#238/888
June 1985
Carly Simon
Spoiled Girl
Genre: AOR
3.25 out of 5
I can’t speak for feminism, although I have been accused (sometimes correctly and incorrectly) of mansplaining. I am a man. I do like to explain things. Much of that has less to do with male chauvinism than it does Dunning-Krueger.
So, maybe I’m the wrong person to be reviewing this record because to me it sounds like everything that the Ani Difrancos and Riot Grrls would be backlashing against a few years later.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about “My New Boyfriend” and the exultation of the wedding bed in “Tonight and Forever” (or maybe I’m reading that wrong…). Carly is singing for and about women and that’s terrific but I fear that her filter is still boomer engendered. Like my mom, who was fiercely pro-woman but admitted that she couldn’t navigate life without the support (financial and emotional) of a man. After my father died she landed another breadwinner within 18 months and, make no bones about it, that was the trade off. She was looking for someone to take care of her financially. And I’ve experienced this conundrum with a few boomer women. The contempt of having to have their lives cared for by an “other” but also raised without the tools to do it themselves, a husband being the only thing they know and can wrap their heads around. It must have been very hard for that generation. But I am grateful to them for breaking down some walls for the next group, and, now, my daughter.
It strikes me that Simon is trying to tell those stories. “Spoiled Girl” has contempt for them and “Tired of Being Blond” being a song of emerging independence.
There’s not enough teeth here, though and Carly is showing her age and by that I mean, she is not leading a generation. She is, more like, reporting on them from the oldsters position and unwilling to give way.
Listening to “Interview” I can’t help but think that, in a different running order, this album is a concept album about the life cycle of a relationship from this particular woman’s perspective.
Boy, that was a lot of words for an album that is really pedestrian.
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