[MUSIC] Donna Summer, "Bad Girls"
I thought of Donna Summers' 1979 "Bad Girls" a couple of Saturdays ago, when, walking west to the College subway station at about midnight, I ended up walking past some female sex workers standing on the southeastern corner of Church and Carlton.
Church and Carlton is located just to the south of Church and Wellesley, east of Yonge Street, and shares in the poverty and relative deprivation common to much of downtown Toronto east of Yonge Street. The intersection isn't far at all, actually, from Dundas and Sherbourne, the intersection that anchors the pleasantly-named neighbourhoods of Garden District and Moss Park and that is well-known as Toronto's most violent neighbourhood, "ground-zero in Toronto's drug scene" and (perhaps not coincidentally) a major centre of Toronto's street prostitution. Even though it isn't any more than ten or fifteen minutes' walk from the glittering towers of the downtown where the G20 will be meeting, with presuambly inexpensive land prices and an excellent location, the neighbourhood hasn't been partially gentrified on the model of Cabbagetown. Stay away, the apartment listings explicitly warn.
"Bad Girls" is a humane song, one fitting squarely into the idealized disco tradition of reaching out to the marginalized, recognizing their humanity, and making something lucratively danceable about it all. The women who walk the streets in her song--not only women, not in reality and probably not on that particualr streetcorner at that particular time--are people, less lucky than most but people worthy of respect nonetheless.
See them out on the street at night, walkin'
picking up on all kinds of strangers
if the price is right you can score
if you're pocket's nice
but you want a good time
you ask yourself, who they are?
like everybody else, they come from near and far
[. . .]
Now you and me, we are both the same
but you call yourself by different names
now you mama won't like it when she finds out
her girl is out at night
(And for the record, when I accidentally sent my mother and sister to stay in a bed and breakfast at Dundas and Sherbourne back in 2005--hey, it was very close to the downtown and the prices were great!--they didn't like the neighbourhood but didn't feel threatened by the sex workers that they passed on the street to and fro. Neither did I.)
My [MUSIC] posts tend to be about how I relate music to myself, how it illuminates area of my own life, even influencing my development over time. What got me to write this [MUSIC] post is how, in that free-associating moment, I realized that I might connect music closely to my own life, I might connect it to trends in the culture at large, but I do not connect it nearly enough to others' lives. It is a failing of empathy on my part, likely the product of the way I acquired my own tastes in music: quietly, without much attention for what else was going on or what other people liked, laden with so much personal meaning that it never quite got through that music could have the same strong meanings for others that it did for me, representing their life or communicating hopes or something similarly auto/biographical. "I have issues--he has issues--we have issues together."
Church and Carlton is located just to the south of Church and Wellesley, east of Yonge Street, and shares in the poverty and relative deprivation common to much of downtown Toronto east of Yonge Street. The intersection isn't far at all, actually, from Dundas and Sherbourne, the intersection that anchors the pleasantly-named neighbourhoods of Garden District and Moss Park and that is well-known as Toronto's most violent neighbourhood, "ground-zero in Toronto's drug scene" and (perhaps not coincidentally) a major centre of Toronto's street prostitution. Even though it isn't any more than ten or fifteen minutes' walk from the glittering towers of the downtown where the G20 will be meeting, with presuambly inexpensive land prices and an excellent location, the neighbourhood hasn't been partially gentrified on the model of Cabbagetown. Stay away, the apartment listings explicitly warn.
Click to view"Bad Girls" is a humane song, one fitting squarely into the idealized disco tradition of reaching out to the marginalized, recognizing their humanity, and making something lucratively danceable about it all. The women who walk the streets in her song--not only women, not in reality and probably not on that particualr streetcorner at that particular time--are people, less lucky than most but people worthy of respect nonetheless.
See them out on the street at night, walkin'
picking up on all kinds of strangers
if the price is right you can score
if you're pocket's nice
but you want a good time
you ask yourself, who they are?
like everybody else, they come from near and far
[. . .]
Now you and me, we are both the same
but you call yourself by different names
now you mama won't like it when she finds out
her girl is out at night
(And for the record, when I accidentally sent my mother and sister to stay in a bed and breakfast at Dundas and Sherbourne back in 2005--hey, it was very close to the downtown and the prices were great!--they didn't like the neighbourhood but didn't feel threatened by the sex workers that they passed on the street to and fro. Neither did I.)
My [MUSIC] posts tend to be about how I relate music to myself, how it illuminates area of my own life, even influencing my development over time. What got me to write this [MUSIC] post is how, in that free-associating moment, I realized that I might connect music closely to my own life, I might connect it to trends in the culture at large, but I do not connect it nearly enough to others' lives. It is a failing of empathy on my part, likely the product of the way I acquired my own tastes in music: quietly, without much attention for what else was going on or what other people liked, laden with so much personal meaning that it never quite got through that music could have the same strong meanings for others that it did for me, representing their life or communicating hopes or something similarly auto/biographical. "I have issues--he has issues--we have issues together."