In Which We Have To Consider Why Shorty Always Wanna Be A Thug

East End Boys And West End Girls

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"Men infantilize women and women tear each other down" - Tina Fey, 30 Rock

"I think you're overthinking this" - common response to my post on Boys' Clubs

Not all groups of men are Boys' Clubs. Boys' Clubs are groups of men that are misogynist and function in misogynist ways. Misogyny is hatred of women. Anything that depicts women as lesser (and strangely, sometimes as greater). Active misogyny involves denigrating women as a group through speech and practice, sexual harassment of all kinds, and contempt/overidealization of "Women" as an idea.

Passive misogyny (emosogyny) is underestimating and/or stereotyping women based on deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes and ignorance, and then getting defensive when you are called out because you do not consider yourself sexist and you do not like being wrong. The refusal to accept that you might ever be wrong is a big part of "Masculinity." It is called sticking to your guns, and it is what got us George W. Bush. 

Janeane Garofalo in the film in the Sopranos episode "D-Girl" where Chris goes to LA

Not all men are misogynists. Not all women are feminists. Men can be the biggest feminists (Alex Carnevale) and women can be the worst misogynists. The culture hates women (Hall Pass) because plenty of men do hate women. They hate women because they don't understand them. They don't understand women because they think they are different. "Good" women are untouchable and "Bad" women are disposable. They often hate women because they are fixated on the idea of women rejecting them sexually, and they project this perceived rejection onto every woman they meet. They think women and men are separate categories of human being. Separate is never equal. Misogynists run most of Hollywood. No lie. I'm not making this shit up. I wish I were! 

One of the best running jokes on The Sopranos was that every time Christopher Moltisanti went to Hollywood he would be horrified by how much worse it was than the Mafia. For some reason, he thought it would be different in a different Boys' Club (lol Chris, so did we). Hollywood, Wall Street, the music business. It's all pretty fucked.

Christopher was always the most sympathetic member of the crew, because he was aware of how sensitive he actually was (although he was constantly trying to repress this awareness). He attempted to channel this sensitivity into writing screenplays, which infuriated Tony because expressing your feelings is a betrayal of Omertà.

Because of the culture he grew up in Christopher never considered that he didn't actually have to join the Mafia at all. He believed he had no choice. He found it hard to kill somebody for the first time in the first season because everybody finds it hard to kill somebody the first time. It only becomes easier through repetition, and even then it never gets completely easy to murder other people, unless you are a sociopath.

Most people are not sociopaths, but "Masculinity" involves aspiring to be one. But most men are not gangsters. Not all men are capable of murder (and sometimes women are). Everyone has violent impulses, which is why women who have Postpartum often describe intense negative fantasies about hurting or killing their newborn babies.

"Excuse me, I'm a vice president! You fucking asshole!" - future Joan Holloway D-Girl 

It is not a tremendous reach to imagine that the kind of corrosive misogyny that dominates the Hollywood studio and agency Boys' Club atmospheres would reproduce itself in other extremely male-dominated corporate climates, particularly ones that run testosterone heavy. I respect aggression on the court, but not off the court (I respect Ron Artest much more than Kobe Bryant). Women are taught and told to suppress their anger and drive. Men are taught to rely too much on it. Intelligent women learn to channel that anger and drive (to do the black swan). Intelligent men learn to channel their anger into their work and leave it out of their relationship with/to women. 

Men who buy "Masculinity" believe there's a connection between channeling anger into your work and channeling it into the rest of your life. They don't understand compartmentalization. Jack Nicholson got trapped in being "Jack Nicholson" all the time and is having serious regrets at age 73. Robert DeNiro is by all accounts a very mild-mannered guy who channels his libido into his acting, into "Robert DeNiro."  

Kanye West is dealing with this on the public stage. All artists do, but now so does everyone who "exists" on the internet. You create/project the idealized image you want to see onscreen. Other people believe in this image, and you may start to believe that you are the same person offscreen. But make no mistake, it is different onscreen. Men who want to be Don Draper are buying the big lie that there is a Don Draper (that there is a James Bond). There is no Don Draper. There is only Dick Whitman. 

We all turn into Kirk Douglas at the Oscars eventually. That's the way love goes. :(

Let's use The Oscars as a microcosm of other rooms: The Kodak Theater auditorium was filled with a predominately white audience. White privilege is invisible, as is whiteness. White people tend to look at the room without immediately noticing that it is predominately white. They do not notice that it is white because a predominately white room seems "normal." Minorities appeared onscreen a few times, extremely briefly. An auditorium that accurately reflected the racial makeup of Los Angeles, the city where the Oscars take place, would be at least half Hispanic and also much more Asian and Black. That would seem "weird" in the context of the Oscars auditorium as we are used to it looking as of now, but it seems way fucking weirder that the room is still so incredibly white in 2011 particularly given the actual racial diversity of LA.

On November 16, 1972 Alfred Hitchcock was invited to a luncheon honoring Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel at director George Cukor’s house. From left, standing: Robert Mulligan, William Wyler, Cukor, Robert Wise, unknown, and Louis Malle. Seated: Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Buñuel, Hitchcock and Rouben Mamoulian.

The Best Director category was all men. Last year when Kathryn Bigelow was nominated and won, the other four nominees were still men. If there were two women nominated for Best Director, it would seem unusual. If there were three women and two men nominated, it would seem more unusual still. If there were five women nominated for Best Director, I don't know, the world would tip off its axis and spin into outer space.

Auteur Theory: all film directors must be Caucasian boy geniuses with father issues

That five white male directors is still automatically accepted as "normal" by both men and women is an example of how cultural stereotypes lead us to believe that unfair things must actually be fair, simply by virtue of tradition and continued existence. 

one of these guys has a serious drug problem but all five have a serious hair problem

"What if white men are just the best directors?" (- a troll) I am not saying those five guys are not all great directors, because I think they all are. I'm just saying the idea that five heterosexual white men in any room with a closed door, is suspicious in 2011. You can extend it to any field, to any room, to any socially exclusive club or profession. The Supreme Court. The Friars Club. The New York Times Book Review.

and you girls get the big important job of copying things on the new xerox machine!

"What if straight white men just happen to be the best directors/ surgeons/ judges/ chefs/ CEOs/ programmers/ musicians/ comedians/ DJs/ authors?" Sure there will always be some who are supernaturally talented, but always? All the time? Girl PLEASE. Most straight white men would not like to think too much about their privilege, because they would not like to think that they didn't deserve anything they have achieved, and they bring up their own weaknesses as proof. That is privilege denying. Unfortunately they are still in charge of a lot of shit that the rest of us want to do.

the world loves a tall handsome white guy but it also hates absolutely anything else

Straight white men have a special status in our culture that no other group has. And everyone else belongs to one of those other groups, and you're damn right we're aware of the privileges straight white men automatically receive in our society. The best straight white guys: Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, James Franco, use this privilege as a platform to ask why we are listening to them more than we listen to anyone else. 

Chris & Ade, a rare accurate depiction of the friendship between two people in love

Privilege is the absence of equality. The mainstream misogynist culture attacked Yoko Ono because John Lennon dared to suggest that she was an artist on the same level as himself, equally as important as he was in the world. That her ideas were just as if not more valuable than his. That his consciousness and practice were being expanded through collaborating with her, similar to (and building on) the way it had been expanded through his songwriting and friendship with Paul McCartney. Mainstream culture privileges bromance over romance because it privileges men over women. 

from the video for Bad Girl, part of David Fincher's indomitable Madonna trilogy

In the "Men Can Be Feminists" department, the films that were nominated this year were unusually feminist except perhaps Incpetion. Christopher Nolan cannot write women but also can't write human beings realistically. We can't discount Nolan entirely because of Ellen Page. In the "Hollywood Is Still Super Misogynist" department, despite making an incredibly high grossing film (Twilight) Catherine Hardwicke was not allowed a look at The Fighter script. She was told a man needed to direct it.

Black Swan was an aggressively feminist mainstream artwork (much like MIA's MAYA). "Women" and "Mainstream" are seen as incompatible by the misogynists that run Hollywood because the culture of "Women" is not mainstream, it is always secondary to the mainstream culture which is geared towards "Men." Television seems slightly more accepting of women than film because TV is the woman to film's man. The internet is accepting of women because the internet is a great space for queering media. 

Judd Apatow, after getting over his defensive anger at being accused of sexism, did the best thing possible by hiring Kristen Wiig to write Bridesmaids and producing a TV show with Lena Dunham. The next Woody Allen will not look anything like Woody Allen. She will probably look like Lena Dunham or Mindy Kaling or Liz Meriwether.

Black Swan got denigrated most often as Camp because Camp, like Women and Ballet movies, is not something to be taken as seriously as men and Westerns. That's why it's great that the Coen Brothers made True Grit a feminist Western, as if to demonstrate that the concepts of Feminist and Western are no more incompatible than the ideas of Feminism and Men. Raising Arizona is a feminist Western about fatherhood. 

The idea that any two ideas must be incompatible is the whole problem. That any dichotomy must be "vs." rather than "and." Binary oppositions are straw men. They are rarely actually in opposition. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Men AND Women. Good AND Bad. Virgin AND Whore. Loud AND Quiet. Peace AND Violence. Logic AND Feeling. Serious AND Funny. Eastern AND Western. High AND Low. New York AND Los Angeles. 

Molly Lambert is the Vice President of This Recording. Get your own goddamn coffee. She last wrote in these pages about Taylor Swift and Ernest Hemingway. You can find How To Be A Woman In Any Boys Club here and Speak Now here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"My Drive Thru" - N.E.R.D. ft. Santigold & Julian Casablancas (mp3)

"Under Cover of Darkness" - The Strokes (mp3)

"You're So Right" - The Strokes (mp3)

In Which Your Ballroom Days Are Over Baby They Got The Guns But We Got The Numbers Gonna Win Yeah We're Taking Over Come On!

Speak Now

by MOLLY LAMBERT

We want for Taylor Swift what we want for Betty Draper, which is for her to realize that the thing she has based her life around thus far is a fucked up lie. And that when she figures out it is a lie, her life will not end, she will just get to live in Sanctuary with the rest of us. Taylor Swift believes that heterosexual men bestow all value on people, and that for women this value is based only around marriageability, but she clearly also knows how good it feels to have a number one hit (a number one heeeeeeet). Swift won't claim her own aggression because it doesn't fit with her idea of what girls are like or should be like (pretty, docile, quiet) but she is already neither docile nor quiet. 

Swift's friend breakup with Miley Cyrus reminded me of nothing so much as Sharon Cherski and Angela Chase in its snotty prudishness. Taylor also slut-shamed Camilla Belle (who "stole" her boyfriend Joe Jonas) in a song, hilariously. "She's not a saint and she's not what you think, she's an actress. But she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress." In her own mind, there is no way that Swift could or ever will be be called a slut. But the longer she is single and the more guys she dates (especially in Hollywood) Well, girl. Why does she think being a slut is so horrible? Because slut-shaming was invented and is propagated in order to stop women from claiming their sexual power. To make them think that it is men who do all the choosing, all the hunting, and that if girls have any interest in sex it is only as deer.

But Taylor is obsessive bordering on scary. She writes vengeful anthems about romantic scorn and infatuated love songs about guys she emailed and met once in real life. What is she if not a hunter? She hunts exactly as hard as John Mayer. It is just that the system is set up for him and not her, to praise his success and laugh at her failure. The system doesn't work, so fuck it. You can't win by doing it correctly. You win by breaking the system, by transforming it, by building a better one in its place. 

Gwyneth Paltrow reminds me of Taylor in her prissiness and privilege and certainty that her privilege will never run out, although it obviously always does as you get older, particularly for women. I enjoy GOOP's midlife crisis because it humanizes her. Because Paltrow is realizing that being a wife and mother is something, but it is not enough to make you happy if you don't also have some things for just yourself.

I also bring this up for dudes who have the now extremely common househusband fantasy. I usually tell them to read The Feminine Mystique. The problem that has no name is not just a women's problem. It is a problem for anyone who defines their identity primarily through their relationships, which is also an issue for a lot of men. 

That to define yourself primarily through taking care of others is to lose track of yourself. That the desire to take care of others can sometimes get in the way of taking appropriate care of yourself. That when you diss Dre, you really do diss yourself. 

Anyone can be a sponge (BRAD PITT). That borderline is considered female and narcissism is considered male just reflects societal expectations based around gendered stereotypes. Anyone who's seen an episode of any Real Housewives can vouch for the existence of female narcissists, and everyone has had a dude friend or ten that disappears into relationships. People aren't their gender. They're individuals.

Watching Valentine's Day (shut up/it was horrible) I was struck by two things about Taylor Swift's performance: that she delivers lines exactly like Jonah Hill, and that her physicality is just like Nomi Malone's. She is tall and gawky and she flings her long blonde limbs around with all the aggression of Nomi on the floor of the Crave Club.

Taylor Swift doesn't understand yet that her constant intense desire to fall in love is mostly just the desire to fuck everything, and that she can fuck everything without automatically falling in love. And that she can fuck everything AND fall in love. 

Why do some people cling so rigidly to gender roles? Ernest Hemingway grew up wearing a pink gingham dress and a bonnet until he was six. Charles Bronson likewise had to wear his sister's hand me down dress as a child, because he was so poor. Those are two of the all time totems of classical outlaw masculinity. I'm not trying to play classical outlaw psychiatrist but there's not NOT a connection there. Ernest Hemingway's mother was the breadwinner in his family, a talented opera singer who then gave up her career to raise children. His father committed suicide. Hmmm...

So many liberal dudes consider themselves political revolutionaries but then ignore or devalue gender politics as less important than other causes. Or they talk a good game about gender politics but then do the complete opposite in their personal lives. There was a great Mad Men episode touching on this. You think subcultures are going to have better more equal power dynamics, but then they usually reproduce the same fucked up power dynamics of mainstream institutions. It happened in the civil rights movement. It happened with hippies. It happens in indie and punk. It happens in everything when men are the only ones in recognized leadership positions. I wish that it never happened, but it does. Rather than bury our heads in the sand we must choose to engage with it, to figure out why it happens and how we can work on it.

That's why it was so cool when Kurt Cobain wore a dress on Headbanger's Ball. It was genuinely radical and revolutionary. He challenged the world to call him a fag, to ask themselves why they would be threatened by a beautiful man in a dress and why he was supposed to care. A hirsute or ugly man in a dress can be dismissed as comedic, but feminine male beauty is especially threatening to traditional masculinity because it offers the question of what exactly "maleness" is, if there is really anything particular to having a dick besides just having a dick. He forced questions on an audience that didn't want to touch those questions with a ten foot pole lest it end up in their ass. 

Likewise Courtney Love took femininity to its farthest possible outcrop and exposed how horrifying all the most desirable/accepted tropes of girlhood are. How fake and impossible it is to be pretty or quiet and how much the world requires and demands it of women. That's why Kurt was so horrified when Nirvana's audiences started to be full of the same kinds of bros he hated so much when they were still Guns 'n Roses fans. And why people who grew up Hole fans inspired by these ideas were all so horrified when Courtney started fucking with her face and body. No one here gets out alive. 

Women aren't afraid of becoming men, but the undertone of misogyny is that men are afraid they'll become like women. It assumes that to feel like a woman is to feel weak, powerless, degraded. But that's not what women feel like! That's just how society treats us. Men feel weak, powerless, and/or degraded every goddamn day. Misogyny allows men to separate themselves from negative emotions and ideas by attaching them to women, to a thing that they get to think they are not and could never be. 

You have to speak up. You have to call people out. It doesn't make you are a horrible shrill fun-averse harpy bitch. It doesn't mean you hate men. You LOVE men. You just also want to be taken as seriously as they automatically are. Not taken seriously for a woman. Taken seriously as a person. A person. Not as a woman. As a human being.  

There is a belief that some people have, historically men but occasionally also Ayn Rand and Angelina Jolie, that they have a divine right to power. A lifelong pass to fuck anyone they want and fuck over anyone they feel like and never have to face real consequences. It is the thing that is scariest and most fascist about the bulk of politicians and politics in general, and why Obama is genuinely revolutionary in his feminism and aversion to macho bullshit, but also why he gets called a pussy (sigh). 

It is to pretend like you are on the board of the imaginary but universal organization that tacitly endorses male dominance and ran ENRON. To side with them because it is to side with history's winners, because it is easy and requires no inquisition of the self, no possibility that you might have to change anything or give up any perks. It is to agree with Hitler because everyone else is. If you really want to renounce fascism and oppressive institutions then you have to renounce patriarchy. There is no other way.

You are never really a liberal if you treat women differently. If you hold them to different more difficult standards than you hold men to, than you hold yourself to. You are something else. You are an emosogynist. It is nothing to be proud of. This is what is so horrible and insidious about Bill Clinton and John Edwards. It's why I hate Bill Maher so much. If you deny women the same personhood you give yourself, you are not a liberal. You are not a revolutionary. You are not an outlaw or a gangster or anything cool. You are just a misogynist in a sweater and fuck you, seriously, for real. 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, and YouTube.

In Which Players Always Love You When They're Playing

Crystal Visions

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Music is a drug. Science has officially demonstrated that music produces the same effects in the brain as powerful euphoric (psychosexual) experiences. The way drugs have an emotional effect on you (why do you think people take drugs?) you are using music as a substance to produce certain emotional effects. That is why you listen to some songs a million times and others once. Individual experiences are subjective. 

In YouTube comments people end up telling you the memory of their most vivid experience of the song. That's why people love pop music in movies so much (done well), because we have all had moments that happened to be perfectly soundtracked. It is another fourth wall. Do you point out how well the music is soundtracking the experience, or does pointing it out automatically stop the existence of the moment?

In the ideal experience you can't point it out because they're inseparable. It's not something you can really set up on purpose. It has to be accidental. The urge to combine all pleasurable experiences is strong, that's why George Costanza wants to eat a sandwich and watch sports during sex. But too much purposeful attempting is an impediment to true enjoyment, the way it can be hard to have fun on your birthday.  

In college Tess and I would occasionally go on drives. Providence is so small it literally sometimes feels like you live in your own mind. The point was never where we went, it was hanging out in the car together, which is why that Dayton/Faris Volkswagen Pink Moon ad blew everyone's mind ("HEY THAT IS WHAT I AM LIKE TOO!") and cornerstone of the enduring appeal of On The Road (uh...in theaters soon?) and Westerns (you're out on horses together someplace. Westerns and War Movies are male romances).

One time we were driving back from the Legal Seafood by the airport, probably really high (jk @probably), heading towards downtown Providence on the highway as the sun was setting. I don't know which came on first, Mr. Blue Sky by ELO or the fireworks (Patriots?) In my memory they occurred simultaneously, but that is because that's how it felt. We both just turned to each other like O___O O___O and felt like plastic bags.

Tess and I have always been obsessed with found poetry. In high school we would talk forever about why the way certain headlines were phrased was so funny. We were especially obsessed with British teen magazines because of their regional slang and lack of shying away from stories about graphic sexual trauma ("I Have Two Wombs!")

I remember reading an interview with The Spice Girls in Seventeen where they asked Baby Spice if she was a virgin and she giggled demurely and said "I might be!" and then a British one where she graphically recounted losing her virginity to a much older man when she was thirteen. American magazines were trying to protect us from full grown child woman Baby Spice's sexuality, and I felt really baffled as to why.

Every time I hear "With Or Without You" I think about when Tess and I would sit on her bed together listening to it in the dark. Theoretically it was about the love we had for some imaginary boys we didn't know yet, but it was just as much about the love we had for each other. It was the desire to meet somebody of the opposite sex that we could feel the same kind of connection with that we automatically always felt with one another. If this sounds so incredibly gay, I mean it is. Straight female friendships don't have the same kind of enforced homosexuality panic as straight male friendships. 

Tess and I are both obsessed with Tony Soprano because we identify with him so deeply, although I identify slightly more with Christopher Moltisanti. Tess finds Tony Soprano attractive, but I do not. I think Don Draper is attractive, but Tess thinks his legs are too short (I have literally no idea what she is talking about). She likes Pete Campbell. I think she's nuts. There are no universal metrics of measurement for anything. Taste is subjective. That's why people define themselves through it.

The Sopranos also always got into how we listen to songs to remind us of how we felt when we heard them at specific times. Tony's obsession with seventies rock spoke to his nostalgia for youthful times when he was brutal and all powerful, not yet locked in by any commitments or responsibilities, with his whole awesome life ahead of him. 

We were obsessed with Fleetwood Mac's The Dance and spent a lot of time speculating about what exactly Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were thinking about during that performance of "Landslide" and whether Lindsey's wife got mad at him afterwards for basically having a taped emotional affair with his ex-girlfriend on a stage. 

Tess and I forward the best spam e-mails we get; realty scams, letters from Nigerian princes, lotto alerts, some pure gibberish. Sometimes inside the text, lurking between the ridiculous typos and half-translations, there is a phrase that catches something. It is always all the more astonishing for being lodged inside of so much junk.

The best are often the e-mails from mail order brides. They prey on the deep human need for connection with sentences like "I'm tall and nice looking girl i saw your profile today, then i decided to drop you some words just to say hello and how was today, i will like to known more about you, and also i will like to tell you about me, please i will be very happy." There's something so touching about it. Hello and how was today.

Sometimes YouTube comments get trolled, but a lot of them are a sort of virtual oasis. A global pangea, an internet commune, a place where people share genuine feelings and thoughts and memories without anyone being a snotty dismissive asshole. People all over the world sharing the experience of listening to a specific song (I told you I'm an optimist). It is the isolating experience that becomes a connective one. 

Selected YouTube Comments From The Above Video For "Dreams"

Race should never play a card in music. But because I'm black I get a lot of weird ass looks for this being something I blast my system to. This song calms me in ways many can not imagine. Stevie Nicks is the shit and I will contest to any person who thinks different. Rock out Stevie, rock out.

Give me an mp3 with 5,000 songs of the 60s, 70s and 80s on it, a pocket full of batteries, my 66 babyblue Pontiac Beaumont, and a back seat and trunk filled with Cold Cokes and Icy Brewskis, and point me to the nearest highway. With a repertoire of great tunes like this one, I will cruise until the tires fall off and then just pull over into a little grove of trees and watch the sunset one last time as my life of pain and sorrow drifts off into a sleep of forever...what a way to go.

Great song!!! Thank you for this great video. Lee .... Santa Barbara , I love life and hope maybe one day you will know that you are a true friend. "Stevie Nicks" 'Rocks" No matter how old I get my heart will forever remain young!  "Sand" Only a call away..... VA Angels

2 very hot women...and 3 guys who got laid like crazy during that decade. WoW.

I remember being small in my car falling asleep as my parents drove home from a long road trip to this song

Why is there even a dislike button on this song??

i used to watch my sister getting ready to go out partying whilst she played rumors over and over again and this song stuck out the most, one of my favourite songs ever

Songs are a snap shot of certain points in our lives. The emotions, moods, etc that are so strongly tied to our most memorable song (even those that are just favorites or well liked) will ALWAYS take us there. And nothing can ever take that away-never! I 54 yrs old, I use this as a tool (sometimes as a drug) to get me there. I am glad I am a human. 'nuff said

man this song makes me smile when I Hear it because it makes me think of life and that we all have to die at one point in time and this song makes those facts not scary....all I know is that i wont forget this song and that when im old il still be hearing this song and it will still make me feel how it makes me feel now.

My voice of singing will never be as great as i wish for it to be, but my father has something wrong with him the doctors cant give him meds for and he is slowly dieing but he told me he would like me to sing this song in the talent show and im learning this song just for him (:

Is there anything more beautiful than the sound of Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham singing harmonies together?

i remember hearing this as a lil kid on sundays when my mom would be cleaning the house early morning. lol. AWESOME SONG!

the only reason i heard this song just now was cus a girl told me it was nice. i agree with her now. this is nice

I love this song so much she is the best of all i know that thunder happens when is raining love that when it happens

o i miss my dad his old music we enjoyed together

that's song are amazing! i never tired of listen!

This song is super dreamy. If this song was a girl I would be all over it.

I'm 12 and even I agree today's music isn't as good as anything made from the 60s to the nineties

awesome song, Guys are such dicks.

For as many women that get their hearts broken by men, there are still plenty of guys that get their hearts broken by women, I happen to know quite a few myself. 

I'm getting her face tattooed on my chest

I miss that: a great song that is simple, tells a story, but that can magically contain one's perception of an aspect of life translated it into melody and lyrics. I do think that people who compose and write music are touched in a divine way.

Ok so I can remember the summer of 1978, I had just turned five, I was at my friend Monica's house...I pressed a button on her parents stereo and this song came on

cocaine's a hell of a drug

Hard to believe this woman is anywhere near 60 years old: time goes by like THAT.

hey stevie i agree on how u feel about the tech of the world i wish threre some way to be more of a freindly hand shake to say hello i dont need this texs its not good for us to know whats important to poeple and just be real face to face and say hi i love u steevie 

It was 1977? Sometime back around then.....Living at South Shore...Lake Tahoe. Yep! Fleetwood Mac and a big ol' doobie......Work hard, play hard....Great music that transports me back to some friggin' far-out times..........Instantly...

its amazing how she wrote this song within an hour. This song chose her to share through out the world!

My dad got to dance with Stevie Nicks while he was security at one of her concerts......That lucky bastard! RIP dad..........xoxoxo

Such haunting song too. Dark, sexy, kind of sticks to you after sex on a rainy summer night. When it's over, it leaves you lonely, but interested and wanting more.

Stevie Nicks is pretty as hell in these photos. I would hop on it with out one seconds hesitation if I had the chance.

magic

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about how to be a woman in a boys' club.

"As Long As You Follow" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Landslide (live)" - Stevie Nicks & the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (mp3)

"Dreams" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"I'm So Afraid (live in 1997)" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Stop Dragging My Heart Around" - Stevie Nicks & Tom Petty (mp3)

"Rooms on Fire" - Stevie Nicks (mp3)