OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

I have a million and one things to say to Maura and Katherine about this, which would probably be better said in (semi-)private on Tumblr or wherever, because this is starting to feel uncomfortable. And yet. Damn the cross-posts.

1) The whole "ooh you're just jealous" thing. You know what, in a world where there is only allowed to be One Woman Anything (remember, you're talking to the girl whose band was not signed by a label who loved us "because we already have a girl band!") it is an awful warping lens. Where the one woman who succeeds gets held up as some kind of benchmark. And instead of hating on the system whereby only one woman is allowed through (and then has to speak for ~all women~) it is *really* easy to get caught up in "it's not fair that this woman got the book dead/record deal/whatever and why not these other great women who totally deserved it (including me)". It would be dishonest of me not to include myself in this group. Of course I am jealous that this woman gets hundreds of thousands of readers, and my little blog gets 250 and I will never get a book deal ever. You know what? There are dude writers who I cannot stand and everyone tosses their 8000 word thinkpieces around on twitter and I just think "why the fuck do you even like this boring masturbatory toss" but the thing is, no one holds up these boring ~dudely writers~ as a benchmark whose mastubatory thinkpieces hurt or harm other male writers. So why do we do it to this woman? I think that Maura is right to go after the *system* rather than the woman, but then turns around and starts criticising the woman's tone or style or voice. Which leads us to:

2) This is something that comes off the Gurl Thread. It's something that ENBB said to me, which has resonated in my head for a long time afterwards. I am a gender non-conforming/genderqueer/whatever woman. I get extra added shit, in addition to the normal every day shit of being read as female, for being this way. I have, in the past, got very angry at women who *do* perform "stereotypically female" roles and enjoy stereotypically female activities and conform to ~feminine stereotypes~. Because my sense was, "lady you are making things so much harder for people like me." Because my sense was, they were just going along with What Society Told Them To Be, and they got an easy ride because they were able to conform to "pretty" and to "gender stereotypes" and therefore got all the Nice Stuff that was denied me, because I couldn't and wouldn't. And we butted heads on this a lot, but what she said was very true: it's not that simple. Many women do and enjoy ~stereotypically feminine things~ not because they are brainwashed by society but because that is who *they* are. It is not my place to judge whether a woman who performs femininity a certain way is doing it because it's her genuine gender expression or because she's brainwashed by patriarchy and the cis-tem, maaaan. I can certainly criticise the *system* that rewards feminine women and punishes genderqueer persons with nice things like societal approval and publishing contracts. But criticising a woman for being stereotypically feminine and performing in a way that TIES INTO EXISTING FEMININE STEREOTYPES? NOPE. I learned the hard way that's not on. And that's what I see every time I see women criticising *this woman* for "making it harder for the rest of us!"

3) Tone/style/voice whatever you want to call it. Living in Britain, my only exposure to this "NPR twee" thing you keep talking about is vague awareness of threads I avoid because they are overly American and also clusterfucks. She writes like a LadyBlog, yes. Surprise! SHE IS WRITING A LADYBLOG! It's like there are two conflicting narratives in this thread: A) she is some mastermind of marketing who is deeply embedded in "NPR culture" and also is a librarian who has read a thousand books and therefore knows exactly what it takes to Write A Best-Selling Blog Crossover and so she has deliberately constructed this "Faux Naif" tone to exactly nail the right tone to push record-snob-man-buttons into making her blog a smash viral hit with instant publisher appeal!!! result!!! B) She is an amateur writer who knows very little about music, and writes about music as a Non-Music-Fan who writes like a LadyBlogger in LadyBlogTone because... (get this!) she reads a lot of LadyBlogs! Which of these narratives is true? A little of both? Somewhere inbetween? I don't feel qualified to call it. Maybe Maura has way more experience in public and can tell more easily what the aim of someone's prose is than I can? This is possible. It is also possible that I am completely missing the cultural context of WHY THESE PEOPLE ARE SO TERRIBLE because "NPR twee" is not a part of my experience and if it were, I'd hate it like I hate... oh I dunno Charlie Brooker or some British equivalent?

4) On letting down the team. I come from the other side of this. I know that I write with a tone which attracts *disapproval* from Serious Music Fan Men (and also many, many women). Because, basically, I aspire to write with the breathless enthusiasm of the 15 year old fangirl I used to be. I try to write about the emotions that music inspires in me. Some of these emotions are, um, salacious. OH MY GOD SHE'S TALKING ABOUT SEX AGAIN. I know it makes some men very uncomfortable when I talk about sex and music in this way. I also know, that in "serious fandoms" I often get taken aside by *other women* and told that I mustn't talk about music in such a ~fangirl~ way because it makes it harder for Serious Female Music Fans to be Taken Seriously, and not treated like raging fangirls who just want to fuck the boys onstage. And then we get to a point where I'm trying to review a band where the singer-dude is talking about fingerbanging and singing about threesomes and yet I must not mention sex or sexuality when describing my experience of this music because I might come off like a fangirl and let the team down. Right. So when I see other Female Music Fans talking about how Other Women must not reinforce bad female stereotypes, I really really get *my* hackles up.

I have spent way too long writing this to hit the back button now, even though sense tells me I really should and I'm going to get ripped apart, but there it is. Anyway, I have to go and look for a job now.

can't you just have one thread where you make everything about you?

good luck xp

or maybe a blog involving reviews of every single blog post from that blog

good luck with the job search!

kate, even though you can bug the hell out of me, i really do wish you well. and even though you think i'm an asshole. i wish the best for everyone here. and now i really gotta get the hell outta this place. i keep saying that...

great post j.!

many xps, er the one from about an hour ago

Oh man, I just opened this thread because it kept getting bumped. I gotta be honest, I don't even know why there is a controversy about this blog. The author reminds me of enough people I've met irl. I think this is a problem of not recognizing the diversity of humanity. Do you and your spouses share the same interests? My wife likes gardening. I like that she has a garden, but I don't really know what she's got in it. I could do a blog about my wife's weird eggplants and shit. Albert Ayler = kohlrabi, imo. I dunno.

my wife's stupid vegetable collection.tumbloggy.com

Dudes who go on at great lengths trying to make every thread on the board about themselves and their opinions and their must-read views on everything, criticising the woman who stands up and says "I have some gender-based relevant experience here" for omg you are making this thread ~all about you~": You're boring and I am so not here for you.

sorry, Branwell (also hi Branwell, i didn't know you were you until just now), but i'm still allowed to bristle at the tone, which is totally overused to the point where it becomes damn nigh prescriptive. good luck with the job hunt.

xp What's up with this kohlrabi? It doesn't even seem like a proper vegetable. Is it trying to be a proper vegetable? Are people just pretending to like it? I don't get it.

My wife's stupid vegetable drawer

also i should note that i have, like, less than zero interest in ever writing for a ladyblog, and yet, because i am a cis-presenting heterosexual female that's the box i feel like i am being shoved toward constantly. the success of sites like this one only underlines that general shove. this is what i mean when i talk about online culture and the play-to-the-cheap-seats nature of virality (and probably online personals too, with their distillation of people into checkboxes and cutesy survey answers) rewarding those who conform (even uneasily) ever more disproportionately, to the point where the genuine misfits—even those who aren't really *that* ill-fitting, but are just enough—have even fewer safe havens.

I completely get that. I even agree with almost all of it! It's bullshit that people get criticized for "fangirl" writing on style-not-substance, it's bullshit that the person writing this blog is undoubtedly facing a lot of sexist crap because she's a woman writing in a particular way (not from people in this thread but in general, in the same way it always happens -- I mean, for all the thinkpieces involving race and pop, the main takeaway the majority of people took from the Miley Cyrus fiasco was "oh my god she's such a slutty slut slutting it up," it's THOSE people). But it's also bullshit to then accuse the women who take issue with this blog that they are secretly just being jealous. Even if the reason it's so easy to get caught up in that, supposedly, is that worrying that you won't get readers or a book deal ever usually means worrying that you won't be able to pay rent / have a career in five years / save for retirement / other completely rational worries during a recession (zoom_in_on_my_empty_wallet.gif and all that), what you're essentially implying is that these women are in the anti-sexism game just for their own personal gain, which is some Tracy Flick shit that is really crappy to apply en masse.

(I'm not in the UK so I don't really know who the UK equivalent of NPR twee would be. Cath Kidston twee? I feel like that might be more analogous to Vera Bradley twee. But then literally a foot away from me are things by both of them, so even though it was a gift from my sister I AM TOTALLY NOT A PERSON TO TALK ON THIS MATTER. Again, their "NPR lifestyle" is literally the least offensive part of this. I don't give a fuck how much Ikea they display, they can fund the entire country of Sweden through the furniture in their apartment for all I care.)

Hi, please can you not use government names, thanks, I'll ask a mod to zap it. Cheers.

I once got invited by a friend to write something for Jeffrey Goldberg's shortlived "jewsrock.com" site. I actually interviewed Norman Greenbaum, but I couldn't get him off of his canned interview answers, partly because he's a canned guy and partly because I was too timid to him off his canned answers. So I canned the project. And that site failed. It was a stupid idea anyway, probably about as stupid as the idea of a "lady" music blog.

i applied for a grant for maura magazine last year and this site got it instead http://boxxmagazine.com/

and... well.

(also, I don't know who you are, or at least I don't know if I know who you are, but I would read a hypothetical music book by you based on the posts of yours I've read, so take that for whatever it's worth.)

I completely feel your frustration(s) for being pushed towards a certain narrative and a certain way of presenting! Which is what makes it so hard for me to discuss this without coming across as table-pounding. But it's a dose of "how do you combat a stereotype (without pissing on people who do, by design or accident conforming to it)?" This is what I mean by "you lose either way".

Nina Persson is trying to make a kale salad with the least amount of noise possible.

Also http://boxxmagazine.com/category/male-boxx/

i think there has to be some combating that's perceived as pissing on the people. which may seem unfair, but that's why 'punching up' is more smiled upon than the reverse.

the people who conform. at the very least, that pissing might make them think about the world outside their sphere.

The author reminds me of enough people I've met irl.

There are people IRL?

I guess my point is, that I don't know that this particular woman is actually "punching up"?

Or rather, that pissing on this woman, in particular, is "punching up".

When her "stupid" book about her husband's "stupid record collection" sells as much as JK Rowling, then it might be punching up. But I don't know how much blog crossover books even sell.

i mean again it boils down to whether or not you see critiques of her tone that would happen to any other writer whose prose is elevated to a particular level of popularity as 'pissing on.' and please don't tell me that she should be protected because it's 'just a tumblr' — tumblr is a publishing platform with a lot of potential for having its authors widely read and passed around (and it's not like writers at a lot of sites these days have their work edited, either)

"tumblr is a publishing platform with a lot of potential for having its authors widely read and passed around" = "it'll be great exposure"

(and it's not like writers at a lot of sites these days have their work edited, either)

Or authors of books

We're going round in circles at this point, but I don't think she should be protected for "being just a Tumblr" but more like "criticising a specific women's tone" is a lose-lose proposition.

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one, because I can't state that any more clearly than I did in the long post above.

if criticizing a specific woman's tone is a lose-lose proposition then women lose extra because they'll never be given the opportunity to grow for fear of offense. good luck with your job interview.

Lol wait did these chuckleheads really get a book deal

no, people are just preemptively mad in case they do

So everyone's just jealous of a fictional publishing contract from the future & that's why they don't like this shit blog, cool

Oh, for fuck's sake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXVPlrY974

that might've been fair when the blog had like 9 readers and her best friend but it's legitimately viral now, it's not like it's some one-in-a-million possibility

yeah, katherine otm. especially with the npr connection, i think the odds of them getting a book deal are 50/50 at least

p What's up with this kohlrabi? It doesn't even seem like a proper vegetable. Is it trying to be a proper vegetable? Are people just pretending to like it? I don't get it.

― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Wednesday, March 19, 2014 11:56 AM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

doesnt' taste like a proper vegetable

Except the ppl criticising it now itt are the same ppl who were criticising it then. So were they jealous before?

kohlrabi is a root not a vegetable i thought?

root vegetables are vegetables. vegetables are just any edible part of a plant that isn't the fruit.

right?

Right

yes!

is that like anti vegitransgressive normativity. cabbage-shaming is real ppl

To piss or to punch up, that is the question.

root vegetables are vegetables. vegetables are just any edible part of a plant that isn't the fruit.

right?

― Treeship, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12:38 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is blowing my mind. vegetables are just defined by their absence of seed. fruit/vegetable

Are you guys being faux naif?

while we're at it... what exactly is a legume?

they are a musical. . . fruit