Continuing
my extended reaction to NPR's "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women"
(see previous
posts in this series for all the relevant links) I am now going to discuss
some of the more egregious oversights in NPR's list.
Plenty
of people have commented on the artists who did not make it onto NPR's list,
including some second-guessing by the list's curators, Ann Powers and Jill Sternheimer.
Nevertheless, here for the record (album) are the Parrot's picks for:
Worst Oversights in
the History of Women's Music Listmaking
a title justified
by the fact that quite a few of them are also missing from several other lists
of albums by women.
Rock and the like
I will
begin by discussing the women whose impact on rock, pop and country music
genres is so important that their absence from the list of beknighted
"greatest albums made by women" sort of defies words. Each of these
artists could have been included on the same criteria that allowed the
selection of at least some of the artists who are on the list; but for what seem like utterly arbitrary reasons,
the "canon" of women in music has to do without them. So much the
worse for such a canon. Who designated 150 as the magic number anyway? But the
artists and albums that follow should probably be in the top 100, several of
them in the top 20, on any fair list of "greatest" albums by women.
Grace Slick: If the NPR list were confined
to albums by solo female artists, or overwhelmingly female bands, or female
artists who had overall control of their recorded output, then clearly
Jefferson Airplane should not be on it. Even Volunteers, which is
largely dominated by Slick, is a joint product of many musicians. And if it
were a list of consistently great albums then Conspicuous Only In Its Absence,
the release of live recordings by The Great Society after they had broken up,
should not be on it. Since neither of these is the case, though, they should both be on it. Slick was not only one of
the first prominent women in rock; her voice, songwriting and stage presence
had a major role in creating the musical style of a succession of bands. The
Great Society lasted only until she left. She then joined the Airplane and
later formed Jefferson Starship with Paul Kantner. She played several
instruments, and shook up the industry with her vocals, which aside from the
raw power of her voice included explicit political statements, sexual
references and profanities before any of them were considered acceptable. (I
suppose her being a former model made that all the more difficult for the
establishment to take.) She wrote
"White Rabbit", the theme song of acid rock and the Airplane's
most well-known song. The fact that the list doesn't include her encapsulates the
absurd inconsistency of their approach.
Joan Armatrading: Unbelievable! Everyone who
knows anything about women in music knows that Armatrading was a game-changer.
A prolific songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with a voice reminiscent of
Odetta, this black, female, working-class immigrant was so overwhelmingly
talented and had such a distinctive style that she was soon claimed to be the
British answer to Joni Mitchell. Her work was a statement that women could rock
(especially after Me Myself I, her biggest-selling album), while she also managed
the melding of musical styles in a wholly original way (cf. Lauryn Hill). Joan Armatrading, her brilliant,
eponymous third album, produced and engineered by Glyn Johns, is my first
choice. Me Myself I should also be on the list.
Pat Benatar: Hell is for adults who favor
teenage pop idols over Pat! Hardly less jaw-dropping than the first two
oversights, we have to begin with the fact that the operatically trained
Benatar is one of the best vocalists rock has ever had. Secondly, she is one of
the best female rockers rock has ever had. The list of her awards, charting
singles, platinum albums etc. is too long to get into; what is more important
is the musical integrity she brings to everything she records, her willingness
to explore taboo subjects in pop songs, and, for the purposes of this list, her
outspoken feminism. Once again, though, I have to add a comment about the
difficulty of identifying music "made by women": although her albums
have been released under her name, her husband Neil Giraldo, one of the finest
guitarists in rock, has pretty much created her sound and written a good deal
of her music. On a more restrictive definition of "made by women",
Pat's recordings might not qualify; they are "Pat and Neil"
productions. On the more relaxed operating definition here, Crimes
of Passion would be an obvious entry. But I will argue for Gravity's
Rainbow, because it's not only a great album but the first one on which
she co-wrote almost every song. She is also co-credited as Executive Producer.
Natalie Merchant: Once again, huh? I mean,
Eurythmics, B-52's, Pretenders... and not 10,000 Maniacs? Bjork, but not
Merchant? Tigerlily, the album with which she started a second musical
career that was even more successful than her first; but In My Tribe would be a
fine choice too.
Evanescence: An example of critics largely
missing the boat: after being dismissed as just another goth-metal band,
Evanescence emerged as the essential one, all but knocking their predecessors
off the chart. Amy Lee's vocal style has been widely imitated, with top female
vocalists like Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne and many others copying her sound
on a track or two, making her one of the most influential contemporary female
vocalists. (Evanescence ex-pats David Hodges and Ben Moody had a hand in some
of these knockoffs.) Fallen is the obvious choice.
Bette Midler: This omission is almost as
looney as the others. The Divine Miss M, an epic female
vocal album, end of story. Well, not quite the end – she's just finished a run kicking
it out on Broadway, to wild accolades. (The Parrot was tempted to squawck
something about her being a "Superstar" but thought better of it.)
Dionne Warwick: In the same way that Mariah
Carey, Christina Aguilera and Celine Dion would not be who they are if there
had not been Whitney Houston to clear a path for them, there would not have
been a Whitney without Dionne Warwick. To my ears you can actually hear
Dionne's tone and phrasing in some of Whitney's early recordings. Already one
of the most familiar voices in popular music before 1967, her album The
Windows of the World begins with "I Say a Little Prayer", the
first certified gold single for her and for the Burt Bachrach-Hal David
songwriting team. It's a remarkable set from beginning to end; the title song
was also a hit, and the set includes another famous Bachrach-David song that
she was the first to record (though the original version was not released),
"(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me".
The Mama and Papas: Did you say Heart? B-52's? Once
again the parity-of-reasoning argument: I don't understand what distinguishes
these mixed-gender groups with female vocalists from The Mamas and Papas such
that the latter don't get on this list. Mama Cass in particular was one of the
definitive women in rock throughout the 60's. "Words of Love",
"Creque Alley", "Dedicated to the One I Love", and other
big M&P hits were showcases for her voice, which sometimes has the most
character even on tracks where she is not singing lead. (Like Grace Slick, who
could similarly change the character of a tune with her outstanding harmonies.)
I'd go with their Greatest Hits, if
that's okay with the canon-makers.
Shirley Bassey: "Goldfinger, he's the man
/ the man with the Midas touch / a spider's touch / Such a cold finger beckons
you / to enter his web of sin / but don't go in... Golden words he will pour in
your ear / but his lies can't disguise what you fear..." Was this supposed
to be about a future American President? Well, read the NPR commentary on some
of the albums they picked and you will surely become aware of their efforts to
make what seem like personal statements - vulnerable, sassy or just proud –
into political statements by their vocalists. Please let Ms. Bassey join the
crowd. Aside from that, she made more than 30 studio albums over a 57-year
career, so if her contributions to the Goldfinger or Diamonds Are Forever
soundtracks don't do it I'm sure one could find something. In fact... Something,
her highest-charting album.
Ellie Greenwich: Granted most of her songs were
made famous on recordings by others. But so were Carole King's. She was one of
the most important songwriters in the history of popular music, aside from
doing backup singing for an arm's-length list of major artists, and she did in
fact record quite a few of her best numbers. To include groups for whom she
wrote the songs that made them famous, but exclude her own quite excellent
recordings of her own songs, seems like a miscarriage of justice. Let It Be Written, Let It Be Sung, the greatest album you've never heard of
by a female songwriter. (I've owned it for about 30 years and it has never been
out of rotation for very long – "Maybe I Know", "Be My
Baby", "Chapel of Love", plenty more.)
Joan
Osborne: She and Alanis Morisette appeared on the scene at
about the same time and had about the same effect; Morisette stayed in the
public eye a bit more by sticking with in-your-face hard rock songs while
Osborne tended to stick closer to the blues, soul and folk idioms. Relish certainly deserves a
place on this list. Incidentally, I like Morisette a lot, but she is a bit more
predicatble than Osborne, who once showed up in Downtown Brooklyn to play a
spontaneous solo acoustic set on an outdoor stage near my office.
4 Non
Blondes: The list is about great albums, right? Not
necessarily representative albums by women with long and storied careers,
right? But Linda Perry, who sang all the lead vocals and wrote most of the
songs on Bigger, Better, Faster,
More! has since had a long and storied career, writing and/or producing
songs for a long list of contemporary pop stars and recording several solo
albums. The 4 Non Blondes album, by a band that originally consisted of four
women ( the guitar player was replaced by a male guitarist during the
recording) is generally seen as her crowning achievement as a performer. She
has said she doesn't like the album, and she's entitled to her opinion. For me
it is a package of 11 songs that range from good to great (their revolutionary
anthem "What's Going On" being an example of the latter), with
Perry's vocals moving from the contralto to soprano registers with equal power.
One of the greatest one-off rock recordings I know of.
Maxayn: Like Jefferson Airplane, this
terrific 1970's group that brilliantly fuses rock, jazz and soul would not make
the list if the term "made by women" were taken seriously. But if
ever a female lead vocalist justified that label, it would be Maxayn Lewis. And
like Slick, Maxayn Lewis also contributed songwriting and keyboard skills, so
that altogether she was a major influence on the sound of the group. Simply
put, she is one of the greatest singers popular music has ever had, and greater
than many others in that she moved fluidly between rock, soul and jazz. The
very first cut on their first album, "Trying for Days", announces a
voice that should be as famous as that of just about any soul singer, earlier
or later – she has the power, grit, technical abilities and tonal nuance of far
better known R&B singers. Or check out her version of "Gimme
Shelter", one of the best Stones covers I've ever heard, including a
fantastic extended jam by the band, which is fully equal to their brilliant
lead vocalist. Maxayn, their first album, is perhaps their strongest, but Mindful,
their second, is a jazzrock masterpiece. NPR did a good turn in recognizing
little-known Fanny on their list, but they missed the boat with Maxayn, whose
three studio albums have finally been released as a CD set and made available on
streaming services.
Folk is No Joke
Possibly
even worse than the exclusion of A-list women in rock+ and pop is the fact that
in spite of several notable entries, women who contributed to folk music and
its modern singer-songwriter progeny have been so systematically neglected it
casts serious doubt on the value of the list as something other than a
popularity contest. These women did something far more courageous and,
arguably, musically important than those who made spiffy pop records in search
of mass audiences: they continued and expanded a cultural tradition that is in
some ways the soul of nations. Overlooking them in this context is embarrassing
and unconscionable.
It's
nice that the canonizers found their way to one of Cris Williamson's
under-the-radar but excellent albums, but left on her own among so many equally
worthy but unmentioned folk musicians she looks like the token feminist artist.
I'm talking about committed feminism,
not the sort of allusive feminist innuendo of so many female pop artists, much
less the attribution of stories about cheating men and whatnot as some sort of
feminist statement. Feminist music is represented mainly in the folk song
movement - see the entry on Holly Near
below.
Moreover,
I have the distinct impression of a serious lack of what I will simply call taste in the making of the list. For the
work of some of these artists seems to me so clearly superior to so many of the
beknighted "greatest albums" that I am left struggling to find words.
To take one example, Janis Ian seems
to me so vastly superior a songwriter to (conservatively) half the artists on
the list that I don't how to begin to argue that she should be there and not
them, except perhaps to say, "take the cotton out of your ears and then
listen". That is to say nothing of the social importance of songs like "Society's Child",
"Seventeen", "Stars", or "Jesse", which argues in
a different way for her inclusion. Even leaving aside such obvious oversights,
there are surely albums by Shawn Colvin,
Beth Orton, Lydia Adams Davis or Dar
WIlliams, to take just a few examples, that are no less worthy of being
"canonized" than quite a few of those that were obviously selected on
the basis of popularity alone; and these are not even my top picks among
overlooked folksinger-songwriters. In spite of a few deservingly recognized
artists (Joan Baez, Odetta, Tracy Chapman, Gillian Welch) the status of folk
music on the list demonstrates emphatically that good judgment, of either a
musical or social sort, did not always prevail.
Here are
some of the more screaming oversights, though there are plenty of other
candidates:
Judy Collins: I can see no rational argument
for including Joan Baez and not Judy Collins, as if one prominent female
folksinger is just about enough. Judy was also a pillar of the folk revival,
songwriter as well as song interpreter, and, like Joan, one of the great voices
of the 60's and beyond. True Stories or her "best
of" album Colors of the Day, or both, belong on any list of great albums
"made by women".
Suzanne Vega: Huh? Do I need to say more? I
mean, pick an album. Solitude Standing... there, I did it
for you. As with Joni, there must be half a dozen of her albums that would fit
the bill. One of the most original and creative female recording artists, with
hardly a missed beat in her entire output of studio recordings. How can a woman
contribute this much and not get recognized in a list like this?
Janis Ian: Once again, I just don't know
what to say, except sqwaaaauck. Not Janis
Ian or Between the Lines or Stars or Breaking Silence – just a
few of the albums that contained songs of great social and political import and
happened to be quite successful to boot? She is one of the most important
female musicians of our time, so I mean, if you like Britney and Mariah Carey
and Shania Twain and Taylor Swift and their seriously charting pop songs with
200 million hits on Spotify, fine,
but at least recognize that for all the $$$ their albums have made, their
cultural importance is limited. They never wrote a song that had the musical or social depth of "Society's
Child" or "At Seventeen". A tremendous oversight.
Holly Near: She founded Redwood Records in
1972 and used it as a platform to promote progressive music with a decidely
feminist slant. She herself recorded about 30 albums, performed with many of
the greatest folksingers of the day, and helped promote the careers of several
other female, progressive singer-songwriters, including Cris Williamson (the only one who made the list), Meg Christian, and Betsy Rose. I don't know which is the best, but A
Live Album contains the first release of her most famous song, "It
Could Have Been Me". Near is also an outstanding example of what one woman
can accomplish, having been a prominent actress, a writer, a political
activist, and a teacher as well as a terrific musician. Another absurd
oversight.
Loreena McKennitt: Like Holly Near, she may not be
a household name, yet excluding her is really inexcusable, particularly in
light of some of the shamelessly commercial pop that is on the list. She blazed
a daringly original trail as an indie artist, founding her label Quinlan Road
in Canada five years before Ani DiFranco started Righteous Babe records a
little below the border. Her complex, original takes on Celtic and Arabic music
defy easy genre classification: she is a folk, rock, world and New Age artist
all rolled up in one. Her voice is the equal of almost any artist on the list;
Joan Baez would be a good comparison. Either The Book of Secrets or The
Mask and the Mirror, replacing any number of lightweight pop albums,
would give the list more gravity and critical respectability.
Enya: She is the second most popular
Irish artist ever, after U2. She has won four Grammies and a host of other
awards. More importantly, she almost singlehandedly made New Age music
respectable and popular. (I'm not sure Windham Hill on its own achieved either
of those.) She is to Ireland everything that Céline Dion is to Quebec. My
personal favorite is The Memory of Trees, but there are
several other options for Enya albums to put on a list like this. Not putting
her on at all is not really an option, though the illustrious judges at NPR
seemed to think it was more important to have two Madonna albums, Britney
Spears, Janet Jackson, Destiny's Child and Chaka Khan. Dance all you want, then
take a rest and listen to some music.
Michelle Shocked: Along with Suzanne Vega, whose
first album had come out a year earlier, she helped kickstart the "second
folk revival" with her Texas Campfire Tapes, a low-tech
live recording that went viral before there was music on the Internet. Shocked
and Vega paved the way for mainstream acceptance of new folk artists like Tracy
Chapman, Shawn Colvin, Lucinda Williams and a host of others to come. Since
becoming a born again Christian she has made some remarks about homosexuality
and gay marriage that are ambiguous at best, but I don't get the sense that
most of the other artists on the list have been given a litmus test on their
social views. Her important role should be recognized.
Neko Case: Okay, the list is trendy
enough, with Joanna Newsom, Lauryn Hill, Alabama Shakes, M.I.A., Taylor Swift,
Adele, Amy Winehouse, Beyonce , Solange, Alicia Keys and Miranda Lambert
representing just some of the post-2000 recordings. (Where, I beseech you once
again, is Lana Del Ray, not to mention Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Kesha and
Ariana Grande? Picky, picky...) Are these artists all supposed to be part of
the "canon"? Give me a break; there is no principled distinction here
between current popularity and longevity; no serious effort to separate merely
good pop tunes from significant creativity. If it's the latter we are after
then I'm going to remove about half of these entries and replace them with
people like Neko Case and others who are actually trying to do something
musically forward-looking. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is
probably the consensus choice for Case, but her follow-up album Middle
Cyclone is as good or better.
Malvina Reynolds: Like Elie Greenwich she's known
more as a songwriter than a performer, but she nevertheless released numerous
albums of her own work. Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth,
for example, contains her well-known song "What Have They Done to the
Rain", as well as "Little Boxes" and "God Bless the
Grass", both made famous by Pete Seeger, and the once-popular children's
song "Magic Penny". As I have emphasized, "greatest"
depends on many things; Reynolds' unique gift for musical social commentary
makes her a standout artist who should be recognized in a list such as this.
Nanci Griffith: Other Voices, Other Rooms
is one of my favorite albums in any genre; it is all covers, but one could
certainly pick from other albums of hers with great originals. Like Neko Case,
she is one of those folk musicians who transcends the genre.
Kate Wolf: She would be one of the first
names to roll off the tongue of anyone who really knows the recent history of
folk music: there are tribute albums and even a music festival devoted to work
she recorded on 10 albums in her short life. The title song of Give
Yourself to Love was something like an anthem of the folk movement in
the 1980's. Not including her suggests ignorance of the history of contemporary
folk music.
Christine Lavin: Funny they left her off,
seriously funny. Don't know what I'm talking about? Well, there's Google,
Wikipedia and YouTube to explain it.
Maria Farantouri: If she had done nothing but
champion the songs of Mikis Theodorakis she would merit a place next to
Mercedes Sosa, another expressive contralto who was happily discovered by the
somewhat nearsighted makers of this pop list. But aside from her many other
musical recordings she has truly stuck her neck out for justice in Greece and elsewhere.
I'd pick her first album Songs of
Freedom, with John Williams and featuring music by Theodorakis, but only
because it's the one I know best; there is much else to choose from.
Make Our Country Great Again
Mary Chapin Carpenter: How about instead of some of
those ladies with the blockbuster country albums we recognize this thoughtful
and socially engaged songwriter? She has written almost every song on more than
a dozen albums, including many great ones. Somewhat like Roseanne Cash, who was
happily included, she has enough Nashville hits to be a household name but is
also capable of setting record sales aside and making albums of honest
integrity just for the sake of the music and what she has to say. I'm going to
go with A Place in the World, but among her 13 studio recordings there
are other possible choices, including her excellent breakout album, Come
On Come On.
Faith Hill: She is similarly bedecked with
country music awards and billion-selling albums, like Shania Twain and Reba
Macentire; why they made the list instead is once again beyond the limits of my
understanding. I happen to like her voice better. Breathe is the album I
know best, and would be happy to see it on the list.
Carrie Underwood: If American Idol had done nothing else, discovering Carrie Underwood
and her stunning vocal capabilities would have been a singular contribution to
popular music. If her voice has any defect at all it is that it is possibly too good, making quite a few other
leading lights of country music sound like they could be her students. I'm not
as thrilled with her material as I am with her voice; it tends to be formulaic
and lead her into predictable vocal moves. She also seems a bit obsessed with
songs about taking revenge on cheating lovers. None of that is quite enough to
remove the pleasure of hearing her bang out a tune with everything from
coloratura melismas to throaty growls. I don't know which album of hers should
be on the list: Some Hearts was her breakout recording, but in later albums she
took more of a role in the songwriting. I'd go with Blown Away because her
own material is acutally some of the best on the album and the best she's
recorded.
Round-up
Also Worth Considering
Those
are some of the more obvious oversights, the ones where it either boggles the
mind how a list of the greatest albums by women could be thought complete
without them, or where there seems to be no reasonable argument for including
some of the artists who were included and not including those who are either
their peers or in some sense superiors. Of course, there were plenty of
opportunities for the listmakers to step
up and recognize some artists who are not names on the tip of anyone's tongue.
Were I to construct my very own list with an all-female cast of musicians, one
of the things I would try to do is find under-recognized artists whose work
deserves greater recognition, for example: Julia
Holter, Lili Haydn, Jane Siberry and Melanie DeBiasio among others. They would all replace a lot of
dubious pop selections on my list. Blossom
Dearie recorded more albums than almost any three of the listed artists put
together; I don't really know them (I've heard individual songs), but she had a
fanatical following well into her 60's and continued recording at least through
her early 70's. Tania Tagaq is an
Inuit throat singer who won both Canada's Polaris Prize in 2014 and Juno Award
in 2015 for her album Animism; if we are looking for women
who make a musical statement that gives voice to a culture (like Mercedes Sosa
or Umm Kulthum) this is a good place to look. In the rock category, there's a
parade of M's that seems to have dropped through the cracks, including Minnie Riperton, Maria Muldaur, Melanie and
Melissa Manchester; in addition to Phoebe Snow, these are popular names
from an earlier era who made memorable albums that are not commonly heard today.
If they are not worthy of "canon"-ization it suggests that some of
the many pop, hip-hop and country stars who landed a spot may not be worthy of
it either, and if they are, well, then they are. Suzi Quatro is another odd oversight, a prolific and influential
role model for the duly recognized Joan Jett and one of the first women to go
it alone as a hard rocker.
In the
folk category, an older generation of singing-songwriting women await
recognition for their important contributions to American culture, including Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Faith Petric. I don't have the time or
resources to figure out which of their many albums might be among the greatest
recordings made by women; perhaps none, because for the most part they were
well on in years before they made solo records. (I have suggested that a better
approach than the "greatest albums" effort would be a "Lifetime
Achievement" list, where these artists would be more likely to get fair
representation.) Singer-songwriters like Cindy
Kallet, Pat Humphries, Bev Grant, Lydia Adams Davis and Priscilla
Herdman, among many others, have given us memorable albums that anyone
seriously researching a "greatest" list rather than a popularity
contest might have found.
I decided long ago...
Never to
spend six months critiquing a list? Oh well, another New Year's resolution out
the window. (Anyone concerned about my sanity will be pleased to know that during
that time my literary efforts have also included a draft of a short story, a
piece of micro-fiction, some poetry, work on a novel, a memoir and a couple of
philosophical essays. So, you could say I'm obsessed with this list stuff; but
only between roughy 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. on weeknights.) But let's put some
kind of cap on this at last. Here are my final squawcks:
Ranking: It is a fine thing to draw the
attention of the public to women's contributions to popular music, but a much
less fine thing to try to order one's selection according to some notion of
"greatness". It is really of almost no interest that this group of
judges thinks that Blue is the greatest album made by a woman, that The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the second greatest, etc. So maybe Pride
and Prejudice is the greatest novel written by a woman, Jane
Eyre is the second greatest, and Middlemarch is the third greatest...?
Or should To the Lighthouse or Ship of Fools, or something else, be
in there? On what basis do you make judgments like this? You can make some very
broad generalizations about entire bodies of work, in which case Joni
Mitchell's stands out so far above Lauryn Hill's that they belong miles apart,
while that of Pauline Oliveros looms far greater over contemporary classical
music than anything the makers of most of the 100-odd albums in front of hers
ever accomplished in relation to rock, pop, etc. Even rankiing the artists'
overall contributions is only possible in a few cases. It is easy to say that
Bob Dylan is the greatest singer-songwriter in modern times, but it is not so
easy to say who is second, third, etc. Rankings also tend to lose their force as
soon as they are challenged. For example, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band is probably the consensus choice for the greatest album ever made;
but I know more than one rock critic who believes it is not even a good album, much less the greatest ever
made. They too can give reasons for their views, and make it seem like myth is
doing more work than quality in upholding the album's status. Powers, NPR and
their friends would have done a greater service by doing without rankings at
all and just bringing to our attention the most interesting and important
albums in which women had the most prominent roles.
So my
comments on what is not included on the list are made without regard to any
ranking. But that does not mean I can permanently resist the temptation to
offer a list of what I think are the
greatest albums made by women! I will do so in the next post, but with enough caveats
to make clear just how little is being claimed in that list.
Quality: In the end, my biggest beef
with the list is that it seems to treat quality
as an afterthought. Quality comes in many forms, but it can certainly be
distinguished from sales and popularity, to say nothing of marketing.
Originality, importance in various ways, influence, musicianship, lyrical
depth, complexity, intensity of feeling, the fit of words and music, and many
other factors can contribute to quality in addition to the basic factors of
performance chops and songwriting skill. On the other hand, excessive use of
standard musical formulas, clichéd lyrics, sentimentality and over-reliance on
technical production tricks may contribute to an album's popularity but not to
its quality. Taking this distinction seriously would have eliminated many very
well-known and popular albums on the list and replaced them with music that
deserves the name "greatest". That is what critical responsibility is
all about, but it seems to have been largely abandoned here.
Quantity: As if 150 were not a generous enough
number of "greatest" albums by women, TheFader.com has graciously
contributed another 150 such disks for our perusal. I
have never heard of many of the albums, or even quite a few of the groups, on
TheFader's list, but it ranges from the obvious move of adding every big
contemporary female pop star (Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj,
etc.) to the highly speculative inclusion of albums like the Pharmakon effort
mentioned in my previous post. This may be more of a comment on the nonsense of
modern listmaking than on perceived gaps in NPR's "canon", for in the
end it is hard to tell which list is the primary one and which the supplement.
Since I
might seriously question whether there are 300 truly great albums altogether in the history of popular music, the idea
that there are 300 made by women is a
little hard to wrap my mind around. But if we take "greatest" in its
purely relative sense, such that albums after the first 100 or so may be
boring, irritating, or trite but greater
than the next group of albums, I guess we could find another 200 and make it an
even 500 Greatest Albums Made By Women.
Then I might have a hard time keeping Britney and other lightweight Top 40
nonsense off the list.
Or maybe
not. I haven't mentioned every worthwhile but overlooked female artist I know
of yet. Take Bonnie Koloc for
instance: one of the best voices among folksingers in the early 70's and after,
she never got much attention outside the Chicago area. You can Spotify her (if
that's a verb now) though they have only a couple of her later efforts. How
many other little-known names might there be? Friends of mine who are music
critics know an awful lot of artists and albums that I don't know, and I
suspect they would rate quite a few of them higher than most of the NPR list. With
the help of some like-minded souls it's not impossible we could at least have a
500-album list of recordings by women that did not compromise on quality or
pander to any formulaic pablum.
Oh well,
when I started this I thought I was done. But there's one more post to go; the
one in which I produce
The
Greatest List of All
But my
next post really will be The Last
Post of All on the "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women".
