My Boyfriend's Back

This weekend, I played with the New Trier Pep Band at the Second City performance and it was a lot of fun.  One of the songs that we were thinking about playing is called, My Boyfriend's Back, by the Angels, and American girl band.  The tune was written and became a hit in 1963.  It is a catchy tune that a wind band can play pretty well, and it got stuck in my head.  At home, I listened to it on YouTube, and I found that the lyrics seemed to fit what we talked about in class very accurately.  If you want to see the lyrics, click HERE.

In the song, it seems like the boyfriend was gone and the girl was harassed by another guy when he was gone.  The girl who narrates the song believes that her boyfriend will in some way be her hero and save her from this other male character.

This raises the question of what kind of gender roles were prevalent in the 1960s, just as we talked in class about the gender roles during the times that Huckleberry Finn is set in.  We talked about how Mark Twain shows his disapproval of these traditional roles by creating characters that defy that stereotype and yet are very positive an helpful characters in the book.

I doubt that the girls in the band actually had a heroic, "perfect" boyfriend such as described in the song, who fights for her and would beat up everybody who tried to take her from him.  Even the loyalty that the narrator felt toward the boyfriend doesn't seem realistic.  Instead, I believe that it is more likely that the singers were pointing out a typical stereotype, of a perfect relationship, and mocking it because so many relationships of theirs or their friends went wrong.

A similar discussion topic could be the roles of women in classic songs, because usually they are portrayed as objects.  Even when women sing the songs, I don't know if the lyrics are more equal to each gender because of the norm that has been set by years of popular songs.