Word: shipley
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...Ellen Shipley might not have written, never mind recorded, Heroes of Yesterday, one of the best tunes on anyone's album this year, if she had not been booted out of her theater class at Hunter College. "You ought to be out of here doing real things," her professor told her, so Shipley (born Shippelkopf) swapped her half-finished master's for a series of the prescribed real things, including marriage, playwriting and a job as an assistant to the music critic of Saturday Review. The marriage shattered, the play never got produced and the magazine got sold...
...Angeles rock clubs and had a No. 1 album first time out this summer, are said to be breaking out in a big way. That message is clear, not just because of the size of their success but because they are all guys. Say that four women, Ellen Shipley, Carolyne Mas, Ellen Foley and Pat Benatar, are breaking out with their separate debut albums, and it just sounds as if they have bad complexions...
Visiting a New York radio station on a promotional swing, Ellen Shipley discovered that "if you look like someone's old girlfriend they won't play you." She says, however, that the problem has as much to do with archetypes as stereotypes. "It goes much deeper than male chauvinist attitudes," Shipley observes. "In music, a white woman has traditionally been set up to play a role for teen-age male fantasies." Mas reflects simply, "Record company people wanted me to do a Stevie Nicks or Blondie. You get a lot of that stuff." One reason for this...
...woman," Shipley says, "it's vulnerability or strength. People want to push you one way or another." These four are not averse to a little push. All of them take great, if sometimes contrary, care with their album photos (Benatar's picture makes her look like a black widow Piaf) and, in hallowed Hollywood tradition, Shipley and Foley decline to give their ages. Still, these women give some indication that if they do not find a fresh new direction, they may at least open up a different route...
...Benatar, 27, was born, like Shipley, in Brooklyn, and there is a lot of New York in their voices and their wise, wily, wounded attitudes. But if Shipley evokes various girl groups, Benatar sounds like all of them packed tight into one. She can put a lot of sass into a song like I Need a Lover ("Who won't drive me crazy"). Benatar's teen-age studies as a coloratura soprano have taught her, she says, "a lot of technique and stamina - I can scream without hurting myself...