Tuesday, September 26, 2017

List and You Shall Hear (I): NPR's "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women"



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.

*****


In the next post I plan to talk about the criteria for inclusion on the list. Once again I have a few brief squawcks.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Virtualized Voice

So El Parroto is heading to the subway in Bay Ridge yesterday morning when he spies a pile of new Village Voices in their Red Box, sporting a picture of Bobby (he of the Nobel Prize in Literature) on the front cover, and worrying that something has happened to our leading folk poet, even though he the Parrot had not yet read the previous issue and was still hauling it around in his backpack, picks it up, hustles down so as not to miss the R train ( a transportation disaster) and has a quick look, when lo!, what is the meaning of this: Final Edition??



Well, I hadn't heard the news, though it was reported by the NY Times several weeks ago that the Voice would cease printing, but not when. No doubt there will still be plenty of copies when I get home, I will pick up a few more... not! By midday every box in the wide city had been cleaned out by "souvenir collectors", or to put it in the Parrot vernacular, fucking lowlife thieves who no doubt came along in vans or trucks right behind the distributors, scooping up entire boxes and throwing them in the back, to be sold on Craigslist for $100@ - the ultimately irony, as that is precisely who gobbled up the classified ad business that used to be the Voice's bread and butter.

Included in the issue is a 50-page photo spread of current and former Voice writers, photographers, and staff members, and as if almost half a century of reading it weren't enough to move me, what jumped out was how many writers in even this grossly incomplete album were familiar names, people who had continually given me reason to cheer, scream or shake my head in sympathy over so many years. Even more than the muckrakers were the music and film reviewers, people I would rarely agree with wholeheartedly but whose sense of engagement always motivated one to think, react, care about the latest indie film or unknown punk rock band.

That is was incomplete was driven home to me when I noticed they did not have a photo of my fellow philosopher Peter Kivy, who I distinctly recall having told me he was the Voice's classical music critic before he became the world's leading philosopher of classical music. Just to make sure, I checked his Wikipedia entry, which sadly did not have much of a bio and did not confirm his tenure at the Voice. So someone who knows for sure one way or the other, please correct that or correct me.

Meanwhile, after all the great photo spreads in the ultimate hard copy, it's that cover that sums the whole thing up. You see, Voice photographer, Fred McDarrah snapped the photo outside the VV offices one day some 52 years ago, clearly a candid shot, when Dylan was not yet Dylan and might still hang out on a bench in public without being mobbed, and he just gives McDarrah a casual salute, "Yo", as he raises his camera. But now the gesture comes to symbolize both a salute to the journalists of the Voice, which is largely what this issue is, and a way of saying "Goodbye" to the newspaper, from someone who became all but a stand-in for the very concept of Greenwich Village. Now, that is an absolutely brilliant use of an archive photograph, as it works in half a dozen ways: as an alluring cover photo, a representation of the neighborhood that gave the Voice a raison d'etre, a nod to the photographers, writers and editors who made it matter, a wistful farewell to the classic version of the paper, a recognition of the symbiosis between Dylan, music and journalism, and a final nod to the man himself who rose to greatness on the same wave of Sixties culture that the Voice did.

This final print edition also reminds me how different the newsstands of New York City were when I was a kid. Then, you would not only find daily editions of The New York Times, the Daily News, and the very liberal New York Post for sale, but also the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American and the World Telegram & Sun - each of their names signifying the collapse or merger of two or more formerly independent New York newspapers. Half of them have been gone for a while, and those that remain are ever more dependent on web-based revenue and ancillary enterprises to survive. The Voice was the only tabloid I had much use for any more, and now it's gone from the sidewalks. I still get the Times delivered on weekends, much to my considerably younger wife's consternation. If they give up the ghost - or rather, become virtual ghosts of their former physical selves - it will be the not very happy end of an era.

So I'm sad to see the print VV go... I like to hold things in my hand, like books and newspapers and worms and... well, okay, not worms, except when I've got the munchies. But yes, matter matters, and virtual voices are never as rich as real ones. Squawck!