It would difficult for a book called "The Importance of Music to Girls" to not come off as condescending or offensive. But that is title that writer/poet Lavinia Greenlaw (or her publisher?) chose for her personal memoir.
While I agree with this quote from a review that ran in the Independent, a UK newspaper...
Greenlaw review in the Independent
"A better title for the memoir might have been "How Some Middle-Class Girls Quite Like Dancing to Music and Think It Is a Good Way to Meet Boys".
... I don't feel like knocking the book as hard as I did while I was in the process of reading it.
Predictably; youthful shallowness, peer pressure and crises of identity appear throughout the book...
Greenlaw's memories of learning how to play a musical instrument??
"I cannot remember the sound I made on the violin and I did not enjoy trying to play it, but I liked to hold and carry it"
Her evolving association with music and dancing, then fighting, then as a way of breaking into a social ring and ultimately gaining a sense of belonging led her to this declaration.
"As I came to understand music as social currency, I realized I needed to declare an allegiance"
So she chose to affiliate herself with "punk" (music and fashion); then "new wave"
"Punk had nothing to do with being a girl. it neutralized, rejected and released me. I made myself strange becasue I felt strange and now I had something to belong to, for which my isolation and oddness were credentials."
But after being exposed to the music (via records and live shows) of Bowie, Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Joy Division, Slits, Swell Maps, etc she realized that she longed for a dance that had steps that she could follow. And a social scene with cues as orderly as the entries on a dance card.
After her boyfriend stopped calling her and Ian Curtis committed suicide she became aware that music was no longer a catalyst in her life. Or maybe she was called out as a "poseur". Either way... she decided to take up writing.
"for all the changing and saving of the world, for all the not being a girl, for all the black and white of it, the rising above and stepping aside, and for all that music had carried and shaped and shown, this was the truth: the carriage return"
Shortly thereafter the book comes to an abrupt end.
There is more to be gained from music than a refined sense of self-awareness. And "being" or "not being" a boy or girl is not always as black or white of an issue as it is to Greenlaw.
But she writes well and her skills have taken her further than the dancefloor and a mastery of the exchanging of phone numbers. Based on what I've read in recent interviews; she maintains an appreciation for music that is deeper than most in her age bracket.
And as crappy and misrepresentative the title of the book is; I probably wouldn't have picked it up otherwise.
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