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

question i'm going to totally regret asking: is counting the number of women on various things a valid metric?

nah. it's not about quotas. equal numbers of male and female artists wouldn't necessarily mean fair, open-minded coverage. it's just that when the male/female ratio is so disproportionate, this should be interrogated beyond just going "eh, writers' taste, what can you do!!!"

honest questions: which artists were covered somewhere in plan b that made it such a diverse magazine, and how often would those artists appear?

^this -- vs., say, Pitchfork...

his should be interrogated beyond just going "eh, writers' taste, what can you do!!!"

― lex pretend

not that anyone here has ever said such a thing...

it was ridiculously open to covering other genres as and when they were pitched

Pitchfork has reviewed country and opera, what do you want?

More stuff they like?

nah. it's not about quotas. equal numbers of male and female artists wouldn't necessarily mean fair, open-minded coverage.

hey cool we agree on something!

By my count, of Pitchfork's top 104 songs of the 2000s*-- a list to champion of white straight male guitar music only surely-- shockingly only has 24 songs by white straight male guitar bands. Someone start a thread on that cherrypicked statistic, use it as the only information you want to receive about who we are and what we do, and beat it into the ground for a month.

*I guess none of the rest of this counts as "our canon" though, just the parts that support what people want to get upset about.

oops, stray words!

As for Bat for Lashes, mentioned in the other thread, ok she isn't one of the three artists that made the 2000s list with a 2009 LP. Not sure what a sample size of "three" is supposed to prove (or "20")

B4L will do very well on our 2009 list; I imagine so will the YYYs, xx, Dirty Projectors, St Vincent, Fever Ray. And maybe Pains of Being Pure at Heart will make our year-end top 20, I dunno? Would we still be sexist then, if seven of our top 20 artists were in some part female? That's less than the m/f ratio in the world, but surely greater than the ratio of m/f making music, so I'm confused.

Who else might do well? Antony, Atlas Sound, Grizzly Bear, Raekwon, the Very Best, DJ Quik, Freddie Gibbs, the Hyperdub 5 comp, Bibio, Neon Indian, Mt Goats, CamOb, AnCo, Flaming Lips, Japandroids, Girls, jj, and Phoenix off the top of my head. That's 25 total: Let's say that ends up being our top 25. That could easily happen, it's as good a guess as I could make right now. Only five of the 25 are white straight male indie guitar bands, so if it shakes out close to that I anxiously await the complaints in a few months about how much we hate and are holding down white straight male indie guitar bands. (aka the Stereogum comments)

again, look, you can cherrypick facts and stats and easily use them to prove your agenda! Hey, it's fun!

anyway...I will leave alone the idea that a defunct magazine somehow proves there is an audience for what that magazine used to do. Especially since it hardly matters bcuz what that magazine did, from what I can tell, was "indie." And I think it strayed less from that than ours does.

songs vs albums.

Well, I just looked at the 40 reviews on Plan B's site, and there's not a single album among them that I couldn't imagine Pitchfork reviewing.

britfork tbh

For reference:
Manic Street Preachers, Wounded Knee, Fever Ray, Isaac Hayes, Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware, Marissa Nadler, PJ Harvey and John Parish, Beirut, Antony and the Johnsons, Telepathe, Frida Hyvonen, Women, Neil Kulkarni on DJ Gone, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Peter Rehberg, Sebastian, Anni Rossi, Fujiya and Miyagi, Suicide, Harvey Milk, Kayo Dot, Plush, Stanley Brinks, Death Cab for Cutie, Silver Jews, The Last Shadow Puppets, Thalia Zedek Band, Robert Wyatt, Boredoms, The Gossip, Rocket from the Crypt, Peter Brotzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love/Mats Gustafsson, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Cath and Phil Tyler, Mountain Goats, Helen Love, Los Campesinos!, Mogwai, Ponytail, Conor Oberst

http://buzzofla.com/Detail.aspx?aid=417

sad/hilarious irony to some of this complaining - though others would of course disagree, I would guess, if such a thing could be quantified, that Pitchfork has done as much this decade to assist the push against rockism than just about any other media outlet.

considering where the site was 10 years ago, where the audience for it in general 10 years ago, how many people we communicate to, and the ripple effect we lately can have on u.s. music criticism (unless those burial and field records somehow got into pazz/jop placements some other way, etc), our constant redrawing of our "borders" and what makes our year-end lists and what we cover, etc., might not be as demonstrative and combative and flag-planting as one NYT article about Christina Aguilera but I think we've changed the landscape more, and for more people. In 2001, indie and PItchfork WAS pretty much white straight male guitar rock; five/seven so years later, it was a no-brainer that M.I.A., or Ghostface, or LCD, or Burial, or Tim Hecker, or Robyn was "ok" for indie kids to like-- the things they got all pissy about was stuff like the Hold Steady! Or folky/jammy Grateful Dead/classic rock types. In any event, I think we've taken a lead with that and continue to do so. Maybe not at the pace some of you would like, but some people we can't please no matter what anyway, so...

nipple effect?

innovation. technology. yes, here at pitchfork media we're leading the way into the 21st century.

In fact, if we let Mats Gustafsson stand in for his collaborators, Pitchfork actually HAS reviewed 32 of those 40 artists. And most of the ones they haven't certainly don't seem far outside of Pitchfork's sphere. No Pitchfork review for Peter Rehberg, for instance, but plenty of reviews for other albums on Mego. Ditto for SebastiAn and Ed Banger. Or: no P4k review of Stanley Brinks, but two of his old band, Herman Dune. Etc.

Would we still be sexist then, if seven of our top 20 artists were in some part female? That's less than the m/f ratio in the world, but surely greater than the ratio of m/f making music, so I'm confused.

Well, it's really frankly amazing how the pop charts and best selling artists manage to be gender split pretty evenly 50/50 over the past few decades, as discussed on that poll (and how, as discussed above by Dan and myself, that even the retrogressive world of classical music is split pretty evenly between the genders) and yet your supposed progressive website seems to think that 7 out of 20 is ABOVE average?

classical music isn't necessarily more "retrogressive" than popular or folk music imo

you would hate the brass band world, kate

(no women in the major bands, there are a couple of women-only bands, but they're not very good)

I should have put "retrogressive" in quotes.

I don't think that 35% of the records released in the world have female artists on them, no. Particularly not rock music.

And I didn't claim that anything made us progressive! I was questioning your sample size and selective use of statistics, and then challenging the notion that we only cover and champion white guitar indie rock.

(I do think that, yes, female pop stars have dominated pop/R&B in the past decade though, as has been discussed here on other threads-- and when it comes to pop and R&B we do skew female more than male I would guess. Amerie, Beyonce, Rihanna, Ciara, Britney, Robyn, Annie, Kelly Clarkson, etc-- the vast majority of the pop/R&B performers who have placed on our year-end/decade/book lists have been female.)

the pop charts and best selling artists manage to be gender split pretty evenly 50/50 over the past few decades, as discussed on that poll

Link?

I just looked at all the #1 albums in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009. Discounting mixed-gender bands like Black Eyed Peas and Sugarland, as well as soundtracks and compilations, there have been 41 albums by men or all-male groups to hit #1 and only 19 albums by women or all-female groups.

bands with one woman in them are female, much like ppl with at least one black grandparent are black

All right, we'll give the female side two Sugarland albums, Now 31, the latest Black Eyed Peas album, and the Juno, Twilight, and Mamma Mia! soundtracks. That's still 41 to 26.

Include 2007 in the data, and it's even worse: 67 to 35.

The number of men vs. women actually making pop/rock records has been the elephant in this discussion for a while, or one of two. The other (perhaps disguised by the first in the sort of stacking maneuver that the species is known for) is the openness of the industry and audience to female artists of various sorts, relative to males. Scott calls attention to this by mentioning that "the vast majority of the pop/R&B performers who have placed on our year-end/decade/book lists have been female." Male pop critics do seem very willing to extend respect to female artists in the "R&B diva" role. Audiences and the industry are certainly more welcoming of female artists in some genres than others -- though exceptions will always be made for attractive girls who can sing moderately well.

All of that does suggest that it's unfair to simply count heads in search of proportional representation. Then again, it also calls attention to the pervasive and deeply-entrenched obstacles that female artists have to deal with in finding any kind of foothold in the industry -- especially if they aren't cute/sexy and don't fit into one of the obvious girl-shaped niches.

bands with one woman in them are female, much like ppl with at least one black grandparent are black

http://www.amalah.com/photos/when_you_marry/epson082.html

I tried to address lots of these issues (e.g. as between the representation of females and the discussions of particular genres) upthread.

With respect to Plan B I really do wish it wasn't being used as the yardstick as it always struck me as more indie rather than less than Pitchfork, columns and articles from people I like notwithstanding - and again, remember that Tom Ewing, David Drake, Philip Sherburne, Jess Harvell etc. all write for Pitchfork.

I would say the exact same thing that Kate says about pitching - I've never been told by Scott that something was outside the scope of what Pitchfork write about (the bigger problem is that I don't pitch or write enough).

That is meant less as a defence of Pitchfork and more of a way of saying that the difference between a writer's experience of what it is like to work for a magazine, and their memory of what their own articles and the articles of their friends covered, is very different from the overall perception of the magazine.

I mean you can say "oh but I always ignored the big cover articles on Plan B", but to say this is to apply a fundamentally different means of judgment which, if applied to Pitchfork, could be equally as complimentary of its non-indie-ness. e.g. If you just read the "Month In" columns you would assume that Pitchfork was about dance music and dancehall.

Remember that Tom Ewing, David Drake, Philip Sherburne, Jess Harvell etc. all write for Pitchfork.

^Real modest talk. Etc. = TIM F.

Don't mean to put him on the spot but I'd love it if Tim wrote and pitched more! (His forthcoming Electrik Red review will unite us all.)

Wow didn't even read the paragraph directly below what I quoted. Tim OTM about not getting a red light for coverage though which has basically been true since c. 2005. I got all kinds of crazy song reviews published, most originating in the teenpop thread!

Anyway I still don't think Pfork is the most useful target for this particular convo -- the real enemies are the network of music "coverage" sites that at best are incidentally uncritical and at worst actively disdain any form of critical thought or application of intellectual thinking to music. The worst I can say of Pitchfork is that it isn't [insert publication run for insane effort and no financial gain that is no longer with us -- say, Stylus].

But if you did like Stylus, note that a ton of their most frequent writers now have regular reviewing gigs at Pfork...

Now that it's been mentioned, and before anyone starts smelling conspiracy, I pitched an Electrik Red review to Scott before this thread was started.

By far the worst IRL example of what this thread is about is the "100 Greatest Songs of all Time" list as voted by Triple JJJ, the national "youth" radio station in Australia. If I recall it had ONE song by a woman in the entire top 100.

To be honest, the main reason I brought up Plan B was because they made a real effort - and showed genuine results - about coverage (at all levels, from new bands on MySpace reviews to cover artist coverage) of female artists *and* recruiting female writers.

Yes, Pitchfork is a scapegoat here - I don't think either of these threads are actually *about* P4k, but more showing discontent with the state of a thing of which P4k is the most obvious and visible example.