Songs of Freedom

I had a new wonderful friend from uni, F, over today, after class, and we smoked and pretended to work and chattered away and shared our music tastes and talked and talked and talked.
F is of Tunisian origin, and we share a lot of discussions about origins and family and feminism, and people have the same complaints about us : confidence, indifference, not needing a man to choose our way :)

So we found out that we had the same musical obsessions with old music and C-Pop (chinese music) and weird J-pop and all the stuff the people such as my ex's circle of friends look down upon because it's too "easy" too "mainstream", and the like.
Now music is a very personal subject, and as numerous teenagers the world over I sort of hid in it. Music is what lifts you up. And I've always had very eclectic tastes :)
So where's all this going? Well I think music has an influence on you.
I grew up listening to rockers and not feeling excluded. Listening to women saying that being a girl was fun and you could be strong and there was nothing to be ashamed of.
That there was something inherently inferior in being a girl.
They were girls who'd kick your ass if you suggested such a thing.

So did that help? Hell yeah. Well, I think so. When I was around eight, at the yearly school fetes, they always played Shania Twain's "Man, I feel like a woman". I was used to hearing her sing about how FUN it could be.
"I wanna be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel"
Possibly not the most feminist track on earth, for sure. I haven't actually analysed it, and I'm not going to, just in case I ruin my memories!
But I was told in the song that I could do whatever the hell I liked, girl or no girl.

I haven't listened to that in a while. But I've always had a fondness for girls singing about things I could actually muster an interest for.
Not so much the stereotyped pop/rnb girls usually singing about how their boyfriend left them or how much they love him.
I like the girls saying that it might hurt but it's not the end of the world. Because that's how I see things too.
I liked them telling me that it didn't matter. That I could do whatever I wanted. That however hard, I could get over things.
It's always a relief to find a kindred spirit.