Cat Power: A Good Woman

Elizabeth Goodman

Apr 2009 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

How Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, Survived Herself–and Became the Indie Rock Queen.

Chan Marshall’s stark lyrics, minimal arrangements,and wounded, smoky vocals, were an instant indie hit in the nineties–but her mental instability nearly derailed her career. How this sensitive but headstrong Georgian daughter of an unstable mother and a relatively unknown musician father–managed to make it big, burn out, and rise up again to become not only the darling of the indie music scene but also a fashion and Hollywood icon is the fabric of this irresistible story.

Covering her musical beginnings in the south and her booze-soaked rise to fame in New York City to her eventual breakdown and subsequent reclamation of herself and her music, Cat Power delves into the soul of this fragile but ferociously gifted young talent. With seven albums behind her, the hottest designers clamoring to dress her, and perpetually sold-out venues, Marshall is at the height of her career–a perfect vantage point from which to look at her notorious and intriguing history.

From interviews with her family, musicians such as Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, and Jack White, past loves like Bill Callahan and Vincent Gallo, and current friends such as Karl Lagerfeld and Wong Kar-Wai, Elizabeth Goodman gives us the real Chan Marshall–the little girl, the woman, the artist.

Ratings and reviews

I'm only a very moderate fan of Cat Power, but almost from the outset I found this book (and particularly its author) extremely off-putting. In her introduction, Goodman reprints a completely innocuous inquiry she received from Marshall's lawyer concerning the details of the book project. She interprets this not only as an "obvious" intimidation tactic but as an unwarranted infringement upon her "right" to investigate the life of a "public figure." You can practically feel the steam blowing out of Goodman's ears as she describes this supposed affront to her privileges as a journalist and Cat Power fan. She apparently had assumed that after conducting one giddy telephone interview, Marshall must clearly be her friend, and seems to take this letter as almost a personal betrayal. One is left with the feeling that her pursuit of her "subject" is really the pursuit of a target -- that she had sold a book to Random House, couldn't get the easy cooperation (and creepy friendship) she wanted, and so decided to undertake an eighteen-month revenge plot. Goodman tracks down a lot of people from Marshall's background, including a snotty editor from Spin (are there any other kind of editors at Spin?) and a few family members, who seem to want to use the opportunity to justify some fairly bad life choices and insist that Marshall got everything wrong about them. This includes Marshall's parents, who seem to reject the notion that they might have done any special damage to their children. She also describes the early-90s Atlanta and Manhattan music scenes in the broadly vivid terms of someone who is used to writing simplistic magazine articles. The thing that bothers me the most about this book is Goodman's reliance on false dichotomies when describing Marshall's allegedly schizoid personality, and repeating endlessly the standard media trope of her target's supposed "craziness." Whether or not Marshall really is "crazy," or schizophrenic, or unstable in any particular way, I don't suppose it would be all that easy for anyone to be sane, having endured fifteen or twenty years of accusations by the press, misogynistic punk rockers, or ignorant hillbilly relatives, even if most reporters take a more pathetic approach by claiming "people say Chan Marshall is crazy" instead of outright saying "Chan Marshall is crazy." When you consider that Kurt Cobain, who killed himself after three years of working for a wealthy, supportive record label, is only ever called "depressed" or "troubled" and is routinely let off the hook for serious narcotics use, and compare that to Marshall, going strong after twenty years of limited label support and routine humiliations at the hands of magazines like Spin and Blender, you have to wonder where the real dichotomy lies. Whatever her supposed sins or instabilities, Marshall is pretty clearly a decent human being, observes a higher ethical standard than 90% of the musicians working at her level, and doesn't deserve anything like the "objective" treatment she gets here. When you consider all the public figures (including entertainers) who are behaving in legitimately horrible ways, it's very hard to understand what someone like Chan Marshall could have done to deserve the continuous abuse she has received. This holds true whether or not anyone actually likes her music, or feels that the critics' attention to Cat Power's work was deserved.

This book is dedicated to my brother, so for that I am so grateful and I love this book. I miss Ben every day and it fills be with happiness to know how many lives he touched and leaves me sad to know how many people he left untouched. I would rather have had you for 26 years than another brother for a lifetime.

About the author

ELIZABETH GOODMAN is the editor at large at Blender magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, Spin, and Nylon.