P2K: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1

the fact that music publications refuse to hire women as writers

actively refuse?

(and in some cases, as Kerr pointed out about metallers that fight against "girly" music

I should point out that 'girly metal' isnt usually metal thats made by girls, its the metal made to appeal to teenage/pre-teen girls.

and jeff

I think gender imbalance in genre should be taken into account though if 'how many critics are male or female' can also play a part. Not saying 'women don't DJ', I'm saying there is an imbalance that also needs to be addressed.

It doesn't relate to this list but hip-hop is finally starting to show a bit more balance in the jerkin movement than it has done for decades. And not in a 'all female rappers have to be like lil kim and wave around their fanny' kind of way either. Once it stops being kids learning their trade with the odd single to producing albums, I think women in hip-hop - or at least in the jerkin part of the list - may start to show up as more than just 'token female rapper who hangs around with more imposing male rapper'. They are more likely to get written about if they actually doing things and making their own sound.

(Of course, getting more attention/critical respect is not the same as getting enough attention/critical respect.)

xpost.

actively refuse?

― blueski

Well, in effect refuse. TBH, the active/passive question ceases to matter when the end result is so glaringly obvious.

I haven't read the x-posts since the Lex... but

I think, also, when looking back on things, for whatever reason, there is gender distortion.

It's like, when you read contemporary accounts of new music, there's an equal balance. Which seems to disappear with perspective and difference. Like, maybe female artists are viewed as more "pop" and therefore by nature more ephemeral.

I'm thinking of genres like Punk, where Debbie Harry and Patti Smith got as much attention AT THE TIME as the Ramones and Television - or in the UK, Siouxsie and the Slits and X-Ray Spex being players, but looking back retrospectively, it's all the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

I bitch about this in the Nu-Gaze scene - that original era shoegaze was very gender equal - boy-girl acts like MBV and Lush were the people defining the genre. And yet, the retrofetishists all seem to be boys in leather jackets.

But perhaps that's it, that the tendency to assign music into genre and cling to retrofetishist scenes and look back upon the past like a historian is more a male tendency - or at least a rockist tendency, while simply taking things at the moment is the poppist (and therefore perceived as feminine?) one? That it's the men who do the looking back, so they pick what they want to remember.

And then bring into play the different ways that age is treated with regards to gender, when original bands reform...

there's just so many things coming into interplay. It's never simple.

I think that history is viewed through the lens of the cultural default, and in all of the genres you listed it is very easy to revert back to the cultural default (ie, white men).

music publications refuse to hire women as writers.

This just isn't true. When I was writing for CTCL/Plan B, there were quite a few publications that tried to recruit me on those grounds.

In my case, it was that I didn't want to write for those publications. It was't as fun or as interesting as Plan B - or their deadlines and wordcounts or "you can never use the first person" or the insistence on using ratings made me just not WANT to write for them.

There's metal made for preteen girls??

multiple xposts

You never heard Stryper?

(But also, I hated feeling like being tokenised. I used to write letters complaining to guitar magazines, for instance, saying, why do you never cover female guitarists, why do you never have females demonstrating the correct way to finger chords - in fact, no females at all, except the half naked ones posing with BC Riches in the ads? And I did get a letter back - more than once - saying "come and write for us" - but I didn't WANT to be the token girl, you know? so they could turn around to the next person and say "we're not sexist, look, we've got AN GIRL on our staff")

slipknot fans are over 12??

I don't WANT to have to be the token girl repping for the tastes of ALL WOMEN - which is what you are expected to do when you are a Token Girl.

I want men and mens roles to change as much as female roles have changed. But again, pissing in the wind.

Ha Kate, in those situations I have viewed tokenization as an advantage! My thought process has always been "My job is to use every tool possible to get my foot in the door and then kick incredible ass once I'm there. If that includes my race, so be it; it's not like I've got piles of family money/connections behind me."

(Granted, it did get tiring to be asked "how do black people feel about [x]?" all of the time; that's one of the reasons I'm never going back to my hometown. When you're talking employment, though, particularly in an arena you are passionate about, I feel like you're selling your opportunities short if you don't use every tool at your disposal, and sometimes that tool is your race/gender/sexual orientation.)

Maybe, but... these weren't paying gigs, you know? And I had/have too much else going on in my life. I will only EVER do music crit if it's fun. I'd rather be making music or DJing or drawing paisley if I'm not gonna get paid for it.

This just isn't true. When I was writing for CTCL/Plan B, there were quite a few publications that tried to recruit me on those grounds.

― Masonic Boom

Thing is, MB, your experience isn't necessarily indicative of the big picture. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for PFork to hire a few more competent, dedicated female writers, if this was something they really cared to do.

Maybe, but... these weren't paying gigs, you know?

oof say no more

"How would a collection of people come to the consensus that an anti-social record is one of the 20 best albums of the decade? Is it just me or does that seem willfully contradictory?"

Pssh. Either I communicated unclearly or you totally missed my point. Plenty of albums about crime or that are explicitly critical of mainstream culture are none-the-less popular, both critically and with the record buying public.

I'd argue that crime and an album about crime are two distinct things, only one of which is anti-social, and that being critical of mainstream culture does not preclude you from being part of or co-opted by mainstream culture (see emo, Hot Topic).

I don't think it's particularly controversial to opine that the wider an audience for a particular art form becomes, the less shocking that art form becomes, or to argue that by the time you get down to a shortlist of "best [x] whatevers" for a given time period, the contenders you would expect to see on that list should be unsurprising if you understand the audience and the people putting it together.

This makes perfect sense and will, I suspect, almost always be true. This is why those of us who were initially attracted to the risky/transgressive/antisocial aspects of a thing will complain about how "safe" it becomes as it's mainstreamed.

k i like a lot of music sung and/or written by women, but tbh on average i just prefer listening to male singers. ok yes i'm a man but seriously it's a purely aesthetic thing and i think this is true of a lot of people. if i were writing a list and it turned out that every single album was written and sung entirely by men i wouldn't think twice before publishing it, my only consideration would be whether it was an honest reflection of my tastes.

dan OTMing it up

"I'd argue that crime and an album about crime are two distinct things, only one of which is anti-social,"

I'd argue that you're trying to parse my argument too finely, and that if you really want me to qualify everything like a proper essay I can, but that this is going to lead mostly to semantic quibbling and a waste of time. Because as it stands, you're arguing that an album that endorses crime is de facto not anti-social, which would mean that either you've got to argue that it's impossible to create anti-social art or that crime is not anti-social (it was a broad category rather than a specific example, but you appear to have conceded it already, so we can elide debates over whether crime is necessarily anti-social). If you concede that it's possible to create anti-social art, you should also be willing to concede that there has been popular (both mainstream and critically) anti-social art. You were the one who said that anti-social work on a top 20 whatever was contradictory, and I don't think it is. I think it's a cop-out to say so.

It's not particularly controversial to say that things get more mainstream as they get more popular; it's nearly tautological. However, in saying that you should be able to understand the list based on the audience and the people who put it together, you're forgetting both that this list wasn't promoted as "Here are the top vote getters from a bull session me and my pals had down at the bar," but rather a play at objectivity. While we're all sophisticated enough readers to get the biases, you're ignoring that there's still a valid critique in pointing out that by putting forth the list, they're attempting to canonize those biases (which include, say, a stunning lack of diversity, and a lot of humdrum schmindie).

It comes back to the fact that if these are the albums that are being canonized, people have boring, worthy taste in music. That this reflects the selectors and the audience isn't an excuse—why should these people be picking the "best" music if they've got such boring taste? Instead of carrying forth the deemphasizing of the canon, it's indie kids retrenching their mediocre listening at the expense of great music.

Whups—Forgetting both that… etc. and that this list is canonizing biases.

I'd like to see this gender debate get a bit more erm specific. Not because I disagree that there's a "problem" but I think it's hard to say what that is, if it's a single thing etc.

Like, lets think of a couple of prominent categories of female music that mainstream rock crit tends to ignore/marginalize etc. Apologies if making a list seems masculinist and hence part of the problem (although on the other hand I feel uncomfortable with "women don't like making lists" arguments - if only because they remind me of old saws like "men are good with maps; women never lose their socks"... though I guess a simple insertion of "... are conditioned to..." gets over the cultural feminism style essentialism issue)!

1) GROUP: Indie Rock made by or involving females
ISSUE: Not "ignored" maybe, but perhaps critics are less ready to acknowledge "genius"? Very few exceptions eg. Joanna Newsom.

2) GROUP: Female R&B
ISSUE: Ignored to the extent the genre is ignored. In some ways female R&B has a higher profile amongst indie-rock criticism than male R&B, though the difference has narrowed in the past few years. No strict gender bias here, but arguable that the lesser position afforded to R&B vis a vis indie rock is related to a former or even ongoing "music for girls" bias. Does it go without saying that many women have rapped me over the knuckles for liking female R&B on account of its (to compress into a single phrase) negative gender modelling - either content-wise or contextually (e.g. the idea that championing female R&B is effectively endorsing a model of music creation where female artists are "locked out" of much of the creation-side - I don't agree with this argument obv but it's not flat out wrong either, these are vexed and I think interesting issues).

3) GROUP: Female singer-songwriters/folkies/etc.
ISSUE: After Joni Mitchell, almost all are regarded with suspicion by the indie rock press. Some including Kate herself are suspicious of what is perceived to be a limiting notion of femininity in this music (let me know if I'm mischaracterising you here Kate). Though I personally find it difficult to see how, say, Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan can be lumped together in this regard. At any rate the female singer-songwriters/folkies etc. that are accepted by the indie press - Newsom obv., but also, say, Neko Case - don't appear to embrace other concepts of femininity or even be majorly stylistically different, so much as simply possess a requisite if at times ineffable air of "indieness". One thing I'd have to think about more is: are similar male artists lacking a sufficiently indie vibe treated with equal suspicion and/or derision? I'm not sure - anyone have an opinion on this?

4) GROUP: Female country artists.
Ignored to the extent that the genre is ignored/disliked. I could be wrong, but I don't get the sense that indie listeners make gender-biased assumptions about country per se or country artists specifically - male and female artists seem to come in for equal and similar ire, and I don't think country "reads" as feminine to the non-fan.

5) GROUP: Female rappers
ISSUE: Pretty much a mixture of all other categories: ignored to the extent that the genre is ignored, perhaps swimming upstream against a "masculine" sounding chosen genre, perhaps also struggling to be noticed by an indie mindset inclined to find genius in males rather than females...

The fact that all of these are different doesn't disprove the argument that sexism at work (the opposite if anything), but I think it means that it's distortive to simply lump it all together under some broad category of shameful indie male sexism. These things definitely warrant thinking about IMO.

there's also the issue of gendered aesthetics at work here ... if a male artist has a large female fanbase, & does poorly in a pitchfork poll, its a diff issue than a female artist with a larger male fanbase in a pitchfork poll, right?

like, gender of the artist vs. gender of the audience vs. gender of the critic vs. gender of the producer vs. gender of the songwriter vs....

Apologies if making a list seems masculinist and hence part of the problem

I think the discussion is part of the problem anyway tbh, on account of the vast majority of its participants not being women interested in this subject, so you might as well flex those listy muscles like a big man.

i guess i understand where you're coming from when you talk about women not being featured in guitar magazines, because so much of that culture is sexist in a Rock-Typical way. but looking at the above Pitchfork list, i hardly think that gender matters. besides a few obvious exceptions (Jay-Z, the Strokes), and i believe this is the case with pitchfork and indie as a whole, issues of gender and sexuality are repressed/non-existant. not a lot of hetero attitude among the Pitchfork set of bands. ESPECIALLY in this decade, where the indie ideal seems to be Prepubescent Boy Next Door (sufjan stevens) or asexual "genius" collectives (radiohead, wilco). hell, daft punk aren't even HUMAN.

This is such patent bullshit that gender/sexuality issues are non-existent.

It just plays, yet again, into that utterly sexist bullshit that default non-gendered gender = MAN. And does not admit invite the existence of women. It's that old "It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman" = ALWAYS A MAN.

Kate is totally OTM here.

Yup. It's amazing to me that anyone would say that gender doesn't matter on the PFork list when it's almost all guys. I mean, the math is not complex.

And I wonder about Tim F's genre-splitting. I suspect that the core issue isn't who's being covered and how -- that's just a symptom -- but that the critical voices are almost all male. That the critical culture is a boys club of the most old-fashioned sort.

same reasons as why ILM is male-dominated more or less

That makes sense, except that ILM (like RYM) is a self-selected pool, and therefore its gender skew isn't anyone's responsibility -- to the extent that the local culture doesn't actively exclude interested women, anyway.

Given that PFork and the like selectively hire their writing staff, it's a different issue. Related, sure, but not the same as.

Hrrrrrrrmmmmmmm.

Well, and there was a mention of politicizing taste up above, and I think that it's sort of begging the question, in that it was a defense of these sorts of lists on a, "Well, these folks like what they like," basis. Yeah, OK, sure, but if what they like ends up being a boring schmindie list without a lot of diversity, replace some of those boring-ass critics. Then it gets into an editor saying, "Well, but he's my pal and I like the way he writes," which is fine, but if the result is a boring read, why not take active steps to mix it up?

But hey, I don't read Pitchfork and when I applied years ago they didn't even answer me, so I flatter myself thinking we've got a mutual apathy going on. On the other hand, I am a music fan, and they are the biggest online organ for music news and reviews, so I'd like them to not suck as much.

I bitched about the politicization of taste, because it seemed to me that MB was complaining that guys should attach more (equal?) value to music made by women, and I disagree. I'm very much of the opinion that the only obligation people have WR2 their tastes (musical, sexual, etc.) is to be honest about them and at least moderately open to new things. The problem, again, isn't the personal taste of this or that guy, but rather a critical culture that seems MUCH more interested in male than female opinion.

Maybe "open to new things" (nudge nudge, wink wink) isn't the right phrase. "Respectful of difference" ought to be enough.

Except this isn't about *taste* so much as what is *canonised*. They're perfectly happy to listen to this stuff, but not to get out the "genius" brush. A bunch of Brooklyn hipster boys can fart in a microphone and it goes to the top of the Pitchfork list as a work of staggering genius, but a woman can come up with The Hounds Of Love or something, and still not quite make the grade.

And I do think that male can do a hell of a lot more taste-expanding in terms of seeking out female artists and not just going to their comfort zones - *and* combine that with actually *listening* to what female artists sound like, instead of just looking at the luscious pouting pictures on the album covers. I *do* think that you have the obligation to explore, challenge yourself, try new things, test your boundaries - if you're going to call yourself a music critic.

(But I admit, this is coming from long-term frustration with so many aspects of this gender equality business - the answers always turn out to be "well, women need to do X, Y or Z different..." and never venture the idea that men might need to get off their lazy, comfort-zoned arses and change themselves.)

I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? These people are not representing themselves as "Casual Listeners Who Like What They Like" - they are setting themselves up as Critics and Canonisers and Arbiters Of Taste.

And if you ARE going to do that, then you do have a responsibility to stick your head a little further out of your comfort zone and take some responsibility for what it is you are canonising, and what that says about you and about the world at large.

I think that is part of the job, yes.

A bunch of Brooklyn hipster boys can fart in a microphone and it goes to the top of the Pitchfork list as a work of staggering genius, but a woman can come up with The Hounds Of Love or something, and still not quite make the grade.

hmmmmmm

Yeah, but see, I don't like The Hounds of Love all that much. Or Kate Bush period. So, though I can appreciate her skills and contributions in a distant sort of way, I wouldn't put her at the top of MY all-greatest list, even if it was submitting it to Canon Central. Instead, I'd include stuff I do actually like. Which would probably skew male. And maybe that reflects some deep-seated internalized sexism on my part, but then again, maybe it doesn't. And there's no way to ever know. I work at appreciating all kinds of stuff and like a great deal of music made by women, but my very very favorite albums/artists lists would probably be just as bad as PFork's -- if not RYM's.

Personally, I suspect that my tastes are more indicative of what I relate to than what I endorse. And so, as a guy, it's entirely unsurprising that I most strongly relate to guy shit. If that's the case for any significant number of people, then Canon Central has an active obligation to gather opinion from a gender-diverse pool. Unless they actually intend to present a specifically masculine P.O.V.

And if you ARE going to do that, then you do have a responsibility to stick your head a little further out of your comfort zone and take some responsibility for what it is you are canonising, and what that says about you and about the world at large.

(a) this is all great but is unquantifiable to the point of meaningless in practice

(b) the % of reviews that are written with the actual intention to canonize its subject, as opposed to just saying how good the record is or isn't, is very likely close to zero

The one point I agree with IEC on is that the list is a reflection of the contributors; if you want the list to change, get different contributors.

You can "not personally like" something and still admit the fact that it is meaningful and worthy and even important as a work of art. That's kind of the point of a "Canon" - that it's removed from the idea of mere personal taste and raised up to some abstract idea of "this is what our society considered meaningful at this time."

I mean, this is what makes this all-male Canon so bloody dangerous - the idea that only white males are capable of making Great Art.

Isn't that the point of a Critic as opposed to a casual Fan - that they go beyond "I like this" or "I don't like this" to try and impose some order and meaning onto this sea of cultural product?

Or perhaps I've absorbed too much in the way of the idea of standards from art or literary or other forms of criticism - music always seems to be different from other artforms in that way.

Can I just ask, who brought "this is the canon" to the table here? Pitchfork, or the people who don't like this list?

I think it was Haagen-Daas.

I think that the moment you start making statements like "These are the Top 200 albums of..." you are making an attempt at claiming some kind of canonical status.

PFork's cultural uniformity/bias/skew is another matter. The culture they represent is a niche and therefore at least passively exclusionary. They aren't Music In General, they're PFork indie. So it's appropriate for them to represent a somewhat narrow range of cultural viewpoints. The tendency of niche cultures to skew this way or that, demographically, is not a problem. I'm not even saying they should be 50/50 male/female, necessarily. Just that 10/1 does surprise me a bit.

I think that the moment you start making statements like "These are the Top 200 albums of..." you are making an attempt at claiming some kind of canonical status.

I guess I'm questioning this because this list certainly isn't my canonical list of What Was Good this past decade, so I'm pretty much ignoring that aspect of it; I think the analysis of what ended up on it and where it placed in terms of sociological post-mortem is interesting but it also seems like this list is not the end-all, be-all of music this decade and needs to be combined with a myriad of other sources before one can start talking about The Canon, including other publications, the Mercury Prize shortlist, the Billboard charts, etc etc etc.