Read on Twitter
A few thoughts on Phil Spector and his ‘tainted’ legacy. A short thread-ette by me Ann Elk. Which I thought of myself. Htt hmm. My thoughts will now begin. 1/5
The fact that many of those great girl group records were produced by a male psycho doesn't diminish the legacy. It enhances it. Those songs are often about women being treated badly by men. That power relationship is already implicit before we even regard the sicko producer 2/5
The spectre of Spector hanging over proceedings gives added poignancy, resonance and legitimacy to what many of those women are singing about. It makes the power relationship explicit. So you gonna be cancelling the Crystals and the Ronettes now huh? 3/5
The girl group era is constantly written out of pop history. Very few rock historians give it any credence whatsoever. The narrative moves from Elvis and R&R to The Beatles (as we all now know were a girl group by proxy) and happily disregards an entire female agency in pop. 4/5
In fact if you include all the Motown female groups then there was complete continuity throughout the 60s. The girl group era wasn’t just the early 60s, it lasted the entire 60s. Remember, rock was boys way of stealing music from girls. It replaced girl gaze with male gaze. 5/5
So to say the the evil of Spector taints his musical legacy is to show scant regard for what the legacy was in the 1st place. Spector made his name by making the pure female sound of pop soar angelic. That's both complex and now suffused with dramatic bleak and tragic irony.
