The idea to create the song was inspired not by John or Taupin directly, but rather by Taupin's wife at the time, Maxine Feibelman, who would say, "The bitch is back," when John was in a bad mood.[7] Taupin then wrote the lyrics. Later, Elton would comment: "It is kind of my theme song."[8] The song originally was written in A-flat major, but was later performed live a half step lower in the key of G major.
The bitch is back
Several radio stations in the United States and elsewhere refused to play the song because of the word "bitch". For example, in 1976, the program director of WPIX-FM in New York told Billboard, "We will play records that are borderline suggestive records such as 'Disco Lady' by Johnny [sic] Taylor but we will not play 'The Bitch Is Back' by Elton John. We won't play those types of records no matter how popular they get."[10] John responded to the controversy, quipping "some radio stations in America are more puritanical than others."[11]
"I own Ayn Rand's personal first-edition, first-print copy of The Fountainhead," Malice continues. "I got it for my twenty-first birthday. It came from her estate. Whenever I'm with other Randians, I so have the biggest dick in the room. 'Oh yeah? You've read all her books? Well, check this out, bitch!' "
Back in 2016, we believed that facts still mattered, that significant swaths of the public were not completely looney-tunes. This was before QAnon not only gained huge traction, but back when Democrats laughed when told people believed Hillary was running a child-sex ring out of a pizza parlor.
So what is Musk gaining by allowing Trump back on? He gets the kudos of the bros, the right wing fanatics, those who think he can do no wrong, who believe you have a right to say whatever you want whenever you want wherever you want.
"There were a lot of us 'bitches' out there," observes editor Cathi Hanauer in her introduction to The Bitch Is Back, referring to the readers and writers of 2002's The Bitch in the House, a collection of essays by women who were, she says, "exhausted, disillusioned, resentful, and angry at our husbands."
Focused as it is on the stories of women who work with writing for a living, The Bitch Is Back provides only a partial answer to Woolf's question. But as Hanauer notes, there are a lot of "bitches" out there. There are doubtless many more volumes that could follow this one.
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002) 782-784 // --> [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature Sarah Appleton Aguiar. The Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. viii + 174 pp. The man sitting behind me on a plane uttered, "All women are bitches." The earnestness with which the phrase was said to a nearby stranger startled me. After all, no one in his right mind would be talking like that. . . in public . . . in light of political correctness . . . surrounded by women. Nevertheless, here he was, shaking his head, raucously trying to convince his neighbor that you "gotta do to women what you know they're gonna do to you," clearly an understanding of "type" and a confession of [End Page 782] emasculation. What startled me about this man's declaration was the unexpectedness of this comment because men just didn't talk or think that way anymore. Women as bitches were another era and certainly not part of the "second wave" feminist thought current in the media then.
Susan Appleton Aguiar's book The Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature attests to why it is possible to have this misconception. Appleton Aguiar observes that the "bitch," as type, is absent from contemporary feminist literature because in "second wave" feminist writers' attempts to reverse these prevalent stereotypes, they homogenize their women characters to the inverse types. She contends, "for all her ubiquitous presence in every other form of media, the bitch has been noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon. Until recently." Appleton Aguiar traces the transformation of the bitch from "the embodiment of female evil: the foil for literature's icons of morality and the scourge of the male hero," so central to much of literary history, to "that vital woman, empowered with anger, wit, ruthless survival instincts," which she details in the writings of contemporary authors Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Fay Weldon, and Jane Smiley.
Appleton Aguiar, in applying the Jungian construct to the works of Ken Kesey and F. Scott Fitzgerald, classifies "the bitch" type into "four structural forms: the Mother, [. . .] the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medium, or Medial Woman." When she looks at these types as prominent in male-authored literature, she additionally classifies these types as including the domineering shrew, the witch, the femme fatale, the devouring mother and the castrating bitch. Conversely, when she looks [End Page 783] at literature written by women, "the bitch" may "seem motivated by recognizably devious, self-centered gains, combined with, in some cases, a distinct lack of self-worth," as demonstrated in the writing of V.C. Andrews and Danielle Steele in addition to the Brontës or Edith Wharton. She details how "the bitch" re-emerges in more recent feminist writings, but in trying to express the sheer mischievousness in looking at "the bitch" as type, Appleton Aguiar undercuts her argument with lighthearted chapter titles and the teasing tone they support. Although designating her introduction as "The Season of the Bitch," a playful change to a 60s song which fittingly parallels the referent of the book's title, "The Bitch Is Back," she can't maintain this frivolity throughout the text. She eventually jumps from song referent to Shakespearean pun, "To Arch the Type or Not to Arch the Type," followed by something as mundane as "The Male Perspective...
A guest claims to have seen a ghost woman taking his money clip from his hotel room. Additionally, the couple now living in Monica's old room claims it is haunted. The temperature is very low, TV and lamps work strangely and the bathroom too seems haunted. Even the camera capturing Monica's lift off seem to be affected. Mary starts a "haunted tour" on the Montecito when the ghost issue gets blown up by the press. Buying, and then renting out the suite would be profitable now when it's haunted, she claims. But it doesn't seem as easy to buy it back as it seemed earlier.
Back in the early 1970s, Maxine Feibelman was married to Bernie Taupin, Elton John's lyricist. As John's fame grew, she became part of the touring entourage, serving as the singer's seamstress. Being in such close proximity to the star, she would see firsthand when he'd fall into one of his notoriously foul moods. She'd warn her husband and the rest of the tour party by announcing, "the bitch is back." It wasn't long before Taupin turned the phrase into a song. For his part, John appreciated the gesture, eventually admitting that the tune is "kind of my theme song."
Ryder (com New Directions):I was justified when I was fiveRaising cane, I spit in your eyeTimes are changing, now the poor get fatBut the fevers gonna catch you when (the bitch gets back)
Ryder (Unique):I entertain by picking brains (My love!)I sell my soul by dropping namesI don't like those, my god, (In my love!) what's thatOh it's full of nasty habits when the bitch gets back 2ff7e9595c
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