Showing posts with label song. Show all posts
Showing posts with label song. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

To Banish the Earworm: "If We Were Married" by Shaina Taub (1/8/25)

An ear with three arrows containing identical music pointing at it
Last night, somewhat to my morning chagrin, I taught “If we were married” from Shaina Taub’s Suffs (2022) in my Women and Music class. I’d seen the whole musical in the Fall, and this jaunty hit about gender discrimination in marriage back in the 1910s stuck with me. Our classroom take-away: music in good hands can function effectively as feminist critique. However, I had an additional personal take-away: bits of the song have been stuck in my head all morning.

The song is sung in alternation, Dudley leading and Doris providing a gender-informed counter-perspective to each of his observations. It’s a familiar set-up, one most of us would recognize as informing the structure of Stephen Sondheim / Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story. In each song, we swing from one perspective to another at a lively clip. Bernstein’s perspective juxtaposes Rosalia’s nostalgia for Puerto Rico with Anita’s tart rejoinders:

WEST SIDE STORY (Broadway lyrics)

ROSALIA: I'll drive a Buick through San Juan.
ANITA: If there's a road you can drive on.
ROSALIA: I'll give my cousins a free ride.
ANITA: How you get all of them inside?

(This is reframed as a dialog of women vs men in both of the film versions, but the song is well worth a re-listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoQEddtFN3Q )

In comparison with Bernstein, Taub’s exchange between Dudley and Doris gives each character more extended space to elaborate on their perspective. She builds an antecedent-spun-out-consequent phrase pair instead of a single phrase each like the West Side Story number:


SUFFS

  • DUDLEY: If we were married / I'd promise to cherish you just as a gentleman should
  • DORIS: If we were married / I'd promise to forfeit my legal autonomy <syncop> for good
  • DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd buy our own acre of land for our own little house
  • DORIS: If we were married / Our possessions and property would solely belong to the masculine spouse
  • BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married


Cherish or forfeit: the gendered nature of the marriage divide is laid out clearly in Taub’s narrative, and the clever rhyming of house with its imagined future of belonging “to the masculine spouse” sets the groundwork of the song firmly into the space of feminist advocacy. Doris is, after all, secretary for the suffragist organization, and so grounded in the bureaucratic and legal realities of women’s (absence of) rights.

But while Bernstein’s “America” breaks into the famous hemiola ( 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1 & 2 & 3 &), Taub uses a different strategy to enliven her narrative. Having already spun out the consequent clause into two units, the second strophe breaks down in the fourth line, as Doris’s iteration of women’s legal and economic oppression refuses to fit to the planned structure. 

  • DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd fill out our family, and life would be simply sublime
  • DORIS: If we were married / I'd sure have your children, 'cause <syncop> contraception's a federal crime
  • DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd save up a nest egg to cushion us later in life
  • DORIS: If we were married / My earnings would be in your name / And I couldn't control my own spending / Or open a bank account, or sign a contract, or hire a lawyer / Because economically speaking / I die by becoming your wife
  • <PAUSE>
  • BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married

How does that work? Doris’s frustration with inequality is made manifest by insistent and extended repetition. Instead of an antecedent and two consequent phrases (b1 and b2), we get stuck on b1, which is itself made up of a three note rising motive – for a total of fifteen statements, instead of three!

DORIS: 
  •   a    If we were married /
  • b1    My earnings would be in your name /
  • 2 And I couldn't control my own spending /
  • 3 Or open a bank account,
  • 4 or sign a contract,
  • 5 or hire a lawyer /
  • 6 Because economically speaking /
  • b2    I die by becoming your wife

We had already known to listen to Doris as the “interesting” partner. She uses syncopation – pausing where we were expecting sound, and then delivering some kind of “kicker” clause. I’d be giving up my rights, she says. For good. It’s a clever rhythmic framing.

The second half of the song has a contrasting segment in which Doris muses about how women buy into the patriarchal system: “Daughters are taught to aspire to a system / Expressly designed to keep 'em under control.” She bemoans the legality of domestic violence within marriage – a situation which surprises Dudley (and in the story line helps to awaken him to the need for the suffrage movement, moving him toward a role of advocacy), asking the kicker: “Can you believe it is 1916 / And all of these things are still actually true?”

Questioning patriarchal systems is serious stuff, but set here to a boppy tune with swing overtones. The humor helps to frame the lesson in ways that the protagonists (and the audience) can hear the disconnect of romance and reality, and recognize for themselves the injustice of that very disconnect.

Why am I writing about it? Because after hearing it, it totally got stuck in my head, particularly the repeated “if” clauses (“if we were married…”) and also Doris’s rolling extension of the second stanza. Both those parts invoke underlying and ongoing worries I have about historical echoes, since injustices from 1916 have uncomfortable resonances with the present day. 

But also, and perhaps more importantly, the tune is just plain sing-songy – simple, approachable, and repetitive without being boring. And it swings. In short, the front part of the song can definitely be classed as earworm worthy!

And now, having paid “If we were married” close attention (yes, brain, okay, we can spend time with it), now I’m going to go put on some Hildegard, and settle into my administrative duties for a while.

Happy listening. May your earworms be pleasant teases for you, just as this one has been for me!

 

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