But it seems we’re all in the pink plastic grip of fantasy princesshood, so I’ve decided to give in for a moment and take a look at some fairytale-themed pop music – but with a little bit of smarts and sass thrown in. Songs that turn tropes upside down or inside out, or give the princesses unexpected vigourous voice. In this post-Shrek epoch we’re living in, it’s a pretty well-travelled road, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

The reliably-entertaining folks over at Comics Alliance are also having a Princess Moment, which this post is intended as a sort of humorous companion to. It’s not really an Order of Preference so much as a Pile of Stuff, because I’m not in the mood today to be ranking things in a heirarchy. A Pile of Stuff is way better.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This isn’t, of course, the be-all and end-all of anything – just a personal take – so I’d love to hear your own suggestions in the comments, with no rules on style! The only rules were 1) fairytale themed; and 2) attempting (if not always succeeding) to do something interesting.

PART ONE OF MIRANDA’S PILE OF POP PRINCESSERY, FROM 10 to 6!

10. Janelle Monae: Sir Greendown

I throw up my hands here – this is a flagrant excuse for me to talk about Janelle Monae. Her image is more robot warrior rock star than princess. This track is one of her dreamier moments, and I admit that aside from a faintly Angela Carter-esque meet me at the tower/the dragon wants a bite/of our love moment, it’s actually pretty straightforward prince-awaitin’ fare – but actually that makes it a funny little island in the context of the rest of her work (check out the bolshy Motown-tinged slice of pure aural glory that is Violet Stars Happy Hunting! and you’ll see what I mean). Monae is fond of her concept albums, and combines a sci-fi android alter-ego with a deep- seated love for The Wizard of Oz. But the forbidden love of her android persona Cyndi Mayweather and the human millionaire Greendown (the storyline of her album and EPs) kinda is a space-age fairytale. (Oh, and go and listen to Wondaland, too.)

9. Kate Bush: The Red Shoes

Because it’s good to be obvious. For the unfamiliar, Kate made an entire album based on both the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale of the same name (as well as the 1948 film, which also drew on the same text). The story itself is unrivalled, if nightmarish, lecturing Victoriana is your thing – read Anderson’s text here and cringe! – but for Bush it proved fertile songwriting ground. The story’s about a girl whose vain attraction to a pair of red shoes (RED! IN CHURCH! SCANDAL) is punished by an angel – she finds she is unable to take the shoes off, or stop dancing, and ends up having to ask the local executioner to cut off her feet. Which then chase her around. Yeah, her disembodied feet, still dancing, follow her around and haunt her. In the end she repents thoroughly …and dies. As you do. Kate Bush’s version, on the other hand, is a hymn to dancing the dream and making the dream come true and enjoying your desires, even so-called dangerous ones. Or as Prof Bonnie Gordon puts it in this essay, “by singing and reclaiming this story meant to constrain women’s bodies and their erotic potential, Bush confronts and overturns its original inherent violence.”

8. Emilie Autumn: Shallott

Ah, Madame Autumn. Prone to self-indulgence on occasion she may be (The Art of Suicide just bores me, for example) but when she’s on form, she’s good fun. I much prefer her when she’s interacting with a story or old folk tale trope that already exists, like, say, with Rose Red from her debut album Enchant, as opposed to when she’s languidly drawling about how Dead Is The New Alive on far less ethereal later LP Opheliac. Here’s Shallott, in which the famous tragic lady of Arthurian legend and Tennyson’s poem gets a soapbox of her own. Driven to distraction by sheer boredom, preternaturally aware that her life story’s already been written for her, archly quoting her own poem, and almost determined to die as flamboyantly as possible, Autumn’s take on the Lady may be angsty, but she’s also deliciously sarcastic – now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me!, she spits. Worth braving the gothic-girl-lost frills and flounces for.

7. CocoRosie: Werewolf

When I saw CocoRosie live a year or two ago, they took the stage in fake moustaches and proceeded to blow me away. Lyrically, only they know what Werewolf is really about, but I love the sudden changes of direction, the stream-of-consciousness narratives, and the thoughtful melancholy that hangs around my speakers in clouds after the music’s stopped playing. Corny movies make me reminisce / They break me down easy on this generic love shit / First kiss frog and princess … I’m-a shake you off though, get up on that horse and / Ride into the sunset, look back with no remorse…

6. Skye Sweetnam: Part Of Your World

I wanted to include a Disney cover- something done as a pop-punk number with a gutsy, bouncy female vocal. In my head, with a change of context, some spit and elbow grease, the song might come out kinda like the Disney Princess version of No Doubt’s Just A Girl.

A survey of YouTube’s trove of punk/rock Disney covers reveals a really male-heavy bunch of bands. (Ladies, where are you? Where’s my hardcore cover of Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, eh?) This was the closest match for a female-voxed attempt at this song (Ariel’s big ballady number from The Little Mermaid) that YouTube could offer me – I’d have preferred something rougher round the edges, but it’s still good fun. Avril-esque Skye Sweetnam, then: she’s supported Britney live, provided Barbie’s singing voice on a Mattel DVD, fronts metal band Sumo Cyco – VARIED CAREER TRAJECTORY – and overall sounds like Bif Naked on a sugar high (no bad thing in my book). Album B-side Wolves and Witches is also sugary fun, if lyrically a bit join-the-dots.

Haters should note that Miley Cyrus has also had a crack at this song, and by God, she phones it in like nobody’s business, making Skye’s effort sound edgier than Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by comparison.

SO! Readers. Could you do better than Skye? Dust off your Fender. Record it. Get in touch. And I will lavish THE FAME OF BADREP upon you. Provided you don’t sound like a cat in a tumble dryer. (Possibly even if you do.) Extra points if you do Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as a B-side. No wildly feminism-relevant reason. I just like it. (I use antlers in all of my DECCCC-o-rating…)

On that note, come back tomorrow morning for Part Two, in which we discover why Nicki Minaj, Paramore, and … Benjamin Zephaniah (trust me, he’s relevant) are rubbing shoulders.

F

FEMALE

Are you all sitting comfortably?

‘Well, well,’ I thought, as I cast my eye over the (now somewhat bedraggled) series of scrawled lists of letters for the Alphabet shoved into my pockets, bursting out of purses and sketchbooks and rotating in scarcely less tatty form in my head. For the question was obvious: What am I going to do for F? Because, you see, Z, Y, X, all those, they’re not actually that hard. They don’t have that much riding on them. But F … well, from the various incarnations of the F-word onwards … a headache.

Because, you see, the word feminism just isn’t that interesting.

Or rather, its interest lies in its power to evoke wide-ranging, frequently violent reactions while remaining semantically straightforward. Feminism gets precisely a centimetre of a three-column page in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Because it means two very simple and uncontentious things: in rare form, ‘the qualities of women’, and as it is more commonly understood today, ‘advocacy of the claims and rights of women’, first used sometime around 1895. All those extra things, the bad reputation … those are add-ons, and not linguistically valid ones, either. So I turned my attention away from feminism, and thought that perhaps I would go back to basics. After all, how often do we think about what female means?

Hey ho, let’s go.

From http://www.edbatista.com/. Used with permission.

Well, it derives from the Middle English ‘femelle’ via the Latin ‘femella’ which is in turn a diminutive of ‘femina’ (= ‘woman’ – yes, another diminutive. They keep popping up, don’t they?) In its most basic incarnation, female simply means ‘belonging to the sex which bears offspring’. This does not have to involve birthing: let me tell you of the seahorses.

Despite his undisputed ‘masculine’ role, the male seahorse receives a parcel of eggs from the female. Upon doing this, he sets out on an aqueous pregnancy-journey, bearing his unborn sea-foals in a pouch specially evolved for the purpose. During incubation, the female what knocked him up visits him each day for a brief catch-up (approximately six minutes), during which time they revisit the rituals of their courtship (holding tails, doing a little pre-dawn dance, smoking that bud and chillin’).

[Here, you must listen to The Sea Horse by Flanders & Swann. I’ll wait here.]

Unlike words like woman and lady, female therefore has a very precise biological meaning that underscores its subsequent development: it is unsurprising that the next place it shows up in the dictionary is in botany (1791), where it refers to the parts of the plant that bear fruit, or, in reference to ‘a blossom or flower’, ‘having a pistil and no stamens; pistillate; fruit bearing’ (slightly later: 1796). Of course, ‘perfect’ plants are ‘bisexual’ in that they possess both male and female parts (this latter, the ‘gynoecium’, literally meaning ‘woman house’). GCSE Biology ftw.

Alongside this specific development is an extremely general one: ‘consisting of females’, ‘pertaining to women’ (the dictionary quotes Pope on ‘the force of female lungs’), and then ‘characteristic of womankind’ in the seventeenth century and ‘womanish’ in the eighteenth. It is curious that the usage here should be ‘womankind‘ rather than ‘femality’ (of which more presently), since woman seems pretty clearly human, and therefore arguably more subjective, than a simple reference to the egg-bearing species.

How low can you go?

It is exactly this sort of little shift that leads to female‘s seventh meaning, as an epithet of ‘various material and immaterial things, denoting simplicity, inferiority, weakness, or the like’ (one wonders with alarm what ‘the like’ might be). Here, of course, we have the realms of the ‘feminine rhyme’, which, while often weaker, are nonetheless much harder to pull off (and more effective, when successful) than any number of the old Moon and June. And mechanics also gets a shout out: female is there applied (as of 1669) to ‘that part of an instrument or contrivance which receives the corresponding male part’. (I love the dry non-specifics of ‘instrument or contrivance’.) However, it should come as no surprise to find that female eventually passes into apparently exclusively negative use: ‘as a synonym for ‘woman’ now only contemptuous’.

They are no ladies. The only word good enough for them is the word of opprobrium – females.

– Anonymous (1889)

‘Female’ … A circular hole or socket having a spiral thread adapted to receive the thread of the male screw.

– Anonymous (1669)

By way of a postscript: some now rare variants on the word. Femality can be both ‘female nature’ and ‘unmanliness’; feminality refers to ‘a knick-knack such as women like’, and Feminie is ‘Womankind; especially the Amazons‘. We like it when things stay self-referential.

NEXT WEEK: G is for Girl