![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In a 1985 interview with Amanda Redington, Dio explained his "mystical" lyrics as a palliative for "the awfulness in the world," which he pointedly characterizes in terms of rape culture: "Every time you pick up a newspaper someone's being murdered or being dragged behind a bush somewhere. The peculiar absence of women from much of his lyrical universe speaks volumes of his refusal to speak for them, and also speaks to how feminism is not merely a woman's discourse about women's problems but an investigation of how difference inflects power and oppression. "I'm trying to make these shouting statements for people,' he said in a 1994 interview with Joan Quinn, "shouting, screaming statements - we're angry about what's going on." But these were not overt, patronizing statements about gender issues rather, they were Dio's attempts to enact resistance to patriarchy without being co-optive, without making a patriarch of himself. Instead, galvanized by his struggles with chauvinistic guitar players whom he refused to let overshadow him, Dio developed a feminism that teased out elements of the killjoy temperament in metal's aggressive approach to its audience and put it to use in undermining masculinist structures of dominance at their ideological and psychical roots. One cannot account for the purpose of such lyrics as "Don't smell the flowers, they're an evil drug to make you lose your mind / Don't dream of women 'cause they only bring you down" (from Holy Diver's "Don't Talk to Strangers") or dispel the overt phallicism of "Between the velvet lies, there's a truth that's hard as steel" (from the song "Holy Diver") without a more sophisticated hermeneutic.ĭio's feminism was not a matter of token acknowledgment of female perspectives, or extending his contempt for patriarchal religion, like the Catholicism he grew up with. Sheffield cites Dio's outspoken advocacy for the world's outcasts and underdogs to explain Dio's feminist empathy, but the case is not so straightforward as that. Rob Sheffield claimed in his Rolling Stone obituary for the singer that "Dio barely ever sang about women unless he was empathizing with them," but even a cursory glance at Dio's canon yields counterexamples. The late Ronnie James Dio is well-remembered for many things - his five-decade singing career his choosing the Italian word for God as his stage name, his setting a benchmark for metal vocal power as a member of Rainbow and Black Sabbath his propensity for slaying dragons during his stage show, despite his diminutive stature his pioneering use of fantasy role-playing themes in his lyrics, spurring the development of the castle-rock genre his fondness for magic and the spiritual symbology of rainbows - but the feminist undertones of his work are often overlooked. The overlooked feminism of Ronnie James Dio Ronnie James Dio memorial in Karvana, Bulgaria. ![]()
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