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Janis Joplin She was the ultimate funky white girl, a rock-and-roll Goddess of the 1960's. Janis Joplin’s lifestyle and her short life demonstrated the changes “blowing in the wind” for women in that era. Her life was a musical representation of the sexual revolution. Women could be horny. Women could party. Women could overdose.
Joplin’s supercharged gritty vocals were punctuated with a powerful and uninhibited stage presence. She is one of the most recognizable icons of the 60’s in her voice, intensity, and distinctive look.
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Joplin's early influences were blues singers. As a schoolgirl, she was drawn to the beat poet movement with its jazz and folk music influence. After college, she moved to San Francisco, getting an apartment in the North Beach district (then, the mecca for beat poets - famous for the City Lights Bookstore, Kerouac, and Ginsberg). There, she began working as a folk singer. Soon she was attracting attention as the lead singer of the San Francisco band "Big Brother & the Holding Company.” She left Big Brother in 1968 and went solo.
Janis Joplin lived hard, indulging in legendary excesses of drugs and alcohol. In 1970, when asked for a comment on the drug overdose that resulted in the death of Jimi Hendrix, she replied “How about ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’?” Two weeks later, the grace of God ran out and she died of an overdose at the age of 27.
She fit no standard of beauty, yet exuded a raw sensuality that mirrored a movement which rejected societal standards by creating its own. She, like thousands of others, was drawn to the Bay area, searching for identity, justification, maybe just something as simple as acceptance. It is the irony of all great icons, that the desire for acceptance was at the heart of their rebellion, and that the masses ultimately embraced them because of this rebellion. The sad thing about rebellion, however, is that it usually follows rejection.
 
In the land of beauty queens and cheerleaders, a culture that puts a premium on marketable feminine beauty, with her unruly hair, tendency toward weight gain and acne-scarred face, she was rejected by peers in her small town Texas high school. When society rejects you, you do the obvious: You reject it.
And yet, to see performance photos, one cannot deny that she was beautiful. Her kind of beauty comes from a more profound place than hair or face; it comes from soul.
© Tess
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