The
Culture Vulture – pardon the temporary ornithological mutation – has been
sitting on this egg even longer than his (? – egg?) usual dinosaur-era posts;
such that it originally began, "This week...", then "Last
week...", and is now past the point of "last month..." In the
meantime this has also become, I think, the longest post ever delivered from
the Parrot's perch, if not simply the longest thing anyone has ever dared to
post on a blog, period. Or it was until I decided to split it up into several
shorter, slightly more manageable posts. So this will be the first of a series.
The
references to temps perdu pertain to
the occasions on which Ms. Vulturess and I alighted on a couple of concerts
featuring music by women. To say that this did not feel like some really new
and unusual experience is an understatement: I guess I've been sufficiently
impressed with the musical contributions of the fairer sex since, I don't know,
my first Joan Baez album, or maybe my Mom singing a verse of some Tin Pan Alley
tune every time I'd utter a phrase that reminded her of a song. (She briefly
had aspirations to be a pop singer in the 50's.)
But these
concerts, both at Lincoln Center – one by Ricki Lee Jones, in a perhaps
slightly underrehearsed performance of her album Pirates, the other in
honor of Pauline Oliveros, the influential composer who passed away this year –
were related to a new initiative on behalf of music by women, courtesy of the
tastemakers at National Public Radio. On what seems to me highly questionable
evidence, they have argued that the contribution of women to popular music, and
music in general, is under-appreciated, a situation they propose to remedy by
the promotion of a List, that paradigm of web-based obsessiveness.
Now,
lists are one thing on which parrots prefer to pontificate, as witness our
previous disquisitions on the the so-called Top 1043 Classic Rock Songs of
All Time or The Tommasini Ten. So excuse me if I ruffle some
feathers, but I plan to say a few (thousand) words about this list, its
rationale, and its method of selection.
One of
the reasons this was a bit like a pregnancy is that I am addressing a list of
150 allegedly "greatest" albums by women, and I started out knowing
about 20 of them fairly well. I was familiar enough with many of the other
artists, but I am just not the type to alight on a Madonna album (much less
some of the less sassy and more anodyne commercial pop, country and R&B
entries) and remain there long enough to listen to the whole thing. So to write
about this I had some more or less reluctant catching up to do. Roughly 45
albums and one Spotify Premium account later I am still discovering 12x
platinum albums I never paid any attention to. It's not a case of "How could
I not have known about this?" but rather "Am I supposed to care about
this now because it's on this list?" Should the Powers That Be find this a
sad confirmation of their beliefs in the underestimation of female popular
musicians, I must inform them that I couldn't name a Steve Miller, Journey or
Bon Jovi album I've listened to either, and hope I am never so inclined to
write about them that I feel a need to. Whether Madonna or Mary J. Blige, Max
Martin or Mitch Miller, I have a fairly dim view of commercial popular music and
remain short on contrition about it.
The list
does include a representative sample of albums outside the pop mainstream; in
these cases I may have crossed paths with the artists but not necessarily with
the selected album. Here and there I discovered something that was never on my
radar, much to my own loss. X-Ray Spex' Germ Free Adolescents: who knew that
one of the greatest punk rock albums was sitting in a record store bin under a
strange name like this? Ditto for Against Me!'s Transgender Dyphoria Blues.
Cris Williamson's The Changer and the Changed: A Record of the Times was a
rediscovery of an artist I have known of for 35 years but clearly have not paid enough
attention to. On the other hand, it looks suspiciously like nearly every woman
who has made a prominent hip-hop/R&B crossover album has been added to the
list, to the point where it is very hard to discern what is particularly
notable about some of the choices in this category. (Rihanna has unaccountably
been excluded from it, but there are so many curious oversights in the list as
a whole that this is no more weird than the others.) I am not going to do any
mea culpas about not having listened to most of them before, because having now
done so I still don't know what is especially great about some of them.
Another
issue is that I was constantly revising my judgments, or ways of expressing
them, and that in part reflects the wish to avoid the perception of delivering
some crass version of the Dominant Male Perspective. (Parrots cannot be accused
of acting like King of the Forest, but it's true that we are situated high
above the other denizens of the Urban Jungle.) The other part is that judgments
in the arts are by nature partly subjective, and I was constantly rethinking
the criteria supporting my judgments, reaching for something more objective. In
this I don't think I've had more than minimal success; what I have to say still
rests heavily on my perceptions, albeit perceptions guided by decades of
listening to, performing, writing and commenting on music in many different
genres.
Given
the nature of what follows, I should make it clear that I think the idea of calling
attention to music that deserves wider recognition, through a list or whatever,
is a fine thing. My whole experience of popular music has been that popularity
just barely intersects with greatness; so for example I have argued
vociferously that Tori Amos and Loreena McKennit, to take two examples, are
grossly underappreciated considering their merits relative to other
better-known artists. But while it does, as noted, contain some lesser known
works of genius, ultimately this list is not very helpful in turning
perceptions around. It rather seems to endorse one zillion-selling recording
after another, even when "great" seems quite a stretch to describe
the album's overall contribution.
I've
never seen a list of this type that I really liked, but this one is
particularly irksome because on the one hand, it wears the mantle of authority,
coming from two elite institutions (NPR apparently teamed up with some musical
magpies at Lincoln Center, though it sort of wears the NPR label on its chest),
and on the other, everything about the methodology seems off: the putative
reason for the enterprise, the criteria for inclusion (or exclusion), the
ordering of the selections - all seem to have been handled so badly that the
legitimacy of the list suffers greatly. Or so I shall aver from my avian outpost.
The
series is divided as follows:
This post: The focus will be on some of
the arguments offered by the list's creators and supporters for the enterprise
as a whole: the rationale for the list, in short.
Next installment: A discussion of some of the
criteria that were used in selecting albums for the list.
Last
part: A highly
opinionated critique of the particular choices of albums that were included,
and a short list of those that were not but should have been.
Taking a potshot at the notion of
"a new canon"
That is
how Ann Powers characterizes the goal of the list in the title of her lead article for NPR, followed by the rhetorical
flourish that "In Pop Music, Women Belong at the Center of the
Story". (Does this mean that men belong on the periphery? Or is everyone at the center, as in Lake
Wobegon where "all the children are above average"?) Powers is not entirely oblivious to the cultural implications of declaring "a new canon", but nevertheless considers this a good thing to do and a gift to women everywhere. Coming from the bully pulpit of these
relatively conservative cultural institutions I think we should not let that go by without comment.
The
feminist critique of canons is that they express the dominant ideology of a
culture, which is typically male and sexist. The response cannot be "let's
make an alternative canon" or "let's make a women's canon" –
that is just a different form of dominance, which can come at any level of
power or control. Cultural elites who attempt to make musical canons in the
interest of some disadvantaged group will end up creating a new class of
culturally disadvantaged musicians: those who have made equally interesting contributions
but were not recognized by the compilers of the list.
Before
pursuing this, it is worth pointing out that canons are not generally created on the fly, they evolve over
long periods of time through the judgments of entire peoples and generations.
The "canons" that pertain to classical music or English literature,
for example, are the result of judgments made, and discarded, over the course
of centuries. Lists can be created at any time, by anyone, and some may have
more value than others; but canons are at
most captured after the fact by lists. I say "at most" because I
think of canons as fluid and vaguely defined, which no list can ever be by its
very nature. So any canon-making enterprise is suspect from the start. (Only the
Vatican is exempt from this observation – by self-definition.)
Second, the
recognition and itemization of canons – which is more to the point of what this
list is really about – can have two aspects, one of which may be positive, the other of which is clearly negative. For the
purposes of basic education and sometimes other reasons, it is useful to have a
set of "canonic" texts, pieces or whatever, which can help guide individuals
towards familiarity with the outstanding works of a nation, a period, or a
social group. Fluency with the canon then becomes a sign of a culturally
literate person.
But canons
also tend to create an orthodox cultural norm that delegitimates marginal ideas
and may stifle creativity. They offer an artificial paradigm against which both
old and new works must be compared for authenticity, and are therefore one of
the very things that can keep valuable contributions by women, minorities or
third world peoples out of the
"center of the story". They get established by prejudices that are often
not manifest, and blind us to other ways of looking at cultural artifacts. The NPR
list's inclusion of a few albums by third world and classical artists (about
10-12 and 4-5, respectively, out of 150 entries) suggests that the listmakers
were hoping to avoid this, but the token-ish nature of these entries shows that
it can't really be done.
Therefore
I don't think it is either possible or desirable to establish "a new
canon" with a list of recordings "made by women". To the extent
that there is an old, intellectually calcified canon that suppresses the
contributions of women, we should question and resist the canonization it
represents. Yet what is being offered is not a canon-free world, or a revised,
more inclusive canon, or even a revised list,
with the underappreciated contributions by women restored to their rightful
place; rather, it is simply another list, so that we now have some allegedly male
chauvinist lists and a putative feminist one. Since this answers absolutely no
questions about the relative position of women's musical offerings in a
gender-neutral culture it does not do anything at all to support the claim that
the other lists are biased.
But the oddest thing about the whole endeavor is that this is not a "new" canon at all: in fact, five years ago, Rolling Stone presented a shorter list, entitled "Women Who Rock: The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time", that virtually duplicates a third of the artists and for the most part the albums on the NPR list. Yes, the very magazine whose longer, non-gendered list of the alleged 500 greatest albums is maligned by the creators of this one (see below), produced practically the same list in abbreviated form! The web site ListChallenges.com also has a list of this sort, with a similar title but twice as long as the RS list, and a publication date of 9/26/13 (per the source code); it once again very largely overlaps the NPR list, but includes several artists or albums that (as I suggest below) were inexplicably left out, like Grace Slick, Mama Cass and Bette Midler. (The list also, in my opinion, has some superior album choices for the artists they include, such as Laura Nyro's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession rather than New York Tendaberry, and a more courageous Madonna choice, her Kaballah-inspired Ray of Light.) So what exactly is "new" or revolutionary or liberating about this NPR list? Nothing – it's been done before, and at most NPR has added another 50 albums, some well chosen and some not.
A dubious rationale
Powers'
article does not get better after the curious title and subtitle. The attempt
to provide a rationale for the list in terms of the alleged under-recognition
of women in popular music falls apart under scrutiny. First, consider a version
of this rationale given in a WNYC interview by Jill Sternheimer of Lincoln
Center:
Well,
in all of these lists, you know, you have the famous Rolling Stone lists, the
famous Pitchfork lists and so many lists through the years. Women, they're on
the list, but they're sprinkled in sort of as an afterthought. And after four
albums by Bob Dylan comes a Joni Mitchell album or three albums by the Beatles,
then there's Carole King. They feel like an afterthought and not the main meal.
Bad
examples, perhaps – I think there should be at least 10 Beatles albums before Tapestry. That the latter is a brilliant
album is hardly news to the world of pop music, since all but one or two of the
songs on it were regularly on FM radio playlists from the time it was released.
But the work of one top notch songwriter, who was also a decent singer and
keyboardist, does not really even begin to match the output of three brilliant
songwriters, four perfectly blended voices, four very creative instrumentalists
and the greatest producer in rock music, to say nothing of the cultural
significance of some of their recordings. I have to wonder what Carole King
thought when she saw this – "Gee, she's right, my album shouldn't have to
follow three Beatles albums!",
or, more sensibly, "My work is great, but would I really rank it in front
of any Beatles album – even the one
where they covered one of my songs?" (That would be "Chains" on
their debut album, Please Please Me.)
In any
case, there are actually only three Dylan albums before Joni Mitchell's Blue, which comes just ahead of Bringing It All Back Home. Joni and
Dylan have a lot in common and are both truly essential, but as with The
Beatles, I would put several Dylan albums ahead of almost every singer-songwriter
album ever made, so it does not seem shocking, much less a sign of implicit
sexism, that three should turn up ahead of Joni's album – which, incidentally, is
ranked in this allegedly gender-slanted list a full 20 places ahead of any Simon
and Garfunkel album, a choice that is certainly open to discussion. Perhaps an
even better comparison for these solo artists is with Elton John, who finally
checks in at #91 on the Rolling Stone list, well after Joni, Carole King,
Patti Smith, Aretha and Dusty Springfield. To my taste, the four or five best
Elton John albums would be in a dead heat with the four or five best Joni
Mitchell albums. So it's hard for me to see how Joni has been disrespected by
the RS list.
Another
piece of alleged evidence can be found in Powers' introduction to the NPR list, where she
refers to,
the
shelves weighed down with books about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, while only one
or two about Aretha Franklin or Patti Smith sit nearby.
I went
to Amazon and stopped counting when I hit twenty
(20) books entirely or largely about Aretha Franklin, not including sheet music
and the like. I counted about the same number for Hendrix, though there are
many more books of sheet music. So whatever may be weighing down the shelves,
the statement does not seem to be an accurate representation of the comparative
critical attention devoted to these artists.
And
this, from the same source, once again on those other lists:
Rolling
Stone's 500
Greatest Albums of All Time list, compiled in 2003 and updated in 2009,
includes no women in the Top 20. Pitchfork's
"People's List," a reader-determined Top 200 list spanning the
publication's lifetime, included two bands with women in its Top 20. Recent
lists by publications ranging from SPIN
to Entertainment Weekly,
Time and NME showed similar
results. And the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has never remedied the problem of
significant female underrepresentation in its ranks.
Now, Rolling Stone and the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame, at some points all but united under the dominant influence of Jann Wenner, are
institutions almost as famous for their musical prejudices as for their
lists or inductees, and can be safely ignored as either barometers of mass
opinion or widely accepted indexes of musical value. But again, Powers does not
try to correct these or the other lists by showing which albums by women really
belong in the top spots, but chooses to go with a brand new list of women only.
That seems to cede ground, while also sewing doubt about whether the
contribution of women is truly underrepresented.
Are
these lists good indicators of the overall recognition of women in popular
music? It's true that of the 50 best-selling albums of all time, perhaps 15 at most have women in the most
prominent role. (What albums count as the best-selling depends on the criteria
you use, so this is a rough number based on various lists.) This is not the
critics speaking but the music-buying public. Far from defending this hodge
podge of sublime and ridiculous best-sellers, I merely want to say that it
reflects the relative number of female and male artists who have gotten far
enough in this rough industry to make claims on our attention. If there is a
problem here, isn't it that the aggressive nature of hard rock music, the
sometimes barbaric incivility of both the (mostly male) musicians themselves and
other industry players, the egos that tower over everything related to the rock
music industry, are a discouragement to women's participation in the first
place? So that while
women have been prominent stars in soft rock, folk rock, pop, country, R&B, techno and many other forms of popular music, they are generally underrepresented
in the world of electric guitar-driven hard rock.
We know
that women can play electric guitar when they want to; indeed, even if we
didn't have plenty of such examples, there is no shortage of women among the
greatest classical music performers on string instruments
like the violin, viola, cello and classical guitar, so what sense would it make to think that
they could not conquer the electric guitar? But maybe this form of expression,
which requires not just manual dexterity and musical taste but (in most cases)
loudness, attitude and aggression, does not appeal to women to the same degree
or with the same frequency that it does to men. Or if it does, then the
prejudices may lie at the point where women are discouraged from taking up the
instrument, that is, in the minds and hearts of parents, peers and other
musicians. Whatever the reason, a core type of popular music is not heavily
populated by women. (At least, this is historically true; see this recent NY Times article for suggestions that the
situation may be changing.) It is only to be expected that both record sales
and lists of favorite albums will reflect this.
I can
understand the frustration that leads to the following comment by Jenna Wortham of the NY Times: "the way that even women
just get categorized in the types of music that’s acceptable for women to make,
or even the idea that something soft and tender and vulnerable and about
emotions and feelings is somehow the antithesis of what it means to make rock
music... that somehow these things are in competition... is just a little bit
mind boggling." Let's not exaggerate the dichotomy, for besides the
already noted fact that women do make hard rock, examples of "something
soft and tender and vulnerable and about emotions and feelings" made by
all-male hard rock bands are not difficult to come by: the Rolling Stones'
"As Tears Go By", the Beatles' "And I Love Her", Grand
Funk's "Mean Mistreater", Led Zeppelin's "Thank You", and
the list goes on. But – to return to my original point – given the historical
male domination of rock music it is no surprise that women are less well
represented in lists that are comprised largely of rock music.
On the
other hand, looking at the Wikipedia list of sales figures by
artist rather
than by album we get a slightly different picture. Among the 10 top-selling artists of all time are Madonna,
Rihanna, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion (40%); among the top 15 add Whitney
Houston and ABBA (still 40%); Taylor Swift is next at #16; and as you count
down the list, out of every five artists you find at least one or two women.
Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Adele – all very new artists, in an era of supposedly
diminished album sales - have each
sold more records than Bob Dylan, Jay Z, Paul McCartney or Prince.
But
sales do not and should not directly translate into critical recognition. The
sales figures show what albums people find entertaining, and the standard for
entertainment seems to be set by a largely teenage and easy-listening crowd.
Britney Spears set all kinds of sales records with her first album, but like
Madonna, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain and so many others on the NPR list, her
appeal is not based primarily on originality in songwriting, vocal performance
quality, instrumental chops or even tasteful selection and interpretation; it
is based on presenting smooth, safe, musically non-challenging, somewhat catchy
material delivered with airbrushed production qualities. If artists like Dylan,
Bowie, McCartney, Springsteen and Prince appear higher on "greatest
album" lists than more popular albums by women, it's because they take
risks and challenge us musically in ways that many of the highest-grossing
female artists do not. (Needless to say, there are more safe, dull, insipid
albums by male singers and groups than by women, but the references in the
comments by Powers and Sternheimer were to the likes of The Beatles and Dylan,
which is quite another story.)
But
women who do take risks and have moved popular music forward in some way are
well represented in hearts and minds, and have generally achieved considerable
critical recognition. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Janis
Joplin, Grace Slick, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Roberta Flack,
Grace Jones, Joan Armatrading, Deborah Harry, Patti Smith, Sade, Amy Lee, Lauryn
Hill, Beyoncé – those who are not in the grip of some rank prejudice already recognize
their outstanding contributions well enough, list or no list.
Indeed,
one of the NPR list's surprises – the very recent Beyoncé album Lemonade occupying 6th place
among these 150 albums – even if it lacks the perspective of time, at least
points to one of the great role reversals in music history: Beyoncé is, and arguably
has been for a while now, taken even more seriously as an artist than JayZ, who
is himself a kind of legend in his own time. (Now, thanks to Lemonade and 4:44, sharing a part of the legend spotlight occupied by Tiger
Woods and Bill Clinton.) And it has arguably been that way before: consider how
The Mamas and Papas were all but represented by Mama Cass; how Big Brother and
the Holding Company came to be seen as little more than a backup band for Janis
Joplin; and how female lead singers like Bjork and Natalie Merchant went on to
successful solo careers without their former male bandmates.
So
neither lists nor album sales may be a good indication of the recognition of
women in popular music. Music by women appears to be critically recognized when
it is made in a spirit of originality, creativity and artistic integrity rather
than for purely commercial appeal. While this may exclude a great many very
popular artists and albums, it includes a great many as well.
*****
