It was the unveiling of Pitchfork’s Top 200 songs of the 1970s yesterday that got me thinking about Marianne Faithfull. Pitchfork happened to position Faithfull’s “Broken English” in the final slot, #200, and when I dialed up Jamieson Cox‘s highly helpful Spotify playlist of the Pitchfork 1970s singles, it turned out that “Broken English” was the first song I listened to.

And what a song! I couldn’t get it out of my head all day, mentally positioning it alongside Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” and Nena’s “99 Luftballons” as the deathless post-punk Cold War anthems. The song drew me to investigate her 1979 album of the same name as well as her rich career before that.

At some point I stumbled on a picture of Faithfull in a French fashion magazine called Mademoiselle Age Tendre, and eventually I found these strange pictures of Faithfull literally “dolled up,” posing as a kind of real-life Barbie doll being taken out of its box. The date is hard to read on this magazine cover, but it appears to be January 1967:
 

 
So, yeah, it’s a cute idea for a shoot and all, certainly an innocent idea, and one might argue that we shouldn’t be too hard on the magazine personnel of that era, impose our perception of gender equality on them, who could not know better and all that. But you know what? Naaah. We don’t have to crucify the people behind that shoot to point out that some ideas date well and others do not, and objectifying women is a pervasive problem in our society that is always best avoided. The pictures may not have played as creepy then, but they play as creepy today.
 

 
By the way, above you can see a picture of Faithfull from 1979, the year she released Broken English. Note the absence of a box for her to come out of.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via Faithfull Forever
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Marianne Faithfull is naked under leather in ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’
I believe God is a good God. Why? Because he created Marianne Faithfull.