ABSTRACT
Today, Carole King is certainly the best known of the women discussed in Chapter 6, largely because of her own immensely successful recording career as a singer/songwriter in the 1970s. Her landmark 1971 album Tapestry included performances of one of her finest girl group songs, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?,” the first number-one hit for a girl group (the Shirelles) beginning in 1960. However, King’s reinvention of herself as liberated, barefoot earth mother was so successful that many fans were blithely unaware of the fact that she had ever been part of a song-writing factory, churning out tunes with titles like “Please Hurt Me” and “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” 1 The ease with which King negotiated these dramatic metamorphoses is not uncommon in the careers of women in pop, as the examples of Dusty Springfield, Labelle, Marianne Faithfull, and, above all, Madonna attest. Strategies of camp artifice and disguise are integral to girl music and girl culture, as I discussed in Chapter 5.
