Cat Stevens’ first Top 40 single as a performer wasn’t his biggest hit — it only reached No. 11, but it’s his most-covered by a wide margin. So far the song has been recorded by more than 100 artists, by talents ranging from Bette Midler to Garth Brooks.
But its popularity with other singers isn’t what has cemented the song’s place in rock history. That distinction belongs to the late pop music critic and feminist Ellen Willis, whose reputation has undergone a resurgence in the past decade. Writing in 1971, at a time when sensitive singer-songwriters like Stevens and James Taylor were thick on the ground, Willis laid bare a strain of misogyny that was lurking beneath the facade.
A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like [the Rolling Stones’] “Under My Thumb” is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens’ gentle, sympathetic “Wild World”; Jagger’s fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female — in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots” — but it’s hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he’s too innocent for the big bad world out there.
This mental exercise is now known as the Willis Test.
I think she was wrong about Jagger — there’s nothing in “Under My Thumb” to indicate that it’s a fantasy, revenge or otherwise, beyond her own wishful thinking — but she’s right about the condescension of Stevens’ lyric. Granted, D’Arbanville was just 19 at the time, but she was a child actress and was working as a club DJ at age 13 when Andy Warhol found her. She didn’t need Stevens or anyone else telling her it was a wild world.
By the next year, when this concert video was filmed, Stevens was saying the song was more about himself than his lost love.
Jimmy Cliff was actually the first to release the song as a single in the UK, where it reached No. 8, and his arrangement inspired the 1988 single by Maxi Priest, who charted highest with the song in the UK at No. 5.
