FKA twigs

it's about the voice, so I am struggling to find an execution that is not "voice-centric"

This isn't taking into account a LOT of different power dynamics that don't fit quite so easily into "girls have to be more pleasant than boys to make it" & fails to account for the different genre values...the focus on vocals in R&B is different from the values in rock ... and of course all of this is shaped by gender/class/race, but in much more complicated ways than she's engaging w/ here IMO. I mean for example: Beyonce is "pleasant"??

― rap steve gadd (D-40), Wednesday, September 10, 2014 4:52 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well does P4k review female R&B singers in the same way that they review Frank Ocean, i.e. giving them a fullness of humanity and agency? For the purposes of this exercise, you're not allowed to reference any Beyonce reviews

ftr i thought the article was really good

Yeah me too; I'm not sure what BN and DJ are seeing that's so abhorrent

reads a little like a college paper i guess but so what

my guess is that The New Inquiry has been written off in advance as "abhorrent" so it is necessary to call any included pieces that

I liked the article; also I feel like I need to sit down with an ILM counselor to figure out which music is correct to enjoy if I want to call myself a real feminist

I'm not being included in the list of ppl who finds this abhorrent because I'm thinking out loud about how gender assumptions affect my perceptions of male/female performers, am I? Or is "DJ" supposed to reference deej?

Deej, I'd never refer to your by your initials because this is a family forum

I mean, sans middle

Sorry, that was uncalled for & inappropriate

Y'know my experience is, when discussing these kinds of things, when someone says really they're fine with "the content" but makes vague unsubstantiated complaints about how the "execution" stops them from getting behind it, it's never the execution they object to. It's the content.

Hahaha

what's 'vague' about what i posted? but thanks for reading my mind

my guess is that The New Inquiry has been written off in advance as "abhorrent" so it is necessary to call any included pieces that

― katherine, Wednesday, September 10, 2014 4:54 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nope

Yeah me too; I'm not sure what BN and DJ are seeing that's so abhorrent

― 龜, Wednesday, September 10, 2014 4:52 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, i definitely said this was an ABHORRENT article, excellent reading comprehension

who are you guys quoting anyway

You sided with a poster about the execution who called the execution 'hideous', idk man if you want to start moonwalking be my guest ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

is this another deej-dayo pedantic-off? I said i agree w/ brad that the problem wasn't the thesis but how it was executed. I didn't say i thought it was 'hideous', merely making clear the problem I had was w/ specific arguments it made in trying to reach its conclusion

Think you mean deej-ILM pedantic-off there, buddy

no, i mean you in particular always try to ask irrelevant questions that misunderstand the argument when trying to troll me

Me: i think this piece doesn't do the best job arguing its point
You: Well, does Pfork give women agency?

...

Alright, you win buddy. You've really convinced me

What is the main thesis anyway?

Do male critics relate to female artists primarily through the voice (although this seems a bit confused with lyrics here maybe):

When a woman apparently hangs in the air as she sings, never engineering but simply existing, critics evaluate her music on the basis of their ability to access her emotionally. The voice, at least, is honest. The draw of an album made by a woman is not to consume what she’s created, but to traverse a pipeline directly to her being. She didn’t make the product; she is the product.Critics often praise the confessional, cathartic aspects of women’s music, favoring a frictionless ride to her core. Last month, when FKA twigs’ debut LP1 made its rounds through the critical circuit, several male reviewers commented on her seductive lyrics as though they were being sung directly to them. “How does it feel to have you thinking about me? Um, can I get back to you on that?” wrote Alexis Petridis for the Guardian.

I think more than just male reviewers have commented on the 'seductive lyrics'? Is FKA Twiggs judged primarily by voice?

I also worry about the dogmatism of the conclusion. There's lots of ways of making feminist music e.g. content and subject matter as well as delivery...I'm not sure I agree with this prioritisation of voice: pop singers that strain their voices against conventional gender performance pierce attempts to make them vessels of male engineering and ultimately suspend the male gaze, at least for the duration of their song

on the two eps there were all these moments that remind me of what its like when someone stands too close to you when talking to you, odd and uncomfortable and too intimate. the album is often very big and never makes me squirm which seems an awful shame.

Branwell OTM

what's 'vague' about what i posted? but thanks for reading my mind

― rap steve gadd (D-40), Wednesday, September 10, 2014 5:13 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just an i.e.:

The voice is a component of a woman’s affect—never learned, never forced, but something she’s born possessing. Watch the audition episodes of shows like American Idol and the Voice. Like beauty, vocal talent rests on a binary: You have it or you don’t.

vs.

Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons has room to sing flat on a live television performance but Beyoncé is expected to catapult through multiple key changes with perfect tone and pitch.

I see conflicting ideas there.

This whole argument is kind of a catch 22 ...on the one hand, Branwell & fgti want more specifics or else I obv must secretly want to think women are objects, but I'm not really interested in picking apart a piece I think is more or less on the right track just because I think it's also flawed.

(Ftr my laughter was for dayo's DP joke, not at Branwell's post, which I didn't see until now)

deej, I don't think what you're identifying with those excerpts is so much "conflicting ideas" as it is "the central thesis of the piece", namely that female singers are expected present in a particular way that make singers are not, and that make singers are more likely to be assumed to have input into the music released under their names than female singers.

this argument really isn't hard to understand, it is basically this applied to the female voice: http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/the-beheld/youre-right-i-didnt-eat-that/

i agree w both of those ideas, i'm talking about how this is a complex & multi-layered problem though. Either we see beyonce as someone who has to jump through a lot of technical hoops, or we see her as raw talent which wasn't learned and is never forced.

i'm not saying the dynamic she's identifying doesn't exist; i think she's just applying it too broadly & w/ too many different variables and contexts for it to be as effective as it could be

xp to dan

So "women are subject to complex and often contradictory pressures, which are not applied to men" is too complex for you to grasp? Well try living inside it.

yes, writing about difficult subjects is difficult. She took on a lot in writing this piece. I'm not saying I could do it better.

lol sorry about all of this! glad you guys enjoyed the piece! i found some of its reasoning lazy and found some of the conjecture kind of aimlessly floating around while still feeling "correct" and also found the prose generally not great while agreeing with the general premise! def not here to defend how dude music writers portray lady musicians in terms of agency especially not dombal! this turned out fun!

i think also when these arguments end up pushing for a particularly 'correct' aesthetic POV they end up on dangerous territory that undercuts the thesis ... that you're only upsetting the male gaze when doing something specifically 'ugly' ... you can end up buying into the supposed superiority of 'masculine' values or more dangerously, ignoring the ways in which 'ugliness' in, say, a punk context, can mean something different than in an R&B one...transgression, masculine power, etc. feminity/masculinity are constructed differently in different genres ... this can end up a bit overly simplistic or prescriptive ... idk. i feel like an asshole at this point continuing to argue, obv i agree that "women are subject to complex and often contradictory pressures, which are not applied to men"

not saying the author doesnt get this stuff, btw

D-40 loool I don't think that at all, like ever. I wanted to type more thoughtfully than some cheerleading but I was on my phone (and I don't/didn't have much to add.) The stats that Geffen is examining, I think it's more about the myopia of forming "objective" quantitative assessments of music (or any abstract form of art), and how that will always favour the patriarchal monoculture, pre-existing notions of "quality", work that toes the line rather than breaks the mold, but this was an unpopular argument that I was making back in 2007 and sure didn't have any legs then, probably not now either.

I acknowledge tho that a lot of points Geffen made is stuff that's she's talked about in other pieces / on Twitter, so I read the piece with a familiarity with the path she was taking, and the breadth of the piece seemed not-too-far-reaching for me.

When it comes to describing women's voices, I disagree that it's an issue of a binary of prettiness/ugliness. Skillfulness is more the issue

well frank ocean's always been punching a bit out of his weight class as a singer anyway

Right, which was part of my point. Female r&b singers of a similar skill level aren't generally given the type of praise Ocean has been and take a lot more shit if people give them the time of day at all. Fwiw, I'm sure I've been quite guilty of this myself.

you mean like noted belter Tinashe, Cassie, and Jhene Aiko?

Sure, although all of them are different from the r&b mean in a different way than Ocean's is. Maybe Kelis would be a better point of comparison?

i think it wd be really interesting to talk about gendered performance norms in an R&B context, but I don't think the terms or framework we're using is really sufficient. I think the 'skill' question is very different here than it is in other places. The Weeknd and Frank Ocean are both, in different ways, anomalies; both examples of a sudden turn towards R&B from people who hadn't paid it much attention since maybe Voodoo. But if you're talking about R&B on the whole, there's a long tradition of guys not only having to look like musclebound super-hawt stars (cf this new Luke James youtube.com/watch?v=R8zSJxA1-mA ] but to execute w/ flawless precision. On the other hand, you're also talking about a genre where the bulk of the audience is female

*are really sufficient

Was just tweeting about this piece but I think if we want to look at how gender is marginalized in popular music it helps to look at the framework this way; to see how pervasive certain values are in a big-picture sense: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/canon.html

not that this is incompatible w/ the original piece posted btw ... just looking to complement it

Could I just throw the not particularly pleasant but still awesome and culturally important voices of Rihanna and Nicki Minaj into the discussion, please? Thanks.

"This voice has been determined as culturally important (and non-injurious to the human ear)" - they should put that on the label

The argument in the article is slightly muddied by comparing white artists to black artists, because black people are obviously also subjected to complex and contradictory pressures that aren't applied to white people and those pressures then manifest themselves in all kinds of different ways primarily according to audience.

If it's a question of who is and isn't allowed the automatic presumption of 'authorship' then Frank Ocean is kind of an anomaly even among male R&B singers (Usher, for example, is not really viewed as the principle creative force behind his own albums). But then there are a range of extra-musical factors that bear down on the way people write about Frank that make him something of a special case.

But it doesn't really change the basic point of the piece, and in any case black female artists are (in general) doubly likely to be dismissed by white male audiences. And white male artists (particularly indie-leaning ones) benefit from the fact that vastly lower standards are demanded of their vocals and personal appearance (and they get away with all kinds of lazy shit as a result).

Yep. According to indie logic imperfection = transgression = agency. Frank Ocean's less than perfect vocals thus make him a better artist than Usher, a point that is only strengthened by his "transgressive" sexuality. Likewise, white male artists (particularly indie-leaning ones) benefit from the demand for imperfection-as-distinguishing-mark.

who gets to decide whose singing voice is "perfect" vs. "less than perfect"?