I received this email from Jody Rosen of the New York Times about our blog post on his article:
Dear Ishbadiddle:A friend of mine directed me to ishbadiddle, thinking I'd enjoy Christopher Molanphy's comments about my recent Times piece on melismatic singing in pop music. My friend was right: I appreciated Christopher's kind and witty words and agree completely with his theory about Stevie Wonder's influence on R&B over-emoters.
Christopher got one thing wrong, though. The Jody Rosen who wrote the Times article is not the "Brooklyn-based critic Jody Rosen" of southsidecallbox.com fame. That Jody Rosen -- Jody Beth Rosen, to be precise -- is a very good critic and, I gather, a very nice young woman. (She and I once had a pleasant email exchange.) The Jody Rosen responsible for the Times article on melisma, various other Times articles about pop music over the years, and a book about Irving Berlin that three people read, is Manhattan-based and as ruggedly male as someone named Jody can possibly be.
You can imagine the pangs of despair I experienced at Christopher's repeated use of the pronoun "she." ("My one criticism of Rosen's superb article is that she does not fully explore who is to blame for this phenomenon, though she does hint at it.") I wish to make some good of this painful episode by reminding ishbadiddlers that history's Jodys include such manly men as President Carter's press secretary Jody Powell; two-time all-star Chicago Cubs catcher Jody Davis; and Jody Porter, the former lead guitarist for Fountains of Wayne and current leader of The Astrojet -- a rock star, of sorts, who I'm pretty sure gets babes. Moreover, in U.S. military slang, a "Jody" is a civilian lothario who preys on the wives and girlfriends of soldiers. This character is a fixture of the chants, or "Jody calls," that soldiers belt out while marching and training:
Ain't no use in calling home
Jody's got your girl and gone.
Ain't no use in feeling blue
Jody's got your sister too.Word up. Anyway...I (heart) ishbadiddle and I appreciate your giving me the chance to straighten out this little mess. I am moving to Red Hook in June, but I trust that, even then, readers will not mistake the lovely, lithe and sweet-smelling Brooklyn-based critic Jody Rosen for that burly rogue, Brooklyn-based critic Jody Rosen.
Love,
Jody Rosen
Manhattan
Sorry, Jody! (That's Mr. Rosen to you.) Chris says: Blame it on Google. And thanks for setting the record straight.
| Gender | Names | Jody Rosen |
And, of course, there’s that other rugged male, Jody from Family Affair ;-)
Comment #1 :: link :: May 28, 2003 09:00 AMMight I suggest that if Mr. Rosen is going to remain a Pop Music critic he change his Nom de Plume to Joe-D. That will give what the kids call Street Cred. I should know, I talked to an actual teen-ager in 1998!
Comment #2 :: link :: May 28, 2003 09:00 AMAs the perpetrator of this gender crime, I have fixed the references to Jody on my own blog. But I've left the erroneous references here at Ishbadiddle, lest the exchange with "Mr. Jody" no longer make sense.
Let me reiterate that like, say, the Times, I sincerely regret the error. But how am I to know that Mr. Rosen wasn't really posing as Ms. Rosen and pretending to be in Brooklyn when he wrote his piece? Perhaps we should scrutinize his expense reports. ;)
