin J. Lieb is an Assistant Professor of marketing communication at Emerson College in Boston and she also brings experience as a freelance writer for
J. Caputi (*) Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA e-mail: jcaputi@fau.edu

Billboard, http://www.billboard.com/, and Rolling Stone, http://www.rollingstone.com/. These journalistic skills are evident in her facility for clear expression. Lieb is particularly good at defining essential theoretical terms and concepts (polysemy, hegemony, the male gaze, symbolic interactionism , objectification , coding and decoding , heteronormativity, sexualization, branding, and so on). The book is laid out logically, first introducing critical frameworks, largely drawn from sociology, to consider the construction and reception of female pop stars. This is followed by an examination of stars as brands, the socio-cultural and business milieu of the modern U.S. music industry, an in-depth look at the oppressive gendered and sexualized branding leading to constrained and shortened lifestyle of the female pop music star, and, finally, an examination of the interdisciplinary theoretical foundations (popularity, gender performance, sexualization, everyday pornography, and popular cultural studies) that underlie the study. Lieb begins with Wendy Griswolds concept of a cultural diamond, which sets up four points of interaction: the social world, cultural object, creator, and receivers (p. 2), all of which, she argues, are crucial for understanding the context for the construction of the female pop star. Key to Liebs analysis, as her title indicates, is branding and the fact of the pop star as a kind of commodity. We feel like we know her . . . But what we really know is her constructed advertised brand. . . the end product of myriad professional authors, all struggling to select the brand meanings they presume will work best with her intended audiences (p. 31). Sexism and accompanying gendered conventions make the female pop star brand especially problematic, mostly because she is almost guaranteed to have a shorter career as women age out of the desirable range for female sexuality and beauty (pp. 8889). Because of this, female popular music stars are considered high-risk investments given their relatively

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short-term careers and the tremendous amount of money it takes to market them successfully (p. 32). For many readers, the most compelling chapter might be the fourth, where Lieb lays out her original concept of The Lifecycle for Female Popular Music Stars, deepened by the insights gleaned through her interviews with the music industrial professionals. Using these and related research, she arrives at the Lifecycle Model (p. 87) that details the stages that most female pop stars go through. This predictability (which is furthered by the rise of social media) is possible because the stars are cultural objects, creators to be sure, but ones who by no means are solely responsible for their images, sounds or narratives. They are not only managed, but have become a form of public property, with everyone, including fans, believing they own a piece. As the interviewees confirm, female pop stars must be able to epitomize and emphasize beauty and sexuality; they must be willing to show and tell all to their demanding audiences; they must harness the power of their personal narratives and leverage their core product or assettheir bodies and perceived sexual availabilityinto as many other entertainments areas . . . . as possible (p. 89). As Lieb points out, in other industries this relentless sexual objectification of female workers could be considered a form of sexual harassment, but in the music industry it is so entrenched that it raises virtually no comment. Throughout, she speaks to the ways that male pop stars have much greater freedom and flexibility; they have the option to, but need not define themselves by their sexual appeal and physical beauty. As such, they have the opportunity to have longer and more lucrative careers than most of their female counterparts. This lifecycle ranges over various career stages that read like a listing of harmful, sexualized stereotypes. Lieb incorporates the terminology used by her interviewees to name these as: the good girl (p. 94), who is almost always, as she ages, turned into the temptress (p. 102). This conglomerate of good girl and bad girl is perhaps the most ancient sexist stereotype, ensuring that women and girls are defined to suit the varying needs of men. In 2009, Lieb writes, the former Disney star and good girl, Miley Cyrus, trying desperately to break free of her Disney origins, had presented herself as a pole-dancing, penis-cake chomping temptress (p. 108). This conglomerate of the good girl and bad girl, moreover, long has functioned to justify rape and other forms of abuse, something that many read as operating behind the lyrics of the 2013 mega-hit, Robin Thickes Blurred Lines. This song was notoriously performed in August 2013 (after this book was published) by Thicke in conjunction with Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards (Wyatt 2013). Applying Liebs Lifecycle Model to Cyruss career, we can consider whether by 2013, with this performance, she had, already, moved into the provocateur stage. For, Lieb writes, those female pop stars who hope to continue their career beyond the temptress stageand

many do not (p. 9091)have six possibilities they (and their handlers) can try to develop. These are: change of focus; diva; whore; exotic (often a place, as would be expected in a racist culture, for women of color) (p. 114); provocateur; and hot mess (a label for a star engaging in public self-destruction) (pp. 9091), a stage into which such stars at Britney Spears fell and Amy Winehouse did not survive (pp. 124125). Lieb engages the interest of the reader as she reads the careers of a variety of stars, who have traversedor, with various degrees of success, refusedthese stages, including Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, Fiona Apple, Adele, and Madonna. She is particularly insightful in reviewing the career path of Aguilera, who showed signs of precipitating a terminal plunge in the whore category, but managed to reposition herself, largely due to her role on the popular television show The Voice. While Lieb does not devote much attention to Madonnas early career (which is amply covered in other scholarship) (e.g., Schwichtenberg 1992; Fouz-Hernandez and Jarman-Ivens 2004), she does make a case for Madonnas achievement in the face of industry sexism to remain popular and relevant as a female solo artist more than 30 years into her career (p. 156). In 2012, she performed at the Super Bowl, defying age expectations by rocking the halftime show (p. 156). Lieb calls out the media for, in effect, ignoring this achievement and focusing all attention on M.I.A.s immature and rude gesture, where she flipped the bird to the world-wide audience, taking on the role of provocateur, while trying to revive her own flagging career. Gender , Branding and the Modern Music Industry is an ideal text for use in classes and is notable for its lucid presentation of complex and necessary theoretical frameworks and paradigms. There is one area, however, that could be more developedwhat feminist theorists call intersectional analysis (Crenshaw 1991; Cho et al. 2013). Intersectional analysis insists on attention to the ways that multiple grounds of identity make for different experiences for members of a group such as women. These experiences significantly affect power distribution, levels of oppression and social definition. Lieb does take differences among women into some account, for example, in her discussion of the exotic (pp. 114118). There, she recognizes that the basic model for the female pop star is that of a slender, white woman, and that race and ethnicity as well as size can cause a performer to fall outside this model, which can have an adverse effect on her career unless she is able to operationalize her exoticism as something beneficiale.g., a factor that makes her mysterious and/ or sexy. Still, it would be helpful to the overall project had Lieb incorporated more of an intersectional approach in delineating how women who occupy multiple identities (e.g., the woman of color pop star) experience the branding process differently. Patricia Hill Collins (2004, p. 120), in Black Sexual Politics,

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writes that White Western normality becomes constructed on the backs of Black deviance, with an imagined Black hyperheterosexual deviance at the heart of the enterprise. The good girl or virgin in the Western imagination is the white girl, while the temptress, paradigmatically, is a darker one, racially and otherwise. Blondeness, as Madonna or Miley Cyrus work it, furthers ones ambitions (Hooks 1992, p. 158). Blondeness/whiteness also allow them to play the role of the whore but, by virtue of being white women, not having it stick to them in the same way that it might for a racially- and class- stigmatized performer such as Lil Kim (McGlynn 2004), who came to be known as the Hip-Hop Madonna (Morgan 2005). Joan Morgan, positively reviewing Lil Kims 2005 album, The Naked Truth, notes that both Madonna and Lil Kim first created hypersexualized personas, but when the time came for reinvention, for Madonna that meant raising some kids, getting married, relocating to Europe, acquiring a new accent, and writing childrens books. For Kim it means a prison bid and stepping bravely into the fullness of who she is as an MC and a woman. Lil Kims viability as a successful female pop star was not sustained through this transformation, though Madonnas was. One core point of Liebs book is encapsulated in her contention that the female pop star is a brand, as familiar and aspirational as Coca-Cola (p. 13). As such, she invites readers to think about the ways that the pop star not only refreshes us, but also provides the entertainment equivalent of empty calories, potentially able to harm the receivers of these brand messages (e.g., around the requirement that looks take precedence over talent and basic capabilities). And, again rather like Coca-Cola, the female pop star as consumer object seems to be designed to tap into the back of your mind, possibly structuring aspirations in ways that lead to ill effects including hyper-sexualization and objectification, body image dissatisfaction and eating disorders, depression, violence against women, and a lack of strong, positive female figures for young women to aspire to (p. 164). Lieb recognizes that individual pop stars (as well as their fans) do openly critique the sexist branding, offering and seeking resistant modes of celebrity and gender expression. She concludes by offering People to Watch, a number of celebrities who embody this practice (Ashley Judd, Adele, Madonna, Alabama Shakes and Kelly Clarkson). While teaching this book, I would supplement it with some of the current intersectional feminist analysis that now attends debates over the meanings communicated by such brands as that of Miley Cyrus (Crunktastic 2013; Freeman 2013; LaFevers 2013; Wyatt 2013) (whose performance of a form of Hip-Hop dance, twerking while employing larger-sized Black women as prop-like background dancers was criticized as racist), or Beyonc, who, despite adherence to conventional beauty and sexuality standards, declares herself a feminist and whom many of her

fans embrace as such (Harris 2013; Hobson 2013). Still, I heartily recommend this lucid, intelligent and excellent study and welcome it as a valuable theoretical and research model, and as a work that will greatly enhance mine and others communication of these ideas in both the graduate and undergraduate classroom.

References
Collins, P. H. (2004). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender , and the new racism. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 12411299. doi:10.2307/1229039. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 785810. doi:10. 1086/669608 Crunktastic. (2013). Twerking makes the Oxford dictionary on the anniversary of hurricane Katrina. Crunk Feminist Collective. Retrieved from http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2013/08/29/ twerking-makes-the-oxford-english-dictionary-on-the-anniversaryof-hurricane-katrina/. Fouz-Hernandez, S., & Jarman-Ivens, F. (Eds.). (2004). Madonna s drowned worlds: New approaches to her cultural transformations. Surrey: Ashgate Pub Ltd. Freeman, H. (2013). Miley Cyruss twerking routine was cultural appropriation at its worst. The Guardian, Aug. 27. Retrieved from http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/miley-cyrustwerking-cultural-appropriation. Harris, T. W. (2013). All hail the queen? Bitch: Feminist response to pop culture, Summer, 59. Retrieved from http://bitchmagazine.org/ article/all-hail-the-queen-beyonce-feminism. Hobson, J. (2013). Why feminists [should] care about Beyonc. Ms. Magazine, Summer, 4245. hooks, b. (1992). Madonna. Black looks: Race and representation (pp. 157164). Boston: South End Press. Jhally, S. (Producer/Director).(1997). bell hooks: Cultural criticism and transformation [DVD]. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. LaFevers. C. (2013). Thinking about cultural appropriation, racism, white privilege, and Miley Cyrus. The Feminist Wire. Sep. 8. Retrieved from http://thefeministwire.com/2013/08/mileys-finger-is-pointingat-you-stereotypes-plus-objectification-equals/. McGlynn, A. (2004). Lil' Kim. In M. Hess (Ed.), Lil Kim. Icons of hip hop: Encyclopedia of the movement, music and culture (pp. 349 456). Westport: Greenwood. Morgan, J. (2005). From a different place. Village voice 50. November, C88. Schwichten berg, C. ( 1992 ). Th e Mado nna con nection : Representational politics, subcultural identities, and cultural theory. Westview Press. Thicke, R. (featuring T.I. and P. Williams). (2013). Blurred lines. Retrieved from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/robinthicke/ blurredlines.html. Wyatt, D. (2013). The tongue, the twerking, the teddy outfit: Should someone have stopped Miley Cyrus VMA performance? The Independent. Aug. 28. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co. uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-tongue-the-twerking-theteddy-outfit-should-someone-have-stopped-miley-cyrus-vmaperformance-8785494.html.