Sam Morrison
Sam Morrison is a MA candidate in media studies at the New School. He comes to the field from an academic and performance background in music and continues to study how music exists within the world of media and within the social: its transmission and interpretation, its relationship with both social conditions and the composer and performer as subjects, and the learning processes and knowledge systems associated with it. Dedicated to creative and production work in addition to research and writing, Sam is involved in composition, sound design and post-production, Max/MSP programming and video. Besides his pursuits related to music and sound, he deals with multiple media forms through working in art museums and galleries and on film productions.
Bob, Meet Roberta: Re-performing and Re-gendering ‘Just Like a Woman’
In this paper, I take Roberta Flack’s recording of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” as a case study wherein a “cover” song adds new possibilities for “reading” a work of pop music, and in particular complicates the song’s expression of subject and gender. Flack’s recording plays with the gendered content of Dylan’s original as she assumes subjective narration in a female voice, while her subtle changes in lyrics shift the relationships depicted.
The central idea I pursue here is that while theories of gender and popular music form our understanding of “performance,” we can best understand a cover song as “re-performance.” Just as the original plays on the song-as-composition, the cover version signifies on the original. My analysis relies on Simon Frith’s work on cultural roles of popular music and on Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance; other analyses of these musicians provide additional interpretations of their choices. I direct these understandings of Dylan and Flack individually toward reading how one interprets the other. This approaches the elusive question of pop’s meaning by exploring how a “covering” voice can re-code and re-imagine that meaning.