I got up this morning and discovered two deer curled up in the snow in a wooded area of our backyard. I hadn�t seen them at first, as they had their heads down and were lightly covered in snow. They looked just like rocks. I�ve always wondered where all the deer go in the daytime and now I�m wondering how many times I�ve walked right past them and not even noticed.

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I was entertained by the pair of articles in Sunday�s New York Times Arts and Leisure section on Norah Jones and Courtney Love as the good girl and bad girl of pop. I�m always interested in issues of music and identity, particularly the marketing of women musicians and Courtney Love has actually been something of an academic darling of late � there were several papers dealing with her at the conference I attended in October.

Jones and Love exhibit two classic types of women musicians. Good girl Jones is classy and exotic. The fact that her father is Ravi Shankar adds to her mystique. But due to her separateness from him, it has not overpowered her (quite a different situation with another Shankar daughter, Anoushka, who is Shankar�s musical heir apparent). And of course the relationship to Shankar puts Jones in a musical lineage with the Beatles. Jones has a fantastic and unusual voice, but her music has no teeth. However her image along with slightly arcane musical references seems to inspire the benefit of the doubt � she�s not so much fluffy as hiding, mysterious. I would actually argue that she�s all veil and no Scheherazade. I think Ben Ratliff, who wrote the Jones article in the Times would agree with me.

Bad girl Love�s musical alignments may have caused her more harm than good in the long run, although they may be responsible for her being on the public radar at all. Had she been a better or worse musician, her marriage to Kurt Cobain would have affected her career differently. If she had been less talented, she wouldn�t have lasted so long. If she had been more consistent, some of the questions of her artistic creativity probably would have evaporated by now. But part of the bad girl image is the constant questioning of her abilities. It�s hard to be a rock star�s girlfriend as well as a rock star. Two conflicting sets of qualities are required.

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