feminist blogs

The new guy at work brought me salsa today. Tomorrow, I am bringing him soup. Yay, new guy! Yay, food exchanges!

Also, I don't know if I mentioned this already, but I'm interviewing two potential housemates this week. First, it's coffee with the apparently radical single dad who has participated in a vegetarian cooking cooperative, and has worked on an organic farm. Then, it's gingerbread pancakes with the seemingly adorable self-described "dorky" apparently stereotypical Austin slacker woman.

Decisions, decisions! This ought to be interesting. Provided they both like me, of course...it seems like I could go either way and still come out ahead.

We'll see. It seems like spring will be a great transition for me. Winter was fun, too...but I'm ready for some new stuff to be happening in my life.

Since we know how much the Republicans love Big Brother these days, and get aroused over governmental spying on citizens, this should probably not be a surprise:

This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: “So if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are.”

Privacy schmivacy! This is the GOP Rootkit, part of their Political Rights Management Program! Your business is Karl Rove's business! Your privacy aids terrorists!

These practices fall way below the standard for today’s polling firms and web sites. The norm for polling firms is to anonymize the data and report only statistical totals. The norm for commercial web sites is to have a privacy policy, with Federal Trade Commission enforcement if the web site breaks its privacy promise.

Without a privacy policy, the state party can tell your views to anyone at all. If you give the “wrong” answers on abortion or other issues, they can tell your boss, members of your church, or anyone else. In fact, these answers could get distributed to campaigns in your town during get-out-the-vote efforts – precisely the place where “wrong” answers can be most damaging.

GOP = Get Over Privacy.

In a comment, SpudgeBoy points out that this is illegal. All I can say is "Since when has that stopped the Republicans?"

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Technorati tags: news civil rights crime Culture of Corruption politics Republicans

To everyone over the past 8 months or so who tried to contact me via the feedback link, I apologize for not responding. I've been playing musical computers and hard drives over the past year, and somewhere along the line an email account feel out of the loop. All those feedbacks ended up on the server, but they were not being pulled down ... until today.

I replied to some of you personally before just giving up and deciding on this blog post. Of course, those who took the most offense at my non-responsiveness probably aren't reading mediagirl.org any more.

Anyway ... sorry about that.

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Technorati tags: announcement website issues

Lest you think it's all about abortion, just take a look at how the Bush Administration has been quietly fighting women's access to birth control.

Senior Food and Drug Administration officials must testify about the federal agency's failure to decide whether a controversial emergency contraceptive pill may be sold without a prescription, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled late Friday.

The decision by Magistrate Viktor Pohorelsky came in response to FDA legal efforts to keep secret the agency's discussions and correspondence about the pill, called Plan B.

Barr Pharmaceuticals of upstate Pomona makes Plan B. Barr bought the rights to the drug from Women's Capital Corp., which in 2003 applied for approval to sell it over the counter. Barr pursued the application. Two advocacy groups and nine women from a group called the Morning-After Pill Conspiracy sued the FDA in January 2005, alleging it ignored a statutory deadline for deciding whether Plan B could be sold without prescription. In December, the FDA lost a motion seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed.

Questioning the FDA's intentions, Pohorelsky said in his order: "Thus, inquiry about contacts between those outside the agency and those within the agency is appropriate to expose whether improper influences led to the FDA's actions."

And here we've been hearing it's all about abortion. Clearly the Bush Administration has something else in mind. So why do conservatives want the State to prohibit women's access to birth control, too -- especially when countries that restrict access to birth control have higher abortion rates?

Maybe because it's not about abortion, but rather about punishing women who dare to have sex.

Let's look at the Utah legislation I blogged earlier:

"Abortion isn't about women's rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex," Buttars said. "This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents."

There it is, in plain text. "Consequences." If a woman has sex, she must faces "consequences."

Jeez, if women could have sex without "consequences," they'd end up thinking they were human beings -- citizens! -- and then all hell would break loose!

And so we get this conservative push that seems to be about abortion, but really is about making women have to face "consequences" for having sex. Thus: no access to abortion; no access to birth control; letting pharmacists deny any family planning prescriptions; banning sex education in schools; de-funding women's healthcare; and demonizing feminists and anything to do with female liberation, women's equality and women's rights.

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Technorati tags: human rights news birth control feminism health Plan B politics reproductive rights Republicans White House

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Part of the news that’s fit to link…

• In honor of Carnival, let’s start with a couple of Carnivals. The Ninth Carnival of Feminists is up at Mind the Gap! and Philosophers’ Carnival #26 is up at Hesperus/Phosphorus. I happen to have a submission featured in each; but if you’re here you’ve probably already read them. Fortunately, like all good Carnivals, they contain multitudes. Prepare to fill out exactly one zillion tabs with excellent reading material.

• Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-21): Spooner on Rent does his best to sort out just what Lysander Spooner’s views on land ownership and rent are. The evidence suggests that Spooner was more like Murray Rothbard and less like Benjamin Tucker on this one. Interesting mainly as a historical and exegetical question (Spooner didn’t dwell on the issue, so it’s not like a treasure trove is being discovered; and the fact that Spooner thought something hardly makes it so). But, Roderick adds, to the extent that there’s any polemical payoff I suppose it’s this: those anarcho-socialists who grant the title of anarchist to Tucker and Spooner but deny it to Rothbard and other so-called anarcho-capitalists on the grounds inter alia of the latter’s disagreement with Tucker about land will find their position at least somewhat harder to maintain to the extent that the distance between the saved Spooner and the damned anarcho-capitalists is narrowed. Read the whole thing.

• ginmar, A View from A Broad (2006-01-30): It doesn’t matter what you think we said…: You ever dealt with somebody who uses the word pussy in front of you—I’m speaking as a woman, here—as a synonym for cowardly, disgusting, vile—and then gets up in your face when you call them on it? Well, uh, I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t intend it like that. … Not thinking is no longer proof of innocence. What it just means is that you don’t give enough of a fuck to think about it. (Boldface added.) Read the whole thing.

• Media Matters (2006-02-14): If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 - 2005: In fact, as this study reveals, conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows. Media Matters for America conducted a content analysis of ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, and NBC’s Meet the Press, classifying each one of the nearly 7,000 guest appearances during President Bill Clinton’s second term, President George W. Bush’s first term, and the year 2005 as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. The conclusion is clear: Republicans and conservatives have been offered more opportunities to appear on the Sunday shows - in some cases, dramatically so. The Right had an especially pronounced advantage when you screened out government flunkies and just looked at journalists. Read the whole thing.

• Natalie Bennett, Philobiblon (2006-02-19): The baby choice, not the baby gap: Well I wanted many things when I was 21 - although I didn’t want children - and I don’t now want many of the same things. I didn’t want many of the same things when I was 25 or 30. At 21 you are still chiefly the product of your conditioning and upbringing - you are only just starting to grow up and construct yourself as an independent individual. No doubt many of those women later changed their minds, or decided that while a baby might be nice, it wasn’t their top priority. Also, no doubt, when they asked those early twenties women the question, they were thinking of having a baby as something that would happen in the far distant future - it is not a serious practical prospect. With, as I’ve reported before, 30 per cent plus of women in Scotland chosing not to have babies, when are the researchers (and the newspaper editors) going to recognise that this is a valid, sensible, entirely normal choice? Sometimes the demographic hand-wringers try to coerce you; other times they just try to hector you and generally treat you like an idiot. In either case, they’re acting like a bunch of bullies and need to drop it already. Anyway, read the whole thing.

• Andy the Slack Bastard (2006-02-18): Burn-A-Flag-For-Lenin Week!: Andy has sort of an ongoing hilarious documentary on the weird, wild world of Marxist-Leninist splinter sects. It’s kind of like a form of neo-surrealist theatre in which the actors don’t realize that they’re part of a show. The latest? Confronted with a recent and continuing downturn in membership, the youth wing of the neo-Trotskyist Democratic Socialist Perspective appears to have hit upon a brand new (sic) idea to try and reverse the trend (or at least make a few dollars): selling flag-burning kits to University students. Commodification of dissent in the name of Communist dictatorship? The power is yours Australia! Read the whole thing.

• Lab Kat (2006-02-20): The barefoot and pregnant crowd, Part III takes notice of Ypsilanti’s finest, Tom Monaghan. Now he’s planning to build his own city. No, not on rock and roll; on the mercy of Our Lady. I’m all for this clown building his own city. Get all the religious right nutjobs in the country to move there, away from those of us who don’t buy their dogmatic horseshit. Let them go play in their La-La Land while the rest of us live in the real world. Read the whole thing.

• Meghan Sapp, Women’s eNews (2006-02-20): Fight to End Mutilation Hits Gritty Juncture looks at the hard work to come in the struggle against female genital mutilation in Africa: moving from international sentiments and governmental resolutions to actual change on the ground. Amid the surge in activities and reports, campaigners against the practice find themselves at a critical juncture. For nearly three years, they have been focused on persuading African Union leaders to ratify the Maputo Protocol. But now that is done, application of the anti-FGM provision at the national and local levels becomes the gritty political challenge. Of the 28 countries where genital mutilation is practiced, 14 countries have passed anti-FGM laws. But only Burkina Faso, Ghana and Kenya actively uphold those laws, according to the London-based Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development. Countries faced international pressure to ratify the Maputo Protocol, but within their own societies they face the opposition of many traditional ruling classes to cultural change. Read the whole thing.

• Kieran Healy, Crooked Timber (2006-02-11): The Papers Continue Fatuous looks on aghast as Andrew Sullivan happily reprints e-mails from his ever-present Anonymous Liberal Reader explicitly pondering genocide against Muslims in Europe. Here’s the word from Betty Bleedheart: I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations—for elementary safety’s sake: (1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent. (2) Intern all of them. (3) Deport all of them. (4) Throw all of them into the sea. Kieran adds: It’s a hollow joke that Sullivan’s blog is graced by a tag-line taken from Orwell—and one about not being able to see what’s in front of your face, at that. … I certainly hope European countries are not about to capitulate to demands from some radical muslims that civil society be brought to an end for the sake of the prophet’s honor. … Nor, I take it, are they about to round up and dump all of them (for any value of them) into the sea. And if some countries have started down one or other of those roads, it certainly isn’t because some clerical thugs are so awesomely powerful that they are in a position to destroy the institutions of western democracy. You’ll have to look elsewhere to find people with the leverage to do real damage there. Read the whole thing.

• tiffany at BlackFeminism.org (2006-02-20): SXSW Collective Brainstorming: Are you a gay blogger or a blogger who is gay? and Tensions between being speaking for yourself or for a group looks at identity blogging and asks some hard questions for those who do (or don’t) care to do it. Read the whole thing.

• Marjorie Rosen, Los Angeles Times (2006-02-19): The lady vanishes — yet again takes an all-too-uncritical but sometimes interesting look at the declining prospects for women in the Hollywood star system. One of the better moments: The studios are nothing if not practical, suggests Michael Seitzman, the screenwriter of North Country. Hollywood would give a role to my dog if it would bring in an audience. The real question is not Why isn’t Hollywood creating roles for women? It’s Why aren’t audiences going to see them? Men aren’t interested in seeing movies about women anymore, but from the response to movies like In Her Shoes, it appears that women aren’t, either. But there may be a perception problem here. Could it be that because Hollywood produces so few movies featuring women’s stories, each one is held up to cold, hard and — dare I say it? — unfair scrutiny? Read the whole thing.

• moiv, media girl (2006-02-21): If You Can’t Get EC at St. Elsewhere, Call Boston Legal, meanwhile, catches us up on the wit and wisdom of Catholic League president William Donahue, who informs us that the real problem is that Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. Oh it gets better — Donahue’s keeping files, you see. Big fat ones. Read the whole thing.

• The Guardian NewsBlog (2006-02-20) reports that the occupation may soon be over, troops drawn down, and genuine independence at hand after a tricky political process … in Kosovo. Black Looks (2006-02-19) reports on the violence leading up to putatively open elections in Uganda. (All in the name of counter-terrorism, of course.) Ryan W. McMacken, LewRockwell.com Blog (2006-02-21) finds that red-blooded Iranians aren’t above some good old Liberty Cabbage idiocy.

• The Guardian NewsBlog (2006-02-21): Milton Keynes: Shia inspiration watches the End of History rising over the ruins of Najaf, with a bit of help from the military-industrial complex. Come watch as the mauling of a holy city by the Warfare State is followed up with the worst that coercive, centralized Urban Renewal has to offer. For those who want to return to the glory days of Soviet-era architecture in Warsaw, I suppose. Read the whole thing.

• rabble at Anarchogeek (2006-02-22): On the futility of creative commons suggests that the increasingly ubiquitous Creative Commons stickers and tags are useless, because they cater too much to the whims of publishers and don’t take a principled stand in favor of freedom. Looking through the guide, i realize that it’s not possible simply to replace the CC with something else. The problem is not that there aren’t good licenses, rather that the cultural war over ideas is being lost. We need a concept like GPL compatible or maybe even the less radical OSI compliant. I think that this may miss the point of what CC’s out to do in the first place, but it’s an interesting debate. Read the whole thing.

• Jill, feministe (2006-02-20): Categorizing Race in the Bookstore reflects on the assets and liabilities of the African-American Interest (Women’s Studies, GLBT) bookshelves at your friendly neighborhood bookstore. Ghettoization? Useful classification? Both? Neither? Read the whole thing.

• Discourse.net (2006-02-25): Florida Cops Intimidate Would-be Complainants picks out an amazing transcript of an attempt to get an official complaint form from the pigs. Via Boing-boing, a link to this absolutely amazing piece of investigative reporting: Police Station Intimidation—Parts 1 and 2 in which CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form. … The TV station that broke the story reports that Remarkably, of 38 different police stations tested around South Florida, all but three had no police complaint forms yet it nonetheless felt obligated to introduce its report by saying that Most police officers are a credit to the badge, serving the community and the people who pay their salary, getting criminals off the street, making the community safer for everyone. Guess none of those guys happen to work the front desk, eh? Read the whole thing.

• Echidne of the Snakes (2006-02-18): Virgins Matter More reports on how a man in Italy got a reduction in his sentence for raping his 14 year old stepdaughter because she wasn’t a virgin at the time she was raped. Because, you see, being forced to have sex against your will isn’t so bad if you’ve had sex already. The supreme court, apparently quoting from an amicus brief filed by Humbert Humbert, mused that the victim’s personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age. Read the whole thing. But only on an empty stomach.

• Laurelin in the Rain (2006-02-21): The Patriarchy Phrasebook: Occasionally (actually make that ‘all the damn time’), we rad fems find ourselves visited by Ambassadors from Planet Patriarchia, who speak in a language that is hard to understand, mostly because it’s less of a language and more of a code consisting of standard statements and arrogant presumptions. But never fear, for I am here with my dictionary of Commonly Used Phrases of Patriarchal Lackeys. These phrases are found variously in patriarchal literature, common conversation, newspapers, TV programmes, blog comments and shouted slogans when you’re minding your own frickin’ business. Read the whole thing.

These are measures that economists use for income inequality in a society, but I'm not going to talk about them at. Just put them in the headline to scare you. Instead, I'm going to talk about the income inequality itself which really should scare you. Krugman gives us some worrisome data in his latest column where he first debunks the myth that it's education which makes some Americans earn so much than others:

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year.

Did you get that? The ninety-ninth percentile, for example, means that a person whose income falls in that percentile is richer than 99% of people in this country.

So what this evidence suggests is that the super-rich are getting even richer, not that those who have a college degree are doing so wonderfully well. Elsewhere in the column Krugman points out that the earnings of the educated have risen over time but only moderately. No, it is not education that has created this increased income inequality in the United States. It is something else. What, exactly, is not clear, but I'd be willing to bet that it has at least something to do with the relaxing of various federal regulations that in the past were used to stop the monopolization of markets and the offshoring of corporations.

Why would any of this matter? Doesn't the cream always float on the top? Perhaps, but so does scum. In any case, very few people probably want to live in a banana republic where a handful of the very rich guard their properties with private police forces and ferocious dogs against the hordes of the starving, and that is where we will end up if we let the income distribution get more and more unequal. Crime and corruption will follow, and if we lose the middle classes democracy itself will be in peril.

...and the rape victims don't. At least not in Utah.

Incest is no exception to a father's right to know what's going on in his daughter's life.

That was the message from Utah lawmakers who refused Monday to make an exception for incest victims in a proposed law that would require parental consent and notification before a girl's abortion.

Gotta love them "family values."

Conservative senators said the legislation is a test of their morals.

They say this with straight faces, too.

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Technorati tags: human rights abortion politics reproductive rights Republicans

I think it's hilarious that I'm getting more Google hits from '2006 Oscar Predictions' than David Carr or Roger Ebert probably are.

Yesterday, maha noted:

Speaking of South Dakota, I was just wondering if it complied with the Mississippi Correlation. The MC states that where a state’s legislature is obsessed with banning abortions, that state will have a higher than average infant mortality rate.

Yep. It does.

That reminds me of something that was going around just after the election....

So what is it about these political leaders with failed policies and their determination to foist their failures on others?

Are higher teen birth rates really something to emulate?

Are higher infant mortality rates something to expand nationwide?

It really amazes me sometimes how these forced pregnancy types who like to claim a "culture of life" fail to recognize just how ineffective and destructive and deadly their policies are. They oppose access to birth control, the mere existence of Plan B emergency birth control and even education of children as to how babies are born and how to protect themselves. And then they turn around and scream about women, and teenaged girls, aborting their pregnancies. They campaign to strip women of their Constitutional rights as soon as a man penetrates them. They oppose healthcare measures to protect a pregnant woman's life and health.

What's up with that? Their "culture of life" promotes death.

And now, with the Roberts-Scalito-Thomas court, they want to push this model of death and failure onto the rest of the country. Because it's not enough that they live their own lives according to their beliefs and dogma, but that everyone else must abide by their own peculiar brand of "morality," too.

And on the other side? We get "pro-choice" bloggers fighting back by attacking ... NARAL and Planned Parenthood?

Now what's up with that?

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Technorati tags: human rights civil rights Democrats feminism health Plan B politics progressive values reproductive rights Republicans Supreme Court

Last week I did a list of my all time favourite movies. This week in darkdaughta's "this is your life" list of lists...my favourite musicians. Now keep in mind I grew up listening to radio and still have a teeny tiny music collection.

So, my music taste is all over the place, very defined by the sorts of stuff I've heard on really mainstream radio.

A lot of my taste was shaped by what I heard first in public school, junior high and high school.

Some of it dates to my coming into consciousness as a Black person in the world which happened during university.

For anyone wondering, you won't find Tori or Ani. There isn't any.

Some are cheesy to the point of being embarassing.

For the fans of present day hip/hop and brainless bootylicious babes, you won't find much here cuz their blatant lack of intellect combined with crass Black people targetting commercialism and consumerism have gutted Black music and left the corpse dying by the side of the road. I'll dance to them at a bar, but do I want them and their "don't think too hard" music dismantling Black consciousness in my house, nope. Same with the "conscious" mc's. I remember asking one of the wimmin in my community who is a hip-hop head who will reference some of the black male rappers and call them conscious, whether she actually thought any of these folks had more analysis, more consciousness than she did? She looked uncomfortable, smiling, eyes darting and said: no...but they're conscious, I guess compared to the rest. :(

For the fans of various African musics, I won't even bother for the sake of political cred to say that I am a fan. I've had conversations with the two continental african wimmin who were in community with me where I said that I didn't necessarily think of these musics as liberation musics any more than any other, that to me they were pop musics in other languages. I went on to say that as a diasporic african woman embracing a class analysis, the very fact that these musics are so embraced by members of the Black middle-class, conservative set, for me automatically put into question the power of the music as a radically political transformational force when transplanted to north american soil. But I'm also just really north american in my music tastes

Soca, reggae, calypso? Nope. I get triggered by the giant gap between allowable musically expressed sexualities in caribbean communities and the harsh reality of our cultures so grounded in outdated colonial/victorian moralities, sexual conservatism, christianity and what is understood as good behaviour. Dancing and jumping up gets to be really painful when I'm fully grounded in what all this means for me personally. But, I'm also just extremely north american in my music tastes.

Other "world" musics, classical, the majority of jazz...well, let's just say I'm not there right now.

There isn't any lefty stuff here. The way I see it, I'm such a hard ass, unrepentantly attempting to squeeze analysis into almost everything I do, see, speak, encounter, music has been my big place of fucking off...just think of me taking an extended audio vacation.

I like to sing along, to play air guitar and to dance by myself or when no one is looking. These aren't in any particular order.

Earth Wind and Fire

Roberta Flack

Tears For Fears

Depeche Mode

Old U2 (definitely a high school thing)

Bob Seger

Joe Cocker

Bonnie Raitt

Eurythmics

Annie Lennox

Kate Bush

Nina Hagen

The Police

Mariah Carey (okay, this is embarassing)

old Jodeci

old Public Enemy

old KRS-1

Heart

old Prince

Donna Summer

The Bee Gees (their voices make me giggle)

Chaka Khan

Metallica

Black Sabbath

Old Ozzy

Genesis (with Peter Gabriel)

Led Zeppelin

old Stones

old Whitney Houston

The White Stripes

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Stevie Nicks (a voice that sounds like she drank one too many tequila shots)

Eagle Eye Cherry (well, only "save tonight")

Neneh Cherry (mostly songs from "raw like sushi")

Lenny Kravitz

Me'shell N'degeocello

old Elton John

The Eagles

Nine Inch Nails

D’Angelo

Queen Latifah (when she was butch)

TLC (when they looked like pretty little bois)

Ya Kid K

Money Love

old Salt n Pepa

Foxy Brown (more for her absolute brazenness)

Peter Tosh (the dark man who taught Bob Marley to play the guitar)

Outkast

Living Color

old Duran Duran

Old Madonna

Smashing Pumpkins

Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Audioslave

Stone Temple Pilots

old Joe Jackson

old Elvis Costello

AC/DC

The Clash

Billy Idol

Dire Straits

The English Beat

Tracy Chapman (when I need to cry, cuz she’s so depressing)

Rough Trade (I was singing along before I was old enough to realize what she was saying)

Old David Bowie

Simple Minds

Missy (fatty girl version)

Nirvana

Jet (well, only "are you gonna be my girl?")

The Cure

Simon and Garfunkel

The Pretenders

Seal

Prodigy (really, just “firestarter”)

Michael Jackson (before the face and complexion thing)

The Doors

Luther Vandross

Rush

Red Rider

Robbie Robertson

Foreigner

Journey

Cameo (Well, only “Word Up”)

The Who

Pat Benetar

Cyndi Lauper

Pink Floyd

Neil Young

Survivor (well, only "the eye of the tiger")

Fleetwood Mac

Billie Holiday

George Benson

old Queen

old Eric Clapton

The Kinks

old Aerosmith

Pet Shop Boys

New Order

Aretha Franklin

Mary J. Blige

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Talking Heads

Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five

The Sugar Hill Gang (rapper's delight)

Jermaine Stewart

Alanis Morrisette (only her first album after leaving canuck pop stardom behind)

Michee Mee

Bif Naked (only "I love myself today")

Janis Joplin

Erasure

Soft Cell (well, only "tainted love")

Rupaul

New Edition

old Janet Jackson (mostly before she got the stoopid abs and the butt done)