the first round
(2) Helen Reddy, I Am Woman
beat
(15) Steely Dan, Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
164-160
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 8.

Which song is the most bad?
Rikki Don't Lose That Number
I Am Woman

Siân griffiths on “i am woman”

One of my earliest memories is of a protest march in Athens, Ohio. I am perhaps four or five years old, and while my little sister rides in an army green backpack carrier, I am walking, and tired of walking, at my mother’s side.
But we’re not just walking. Together, we are marching—marching for equal rights. This distinction is important. My mother believes that this day, this action, will affect my future. She is a member of the League of Women Votes, and they have organized this march. ERA NOW proclaim the bold blue buttons on every woman’s chest. Athens is hilly and my legs ache and I don’t want to march or walk or move. “This is important,” my mother tells me. “We have to keep going.”

*

I got my first stereo after I got my first job. I was seventeen and the guys I worked with called me “Biscuit Babe” and “Hot Pan,” shouting for more trays as we worked our early morning shift at Hardees. The job paid minimum wage, $4.25 an hour, but a few months’ savings allowed me to order a stereo from a JC Penney catalog that contained CD, dual cassette, and record players. In my car, I played Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, but at home, I raided my parents’ stack of long unplayed LPs, taking the Best of the British Blues (John Mayall, Eric Clapton), the Rolling Stones’ Big Hits Volumes I and II, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, the White Album, and Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. Late into the night, I would play them in turn, setting out cards for solitaire as I sat in front of the speakers, absorbing.

*

When people in my family say I have a good memory, what they mean is, I remember the details. I hold the word “remember” in question. I suspect the details are largely inserted by imagination. Even so, I tend to be right about the broad strokes. The ERA march is a fact as well as a memory. The stereo had a laminated fake oak cabinet, where the records leaned like smokers in an alley.

*

I’ve heard people complain that Reddy’s one-hit-wonder is too soft and lyrical. It’s not forceful, they say, under which I hear, it’s not masculine. “I Am Woman” is a distinctly female anthem. It doesn’t shriek or rant. It doesn’t demand. It doesn’t shove or hit or proclaim. Reddy’s song calmly and lyrically states facts: she is strong; she is wise; she is invincible. These things are as inarguable as a brook or a sky or a songbird.

*

When I teach literature surveys, I give slide show-based lectures summarizing the historical movements of each era corresponding to our Norton anthologies. When we reach the twentieth century, I ask my class, “When did the U.S. Congress pass the Equal Rights Amendment for women?”
They usually stare back, unsure. We are in territory the history books didn’t cover.
“I’ll give you a hint,” I say. “The 14th and 15th amendments, which granted equal rights to men born or naturalized into the U.S. regardless of race or skin color, was ratified in 1870.”
My students guess the women’s rights must have passed in 1890, 1990.
“I’ll give you another hint,” I say. “Women got the right to vote in 1920, and the ERA was proposed in 1923.”
My students guess the 1930s, the 1940s.
“OK, last hint,” I say. “The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.”
They guess the 1960s, the 70s, the 80s.
“Tell us,” they say. “Tell us when it passed.”

*

Even in her depiction of strength, Reddy uses distinctly female imagery, invoking birth itself. Her wisdom is born of pain; she is still an embryo. Childbirth is the benchmark of physical pain, yet when creating icons of strength, popular culture conjures men like Rocky or Rambo. Mothers are low on the list, associated instead with home and love. Only when dressed in the trapping of those tough guys, as Sarah Connor was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, are they able to transcend. In the American imagination, mothers are where we turn when vulnerable. They are places of safety rather than strength. Reddy implies they are both.

*

The light scratching on my mother’s record created a warmth each time I played her records, a kind of sonic hug. As it spun, it was if she wrapped her arms around me and lifted me to her hip. It was as if it said, tired as we might be, we have to stand, to march. We would support each other and move forward.

*

It never passed, of course—the ERA. Not at the national level. Any equality that women have has been fought for in court, not written into law by the United States congress. Any equality we have is fragile. Any equality we have is not actually equality at all.

*

2016 was a year of deaths: Elie Wiesel, Muhammad Ali, Janet Reno, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Gene Wilder, Jim Harrison, William Trevor, Fidel Castro, Florence Henderson, Umberto Eco, John Glenn, Carrie Fisher, Prince.

My mother’s death that March did not make any headlines. She left the world quietly.

*

Some songs take the world by its throat. Some drumbeats kick their listeners in the gut. Some guitars scream until you listen. Some singers growl, some shout, some taunt, some plead, some rant. For most of my life, I gravitated towards those singers, thrashing my way through metal and grunge. Helen Reddy was an exception. Her anthem, pulled from my mother’s collection, makes me go still, reminding me that power can take different, more feminine forms.

griffIMG_1034.jpg

Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah, where she teaches creative writing at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and American Short Fiction (online), among other publications. Her debut novel Borrowed Horses was a semi-finalist for the 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel Scrapple and her short fiction chapbook The Heart Keeps Faulty Time are forthcoming in 2020. Currently, she reads fiction as part of the editorial teams at Barrelhouse and American Short Fiction. For more information, please visit sbgriffiths.com

meghan phillips on “rikki don’t lose that number”

When I started working on this essay, I kept thinking about a joke from a standup special (?) in which a female comedian deadpans “I’m sick of rap songs telling me what to do.” I pride myself on being a pretty good googler, but I couldn’t find where the heck this line was from until I remembered who was serving that deadpan delivery: Aubrey Plaza.
In Judd Apatow’s 2009 film Funny People (her feature film debut), Plaza plays Daisy Danby, an aspiring stand-up comedian and the kind-of love interest of Seth Rogen’s character. We get about 30 seconds of her stand-up and the joke that had been running around in my brain was the bulk of it.

This joke has stuck with me, I think, because I too am sick of songs—all songs, not just rap songs—telling me, and women in general, what to do.

*

There are a lot of songs about women. Like, so many songs about women. Sometimes it feels like every song is about a woman.
There are so many songs about women that a few nights ago, in the middle of cooking dinner, I started to create a list of categories for songs about women.
(It’s worth noting that I listen to a lot AM Gold, you know, Top 40 hits from the late 60s and early 70s, which I guess is my own claim to Badness authority, but is mostly to say that my examples are… not current).
Here are just a few:

It’s that last category that is the one I’m currently most annoyed with, and it’s the one that gets us to what this essay is really about, Steely Dan’s 1974 hit “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”

*

There’s a sliding scale of how rough the imperative mood of each song is in the “I’m Gonna Tell This Lady What to Do” category. On one end, there’s songs like “Rosalita” and “Lay, Lady, Lay” where, yeah the speaker is telling the lady to do something—“Jump a little higher,” “Lay across my big brass bed”—but the action itself is fairly innocuous.
On the other end of the scale, the “oh, hell no” end, is Gary Puckett & The Union Gap’s “Young Girl,” which has to be a top five problematic song of all time. “Young girl, get out of my mind” is not terrible on its own (it’s not great!), but coupled with the speaker’s admission that his “love… is way out of line” and putting the onus of responsibility on the young girl to keep away from him (“better run girl”) it’s simply too much.
“Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” is somewhere near the center of the Imperative Mood Badness Scale for Songs about Women. With no additional context, the speaker’s only crime is audacity. “Rikki don’t lose that number/you don’t want to call nobody else” is a bold assertion, my dude. Even bolder is the bridge where the speaker claims, “You tell yourself you’re not my kind/ But you don’t even know your mind.” Telling a woman you’re trying to pick up to hold on to your number because not only might she change her mind but also it’s possible that she doesn’t even know what she wants is some kind of pick up artist b.s. That’s some Gary Puckett-ass line of thinking.

*

“Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” is Steely Dan’s highest charting single, peaking at #4 on the Hot 100. It’s also a song, like many Steely Dan songs, that makes the people want to take to the message boards and discuss who or what the song is really about.
Here are some things posters think “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” is about: drugs, marijuana in particular, specifically mailing a joint to yourself because that is apparently something that people could do; drug addiction; a gay man’s attempt to seduce a straight man; a young boy’s attempt to impress his crush, an older girl who lives on his block and is moving away; a “poor man’s copyright,” which is a theory that by mailing song lyrics to yourself and keeping the postmarked envelope sealed, you can prove that you wrote the song; a girl who is into group sex but is in denial about it.
Here are some people who are believed to be the titular Rikki: Ricky Nelson, Rick Derringer, Rickie Lee Jones, a woman poster Mike54 dated during the summer of 1997, the headmaster’s daughter from Fagen’s boarding school, a childhood friend of Fagen’s who died, and Rikki Ducornet, the wife of a Bard professor.

*

The other part of my argument for this song’s badness really only works if you subscribe to a specific Rikki theory. One specific Rikki theory. Much like how Stephen King’s 11/22/63 revolves around the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, my theory of badness hinges on Rikki being poet and novelist, Rikki Ducornet.
Fagen has never confirmed that Rikki Ducornet is the Rikki, though Fagen also has a reputation for not wanting to explain his songs. Ducornet, however, has gone on record remembering a conversation that she and Fagen had and the suggestion that he call her, which she never did. In an Entertainment Weekly article from 2006 called “The Origins of Steely Dan,” Ducornet elaborates, “‘I was very tempted to call him, but I thought it might be a bit risky. I was very enchanted with him and with the music. It was so evident from the get-go that he was wildly talented. Being a young faculty wife and, I believe, pregnant at the time, I behaved myself.’”

*

What’s so bad about this, you might find yourself asking. What does the song’s badness have to do with it being about this particular Rikki?
I’m going to answer this question with a question. Did you know the Chevy Chase played in a band with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at Bard College in the late 60s? I didn’t. Probably because it doesn’t come up when people talk to Chase about his work, or when people talk about Chase in general.
When Ducornet’s most recent novel Brightfellow was released in 2016, this is how J.W. McCormack kicked off his article in about it in Publisher’s Weekly: “Let’s get this out of the way: Rikki Ducornet is the subject of Steely Dan’s 1974 hit ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,’ which, regardless of your appreciation of smooth jazz rock, gives her bragging rights of a sort.”
I’m sorry, but has Ducornet not written multiple novels, short story collections, and collections of poetry? Has she not done other things in her life than talk to Donald Fagen at a party that one time?!
Whether or not the song is really about Ducornet, it has colored the way she is perceived. She is that girl from that Steely Dan song. She is a woman whose work and talent has been overshadowed by something created by a dude. And if that’s not bad, then, to quote the song in question, I don’t know. 

Badness Photo.jpg

Meghan Phillips is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her flash fiction chapbook Abstinence Only is forthcoming from Barrelhouse Books. Her writing can be found at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets @mcarphil.

Want to get email updates on new games and all things March Xness during February and March? Join the email list: