What's love got to do with it? Absolutely nothing

I don't agree with Justin's take on The Ronettes' "Be My Baby". Aggressive, yes. Voracious too ("For every kiss you'll give me/I'll give you three"); and thanks to Ronnie Spector's slightly flat vocal she's the embodiment of every 16 yr-old girl who wished her boyfriend would crawl thru her bedroom window instead of dropping her off for the night. For the guy on the other end, it's flattering to date a girl with this insatiable a sexual need, but it's also unpleasant and creepy, which is probably producer Phil Spector's (and Ronnie's husband) point.

Thus, when Justin asserts that "`Be My Baby' echoes the recent past without anticipating the changes to come...hardly a feminist highpoint, even if Ronnie did sing the hell out of it," I think he's too hung-up on academic definitions of feminism. The drumbeats that echo into eternity, the wan backing vocals of the other Ronettes, the string section -- female teenage angst had never been flattered with such grandiosity. But he demurs:

Her economic offer places her in a subservient position (emotionally and physically), and her plea sounds more like a male fantasy of female desire than it does an honest proclamation of a woman's right to want.

I give Spector more credit. His production and arrangement, by virtue of its meticulousness, actually legimitizes Ronnie. We may not want her as a girlfriend, but at least she's a human being, with recognizable passions. (To Justin's credit, he seems aware of the paradoxes and acknowledges at a later point, after a rather good interpretation of how Ike Turner exploited wife Tina, that there's "something problematic" about reducing Tina [and Ronnie too?] to "an archetype.")

Let's look at another great artist: Eddie Money. Remember his Top Five hit from 1986? You can all sing "Take Me Home Tonight." Betcha it was the first time you'd ever heard Ronnie Spector, appended to coo, rather wobbily, the chorus of her biggest hit. Besides his no doubt benevolent gesture to give a childhood icon some work, what on earth was Money thinking? Consider: hoary, white, mulletted he-men don't usually allow their women a chance to speak their minds, even when, in this case, all they're doing is validating the male singer's grotesque egoism. "Take Me Home Tonight" recontextualizes "Be My Baby" as the plea for subservience of Justin's nightmares.

The members of the interpretive community of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish's dreams would include both the audience and the context in which the song is recorded, as well as its form (which, of course, leads us to formalist and structuralist interpretations, and too much thinking about what I wanted to forget about grad school).