round 2

(3) starship, “nothing’s gonna stop us now”
was not stopped by
(6) CHER, “HALF-BREED”
165-139
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 13.

This Dream, Together: melissa faliveno On Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”

Heart to Heart

The lights of the RCA Dome in Indianapolis are low, bodies packed in tight and pressed together in the dark. There’s an energy in the air: thick and giddy and humming. It’s a day that’s been circled on calendars in Midwestern kitchens for months, days leading up to it crossed out in black Xs. Like a holiday or vacation, but more: a destination, maybe a destiny, this thing we’ve driven hundreds of miles to see. We the weekend warriors, we of the wanting, we of the dreams.
And then: the first five beats of a snare drum, a rapid-fire explosion of sound. It’s a LinnDrum, actually, a drum machine that’s not a drum at all, but I don’t know this yet. Today I believe everything I hear.
And then come the synths: cool and dreamlike and compulsive, twinkling like stars and soaring above the four-four bass (not a real bass) and kick (also not a real drum).
     The lights go up, and the stage is alive, and we are too. And the male vocals sing:

Lookin’ in your eyes I see a paradise / This world that I’ve found is too good to be true.

But it is true: This is paradise. We’ve found it.
A lone man paces the stage. He holds a wireless mic, or maybe he wears a headset. Either way he’s got his arms raised high and he’s clapping. And we follow his lead, because he is our leader. We do whatever he tells us to do. Because this man has promised us something, and we believe he will give it to us. We believe that he can. We believe in him, and yes, we even believe in ourselves.
We clap in bad time, thousands of doughy Midwesterners with no discernible rhythm. We are compelled, as if by some intangible force, to pump our fists in the air. And when the female vocals come—and they come high and loud—we screech them together:

Let ‘em say we’re crazy / I don’t care about that / Put your hand in my hand, baby, don’t ever look back.

We are ecstatic. We are fired up: with anticipation, with love, most of all with hope.

Let the world around us / Just fall apart / Baby we can make it if we’re heart to heart.

What does it even mean? We have no idea. But we feel it anyway. We are heart to heart. And in one massive, stadium-sized chorus we sing it, we scream it, we are filled up with the universe-sized joy of it:

And we can build this dream together / Standing strong forever / Nothing’s gonna stop us now.

I am singing at the top of my lungs. I might be crying. I am pumping my small fist in the air. It is 1993, or 1994. I am ten or eleven years old. And I am not here in the RCA Dome to see Starship, no: I am here for an Amway convention.

The Dream

Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a bad song. It is objectively bad. But oh, how I loved it. And oh, how I can’t help but love it still. Maybe it’s so bad it’s good. Maybe, more likely, I love it for its unabashed badness, like I’ve loved so many bad songs before (not least Starship’s other badsterpiece, “We Built This City,” to which I choreographed several interpretive dances as a child). But when I play “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” at home on my guitar, which I’ve been doing with embarrassing frequency these days, I play quietly. I certainly never plug in. I don’t belt the lyrics; I whisper them low. I don’t want my neighbors to hear.
It’s not the music that makes this song so bad. It’s actually a solid chord progression (though a repetitive one—verse, chorus, and bridge), and Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas can sing. It’s a song built entirely of hooks, so catchy one can’t help but sing along. (In the 2014 movie The Skeleton Twins, a lip-syncing duet by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader is predicated on the song’s irresistibility). We might even forgive the LinnDrum, the Charvel MIDI guitar, and all those synths—the purely synthetic pop products of the eighties.

It’s the lyrics that make this song so bad. To wit: “Standing here beside you / want so much to give you / this love in my heart that I’m feeling for you.” And: “Take it to the good times / see it through the bad times / whatever it takes is what I’m gonna do.” Such lyrics aren’t just embarrassing; they also possess that most insidious kind of badness: the bogus message they’re trying to sell. Those syrupy-sweet clichés about love as battle, love as a dream for which two people against all odds will fight, and win. That they are invincible. It’s saccharine, insipid, and stupid, an eyeroll in F#. From instrumentation to implication, the song a sham. It’s bunk, baloney, codswallop, claptrap—so completely built of crap that Grace Slick herself has suggested the song, and the whole Starship enterprise (see what I did there?) was bullshit.
What better song, then, to serve as an anthem for Amway, that titan of American fraud, purveyor of impossible dreams? At conventions, on motivational tapes, its lyrics repeated by wealthy white men who paced stages across America: “We can build this dream together,” they said. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.” We listened, and we believed it. We sang our anthem and we turned it up loud.

From Badass-ness to Badness (Or, From Airplane to Starship) 

When the realization came, it hit like a rocket crashing to earth. That the woman who sang such psychedelic rock anthems as “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” could possibly be the same woman who sang “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” seemed at best a bad dream, at worst some kind of nightmare trip. But it’s true: Grace Slick was both Acid Queen of the sixties and shoulder-padded, hair-sprayed synth-pop-star of the eighties.
How does a musician of such talent and imagination, whose low commanding vibrato gave us the words “Feed your head,” find herself singing “If this world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other”? To understand the fall, we must start with the ascension.
     In the ill-fated voyage from Airplane to Starship, there’s a lot of convoluted history: firings and departures and lawsuits, side gigs that became bands like Hot Tuna, the shedding and reclaiming of names, various aircrafts relaunched long after they should have been grounded. But where the story begins for Grace Slick is in 1965, at a San Francisco club called the Matrix. She found herself in the crowd, watching the first show of Paul Kantner and Marty Balin’s new band, the Jefferson Airplane. The experience inspired Slick’s own first band, the Great Society, for which she wrote “White Rabbit”—the product, she says, of twenty-four hours of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and a lot of LSD. They eventually opened for Airplane at the Fillmore, the famous haven for tripping flower children, and a year later Slick was recruited as Airplane’s new frontwoman. “White Rabbit” and another Great Society song, “Somebody to Love,” made it onto their 1967 record Surrealistic Pillow; the Airplane took off, and Slick was crowned a Queen of Rock.
“The first time I saw Grace play I was entranced by the strength of her delivery,” Kantner says in the 2004 documentary Fly Jefferson Airplane. “The power and the strength of her onstage was amazing.”
On “American Bandstand,” in 1967, Slick—who David Crosby called “the Chrome Nun”—wears something between a habit and a druid’s cape and stares directly into the camera as she lip-syncs. In one performance of “White Rabbit,” she floats atop Marty Balin’s organ; it’s an acid-drenched video, and we trip along with her. Playing Woodstock at sunrise, a dreamy-eyed, slow-voiced Slick, hair wild and dressed in white, promises the crowd “a new dawn.” And in 1968, a year before the Beatles did it, Airplane plays a rooftop in New York City, yelling “Wake up, you fuckers!” as crowds of dark-suited businessmen gather below. In the footage, Slick wails into the sky, her voice carrying up above the high-rises.

The word “badass” gets tossed around a lot, but if ever there was a badass Grace Slick was it. She recorded a solo album called Manhole, and once hatched plans to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD (she and her conspirator, the anarchist Abbie Hoffman, were thwarted by White House security). In her book, Somebody to Love? A Rock and Roll Memoir, Slick writes of a show in Chicago, when a man in the audience yelled at her to take off her chastity belt.
“I look directly at him and say, ‘Hey, I don’t even wear underpants,’” she writes. “I pull my skirt up over my head for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering, ‘Oh, Jesus.’”  
Slick was a drinker. She was arrested several times, once for waving a gun at a cop, once for drinking wine and reading poetry in public, and usually for talking shit. In 1978, four years after Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship, she donned a Heidi outfit and goose-stepped across a stage in Hamburg, drunkenly berating the audience.
     “Who won the fucking war?” she yelled. Kantner, who was by then the father of Slick’s daughter, asked her to leave the band; she did, and went to AA.
In interviews, Slick is smart, funny, and self-deprecating, and talks openly about her problem with “drunk mouth” and “talking under the influence.” In 1981, she climbed back aboard Jefferson Starship, sober and ready to play it straight. But Kantner left in 1984, later explaining: “The band became more mundane and not quite as challenging and not quite as much of a thing to be proud of.” Slick stayed and kept the rights to the songs, Kantner sued for the name “Jefferson,” and the band became Starship. Mickey Thomas, recruited after Balin’s departure in 1978, took the reins and sang sweet-voiced duets with Slick.
“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” written by hitmaking duo Albert Hammond (father of Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.) and Diane Warren, was commissioned by director Michael Gottlieb for his exquisitely bad 1987 movie, Mannequin. Hammond credits a drawn-out divorce, and finally getting to marry his long-term girlfriend, as the inspiration for the song. “It’s almost like they’ve stopped me from marrying this woman for seven years,” he said to Warren. “They’re not gonna stop me doing it.”
Included on both the Mannequin soundtrack and Starship’s album No Protection, the adult-contemporary power ballad hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 4, 1987, and stayed there for two weeks; it was No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for four weeks, and hit the top-ten in six European countries.
Slick hated it.
“In the 80s we weren’t writing our own songs,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “It was like being in L.A. rather than San Francisco. I was in my 40s and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is just awful.’ But I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober…by being a good girl.”
She left Starship in 1988, and with the exception of a rare reunion show retired from music. I’m not saying “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” made her do it, but maybe I am.

Going Diamond

My father always wanted to be his own boss. The son of a barber from Orange, New Jersey, he started a small business of his own, counting the inventory of convenience stores, bodegas, and gas stations in Florida, and then Wisconsin. It was work my mother and I did with him, on our hands and knees in dusty stores across the state on weekends, large manual calculators in hand. The business was a side gig, part of a larger dream: that my father would one day work only for himself—never again to walk a department-store floor, spend days on the road selling forms, heft boxes or sort mail in a hospital basement. But it never worked out that way.
Imagine, then, what the promise of Amway must have sounded like. The promise of financial independence, of providing, of freedom. This was the dream Amway peddled. It promised that if you worked hard enough, you too would be wealthy—like billionaire cofounder Rich DeVos, father-in-law of Betsy—that you would go Diamond (the Amway ladder is made of jewels, with Diamond at the top). This was the message we were given, and it’s the message we bought.
We also bought products. Amway-branded everything filled up our cupboards and closets: SA8 detergent, LOC floor cleaner, Artistry makeup and Satinique shampoo, Glister toothpaste, Nutrilite vitamins, the Big Cookie—a giant oatmeal-raisin rock that could have been branded Colon Blow. We were no longer allowed to shop at the grocery store. The Amway catalogue, we were told, had everything we’d ever need.
     It was my job to fill out the order forms.
“Soon you’ll get a starter kit of your own,” my father told me as I hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling product numbers. The Amway equivalent to a confirmation or bat mitzvah, when I would become not a woman but a tiny entrepreneur. In the background, a tape played on the stereo, the promise of riches proselytized by a conservative Christian man who was indeed extraordinarily wealthy, but not from selling soap. Between his words were the ones I loved: We can build this dream together.

Fake Plastic Girl

It’s time to talk about Mannequin. The whole reason “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” exists, it is a movie so bad it’s a wonder. So miserable it might be a miracle. Mannequin is not just a bad movie; it’s quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen.
I watched it for the first time only recently, having somehow escaped its clutches all these years. And not only will I never get that $3.99 Fandango rental or those ninety precious minutes back, I will never be able to unsee it. It’s etched indelibly into my brain, a plague upon my consciousness that will no doubt send me to an early grave.
For those lucky enough to have missed Mannequin, a quick plot summary: In ancient Egypt, a young (white) woman is doomed to marry a man she doesn’t love. The gods spare her, naturally, by transforming her into a mannequin in 1980s Philadelphia. Jonathan, a young failure of an artist played by a motorcycle-driving, pervy Andrew McCarthy, assembles her in a mannequin factory. She is beautiful. She is perfect. She is his. Then she comes alive—but only in front of him. He falls in love with her, of course, because he made her; because she helps him become a hugely successful window-display artist but takes none of the credit; because she lives only for him. A fake plastic female, the movie declares, is the perfect woman.

Atrociously unfunny slapstick and witless hijinks abound, and McCarthy’s Jonathan is so much of what’s wrong with America: a mediocre white dude failing fantastically upward. Kim Cattrall as plastic muse manages to be somewhat charming, as does Meshach Taylor, the actually-talented window-display artist and flamboyantly gay caricature named Hollywood (the movie deals in casual homophobia and racism almost as effortlessly as it does misogyny, but not quite). Rotten Tomatoes gives it an aggregate 22 percent, which is stunningly high; The Washington Post called it “made by, for, and about dummies;” and Roger Ebert gave it a generous half-star, deeming it not only “full of clichés” but, simply, “dead.”
The song doesn’t come in until the last scene. (A reminder that the whole reason I sat through this shitheap was the song. I almost watched Mannequin 2: On the Move, because the song also appears in the sequel, but I actually feared death.) Once it did, what struck me was this: The movie is so bad it makes the song seem good. In the universe of badness, if Mannequin is the ninth circle of hell, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a polystyrene paradise.
In the music video, Grace Slick plays the role of mischievous mannequin come to life, and Mickey Thomas is a convincing McCarthy—he mostly just looks around dumbly and dances with his hands. Slick, like Cattrall, is pretty delightful, despite the overwhelming emptiness one feels while watching; she rocks those eighties shoulder pads, that eyeliner and huge-sprayed hair, with her signature spooky grin. At the end of Mannequin, the plastic girl becomes a real live lady and—let ‘em say we’re crazy!—the lovers get married. In the music video, Slick and Thomas both end up as mannequins, which seems a much more fitting end.

The Tapes

Each month, we got a new tape in the mail. They were audio cassettes, ninety minutes of motivation by way of yee-hawing about dreams and boot-straps cut with songs. Bad songs. The kind of songs meant to get one “fired up.” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was on several tapes from the 80s and early 90s, along with another terrible Starship song, “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” We listened to the tapes whenever we got in the car; they blared from the living-room stereo. Gone was the classic rock, here were men like Rich DeVos and their promises of pools and Cadillacs and kitchens, wives who spoke of serving Husband and God. We listened on repeat, memorizing the words.
The Amway mantra was “Show the Plan (STP).” They chanted this on the tapes, too. To Show the Plan meant inviting friends, coworkers, and neighbors to your home—or inviting yourself to theirs—to try to get them to buy, and then sell, the products. While the Wife served coffee and cocktail wieners, the Husband drew on an easel the basic model of any multilevel-marketing scheme, which of course took the shape of a pyramid.
     In “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Mickey Thomas sings: “You can’t build a dream without a plan.” On the drive home from Indianapolis, I scrawled STP in the fogged-up windows of our Chevy. In freshman-year math class, I spotted a sticker with the same three letters plastered to the binder of the coolest girl in my grade.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Do you Show the Plan too?” I whispered, frizzy-haired and giddy.
     “What are you talking about?” She said with a scowl, then turned her back.
I had no idea who the Stone Temple Pilots were.

The Gear Shift

A note about the key change. It comes at the end of the song, like any respectable key change. It’s the classic truck driver’s gear shift, the proverbial long-hauler saying, We’re on the open highway now, baby; let’s kick this big rig into fifth. We jump from F# to G, just a half-step up but it might as well be another universe, higher than most contraltos can sing. But Grace Slick nails it, and Mickey Thomas does too.
The gear shift doesn’t come with any new lyrics; you just hear the same words you’ve been hearing in a shiny new key—in this case with some added Hey Babys and Woos and impressively high wails. The gear shift is great. It incites—maybe requires—a fist pumped high in the air, which Mickey Thomas delivers in the video along with a perfectly-timed HEY! With those two triplets—one fast, one slow—we know what’s coming; in six synthetic snare hits we transcend the stratosphere. And as that guitar solo carries us to the stars, we can’t help ourselves; we pump our fists in the air too.
But the gear shift is also a gimmick, a superfluous trick of shlock-pop producers who say, “Let’s just go ahead and get these suckers to pump those fists for no reason.” It’s a lie, promising us something with no substance. It’s a manipulation, and it works.

The Dream, Deferred

In December 2008, Indianapolis’s RCA Dome imploded. In video footage, after a series of small controlled explosions at its foundation, the stadium collapses in on itself in slow-motion—a fitting end to the site of an Amway convention, just as the economy was doing the same. But as it falls, the dome’s replacement, the Lucas Oil Stadium, stands behind it—a reminder of the tenets upon which cities, and this country, are built.
I’m not sure when or how my family got out of Amway. Like so many things, we don’t really talk about it. What I know is that my mother—once a bra-burning hippie, who had loved Grace Slick but hated Starship—hated the conservative messages Amway sold, and the good ol’ boys who told her that her real job was not to manage a Marshall’s but to serve her husband.
     I also know that we never got rich. And one day the SA8 and Satinique and Artistry and Big Cookie were gone, and we were allowed to shop at the grocery store again.  
For a time, maybe Grace Slick imploded too. But she rose from the wreckage—and by that I mean not addiction but Starship—and built a different kind of dream. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as a member of Jefferson Airplane, which received a lifetime achievement award in 2016. At age eighty, Slick now spends most of her time painting: portraits of musicians, mostly, her dead friends from the sixties—Jerry Garcia, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison—along with some trippy white bunnies wearing marijuana-leaf capes. In 2017, she licensed “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” to Chick-fil-A for a TV commercial, then gave all the proceeds to the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal.
“We can use our gifts to help stop the forces of bigotry,” she wrote in a Forbes op-ed. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.”
Paul Kantner died in 2016, and Marty Balin followed in 2018. Jefferson Starship continues to tour, with original member David Freiberg and frontwoman Cathy Richardson—who’s been singing “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” and “Find Your Way Back” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” pretty well for decades—at the helm; while a separate offshoot, Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas, is still touring too, ostensibly playing the same songs. It’s confusing, and none of it is very good.
Today, when Grace Slick talks about Starship, she’s the first to call it what it was.
     “That was a sell-out band,” she says in an interview. “The Airplane was a smorgasbord, but the Starship I hated.” She sang the songs, she says, but it took some big-time faking. 
“I felt like I’d throw up on the front row but I smiled and did it anyway.”
     In one video interview, she is asked about “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” She laughs, and it’s a big, contagious cackle. She falls backward comedically, as if in pain, and moans.
“A dumptruck will stop you right in your tracks if you don’t look,” she says. “Oh, man…it’s such horseshit.”

Melissa Faliveno (pictured above, early nineties, around the time of the Amway convention) has never had her ears pierced. Hair by Satinique™. Rather than an entrepreneur she became essayist, and her first collection, Tomboyland, is forthcoming in August 2020. 

STACY MURISON ON “HALF-BREED”

If you observed me alone in my bedroom at the height of my Sonny & Cher obsession, here’s what you would have seen: me, holding an unplugged curling iron as a microphone and wearing a beach towel on my head mimicking Cher’s long hair. I would have made sure I pushed the towel back from my shoulders, shifted my weight purposefully to one hip, licked my lips, and let my other wrist flop just so, as Cher would have. I would have rolled my eyes at something stupid Sonny would have said and then, only then, would I have stepped forward and begun singing,

Half-breed, that's all I ever hurled
Half-breed, how I learned to hate the world
Half-breed, she's no good they borned
Both sides were against me since the day I was born!

I misheard some of the words and made up others as I went along because I was five when the song first came out (aw, hell, I still do this and I’m now in my 50s). When Cher sang “Half-Breed” on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, she sat on a white horse in an almost blinding white headdress while lip-synching. She looked like a dream: glowing and partially blurred. My grandmother explained the fogginess of Cher’s image was probably a petroleum jelly-covered lens like they used for the soap operas we also watched together. I didn’t really understand all of the lyrics and didn’t realize that Cher may not have actually been Cherokee (more on that later). What I did know at that age was the emotional core of the song—that she felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. And if someone as glamorous and beautiful as Cher didn’t belong, what chance did a moon-faced, snaggle-tooth kid like me have?

What I saw was this: Cher, tall and beautiful, with a huge smile and many eyelashes, good humored and tolerant of that weird, goofy guy, Sonny, who was (incredibly) her husband. My grandmother and I snuggled on her sofa as we watched the show every week. Grandma would bring out peanut butter and celery or saltines and butter for snacks and we’d laugh at the skits, which were not as funny as those on The Carol Burnett Show but pretty good. Once, Cher sang my other favorite song, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” which had an accompanying cartoon. Grandma’s house was the best kind of escape: somewhere I could relax while watching glamorous people on television after another bad week at school. 

The other children always laughed at me…

When we drew self-portraits in class, I used a protractor to guide the circle (half moon + half moon = whole moon) that I perceived as my face. Later, I would switch to a compass, but it was still a challenge to get the curvature just so, to match up the ends of the curve without overlapping. There were circles in the playground too: at recess, I would find myself alone until other kids would circle me and chant, “you’re adopted, you’re adopted.” It was like a bad game of Monkey in the Middle with no hope for escape. I figured they knew something I didn’t. A few years earlier, my parents had tried to adopt a boy, a baby brother for me, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that I was also adopted. I remembered asking my parents about this, but instead of answering, they would ask, where’d you hear that?
Eventually I had to stop drawing my face because I was fitted for headgear to fix a prominent overbite. I could not figure out how to draw the angle of the headgear in relation to my head on the page. When the taunts at school got worse, I settled into the dual escape routes of books while I was at school and Barbie® dolls while I was at home. Fueling my Cher obsession, my parents bought me a Cher doll in a magenta halter gown. Because she was slightly taller than the other dolls, she needed her own wardrobe. With the accumulation of Cher clothes (including what passed as a Native American-style dress with beads) and accessories (shoes, shoes, and shoes), my parents eventually bought me a storage case that was supposed to resemble Cher’s dressing room. This was the first time Cher really let me down. In television commercials, it appeared that the dressing room came with even more clothes. Unfortunately, it was a slight-of-hand trick. The Cher doll, dressed in a black leotard, would stand in front of the dressing room “mirror” and appear to be wearing an outfit featured on a cardboard card behind the mirror. There were no extra clothes in the box. When I find the images of the dressing room on Pinterest, I notice the desert colors and indigenous-appearing drawings, the toy manufacturer perhaps choosing these images to bolster Cher’s claim of 1/16th Cherokee ancestry on her mother’s side.

When I tell friends who are of my vintage that I’m writing this essay, they fall into two camps. The first repeat back to me that Cher was part Cherokee and I feel like an ass telling them that in all likelihood this was an adopted persona in order to sell the song. If Cher only sang her autobiography, it would also call into question her time as part of a traveling show and if her father did indeed actually sell “doctor good” (Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, 1971). This is perhaps part of Cher’s enduring legacy: making listeners believe whatever she sang to them. She could completely inhabit the characters of her songs—this, I reason, is how a five-year-old homely kid could feel kinship with a singer like Cher. I would argue that this is a quality we look for in our favorite musicians—they seem to know our hearts, what we’re thinking, what our dreams and hardships are—and they put all of these emotions into lyrics and orchestrate them in such a way that we feel understood and less alone in the world. 
The second group of friends encourage me to write a socio-historical treatise on colonization and ongoing oppression. This is more challenging because of my own limitations as a researcher and the privilege I have experienced—there’s no way that I can do this topic justice, but I can call attention to what I notice and ask questions. For example, the more I research the early 1970s, the more I find trends toward embracing the culture and identity of indigenous people, often signified by the term “American Indian,” which I find in expressions of fashion, including these embroidery patterns.

One of the first indigenous representations that I noticed when I was younger was the Keep America Beautiful campaign (1971) featuring the “Crying Indian,” an actor known as Iron Eyes Cody. This actor also claimed partial Cherokee ancestry but was later found to be Italian-American. The historian Finis Dunaway posits that part of this appropriation of indigenous cultures may have been caused by Americans trying to move toward being less commercially motivated. Through the critical lens of time, we can view this behavior as exploitation. I do wonder what motivated many members of a society to appropriate another culture except to understand this as part of the backlash from the ongoing cultural revolution in the United States and protests of and reverberations from the Vietnam War.

Although I was never (nor have I ever been) fashionable, I remember my parents and their friends wearing different forms of ponchos, headbands, and fringe. My mother ironed her long wavy brown hair at night at the ironing board, hoping for that super-straight look—she was my own version of Cher, except for making me eat the string beans I hated so much. A neighbor often told me that I looked like an “Indian princess” as she stroked my long, black braids. I did not correct her and tell her that I was part Ukrainian-American and part German-American. Other pictures I find of Cher from the 70s show her wearing embroidered clothing and turquoise and silver jewelry that she may have thought would enhance her Cherokee persona, or that was on-trend in the style of clothing worn in the 1970s, or a combination of both.

But I can't run away from what I am…

We can’t know what anyone is thinking at any given time and it’s in these moments that I find myself feeling some compassion for Cher. In her mid-twenties when “Half-Breed” came out and reached number one on the Billboard charts (where it remained for two weeks), she was in the process of divorcing from Sonny Bono, her de facto career and image manager since she was 16 years old. I try to put myself in the place of a woman whose entire life and career revolved around another person so completely and whose name always got top-billing. An interview with her by People Magazine in 1974 was titled, “Cher Without Sonny: Can the Show Go On?” It seemed in my Cher-worship that she was always the bigger star—the better singer, the better performer—and I’m curious that the writer implied Cher couldn’t go it alone. Interviews like this one must have been challenging for Cher. I can imagine her at age 27, facing divorce and an unknown future as a solo artist. It’s possible that Half-Breed became a kind of anthem for her striking out on her own. I can also just as easily imagine that many people believed the song was actually about her life and that it might have been easier to perpetuate the story that she was part-Cherokee than to explain to her fans and to reporters that it was just a song someone wrote for her. I think about the questions I field about my own writing and the pressure I sometimes feel to be more interesting. It is always tempting to be something other—someone better—than who I really am.
I write this knowing that there are many sides to the story of Cher’s identity. There are multiple articles that quote Cher claiming Cherokee ancestry as well as others where she claims it was something a publicist made up. Other people who have researched her ancestry believe they have disproved these claims. I don’t feel it’s responsible to not acknowledge all of these statements: what Cher may have been told by her own family about her family history, what she may have invented about her lineage, what someone may have made up about her background, and what others have been able to research about her family history. And, although it is wrong to claim to be someone we are not, I can see the appeal of it. I can also understand how it would be hard to dig out of a lie that has gone on for so long. It is not always possible to ask for forgiveness in our culture, although there is almost always some credit given for at least trying.  
What is perhaps more difficult to understand is why Cher continues to perform the song in concert wearing variations of her original costume. As recently as 2017, she performed “Half-Breed” in concert with a dancer/model who walked the stage wearing a floor-length headdress and outfit that mimicked the one Cher wore during her 1973 television performance of the song. After being asked to explain and to apologize for the song and costume via a Twitter campaign, Cher acknowledged that it was “way past time” to retire the costume and the song and, in what could be described by some as an “ok, Boomer” moment, asked people to remember that this song came out almost 50 years ago. But Cher also calls herself out on her own bullshit as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the follow-up thread to see if she was indeed “better” at dialog the next day.

The Twitter exchange partially highlights the challenge to engage in meaningful dialog, to ask questions, and to provide context on social media. In situations of cultural appropriation, we want an honest exchange that culminates in a better understanding and also an apology and other reparations. Today, we are often quick to “cancel” someone based on information-in-the-moment and without context. When we do call someone out and are met with defensiveness or with excuses (and without explanations or apologies), how do we continue to engage in the processes of education and discussion? When neither side feels it is being heard, both sides feel betrayed and angry. Or, as the lyrics from “Half-Breed” indicate: When you're not welcome you don't hang around. I contend that the emotional truth of the song still remains, and, if anything, more people than ever feel alienated and “othered” in our society precisely because we have lost the means to engage in honest and open dialog. If we can’t make space to discuss the issues of cultural appropriation around “Half-Breed,” and if Cher can’t move beyond “I didn’t know,” we remain at an impasse. But it is worth continuing to ask the questions so that we may be educated and, in turn, educate others.  

Works Cited

Blagden, Neil. “Cher Without Sonny: Can the Show Go On?” People Magazine. 25 March 1974. Accessed 3 January 2020.

Breihan, Tom. “The Number Ones: Cher’s Half-Breed.” 22 April 2019. Accessed 13 November 2019: https://www.stereogum.com/2040423/the-number-ones-chers-half-breed/franchises/the-number-ones/

Cher (@cher). “I Did Song 50 Yrs Ago…” 22 December 2017, 6:37 pm. Tweet.

Cher. “Half-breed.” MCA Records, 1973. Lyrics by Al Capp and Mary Dean

“Cher the Half Breed.” DNA Consultants. 12 March 2019. Accessed 13 December 2019.

Dunaway, Finis. “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement.” Zocalo Public Square. 9 November 2017. Accessed 15 November 2019: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2017/11/09/crying-indian-ad-fooled-environmental-movement/ideas/essay/

Gambaccini, Paul. Half Breed. Rolling Stone. 14 February 1974. Accessed 13 November 2019: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/half-breed-206106/

Stacy Murison’s work has appeared in journals such as Assay, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University where she now teaches composition and is known by her students for hosting Dance Party Fridays and singing (poorly) before, during, and after class.