Monday, January 1, 2018

List and You Shall Hear (IV): Reviewing the Situation



I wrote much of this review before somewhat belatedly reading Wesley Morris's article "Voices in My Head" in the October 8 Sunday Times Magazine, and now that I've read it I feel much better. I thought that any reader who found his or her way to my blog posts on the NPR list of "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women" would wonder if I had a few screws loose, spending so much time listening only to music by women, and not incidentally offering my critique of the list. Now I can at least respond that I am not the only one: Morris informs us that for months he listened to the entire NPR list, from #150 to #1, and at least 75 more albums by women to boot. I have not even been through all 150, though the still unheard albums tend to be those by artists I am familiar with, even if I don't know the chosen album in full, as well as some of the jazz and classical artists. I have, on the other hand, listened to way more than 75 other albums by women, probably closer to 200 or so, not to mention attending concerts by Rickie Lee Jones, Tori Amos and an ensemble performing works of Pauline Oliveros.

Did all this increase my appreciation of the importance of music "made by women" (a term Morris does not seem to question, in spite of its inaccuracy)? I at least owe Powers et al. a note of thanks for sending me off on a journey of music discovery that has turned up numerous gems of which I was unaware. Some are albums on the list, some are other albums by artists on the list, and quite a few are albums by artists who were not included at all. Had the NPR list done nothing more than bring to my attention the brilliant early 1970's Filipino-American female group Fanny it would have done me a great favor. In fact, you can also now count me as a confirmed Siouxsie and the Banshees fan, and throw in The Bangles and a few others.

But it also pushed me to check out the empty spaces where Suzanne Vega and Janis Ian albums should be, and to listen to many alternatives to the listed works. Morris notes the exclusion of artists like Shawn Colvin, and questions (subsequent to a Tori Amos quip about the lack of "testosterone" in the Lilith Fair lineup) whether we are making the wrong demands on music by women. I would put it more bluntly: the list indulges vulgar commercial efforts at the expense of more serious artists, and often picks albums based on hits and sales rather than inherent quality.

Morris also makes some questionable judgments in his piece. Nostalgia for Donna Summer is perhaps understandable, as the loss of her and Whitney Houston in the same year is still an open wound five years later. But calling her "the musician who paved a boulevard for lots of women who top charts" is a bit much. The women who paved that boulevard aren't even allowed on this NPR list – Betsy Smith, Patsy Cline, Martha Reeves, and many others who laid down that pavement are not there due to being pre-1964 artists. Dionne Warwick is not on the list; neither is Judy Collins. But even if we stick with those who are on the list, after Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Dusty Springfield, The Ronettes and Aretha Franklin put down the blacktop, all Donna Summer needed to do was walk on it. Nostalgia for Janet Jackson is a bit harder to explain, but since his tastes also include an outsized admiration for Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville and the dismissal of Janis Joplin's Pearl as "not a great album" I guess all I can do here is shrug and move on.

Morris also indulges the statistical game of counting albums "by women" in this or that list and comparing them with the much larger number "by men" and concludes that indeed music by women is underappreciated. It takes more work than this numbers game to show that, if it's true. There could be many reasons why there are fewer women than men represented in lists and such; those reasons may well show that women have not been treated fairly in the music industry (this would hardly surprise anyone) but not that the achievements they managed in spite of this are underappreciated.

Morris does not seem fazed by any of the criticisms I've harped on in my posts: that most of the albums are not in fact "made by women" in any sense other than (at most) having female lead vocalists; that it does not really recognize the greatest albums but rather offers us representative albums by those considered the greatest or best known female lead vocalists; that its tokenish inclusion of a few classical and jazz artists, and slightly more international artists, is ridiculous and results in absurd juxtapositions; that the rankings themselves are extremely arbitrary and could be radically revised even for the albums selected, to say nothing of those not selected (e.g., probably 2 or 3 albums each by Joan Armatrading, Suzanne Vega and Janis Ian could be among the top 25 albums in the list); that what is included has an overall commercial tilt that ends up under-representing many of the greatest female songwriters and musicians (Morris does hint at this point but doesn't target it directly); that it is not even an original idea, largely repeating the choices of earlier, similar lists; and that the starting point in 1964 is very arbitrary and excludes those who set the standard for female recording artists, on the misleading notion that before 1964 they did not primarily make albums.

Well, back to business, as I have elaborated all those objections in previous posts. Having had my say on the choices of Joni Mitchell albums, I will now discuss the rest of the list, identifying the albums in groups by their numbers on the list.

*****
  
1 (Joni Mitchell, Blue), 121 (Joni Mitchell, Hejira)

Please see my previous post regarding Joni Mitchell's albums.

2 (Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), 9 (Amy Winehouse, Back to Black),  12 (Erykah Badu, Baduism)  57 (Mary J. Blige, What's the 411?),  77 (Aaliyah, Aaliyah), 92 (Meshell Ndegeocello, Peace Beyond Passion), 116 (Macy Gray, On How Life Is)  149 (Alicia Keys, Songs in A Minor)

If there is anything particularly new or provocative about the list it is the promotion of neo-soul, hip-hop soul and other variations on classic 1960's soul music to the center of the musical conversation. The sub-list doesn't stop with those seven selections, especially if you include early influences like Sade, and fellow travellers like Norah Jones and Adele, and of course Beyoncé, whose sometimes soul-inflected album Lemonade sits at #6 on the list. I am inclined to ask: is this correct? I mean, is Lauryn Hill's neo-soul/reggae/hip-hop crossover album the second greatest album ever recorded by a woman? The women I have asked tend to raise an eyebrow and then suggest that it's not a bad choice, but perhaps a bit surprising. To put it another way, are 3 (or 4, if you include Lemonade) of the 12 best albums ever made by women neo-soul albums? That's a lot of credit for this subgenre. Historically speaking, neo-soul had a brief heyday around 20 years ago, while hip-hop/soul confections continue to crop up. (Aside from Lemonade, Kehlani's SweetSexySavage is the latest entry in this category to win all sorts of accolades.) Not all of it represents what I would call first class songwriting, which is one of my main criteria for a great album.

Some, like Baduism, make a kind of musical/poetic statement: trim down the arrangements, don't be afraid to express your deepest feelings, make each single note as expressive as a symphony. These are solid ideas, but my simple ear just wants to know if it is an album full of great music. I'm not sure; after playing it maybe half a dozen times it still doesn't seem to compare with Sade's Diamond Life, for instance, nor with soul-inspired classics like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On? or Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul. Similarly for many of the others here. Alicia Keys' Songs in A Minor is a very nice, listenable album, especially if you ignore the lyrics, which rarely rise above sentimentality; it would be hard to argue with a rank of #149, barely making it onto the list, if there weren't so many other better albums by artists who were not included on the list. Mary J. Blige's What's the 4-1-1? is also a perfectly fine album, on which she does a great job singing a collection of fairly straightforward R&B covers. Her My Life would have been a better choice: like Baduism and Aaliyah it's a completely seductive album on which (like Badu, unlike Aaliyah) she co-wrote almost every song. It's been listed again and again among the greatest R&B albums ever made, so why the former would be chosen to represent her instead is just one more of the ultimately unanswerable questions raised by this list. Ditto for Meshell Ndegeocello's Peace Beyond Passion: very nice album, but Plantation Lullabies, her first, seems to me superior to it in every sense.

But My Life and Plantation Lullabies still do not sound like the cream of the crop in popular music. Perhaps #57 and #92 would be good places for them, assuming some of the stuff that does not belong at all was removed. But what about #2, #9, #12 – can these really keep company with the best of Joni Mitchell, with Diamond Life, Tapestry, Pearl – or with some of the greatest albums by unaccountably excluded artists like Joan Armatrading or Suzanne Vega? Not to my ears. In fact I don't think they compare with #139 (The Bangles, All Over the Place) or with #133 (Fanny, Fanny Hill) for musical interest, and certainly not with #122 (Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Scream), or with Kate Bush, Tori Amos or Sonic Youth for innovation. So what are they doing in these exalted positions?

What I described above as "the fog of music" may have enveloped the brains of the list's jury members. The truth is, every one of these albums is pleasant, easy to listen to, takes some interesting new approaches, includes some notable performance moments, etc. They may be among the top albums in their genre, even if that is construed broadly. None of this adds up to being a great album, a term that brings together a number of outstanding qualities that create a surge of musical satisfaction and that rise far above the multitude of good albums released every year. Generally, such albums either identify themselves as summits of achievement in a certain style or era of music, or become points of reference for much that comes after them. But all these neo-soul albums stand on approximately the same plane, like latter-day reflections on Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes and Nina Simone after the social and musical developments of the 2-3 decades since their greatest albums. Like neo-psychedelia and neo-punk, some excellent music can emerge, but this is rarely the place to look for great albums. Which, unless we are going to be uncharitable, suggests that they are over-represented and overrated on the NPR list.

 ***

3 (Nina Simone, I Put a Spell On You), 28 (Nina Simone, Nina Simone Sings the Blues)

Nina Simone's I Put a Spell On You is an odd choice for a #3 album on this list. For one thing, in spite of the fact that this was also the title of her autobiography, it is not her best or most representative album, and seems to have been picked solely because it is the first acceptable one post-1964, the list's arbitrary cutoff date. Secondly, in spite of the fact that she has influenced a lot of artists, Simone herself is fairly controversial, and not just for her advocacy of violent revolution, use of gun threats to get her way, or fabled histrionics. Her artistry, though widely revered, is a bit uneven. I personally think Robert Christgau's highly critical assessment, cited in Simone's Wikipedia entry, is too harsh by half – he was clearly not listening to her best work either as vocalist or pianist. (See my previous post on his mis-assessment of Joni Mitchell's later work.) That said, my feeling is that in contrast to some rich early recordings, both tone production and emotional resonance are somewhat spotty in her subsequent work. The controlled vibrato of her early (pre-1964) work is largely replaced with a tremolo that is not always applied to the best effect. Her keyboard work is impressive at its best, humdrum at worst. She has an enormous recorded legacy and I am far from being ready to speak about all of it, but my impression is that there are more important albums to occupy the title of "3rd best album made by a woman". Now, having said that, I am going to flip back the other way and say that Nina Simone Sings the Blues, at #28, is one of her better later albums; her performance of the Gershwin-Heyward song "My Man's Gone Now" by itself deserves some sort of place in musical history, a sockdolager in every way. Overall her voice shines, and even the tremolo works better than in more popular material. Her keyboard playing is no great shakes but there are other worthy musical performances on the album, and it's her voice that is front and center on this album anyway. In short, #28 no problem; #3, not convinced.


 ***


5 (MIssy Elliott, Supa-Dupa Fly), 33 (Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen), 43 (M.I.A., Kala), 71 (Salt-N-Pepa, Blacks' Magic), 96 (Lil' Kim, Hard Core)

No expert on rap, here, though I've listened to it on and off since the days of Grandmaster Flash. I think I can distinguish great rap from average run of the mill rap, and I can certainly distinguish intelligent lyrics with something to say from gratuitous scatological garbage and self-indulgent violent rants. Here, in the few more or less pure rap selections, we have both ends of the spectrum.On the one hand, Queen Latifah holds down the classic end of the genre on All hail the Queen, which more or less made it a commercial and artistic success. Salt-N-Pepa's album Blacks' Magic mixes fairly straightforward rap rhythms with a sometimes feminist message that defied the often misogynistic tenor of rap at that time. 

Lil' Kim also defies misogyny, as well as taste, decency, the law, and a long list of other rappers, with whom she has feuded endlessly. Her foulmouthed and violent lyrics earned her music the label "gangster porno rap", which is fitting for someone who has been convicted of perjury for covering up her violent friends' perfidious activities. Any complaints I have aired regarding the moral fiber of Nina Simone, Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse are lightweight stuff compared with this treasure. Or is it not just obvious that the answer to sexism is not to offer one's vagina and anus as weapons in the battle to conquer male sexual dominance? All the rappers here can be explicit enough about sex and sex roles; but explicit can be in good taste, while raunchy and violent cannot. Really poor judgment putting Hard Core anywhere on the list, in my opinion.

Missy Elliott is one of the most important people in hip hop and in R&B generally, but that is more the result of her production and songwriting activities, which also helped catapult Timbaland into the first ranks of hip hop producers and musicians. As for Supa Dupa Fly, it is a fine album, but its exalted place at #6 on the list may be more a token of recognition for Elliott's overall contribution than a true rank for the album itself. Neither her singing voice nor her rap skills are first rate, but her great creative talent makes it a very good recording nonetheless - at some points not unlike some of Aaliyah's work, which she helped write and produce.

As for Kala, I'm not sure what to make of it. Being the only Tamil pop superstar certainly makes M.I.A. a person of interest. The eclectic mix of rap, dance, electronica and I'm not sure what else ranges from musically inspired to boring, and the lyrics, where I could follow them, have patches of interest and obscurity among their various personal and political directions.


 ***


6 (Beyoncé, Lemonade), 134 (Solange, A Seat at the Table).

Am I the only one who finds it a tiny little bit suspect that two albums that are just over a year old, done by two sisters, both happen to make the list, all but serving as bookends? I've heard and respect both of them, but as to the extraordinary confidence in placing the recently released Lemonade near the top of the list... can we talk? I mean, I can see the argument for it: Beyoncé has practically invented a new form of musical expression, something that is equal parts rock opera, hip-hop, poetry, video art, soul, electronica - it is so much to digest that perhaps the course of least resistance is to just call it one of the most innovative albums of the 21st century so far, and leave it at that. But I have asked, and will continue to ask, the more basic question in relation to list-formation: is it a best-ever experience as music, as songwriting, as instrumental and vocal performance? Perhaps this is unfair to hip-hop and its ever-expanding reach into popular music, since "songwriting" is not exactly what it's about. (Nobody would characterize the achievement of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly as somehow lesser because it is not an album of tunes you can whistle.) But for me, that is one of the things that needs to be there for an album to be near the top of a "greatest" list. There are a couple of outstanding songs on Lemonade ("Sandcastles" is an instant classic, and "All Night" is a beauty too) but it is the album's concept, spirit and visuals that have captured the imagination. It gets a seat at the table for that reason, but I'm not putting it at the head of the table without a more or less continuous stream of great music. Speaking of A Seat at the Table, Solange's album too may deserve one, but only by opening up numerous places from albums I don't think belong there, since there are quite a few more obvious choices that were omitted from the list altogether.


 ***


9 (Amy Winehouse, Back to Black), 93 (Britney Spears, ...Baby One More Time)

How did Lindsay Lohan's two recordings get overlooked? These two singers' personal issues have made for at least as much copy as their musical efforts. True, one can turn up plenty of tabloid worthy material on Janis Joplin, Nina Simone and others; we would lose a lot of talent if we denied people their rightful place in music history based on a few run-ins with the police or stints in drug and alcohol rehab. So what exactly does that place consist in? Amy Winehouse captured a lot of attention on the basis of her soulful but highly derivative style, and even if her notorious self-destructive force rates up there with some of our recent hurricanes, it is hard to deny the effectiveness of her music. I seriously question, though, whether she should be at any such illustrious position on this list or any other. She ranks here above Whitney Houston, than whom there is no greater vocalist in pop history; Barbra Streisand, about whom little needs to be said; and people like Kate Bush, Tori Amos and Rickie Lee Jones, all deep fonts of creativity on a level that Amy Winehouse does not even pretend to. Back to Black is a brilliant pastiche of soul-inspired styles, as is Frank, her only other commercial recording. But recognizing that is quite compatible with her being assigned a more modest role among the many creative women in popular music.

As for Britney Spears, there is absolutely nothing to recommend her from a musical point of view, unless popularity with teenage girls is in itself a sign of greatness. She has no particular vocal abilities; the material on her recordings is about as trite as you could dream up, even if some of it may have been vaguely transgressive in a quasi-feminist way that Madonna had long since made into a brand, or tickled the nascent sexual imaginations of teenage girls everywhere. I think the popularity of her recordings, to the extent it has any relationship to the music itself, is 90% about the production, for that is all that stands out as differentiating them from the mass of mainstream pop, if anything does.


 ***


10 (Carole King, Tapestry), 44 (Heart, Dreamboat Annie), 45 (Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis), 53 (Linda Ronstadt, Heart Like a Wheel), 83 (Bobbie Gentry, Ode to Billy Joe), 85 (Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust), 124 (Carly Simon, No Secrets), 126 (The Carpenters, A Song for You), 133 (Fanny, Fanny Hill)

This imperfect sublist captures what you might call the rock, light-rock and country-rock genre of the decade from1967-1976 as represented on this list – that is, whatever is not strictly R&B, traditional country, early punk, experimental/jazz, etc. Of all of them, only two strike me as consistently good in a way that ranks them among the greatest albums by men or women: Tapestry, of course; and the discovery of the decade, Fanny Hill. The latter is like discovering the equivalent of Canned Heat, Humble Pie, or maybe Bad Company, having never even heard the name, and realizing that you have to rewrite the history of the era. The Carpenters' A Song For You is an inspired collection of songs, but I tend to relegate albums that are mostly covers of other people's material to a different class from wholly original ones; and The Carpenters are one of many - many – groups on the list where men and women played roughly equal roles (see the next section). 

Most of the rest are really held in place by one or two hit singles. Carly Simon's No Secrets, for example, is not even a good album overall; I'm not even sure "You're So Vain" is a particularly good song (my favorite of hers is still her first hit, "The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be"). She is an excellent singer (way better than Carole King in that respect), but a sample of her many other albums suggests that she is good for one or two standout songs on a recording, a lot of fair-to-middling material and the occasional unlistenably trite filler. Like Taylor Swift, she sometimes makes me want to scream: "Not every single thought you've had about some passing relationship is worth writing a song about!" 

Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe is a dubious pick not so much for the songwriting as for the recording, which sounds like it took place in a cardboard box and managed to sneak into the mastering room without a final mix, or even so much as a small concession to reverb. Heart's Dreamboat Annie is the source of a couple of great R&R hits, but as for the album, they have better, including their much more recent Fanatic. I love the title song of Diamonds and Rust but repeated listening over many years has not convinced me that the album is as essential as the song. (Her One Day at a Time and Gracias a la Vida are two of my favorite folk albums.) Dusty Springfield and Linda Ronstadt are each represented by "classic", "landmark", "breakthrough" country-rock records that one can't help feeling a bit sentimental about, without necessarily wanting to listen to them much.


 ***


16 (Fleetwood Mac, Rumours), 35 (Blondie, Parallel Lines),  79 (Portishead, Dummy),  87 (X, Los Angeles), 127 (Sonic Youth, Sister), 135 (The B-52s, The B-52s), 138 (The Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas)

None of these bands are female-led groups in the same sense that, say, Hole is truly Courtney Love's group or The Pretenders is Chrissie Hynde's. The history of Fleetwood Mac is very complex and it certainly is not adequately captured by calling it a mainly female band in any of its several eras. Other than lead vocals, Chris Stein had a roughly equal role with Debbie Harry in Blondie, and The B-52's are also more or less gender-equal. Beth Gibbons seems to have had a role roughly equal to her two male collaborators in creating the music of Portishead. Calling this an album "made by women" seems like a calculated attempt to grab some foundational trip-hop credit for "women" when in fact nearly all the personnel except the lead vocalist were men. Elizabeth Fraser's vocals are central to the Cocteau Twins' sound but so are Robin Guthrie's synthesized guitars; songwriting credits are given to "The Cocteau Twins". I will deal with X and Sonic Youth below, and I have mentioned The Carpenters above. I do not understand why these groups would be on the list and not ABBA – though I am not offering ABBA or their material as instances of greatness. (They do, however, have the distinction of having twice won prizes in the Eurovision song contest, with "Waterloo" winning overall and "Ring Ring" placing third.) Given the largely mainstream nature of the list they seem like equally good candidates. But if we are talking about albums "made by women" these mixed gender groups are even less appropriate than some of the albums which, as I pointed out in earlier parts, are merely sung by women.


 ***


17 (Janet Jackson, Control), 75 (Donna Summer, Bad Girls), 118 (Chaka Khan, I Feel For You), 130 (Teena Marie, WIld and Peaceful)

There was a time when disco-era R&B performers like Janet Jackson, Donna Summer, Teena Marie and Chaka Khan would not only not make my list of deserted island disks, they would be sufficient reason to remove to a deserted island without electricity. I may be more open to dancehall funk, disco and post-disco now than I was then, but in spite of critics like Vince Aletti and changes in historical perspective, they are still not going on that ship with me. I have a short list of disco-pop songs (not many albums) that I like as pure music, for I am not really interested in what songs are best to shake your booty to; but they are not "made by women" even in the loose sense of this list. It is interesting to compare these with R&B entries like 4 (Aretha Franklin), 14 (Whitney Houston) or 15 (Diana Ross and the Supremes) – I would argue with anyone who denies their artistry, whether or not those particular positions are the right ones. But times have not changed enough for me to put any but a handful of disco/dance-pop songs on a list of "greatest" anything, and nothing I heard in the selected albums moves me to change that opinion.


 ***


27 (Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes), 37 (Kate Bush, Hounds of Love)

Tori Amos is represented by her first solo album, Little Earthquakes, having made way for higher-rated choices like Selena, Janet Jackson and Madonna. The injustice of this is startling. A brilliant songwriter, classically trained keyboardist and superb singer, she is one of the most interesting artists of any gender in the last 20 years. In the way she creates poetic, free form lyrics and then manages to coax formally coherent and powerful songs out of them she seems to me unique and something of a genius. Her From the Choirgirl Hotel, Scarlet's Walk and Abnormally Attracted to Sin, and possibly several others deserve to be on the list as much Little Earthquakes. Other than Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin, only Madonna seems to have been deemed worthy of multi-album representation (Joan Jett and Beyoncé each appear in two different musical formations), but that is ridiculous, and Tori Amos is one reason why.

The recognition of Kate Bush's work is also pretty lame. As great as Tori Amos is, she walks in part in Bush's footsteps, as do so many other female recording artists. Yet Bush's Hounds of Love is ranked below Adele's 21, Björk's eclectic Post, Grace Jones's interesting but hardly earth-shaking Nightclubbing, etc. While I am still searching for the Kate Bush album that will thrill me as much as the best work by Tori Amos (or the unaccountably overlooked Suzanne Vega), many of them are greater creative works than anything Adele has yet done (and produced more charting singles than Adele may ever do, for what that's worth). Perhaps the lesson here is that by offering a spurious and chaotic ranking of individual albums the NPR list does a disservice to women whose musical accomplishments are far greater than the sum of their parts.


 ***


30 (Adele, 21)

Adele has sold a lot of albums. "Rolling in the Deep" was a great single. But it will be a long time before we know whether there is a legacy here worthy of this sort of recognition. While she clearly has a strong voice, nothing else she has done signals more than another good pop singer/songwriter. That's just not enough to be selected for this position in a "new canon" because there are just too many such artists, big in their day and largely forgotten not long after. (Don Williams died a few weeks ago; remember him? Even if you do, does he stand out in the pantheon of Nashville stars? He had seventeen #1 singles on the Country charts, and 14 albums in the top 15. Get my point?)


 ***

35 (Blondie, Parallel Lines), 56 (X-Ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents), 72 (The Runaways, The Runaways), 74 (The Raincoats, The Raincoats), 87 (X, Los Angeles), 119 (The Slits, Cut), 122 (Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Scream), 127 (Sonic Youth, Sister)

Scattered around the list are these late 70's/early 80's groups with punk roots (or pretensions), many of them dominated by women. (I have omitted ESG's Come Away With ESG because I am not sure they really fit the category – they may be in a category or their own, like "minimalist dance-punk" or whatever.) The first question posed by this category is how many of these bands fall under the "made by women" label at all? Blondie and Siouxsie and the Banshees were co-founded by a male and a female member; in both cases, the female member did the lead singing and co-wrote some of the material, and the male member created the guitar parts and co-wrote some of the material. As for X, after joining the band formed by her boyfriend John Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom, Exene Cervenka contributed many of the lyrics for the album and shares the vocals with Doe. Sonic Youth is an even more dubious choice for the "made by" label. So half the bands in this category fit tenuously if at all in the list. The second question is, what justifies this distribution of punk-related albums? Does the order hold up even in itself, much less in relation to the rolling wave of genres and styles that characterizes the list? Here are my thoughts:

Parallel Lines by Blondie is certainly the most commercial; that it is the best of the lot could be argued for, but is not a truism, especially to those who deplore the commercialisation of post-punk. Impressive that they could make the jump so cleanly after two hardcore punk albums, but one is not required to prefer these clearly catchy pop tunes (including the discotheque number "Heart of Glass") to solid punk tracks. Cheap Trick, The Police and other post-punk bands took a similar turn, with similar results; apparently, all one had to do was decide to sell a few more records and it was not hard to trade in the revolutionary fervor for a spot on the Billboard charts.  

Germfree Adolescents by XRay Spex is one of the great one-off albums in rock, a masterpiece of punk by a band that crashed and burned before releasing a second album but left a big mark, largely thanks to their female lead singer, Poly Styrene. With or without the punk anthem "Oh Bondage Up Yours", an early single which was added to the original LP later on (I have to credit the Trouser Press review for pointing this out), this album could easily exchange places with many of this list's top-30 selections - Adele, Lucinda Williams and several others, by my lights.


The Runaways were more like punk wannabes than a true punk rock band; The Runaways is a slick hard rock/heavy metal album that could have been the work of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath or any other competent metal band of that era, lyrics aside. Unlike The Raincoats, Siouxsie, or The Slits they are not much given to experimentation (an understatement, perhaps) but reliably land one hard rock number after another. Their later albums occasionally veer into a slightly more punk sound, while still exhibiting the same polish - think of ZZ Top covering The Ramones. Being a sucker for solid, guitar-driven hard rock I have no bones to pick with them on that score, but the sense of self-consciously pandering to adolescent rebelliousness sort of leaps off the vinyl every third song or so, and other than their gender very little of their music (particularly on this album) breaks any new ground at all.

The eponymous The Raincoats is here accorded the honor of being the 74th greatest album "made by women", ahead of anything by Laura Nyro, Sheryl Crow or Carly Simon, for example. In spite of the endorsement of Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain and other Ministers of Noise, one can go either way about calling this album one of the "greatest" of anything. It may be one of the greatest recorded jokes in the industry: the lead singer can't sing, the rest of the vocals consist not in harmonies but off-unison shouting, the guitarist certainly can't play anything resembling a solo even when she is actually in time with the band. The drummer is quite competent and Vicky Aspinall, the violinist, suggests what might have happened if Chubby Wise or Buddy Spicher had moved to London and joined a punk band. That's as much as you can say for the performances. The lyrics, to the extent one can understand them, do seem a bit more interesting, and the music as a whole has a kind of anti-commercial integrity that is admirable if not often lovable.  Perhaps it deserves a place somewhere at the nether reaches of the list, but that surely suggests that all nonsense by the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and the like is excised to make room for it.





As for Los Angeles by X, it is not even remotely an album "made by women". The style sometimes verges on "punkabilly", but however unusual, it's a great record and a piece of classic American post-punk, made mainly by men with significant contributions by a woman.


The Slits' Cut, another more-or-less one-off (discounting compilations and variations) stops short of being "experimental" but neither is it easily accessible, either in the way punk and post-punk can be, or as standard rock. "Artpunk" may be the best term to describe it. Because I'm partial to experimentation that somehow manages to work as songwriting I give this choice a thumbs up, keeping in mind that it feels more like a preview of things which never came than a completely convincing statement.


Siouxsie and the Banshees are surely the greatest, boldest and most influential of these groups. If The Scream were not on the list at least 2 or 3 of their other albums could be; critics seem to prefer Juju, Tinderbox and Peepshow to this one, and it is extremely difficult to see why The Raincoats or Cut would come out ahead of just about any of their albums, including their uncompromising Join Hands, some of which already brings to mind the much later rock trend known as "shoegaze". I thought this list was the work of people who have some in-depth knowledge of rock history, so I am a bit flabbergasted how this seminal group ended up with a single album near the end of the list, making way for higher-rated purveyors of superficial Top-40 pap. Then again, Suzi Quatro is represented by no album at all, so perhaps we should be thankful that the feminist listmakers saw fit to recognize one Siouxsie under an alternative spelling.

It is hard to imagine what on earth convinced Powers et al. to include Sonic Youth's Sister in a list of albums made by women, unless it was the album's name (referring to a sister of Phillip K. Dick who died shortly after birth). Nothing about the band's history suggests that it was so dominated by Kim Gordon as to justify the claim that any of Sonic Youth's albums were "made by women" – Gordon didn't have a more than equal role in the lead singing or songwriting, nor can the band's often noted alternative treatment of guitars (modified tunings, insertion of objects under the strings, etc.) be her invention alone. (None of those techniques were new to popular music in any case.) I am not trying to minimize what she did do, which is contribute to one of the most original and influential bands in history, but to call their albums "made by women" puts this in the wrong perspective. It is reasonable to point out the role that women have had in all sorts of innovative ensembles, from Pauline Oliveros to The Breeders, The Raincoats to Sonic Youth, but overstating the case does not help correct any historical oversights. The choice of albums is perhaps beside the point; their next album, Daydream Nation, is often considered their masterpiece, but the band's constant evolution makes the choice of any one album even more arbitrary than with many other groups.

Take the current order of appearance of these albums in the list as (1)-(7); for my money, judged on the basis of overall quality, with some credit for originality, the correct order would be:
         1. (7) Siouxsie and the Banshees – Scream (or any of several others)
         2. (2) XRay Spex – Germfree Adolescents
         3. (1) Blondie - Parallel Lines (I'd replace it with Eat to the Beat)
         4. (8) Sonic Youth – Sister (not really an album "made by women")
5. (5) X – Los Angeles (not really an album "made by women")
         6. (6) The Slits – Cut
7. (3) The Runaways – The Runaways (Waiting for the Night might have bumped them up a notch)
8. (4) The Raincoats – The Raincoats
If the original order is so far off, interspersing these albums in that order between albums that are far removed in musical style seems like a recipe for a pretty random list.


***

47 (Celia Cruz, Son con Gauguanco), 73 (Astrud Gilberto, The Atrud Gilberto Album), 78 (The Bulgarian State Radio and Television Choir, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), 103 (Umm Kulthum, Enta Omri), 112 (Mercedes Sosa, Mercedes Sosa en Argentina), 115 (La Lupe and Tito Puente, La Pareja), 137 Ofra Haza, 50 Gates of Wisdom, 145 (Oumou Sangare, Moussoulu)

If the list's efforts at cross-cultural inclusion are slightly greater than their efforts at cross-genre inclusion (see below), it is still a mere token selection of third world female artists. There is so much else to choose from, and so little to go on in choosing albums by these particular artists that it just does not make sense. Without trying too hard I can think of Greek, Polish, Lebanese, Israeli, Chilean, Mexican, Venezualan, Jamaican, Algerian and Inuit artists who have as good a claim to inclusion as many of these artists, and I'm sure this is also just scratching the surface. It's silly to imagine that of the 150 greatest albums made by women, just 10 or so are albums made in non-English-speaking third world countries. To take a few examples: While the nueva cancion genre is represented by Mercedes Sosa, the great Cuban singer Sara Gonzalez is equally important and deserving of recognition. Umm Kulthuum seems to be representing the entire Arab world, but there are others not quite so famous but perhaps more accessible, like the contemporary Algerian/Berber singer Souad Massi; her 2003 album Deb is one of my favorite pieces of so-called "world music". Please see my next post regarding the Greek singer Maria Farantouri.


 ***


55 (The Go-Gos, Beauty and the Beast),  59 (Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls), 64 (Spice Girls, Spice), 139 (The Bangles, All Over the Place)

Girl groups? Where's Bananarama? How about Pajama Party? (Just kidding – I happen to know someone who was in the band, though not on their recordings – you can see her introducing them in concert here.) One thing the list brings out is how differently we perceive bands with women filling most of the key instrumental and vocal roles. I've never heard anyone refer to Heart or Hole as a "girl group", and even Bikini Kill, which actually coined the term "girl power", is not really a "girl group" in the sense that the Spice Girls, who co-opted the term in support of a completely different musical experience, are truly a "girl group". A few comments are in order, anyway. 

·         First of all, the positions of The Go-Gos' 55.Beauty and the Beat and The Bangles' 139.All Over the Place should at least be reversed. The Go-Gos occupy an interesting place in rock history as perhaps the first all-female "New Wave" group. But they always sound like they are knocking off some tune by Blondie, The Knack, or The Cars; after all, Eat to the Beat, Parallel Lines, Get the Knack, Candy-O and a bunch of other New Wave albums were out before Beauty and the Beat. I'm not sure what makes it "one of the 'cornerstone albums of US new wave' (AllMusic), breaking barriers and paving the way for a host of other new American acts" (from their Wikipedia entry) – weren't those so-called "barriers" long gone, or at least seriously diminished? (What were Suzi Quatro, Joan Jett or Pat Benatar doing if not breaking those very barriers? To say nothing of earlier female rock stars from Janis Joplin to Linda Ronstadt.) I'd call it a good album, not a great or highly original or pathbreaking one. 

·         On the other hand,The Bangles' All Over the Place is one butt-kicking piece of rock and roll, good to the last drop, one that belongs in any "greatest albums" list that goes this deep. One note, though: The Bangles' 1987 smash hit "Walk Like an Egyptian" is more than a little reminiscent of "You Can't Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can't Sleep)" on this 1981 Go-Gos album – not close enough to call it plagiarism, but surely in debt to it as a predecessor.

·         The Spice Girls' Spice is bottom-feeding bubblegum trash, and with the very partial exception of their hit "Wannabe", it belongs on a list of the 150 Least Adventurous Albums Made by Humans. There are dozens of albums that could replace this in the list, even if we limit ourselves to overlooked albums by the artists already represented. As for their historical relevance, here's a quote from the album's Wikipedia entry: "It is considered to be the record that brought teen pop back, opening the doors for a wave of teen pop artists." And one from Britney Spears' Wikipedia entry: "Spears is... credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s." Credited? Was that supposed to have a "dis" in front of it? Something tells me that Powers et al. were sufficiently impressed with the "importance" of these pop outings that they felt it necessary to include such clearly unremarkable recordings for fear of offending middle school girls from Brixton to Brooklyn. I don't see why such pandering should determine the "canon" of music by women.

·         The Indigo Girls, by contrast, are more aligned with the folkrock genre, show consistent artistic integrity, manage to be highly accessible without playing to lowest common denominator tastes, and are all but a women's musical separatist movement, so tightly do they control the gender makeup of their album personnel. (They do have a few men in their lineups but they are a distinct minority.) Whether you like this separatist approach or not, their results speak for themselves. As for which album belongs in a "greatest" list, this duo once again suggests that bodies of work rather than albums should be the main focus, as Indigo Girls is on a par with several of their other efforts.


 ***


78 (The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Choir, Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares)  80 (Laurie Anderson Big Science),  111 (Diamanda Galás, The Litanies of Satan), 128 (Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening), 136 (Yoko Ono, Plastic Ono Band), 147 (Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music)

Far be it from me to deny that these artists deserve recognition, but such clearly editorial choices seem so ridiculously out of place with the heavily pop orientation of the list that they are almost embarrassing. Oliveros' 1989 album Deep Listening, for example, consists of a series of very long tones played in an underground cistern. Is that better or worse, more or less important, than the album 100 places above it - Nina Simone Sings the Blues? Aside from showing that the one-list-fits-all idea was a bit loony, it also throws into question what the limits of "greatness" are. If Galás' incomprehensible and astringent wailing is to be bestowed with the "greatest" tag, why not add Pharmakon's Bestial Burden, an esoteric and deeply disturbing electronic assault that TheFader.com kindly placed on their list of 150 More Great Albums Made By Women? It is also worth pointing out that while these particular albums may stand out among these artists' work, it is far more difficult with experimental or classical artists to identify a single album as "greatest" rather than recognize the originality and influence of their work as a whole. The albums are mere tokens, representing not only a few unique artists but a whole world of contemporary music with numerous worthy female practitioners.

The same goes for the few non-vocal jazz entries (Alice Coltrane and one or two others) – they seem like mere placeholders. Apparently, for example, the listmakers were not familiar with the brilliant pianist Geri Allen, who passed away this year after making numerous recordings with many of the great jazz masters of the last 30 years. What's the point of throwing in a few classical, experimental, jazz or crossover artists without really exploring these areas? And by what criteria do you select these artists or albums while not recognizing someone like Blossom Dearie, also unique but not given to the vocal experiments of of Ono, Galas or Monk?

 

89 (Shania Twain, Come On Over)  99 (Taylor Swift, Fearless), 114 (Reba McEntyre, Rumor Has It)

What distinguishes the albums by any of these latter day country superstars from their superstar peers like Faith Hill, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood or several others? I can see the temptation to include older, known entities like Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, who have a sort of legendary status, whether or not they made any albums I'd call "great". I can understand the impulse to recognize slightly off-the-beaten-path artists like Iris Dement, Rosanne Cash, Miranda Lambert and the Dixie Chicks, all of whom challenge Nashville norms in one way or another and have made some great music doing it. But I do not see the point of including several mainstream, formulaic, slickly produced country albums, even if some of them write their own songs, when nothing makes their music stand out from the tidal wave of Nashville slush. Yes, Twain supposedly broke some rules, edging very close to rock at times while also playing to a Nashville audience, but I'm not sure what is so exciting about someone figuring out that you could sell even more records by appealing to both Nashville and rock mainstream audiences. (And that someone was mostly her husband, Mutt Lange.) In any case that idea was not new, since Graham Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, Dwight Yoakum and many others had already figured it out; what was new was the over-the-top production job that added layers of studio complexity to the standard Nashville sound. (This is how a Canadian ended up as the all time best-selling artist, by some measures, of music typically made below the Mason-Dixon line.) Why this is a significant contribution to music "made by women" eludes me – the listmakers seem to be so dazzled by the gold dripping from some recordings that they just can't ignore them.

As for Taylor Swift, she is a prolific songwriter, but has not an ounce of the depth that the similarly prolific Mary Chapin Carpenter has in that regard, and is no great shakes as a singer either. Once again, record album sales seem to speak louder than musical accomplishments in this list. There's no question that Reba McEntyre can sing, but Carrie Underwood is also an extraordinary singer, who began (unlike McEntyre) co-writing her material after her first album, not to mention exhibiting more of an active engagement with social causes than the typical female country singer.

I have questions about the selection of albums even for country artists I admire. Lucinda Williams' 18. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is accorded a dizzying degree of respect in the top 20; but it tries a little too hard, for my taste – her first album is better, though I doubt it belongs anywhere near #18 either. Rosanne Cash's 68.King's Record Shop is a good album with a lot of hit songs, but not especially pathbreaking; starting with Interiors she set out on a less commercial path, retreating from the Country Hot 100, and it might have been better to recognize those efforts instead. I don't know who thinks Iris Dement's second album, My Life, is better than her inspired debut, Infamous Angel, but apparently such opinions are represented in NPR's committee.

To me, all this adds up to questionable judgment in the country department. We can consult Billboard or Wikipedia if we want to know who sold the most albums or which album got the most rave reviews; the only reason to do a list like this is to present the verdicts of taste, independent of album sales.

***

97 (Mariah Carey, Daydream)

I will not stand on a soapbox and insist that no Mariah Carey album should be on the list, but it is my duty to report that "One Sweet Day", the zillion-selling single from Daydream, is a syrupy, sentimental, bottom-feeding piece of trash. Other songs on the album are considerably better, but it is also worth pointing out that Carey's endless melismas sometimes hide an underlying lack of inherent melodic interest. This reminds me to ask again, where's Mariah's melismatic sidekick Christina Aguilera? Selling over 100 million albums and winning six Grammys is not enough to get her a spot in the parade of superstars? This is the sort of thing that puts the whole list in question, as it seems like purely arbitrary decisions were made about what's in and what's out.


*****

So, that's it for my comments on the choices for the list. I have no regrets about devoting the time and energy to this, but I have also become more convinced than ever that there are few artists and perhaps fewer albums that deserve the label "great". Kate Bush is a great artist, but if Hounds of Love is her best album – and I've listened to most of her others more than once as well – she may not have made any great ones, on my definition. A great album doesn't have one or two hits and a bunch of okay material to fill out the record; it is an album where nearly all the songs are at such a high level that the hits do not stand out as exceptions. A great album may have one or two songs that don't generate much enthusiasm, without being completely lost causes; or it may have a song that is a sort of throwaway but a very amusing or entertaining one. Other than that, it has to grab you, song after song, right to the end.

Most great bands don't make many great albums. The Rolling Stones have made 26 studio albums by my count; other than singles collections I'd call only one or two great albums. I may enjoy listening to half a dozen of them, but they're not "great", they just have enough great material to warrant hearing them again. Great albums are not defined by having multiple hits – that may in fact signify an album that is reaching for commercial play at the expense of artistry. Queen had just one hit song on Sheer Heart Attack, "Killer Queen", but every song is exceptional; that makes a great album. 10cc's The Original Soundtrack sports the ever popular "I'm Not in Love"; it may be the least memorable song on the record. King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King has no hits, but is a seamless, genre-defining brilliant album. Steely Dan was not much of a hit generator, but by my lights made one great album after another. The artists and bands who by general agreement created more than one or two great albums are few and far between: you might get consensus on The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Elton John – after that (and possibly before), tastes will diverge. I would gladly put Siouxsee and the Banshees as well as Suzanne Vega on that list. But due to the sheer quantity of male recording artists and male-dominated groups, there are a lot more great albums by males than females.

I have a lot more questions about the list than I've had time to raise in the reviews above. Like, whether there should be two Madonna albums on such a list; or, for that matter, why the two Like a... albums and not her first album, which had a generally better critical reception, or her much more courageous and artistic Ray of Light, which eschews the predictable hooks and sexual innuendo in favor of a spiritual journey? Or whether Sleater-Kinney isn't way more important to women in music than their #81 slot suggests? Or whether Robyn's #143 electro-dance-pop Body Talk is more than a curiosity with it's cute-catchy "Fembot" and a lot of sterile discotheque material. Or whether Joanna Newsom's squeaky voice and monotonous melodic lines on #141 Ys have even less to recommend them than the bloodless vocals of Lana Del Rey, whose Born to Die was unaccountably overlooked for the Top Contemporary Female Folk-Pop spot. Or whether Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway isn't so much better than Taylor Swift's #99 Fearless; not that it would be amiss to reserve a spot or two for Certified Pop Child Prodigy, though Swift would have quite a bit of child-superstar competition these days. Etc.

But I don't have the patience to argue for each of these claims; besides, they're either as obvious to you as they are to me, or you probably won't listen to my heartfelt arguments anyway.

Please stay tuned for my next and last post on this topic, in which I offer a list of overlooked artists and albums, serious consideration of which might force a radical revision of the NPR list. [Note: various typos and other errors were corrected on 8/11/2018. And my next (5th) post on this topic turns out not to be my last - there will be at least seven altogether.]

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