I think the 2010's will be dominated musically by...

oh wait, M.I.A. had three records in there -- forgot Piracy Funds Terrorism

xpost - oh, Kate, I was talking about before, when you mentioned Bat for Lashes and Seven Bells and stuff

deej I don't really disagree with that; I think you're kinda getting at the same thing I'm shooting for, in a way, which is that part of what makes certain things the "critical canon" is about who talks about stuff in a way we consider sufficiently "critical." right? i.e., there is a discourse about music that is considered sophisticated and discerning and critical and there are other discourses about music that aren't, generally. so sure, on one hand it makes sense to look at certain publications and ask that they expand their discerning critical discourse to encompass as much stuff as possible. but that's also a pretty narrow and strange reaction, isn't it? especially if the stuff you don't like about their focus correlates pretty directly with the traits that make their discourse seem sophisticated and discerning. (e.g. obviously your canon will seem collegiate if the discourse you deem important is exactly the kind that's all educated and collegiate in the first place.) I mean, I don't disagree with you about a certain discourse having a bigger pull, but I think it's important to look at why that is and what it serves -- and whether the answer to it is that a given music publication should talk differently, or whether it's that the people reading and passing those tastes on should be less beholden to it. I dunno.

-- btw just out of statistical interest I am coming up with a count of 56 for top-200 albums where the act substantively includes a woman. I'm not saying that's meaningful in any direction, and I know part of what we're talking about isn't like numerical inclusion but some sense of prominence or centrality, maybe. But it was fun counting. I think Kate's totally right that something like list inclusion is really just a tip-of-the-iceberg issue on a whole bigger thing that traces way farther back -- why there aren't more records in the first place involving women, and then before that why there aren't more bands, and before that why not more musicians, etc. etc. By the time you get to listing records I think a lot of this stuff is already stacked up...

xpost - ha, Kate, I was totally just writing about that the other day, but about VOICES -- the whole indie "anyone can sing" ethos used to be about people with WEIRD voices, and college-rock type bands seemed to specifically go out and find a real, interesting singer -- very often a woman. but now the "anyone can sing" thing has just meant that any guitar player will croak out the melodies like it doesn't matter, like he's really more of a guitar player, and in addition to making a ton of singing god-awful it cuts out one role that brought tons and tons of women into bands

my confusion at the cred thing was an x-post with yr explanation that it was a joke - sorry, jon.

x-posts

It's okay, I just didn't want you to think I was piling on you.

Nabisco - that wasn't my list, I was quoting Dog Latin. There's a lot more I would add to that list. Many of whom have been mentioned on the other thread.

what we're talking about isn't like numerical inclusion but some sense of prominence or centrality

YES.

I hate to say it, but Nabisco OTM. This is what I keep trying to say, but not as articulately, as I keep getting angry. It's the tip of the iceberg, but we keep shouting back and forth about the tip, because it's the most visible end of the problem.

It's funny, because back in the late 80s/early 90s, myself and many of the female musicians I knew (of the instrument playing variety) used to get rather wound up about Token Female Singer in bands. Like, that was the only role that every got assigned to you. You could turn up lugging a drumkit, and the sound engineer would still say "oh, are you the singer?"

But if we'd known how even that role was gonna get written out of the story in the future, maybe we would have had a different perspective on it.

Well, the top list is 200 albums long, and I don't know it by heart. And my point isn't really "OMG, they should have included this and this and this!". More that the upper reaches of the list (top 50) are oppressively male-dominated, and that there are plenty of other ways they might have gone. Are you asking me to suggest female artists that don't appear anywhere on the Pitchfork list? Umm, I don't know the list that well. I assume Neko Case is on there, right? And Le Tigre? (Ooops, I guess they aren't, WTF?) And, like, Marnie Stern? Electrelane? (The Power Out's one of my very favorite records of the decade.) Peaches? Blevin Blectum? Plus pop artists that fall outside Pitchfork's usual purview, like Britney & Xtina. I mean, if they can expand enough to treat Justin Timberlake with respect. Along with the Gossip, Ellen A, Grouper and CocoRosie that should be enough to go on, right? I mean, it's kind of amazing to me that Standing In the Way of Control didn't make the cut, now that I think about it...

I don't think that relative rankings are all that important, but I do think that the top 50 is pretty decidedly male-dominated.

That in response to a nabisco request that got buried in a flood of meanwhile posts...

you get into some weird stuff about list-making dynamics, obviously -- like you'd look at that list and see Arcade Fire at #2 and figure Arcade Fire were more "central" to the list than M.I.A., but then M.I.A. placed three records in there, two in the top 50, which means voting-for-M.I.A. was actually a way more central activity for people than voting for anyone apart from like Radiohead and Animal Collective and Wayne

I do think what you get with individual male rock fans is this small slip where the thing that's most prized is going to come from male artists -- like women may be at #2, even all through the top ten, but the sworn-by favorite thing is going to be male and accrue some sense of "importance" in some way that usually accrues to men. (And that tendency may echo all the way down an individual list.)

xpost - haha I just got distracted trying to imagine how Pitchfork would receive a "male Peaches." Sorry, contenderizer, I'm not trying to grill you too much, just trying to get a sense of what people feel is slighted or omitted, because if you just look at individual cases in isolation it's easy to say "well the reason that's not higher is X" -- if I'm trying to think about how gender affects it I sorta need to look at a broad sample, you know?

I don't know if this is going to add anything to the discussion. However, it may be of interest that a handful of radio stations in Canada (including the one I do some programming for) introduced a "female content" provision so that we aim for 50% female content. Unlike the other programming requirements (for us 40% Canadian, 65% released within the last 6 months, 65% independent) this one is voluntary so there are no government definitions of what "femcon" actually is. So any CD with a woman performer or producer counts. When it was introduced there were a few raised eyebrows and a certain amount of moaning but after a couple of years I think it has been a big success - it's so natural that it's barely mentioned anymore, cetainly not in a critical way. It's actually really easy to program like this, I don't think anything credible gets sidelined because of it and it means that at our level in the music biz stepladder, women in/women out=men in/men out as efficiently as is reasonably possible.

And if you were reading carefully, yes, the government of Canada DOES have an official definition of "independent".

And Scott Seward OTM about most music writers having terrible taste. That's not a reactionary viewpoint, just the absolute, obvious truth.

although contenderizer, I can definitely tell you why Le Tigre aren't on there, and it's that the album of their that everybody actually likes came out in the 90s

Also, I'm getting a weird discontinuity vibe from reading about how things were so much better and more inclusive back in the college rock 80s. Cuz I don't think they were, at all. I suspect that a list of the most critically prominent American college and independent rock bands of the late 80s and early 90s would skew just as male as the Pitchfork list, if not more so.

Nabisco raises a really good point about the types of voices do the work of attaching critical voices to things, and the culture(s) the represent. The Western academic/critical thing (both a functioning system and a historical conception, a bunch of people at work and a bunch of ideas held by those people) that frames the "canonizing process" we're talking about is by and large the invention of centuries of privileged white dudes bouncing ideas off one another. And though lots of smart, dedicated and well-intentioned people have been struggling against that inbuilt cultural narrowness for decades now, it's still there. It's built into the figurative DNA of what we, in the West, imagine constitutes "artistic value".

Therefore, it shouldn't surprise us that a critical culture largely composed of relatively well-to-do white guys -- speaking to a largely white & middle-class audience (in Pitchfork & NPR's case this is almost certainly true) that grew up in a culture controlled for centuries by a bunch of even more well-to-do white guys -- should favor the works and values of well-to-do white guys. Nor should it surprise us that such voices assume a position of cultural centrality -- though this is much less true now than it was, say, 150 years ago. Progress! I think the best we can reasonably hope for is a continuation of this trend, so that by the end of the 21st century, the prominence of such voices isn't so automatic.

And yr right about Le Tigre. Debut came out in late 99, but you have to draw a line somewhere.

that is really far from where I was driving, but this thread could probably afford to get back to the question. basically I think it really obscures the issue to act like this stuff is purely a matter of tribal affiliation, like white middle-class people just naturally praise other white middle-class people. (also the "white" here just needs to go away for god's sake.) it's about lenses and perspectives and sets of values. those things hang around with backgrounds but they are not the same as backgrounds.

"...the types of voices that do the work of attaching critical voices IMPORTANCE to things, and the culture(s) theY represent."

goddam it

Agree, nabisco, and I know I should approach some ideas with more care. But though tribalism is a difficult issue to deal with, I think it's at the heart of this issue. It isn't the whole thing, but it's part of it, and race is part of it, too. I would like to be able to talk about this stuff without destabilizing the conversation, but I don't know that that's possible...

really want to second deej on these two points -

i do worry (& think its worth thinking about) that there's a level of privilege going on, broadly, in my generation, where indie is seen as a primary expression of 'worthiness' in music, that its the ONLY filter thru which to view records ... i dont think all (most?) pitchfork writers themselves are even guilty of looking at music this way, on an individual basis, but the overall effect of canon building, of ppl who dont have time to explore music the way lots of us do, are just skimming around for the 'best of the best

and

i just think indie should be a 'choice among many' instead of a predominant critical voice

so should the rest of us just restart this thread and leave this to more pitchfork critical wrangling then or...

send these to thread dump for a mercy killing

thread dump is too good for them

contenderizer its kind of annoying how u say something no one agrees with, they disagree w/ you, you say you agree with what they just said & then move back a level to restate basically the same argument

Music sounds best when being melody/harmony oriented rather than rhythm oriented and performed by male voices.

Now, it's easy for black people to make the former, and they probably well before or since to a larger extent than today. But no hope for female voices, sorry.

....

Kate are you describing the stuff you make/like now as "hard dance" btw? Or was that just a randomly chosen genre term?

i think she meant limbo music. that's the hardest dance i can think of.

Guys, there's no way Geir's not kidding. Seriously. That post is definitive proof.

I know, I know, "it's just Geir." But seriously, this—"But no hope for female voices, sorry"—is more than o_O.

It is you guys who are trying to make music into something else than just music. Music is all about how it sounds and nothing else. There is no quota for certain genders or skin colours, just sound and nothing but sound. Music is strictly music, and shouldn't be judged from any other criteria than strictly (head) musical ones. The world neeeds to get back to the values of German classical music in the 18th and 19th century.

And, yes, that criteria works perfectly on pop music too. As long as you judge it from chord changes, modulation and clever musical moves, not from sound or groove or whatever.

ffs surely you should be close to 51 now geir

Geir, so you would claim that "female voices" are somehow inherently less, what, melodic than male voices?

Yes, another attempt to reason with Geir is surely the way to make this thread more scintillating.

They just don't fit as well into the entire sound, but really, that's not the most important part. There is good music with female voices, but "rock" music has been male dominated from the start, and probably always will.
Whenever there are females, there is more reason to respect female singer/songwriters like Suzanne Vega or Joni Mitchell than female hot "babes" who are only around for 15 year-old fans to get a boner though.

I'm definitely not trying to reason with Geir, because the dude's not going to change his mind, but I am curious why he made that statement.

Well, I still think male sounds better, and it seems the entire rock history agrees with me.

However, I think also part of the problem for girls is that they aren't taken seriously by the music biz, they are just being seen as poster girls to sell records rather than creative musicians who create music in their own right. Since the late 80s, there have been a lot of female vocals in pop music, but most of the most popular ones have always been just borrowing their voices - and looks. Why aren't record companies more on the lookout for female songwriters? I mean, sure there are some, but there are much fewer than male songwriters.

Obviously, the entire indie/rock tradition will always respect singer/songwriters much more than just singers, and females would probably have been more represented had they been writing their songs to a larger extent rather than just performing songs written by males.

There is no quota for certain genders or skin colours, just sound and nothing but sound.

http://trekmovie.com/wp-content/uploads/charliex/spock_leer.jpg

contenderizer its kind of annoying how u say something no one agrees with, they disagree w/ you, you say you agree with what they just said & then move back a level to restate basically the same argument

― deej

Not sure what yr referring to, deej. I try to clear things up when I've been misunderstood or misrepresented, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

for the rest of us

I think the 2010's will be musically dominated by...

http://www.allkings.org/images/agame.jpg

1) NV, your screen name is freaking me the fuck out. I keep thinking he's discovered this forum and thinking I'm gonna have to run away.

2) "hard dance" meaning, esentially that "post-Justice highly aggressive more than slightly rock oriented distorto bass rapey nanorobot crap" that Erol (not bomber) Alkan etc. seem to play. Not just indie friendly electrowibble but that super-aggressive boys noize stuff. Which has almost 0% female content these days. I'm still taking baby-steps into dance music that I don't know the proper terms for certain things, so I'm making them up.

3) In thinking about this and what to *do* about it, I did actually wonder if a Can-con style approach would be something worth considering. I mean, as ridiculous as a quota type system might seem, the Can-con thing has had a positive effect on Canadian music. That it actually puts the onus on promoters, radio programmers, journalists etc. to go and FIND that content rather than just be lazy and take whatever comes down the promotional pipe. You can do that and still keep your god-given right to have "taste" - no matter what genre your taste is confined to, I'm sure you can go out and find some womens making it. Except brass band music, clearly. :-P

Now I'm gonna put the leech-block back on coz I need to work this morning.

I was mostly away from ILX for the last week so I missed this conversation, but i wanted to ask about something nabisco wrote:

part of what makes certain things the "critical canon" is about who talks about stuff in a way we consider sufficiently "critical." right? i.e., there is a discourse about music that is considered sophisticated and discerning and critical and there are other discourses about music that aren't, generally. so sure, on one hand it makes sense to look at certain publications and ask that they expand their discerning critical discourse to encompass as much stuff as possible. but that's also a pretty narrow and strange reaction, isn't it? especially if the stuff you don't like about their focus correlates pretty directly with the traits that make their discourse seem sophisticated and discerning. (e.g. obviously your canon will seem collegiate if the discourse you deem important is exactly the kind that's all educated and collegiate in the first place.) I mean, I don't disagree with you about a certain discourse having a bigger pull, but I think it's important to look at why that is and what it serves -- and whether the answer to it is that a given music publication should talk differently, or whether it's that the people reading and passing those tastes on should be less beholden to it. I dunno.

Is there a causal relation between favoring "collegiate" critical discourse and favoring indie rock? Like, being into hyper-literate songwriters is "natural" for people into hyper-literate critical discourse?

This seems wrong to me because the terms "collegiate" or "hyper-literate" are pretty loaded.

But still: I wish there was more hyper-literate or collegiate discourse about country music or r&b. We do ok on ILM about this. I gather the problem is that there's not a perceived market for such criticism about those genres. But I think it matters, in terms of pushing people who want to have "college" talk about music into fandom of indie rock, where they can have that talk.

1. Indie rock has depended on rock crit much more closely for survival than have genres such as pop, dance music, R&B, country etc. all of which have alternate means of finding their market (the radio, the club/dj endorsement etc.).

2. And insofar as the above is true, it's also true to say that the status of the rock critic is elevated w/r/t indie rock. Britney, Beyonce et. al. were going to be big no matter what was written about the quality of their music, whereas there is strong evidence to suggest that, say, Pitchfork "broke" The Arcade Fire to the public by pushing them so hard.

3. To the extent that indie is, by and large, not experienced socially (except at live concerts and perhaps increasingly through film and tv soundtracks...) the crit (and crit-like-discussions) becomes perhaps the primary means by which people can seek to share their experience of the music.

4. The above are all mutually reinforcing, in that (1) people look for new indie via music criticism; (2) they therefore pay attention to what the criticism is doing and saying, (3) the language and forms of music criticism seep into their own discussions until they are essentially engaging in amateur rock crit (but is there any other kind); and (4) they start to take seriously the debates and crusades of music criticism, such that they feel obliged to e.g. "have an opinion" on the new Animal Collective.

That all seems correct, Tim. Especially 3; and on 3 I'd add that I have no "easy" way to experience r&b or country socially, because my profession doesn't include people into those areas---most are into classical/opera exclusively, and the ones who listen to "pop" music are the indiest of the indie. And, sad or not, most of my friends are people I'm professionally related to. And it's not just my profession (academia)---my closest friends outside the academy report similar experiences.

Yeah the other thing to note here, which is basically your point above, is that in many cases probably the strongest calls for rock crit style treatment of non-indie is from people who experience that non-indie music in an "indie" fashion.

On the UK funky thread Lex wanted to know why I get so worked up over what people say or don't say in articles about uk funky or related to it - and the answer is, being on the other side of the world, I'm unable to experience the easy communality I might get from going to a rave or club.