In 1966, French rock star Serge Gainsbourg, a party-hearty lothario, asked a teenage protégé named France Gall to sing a new song he had written. Les Sucettes was ostensibly about lollipops, but the lyrics contained multiple heavy innuendos. One line claimed that “lollipop juice” flowing down a girl’s throat could transport her to paradise. Gall was only 18 and not particularly worldly. After the recording and the associated video1 began to gain public attention, someone finally clued her in. She was so mortified she hid for weeks. She never spoke to Gainsbourg again and declared later that she’d felt “betrayed by the adults around me.”
In the recording industry, women have often received the short end of the stick. John Lennon cribbed most of the lyrics for Imagine from a Yoko Ono poem but declined to give her a songwriting credit; this didn’t get corrected until 2017. In 1996, the Los Angeles Times reported that the three young members of TLC—whose second album, CrazySexyCool, went platinum four times over—received less than 1% of the $175 million revenue their music had generated. The trio declared bankruptcy.
And then there’s Astrud Gilberto.
The male gaze
On March 18, 1963, Astrud Gilberto accompanied her husband, pioneering bossa nova guitarist and singer João Gilberto, to the A&R studio in midtown Manhattan. João, nine years her senior, was well-loved in their native Brazil, but Astrud, at 22, was unknown.
