It’s probably unsurprising that the topic of gender in popular music is something that’s an obsession of mine, which is why I was thrilled to read Katie Hasty’s terrific piece in Billboard on the lack of women in the music industry, and how that demographic makeup affects the gender makeup of music that gets signed, marketed, and sold to people. The piece is smart, and it doesn’t pretend to have any answers–her wrestling with the idea of the celebration of “women in rock” and how that can turn into ghettoization of the same is something that I personally struggle with every day, and yes, I am seeing the irony of posting about this today, given where most of our traffic has come from in the past few hours–but there were a few statistics about the state of radio that actually made me raise an eyebrow:
Radio is another key arena worth a look. Adult Contemporary, Adult Top 40 and Top 40 formats are generally considered to be angled toward women. In the Sept. 22 issue of Billboard, six of the top 25 slots on the Adult Top 40 chart are occupied by women; 11 of the top 50 on Hot 100 Airplay; and 9 of the top 25 on Adult Contemporary. Keep in mind, there’s a lot of crossover on these charts. But take a gander at rock airplay, which is typically centered on a more male demo. Four of the 25 slots on the Modern Rock tally have ladies in them (only one with a leading lady: Flyleaf), and out of the 40 on Mainstream Rock, you’re only talking three (Flyleaf, Smashing Pumpkins and the White Stripes).
Obviously, these aren’t scientific indicators, but these numbers raise some interesting questions. Do male critics and radio audiences skew toward music that is typically crafted by males? Do females listen based on gender? Do acts with females in them need to work harder to be heard? Does it matter if the musical act is lead by a female singer or not?
It’s funny that Hasty brought these questions up, because they’re certainly ones that I think about a lot; in putting together my top albums of the year list for 2007, I’ve realized that the four albums that are definitely among my favorites* all have a strong female presence, if not complete domination by women as far as vocals, at the very least. (A perhaps-related anecdote: During my first set on my college radio station, I got chewed out for having a four-song set that had three women-fronted acts; the critique a) wasn’t because all the bands were indiepop and b) wouldn’t have stood had the ratio been reversed at all.) But is that because of who the artists are, or the quality of the music? I’d argue that the quality of the music comes first, but I do know that I’ve had a long-standing affinity toward listening to bands that have women in them, whether it’s because I can sing along with them more easily (well, most of the time) or because of a deeper impulse.
On the flip side, though, I had a long-standing problem with Lilith Fair (and its heiress, the now-canceled Girlfrenzy festival) because their idea of “women in music” seemed to focus solely on frontwomen in music, thus ignoring all of the contributions by the few women out there who were instrumentalists (and yes, even the cliched ’90s “chick bass player” counted on that front), and that was a little too tied up in the ideal of the male gaze (looking at the woman because she was a woman, even if she was backed up by a band that was 100% made up of men) for me to be too comfortable with it. And I think that it’s complicating factors like these–what makes an artist a “woman in rock,” is there really a biological impulse that makes women and men gravitate toward different musics, does this mean that the phrase “tampon rock” will never really go away–that make Hasty’s final question, “Will the industry ever employ and promote enough females to eradicate the Women In Music issue,” one that will probably not be answered to anyone’s satisfaction (especially my own!) for a while.
(What Does It Matter If) She’s A Lady [Billboard]
The Slits – Typical Girls [YouTube]
* Tracey Thorn, PJ Harvey (apparently Pitchfork‘s Joshua Klein misplaced his ears recently), Siobhan Donaghy, Monarch. Subject to change, of course! But I figured full disclosure was important.
the “tampon rock” and sometimes the “women in music” labels can be seen to imply that there’s an identifiable “feminine” aesthetic – that having XX chromosomes or estrogen or a womb or whatever means that you’ll make and like a certain kind of music.
what’s more important, i think, is trying to resist the homogenization that these labels imply.
what’s most important is reassessing the definition our society has of a “serious artist” — this is a largely gendered image (rebellious, dirty, hard, etc). also, there’s the tendency of society to discount/devalue any genre so soon as women become successful in it (commercially and/or artistically).
(I thought you were gonna namecheck Bats for Lashes among your ’07 faves, too. Or is that strictly an ’06 release?)
In the late ’90s, I used to say to my fellow Gen-Xers, “I hope you enjoyed the first half of this decade — the bubble-grunge and the alt-pop and all that — because that was our moment of pop-cultural dominance, and it’s over.”
My feeling about female-fronted rock is similar; most rock-savvy women I know grumble about the Lilith-heavy late ’90s, but the bad news is – that was the Moment, and it’s gone. At the end of the decade I remember numerous Billboard stories noting the end of the 3-5 year infatuatuion with Jewel and Alanis and McLachlan and all o’ them, and quoting pop and rock radio program directors, all saying the same damned thing: “I have to be careful how many songs in a row we program with a female lead.” Apparently they have research about it and everything.
Which doesn’t prevent such behavior being timid and pathetic, or prevent most Lilith rock from being a snooze, but…sadly, that was considered progressive, and it still is.
Obviously the answer is for women instrumentalists to become unremarkable, rather than “celebrated” and hyped up. But we’re clearly a ways away from that.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as well. I think what specifically got me started this time was reading review after review of the new St. Vincent record. It’s a good record, but for some reason every review has to quantify it. It’s never just Annie Clark, it’s always Annie Clark (guitarist for Sufjan Stevens and Polyphonic Spree). I understand the need to relate the two, but there’s something so wrong about having to hear she played with those people like it’s an excuse, like she’s only relevant because of her previous work with the boy’s club, and not because she wrote a pretty great album.
Oh, and I have to say Electrelane’s “No Shout, No Calls” is still my number one for the year. I love that record.
@dennisobell:
i don’t know that “genderblind” approaches (i.e., women instrumentalists as “unremarkable”) are doable, let alone desireable. our image of the artist/rocker/dj/mc are so thoroughly masculinized that there’s a percieved category mistake – stereotypical “femininity” does not coincide with what is usually considered as/required of musicianship. indeed, even stereotypically feminine traits that are valued aspects of artistry/creativity (e.g., emotiveness) are valued only when they appear in male artists (who, of course, properly re-masculinize these traits/themselves). when dee snyder runs on about how he’s not gonna take it anymore, that’s rawk. when a chick does it, she’s “just angry” (and thus not a properly feminine woman, but not for that fact masculine enough to be taken seriously as someone who can use anger productively).
so what i’m saying is: sure, there’s gobs of overt misogyny in the music biz…but we gotta pay more attention to the latent misogyny.
@fishnotfried: I don’t agree with the comment about Annie Clark; Pitchfork makes a point to reference all multi-act performers in terms of what other bands they are in, be they male or female. And frankly I think Annie Clark, while certainly trying to establish herself as a credible solo act, will appreciate some upped record sales through association with her other jobs. I think those kinds of cross-references are not intended as an “It’s okay to listen to a girl because she plays with Sufjan,” but more like “Hey look at all the cool shit she’s done! This could be good stuff!”
It’s a way to establish some ethos for the artist.
I’m not going to get into whether the industry avoids female acts and whether the music listening public naturally assumes that girls can’t rock or don’t rock or rock in their own special way; I want to simply state that in my own case, I, as a guy, generally gravitate towards males in terms of my musical preference. This is mostly because I find it far easier to relate to male songwriting than I do female. Plain and simple, guys write stuff that guys understand better. I can’t speak for the same being true for women, but I know that when I hear a women songwriter, her lyrics often don’t ring as true to me as when a guy writes lyrics. Not to say that there aren’t a good number of women performers that I enjoy, but I innately do favor male songwriting.
@SomeSound-MostlyFury: No, I agree wholeheartedly that at least referencing her former work is necessary, but it’s always done in such a skeevy manor. It’s never mentions her contributions in said acts, or how watching her freak out was one of the best parts of seeing the Spree live. Rather, it’s done as a buffer. It’s always the sentence that follows her name, like she can only be appreciated in that context. The fact that the first time her name is mentioned in all these articles is immediately followed by Sufjan’s seems inherently wrong to me. Couldn’t they at least have waited until, you know, the second paragraph?
Yeah, this is one of my major interests too, and what I think needs to be pointed out is that there certainly are women working in the music industry, but to get hired in the music industry in the first place, your taste has to line up with the taste of the people doing the hiring, since you’re going to be promoting/A&R’ing/marketing/whatevering the artists signed by the people who are hiring you. So the women that are getting hired by music-biz companies by definion like the same bands and sorts of bands that everyone else in the music industry does–which are, as Hasty points out, pretty dude-centric. At the end of the day, being a woman in the music industry doesn’t matter very much if you’re not making the decisions about who to sign and promote, because otherwise you’re just ratifying the choices already made by your Jimmy Iovines and Clive Davises. The untested hypothesis here is: if women actually ran music-biz companies, would they promote different bands, and would those bands sell? The further problem is that, given that female-centric bands aren’t getting signed and promoted, there are still very few inspirations for women to form bands in the first place (though way way more than there ever was), and so there isn’t even the volume of talent out there to make this a reality. (Please note I said “volume” not “quality.”) I can certainly envision a situation in which a strong female executive decided to essentially create a sound and image out of whole cloth by very carefully signing a certain set of the lady-centric bands already out there, but absent that, it’s hard to see things changing much; rock in particular seems to have decided that being rebellious means rebelling against mainstream notions of feminism, such as they are.
@Bob Loblaw: sure, it’s not Lilith Fair, but that whole Feist video is basically an awesome version of Bust. The people in the video might as well be knitting. Nothing against Bust or that whole aesthetic (half my friends are those kind of girls), but it’s still pretty much a girl ghetto. Just a funner one.
i’m not an indie exclusivist (obvs, check the name…), so i hate to
hear all this ‘burnt out on feist’ rap. she’s an amazing musician and
performer. she blew me away the first time i saw her, having no idea
about her or her scene. she stands out in the field of dynamic
singer/guitarist ‘frontpeople’ – men or women. let’s not let apple take
that away from us!
@dennisobell: You really think that women should become less remarkable? You must die so that you can truly live? I’d hate to live in a world where women on stage hid back by the amps, or covered their faces with their hair. It’d be kind of soul-sucking, I think.
Last night I saw Rilo Kiley put on a surprisingly great and fun show. Jenny Lewis didn’t vamp and the crowd didn’t catcall (one girl did, actually), and when they clapped people sounded like fans. Or seeing Feist every four minutes in those Apple commercials, that still makes me oddly happy, even though I might not ever be able to listen to that song again.
Believe me, I’m not putting Jenny Lewis or Feist out their as ideals or saviors of women, even great artists necessarily. I just think they’re becoming vaguely significant women, and they’re doing a pretty job of it so far, not becoming girl ghetto-ized. I don’t think either have even a faint whiff of the Lilith fair thing (Feist, maybe), they own their sexuality, and they’ve got an almost unisex appeal. I think that direction’s way more fun than the unremarkable one.
male gaze? sorry, are we in freshman seminar? Grow up.
@Bob Loblaw: Great for Feist or Jenny Lewis, but I really want to see more Eliane Radigues, Diamanda Galas, or Laurie Andersons. Deep musical thinkers. Bjork. Like that. I just don’t see enough of it, and I don’t have any good theories as to why experimental music is dominated by men, especially considering some of my favorite stuff has been done by women. I think that society tells women that the girl-with-a-guitar model is one of the only ways that they can express their femininity.
I think the only way to truly understand why there’s a low level of female involvement in chart/mainstream/rock/pop whatever, both in industry roles and performers, is to compare it to other, similar markets. the one that sticks out for me, would be Country Music.
For such an arguably Blue State phenomenon, the number of women involved in country is much greater- nowhere near a 50/50 split, but a shitload closer than rock. This divergence there is very interesting, especially in terms of ‘elder stateswomen’, like Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette etc, who not only sang but wrote, produced etc, for themselves and others (often men), why? i dunno. question for the ages.
Of course, there are women in these roles in ‘mainstream’ music (arguably more in R&B and straight pop than ‘white’ rock/AOR/MOR/pop). but not to the extent or visibility that exists in country. does this have some sort of knock- on effect? if there are no role models or precedents, do people regard women in rock as freaks, or out of their depth? probably (and ashamedly), the answer is yes.
@Dick Malone: Just a funner one.
i really really wish i was a dancer in that video.
(DOES THAT ONLY REINFORCE ASSUMPTIONS MADE ABOUT MY GENDER? DO BOYS WANT TO LIKE THAT VIDEO LESS NOW? AM I A DISGRACE TO GIRLS IF I DON’T KNOW HOW TO KNIT?)
@CharlesRockyPamplin: For such an arguably Blue State phenomenon, the number of women involved in country is much greater- nowhere near a 50/50 split, but a shitload closer than rock. This divergence there is very interesting, especially in terms of ‘elder stateswomen’, like Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette etc, who not only sang but wrote, produced etc, for themselves and others (often men), why? i dunno. question for the ages.
i think if you looked at country radio today, you’re talking around a 40/60 or 45/55 ratio of male/female listeners.
on the most current billboard hot country songs chart, there’s 12 female acts within the 60 slots; the closest to the top is reba’s “because of you” featuring kelly clarkson at No. 9 (no. 5 last week). there’s some repeat artists of those 12, too: sugarland and leann rimes (the latter is featured on the bon jovi track).
and hell dolly!, one of the very, very few oldies on the chart, at no. 56 with “wild ride.”
just fun facts, is all.
It’s waaaay too early to be reading these comments (I;m with C.R.E.A.M., I think), but I really wanted to say thanks for the Slits video.
@katie_a_princess: well shit, there you go! interesting, no? so it begs the question- what do these CMT/radio women ‘get’ from country music that they don’t from (say), a PJ Harvey, or Bjork, or Patti Smith? validation? some kind of Proustian shared experience? or just a good tune?