List and You Shall Hear VI: The "Readers" Sing a Different Tune

After posting on and off for about a year in response to NPR's "150 Greatest Albums Made By Women", curated by Ann Powers and a host of NPR and Lincoln Center music business pros, I was just about ready to publish my own (more or less dissenting) list when NPR followed with a new list based on a "Reader's Poll". The "Readers" (aren't they actually "listeners"? or is that a dumb question when people are more likely to read media web sites than listen to the radio?) came up with a substantially different list of albums. So that has diverted me into a separate commentary - brief, but only by my verbose standards!

In certain ways the "Readers" have improved on the "Pros" list (as I shall call them, respectively, throughout this post). For a few examples:

• Tori Amos shows up multiple times, as she should, even if the specific album choices wouldn't be mine; while she may suffer from the perception of being America's answer to Kate Bush, she is to my mind one of the most brilliant artists on the music scene in the last 25 years and deserves far more recognition than was accorded by the inclusion of only her first solo album, Little Earthquakes.
• Though they retained the Pros' Joni Mitchell picks (which I disputed in my third post) they added several others of hers which are to my mind superior.
•  Again, while they kept Bjork's Post, they awarded a higher place to Homogenic, clearly a better album musically.
•   Madonna's Ray of Light and her first album are there and Like a Prayer is not, another way in which the readers have demonstrated that quality known as taste that is supposed to be the province of music critics. In reality, the latter are just as often moved by extraneous factors that the ordinary listener neither knows nor cares about.
• Joan Osborne's Relish has been accorded its rightful place; Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill seemed a bit lonely without its companion on the Pros list.
• P.J. Harvey's To Bring You My Love makes the list; although the Readers recognized other albums of hers that I am sort of meh about, at least they included this most listenable product of her unique style.
• Neko Case's two best albums are duly recognized; it was difficult to fathom how the Pros managed to neglect her brilliant work, both as solo artist and with The New Pornographers (since the Pros included many not-really-made-primarily-by-women albums in their list).
• Mary Chapin Carpenter has been added (twice), as she should have been to begin with; and while I regret their dropping Iris Dement and Miranda Lambert, overall I am more pleased than not to see the likes of Carpenter and Brandi Carlisle added.
• Janelle Monáe: how on earth (!) did the critics and other Pros miss her? With their long list of neo-soul albums and their willingness to indulge electronica of various sorts, what the heck were they thinking by not including some of the most interesting R&B, or popular music of any kind, in decades?
• Ditto St. Vincent! Her first two albums, though difficult to classify, are a new standard of some sort, and an inspiration to artists trying to find that space between underimagined and overreaching. The Pros managed to jump all over Beyoncé's latest but somehow missed this more original, and by now somewhat time-tested, recording. (My hunch is that in this visual age critics, no less than the average teenager with a cell phone, think they are evaluating music when they are actually evaluating videos. My remarks in all these posts are directed to the music alone. I can post about the 150 Greatest Rock Videos Made By Women another time. Video content is irrelevant to musical content, period.)
• Whether out of intuition or ignorance, the Readers made almost no attempt to include classical, jazz or world music choices. I said it was a bad idea to include albums of incommensurable musical styles and give them a rank in a list. Once again the Readers exercised better judgment than the Pros.

Aside from that, the Readers, who are clearly less knowledgable about the history of popular music, omitted a number of obscure choices, like Robyn's Body Talk or Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, ESG's Come Away With ESG, Bikini Kill's Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, etc., as well as passing on some earlier pop idols like Chaka Khan, Teena Marie and Shania Twain. All fine with me.

One other notable difference between the lists is that the Readers seemed to be picking their favorite artists and sticking with them, rather than trying to be nice to every female who has ever made some recordings. Thus not only are there several albums each by Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, Bonnie Raitt, Madonna and Erykah Badu, but the Readers squeezed in three albums by the relatively new artist St. Vincent, four by both Taylor Swift and her antithesis PJ Harvey, and at least two each by Janis Joplin, Norah Jones, Janelle Monáe, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Florence and the Machine, Sade, Beyoncé, The Pretendeers, Janet Jackson and quite a few others. In short, the Readers list includes a lot fewer artists and recognizes the best albums by these artists at the expense of the best efforts by other artists. In part this reflects the space opened up by the Readers' exclusion of most albums outside the English-speaking folk/pop/soul mainstream. But it also reflects the non-curated nature of the list: without the gravitational pull of professional experience and responsibility, people were free to just list their favorite stuff by their favorite artists. But that also means that some unfamiliar efforts that represent greater achievements than the latest Taylor Swift album were simply ignored in favor of whatever turns people on at the moment.

In spite of their many improvements, the Readers list suffers from some of the same flaws as the Pros list. On many of the albums women are not the primary musical drivers: Blondie, the Cocteau Twins, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Fleetwood Mac are albums where women were either equals, or simply sang (most of) the lead vocals, with the album in most other respects being a product of male musicians. The Readers even added Cheap Thrills, on which Janis Joplin contributed vocals for a pre-existing band and did not have creative control over the album (which is why she went on to form her own bands for her next two albums). Grace Slick's outstanding songwriting, singing and instrumental contributions for Jefferson Airplane are still not recognized, even though the bar has still been set very low for what constitutes music "made by women". She is literally the first person who should come to mind when the phrase "women and rock" is uttered, and if the Airplane's albums and the later release of material by Slick's earlier band The Great Society are not included, the same criteria should be applied to the whole list.

Moreover, while chucking some older pop singers with little staying power, a lot of more recent teenage pop is catapulted into top positions: Carly Rae Jepsen, Lady Gaga, Lorde and others now join the list, and Adele and Taylor Swift are further exalted. Also, some classic album choices are probably based more on well known titles (Nina Simone's I Put a Spell On You, Grace Jones' Nightclubbing) than on serious critical comparison with their own or other artists' work. And while I might agree that much of the neo-soul that finds its way into the original NPR list is overrated there, some of those artists make more sense in a list of 150 albums than many of the newer selections on the Readers list.

The same standard but dubious critical evaluations show up as before:

• Blue (once again) is not Joni Mitchell's best album, good as it may be; indeed, the critical history of selecting it as the number one album by a woman is so overwhelming at this point that the choice can no more be considered objective than the choice of "Stairway to Heaven" as the best classic rock song (it is not even the best Led Zeppelin song, much less the greatest rock song).
• No matter how often it is lauded, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is not Lucinda Williams' best album, though it strains at every seam to equal Sweet Old World.
• Although I'm happy with Homogenic as the Bjork album of choice, the ubiquitous and overrated Post is still there. The inclusion and high rank of Vespertine is less standard and a bit bizarre.
• Patti Smith's Horses is once again picked, presumably as an icon, not an album, because as an album it has not gotten any better than it was; though I appreciate the posting of a reader's comment that demonstrates exactly this point: "it gives precisely zero f***s how you or anyone feels about it. It is the embodiment of punk." Okay; it is anything but "the embodiment of punk", and there are a lot of albums that give "precisely zero fucks" how we feel about them, which makes them... what? Sociopathic?
• Marianne Faithfull's Broken English shows up again. While it is hard to say exactly why Horses commands so much attention, Broken English is on both Pros and Readers lists for obvious reasons: it has a memorable single, and it is the only well-known album by a woman who had more than a minor place in the history of rock and roll. For all that, it is not, in its entirety, a particularly impressive album. Neither the album nor the single sold very well in either the U.K. or the U.S. It also once again raises the question, "Just what do you mean by 'Made By Women'"? Three of the songs were co-written (with many other writers) by Faithfull, the rest by men, while men played all the instruments as well as doing the producing, engineering and just about everything else.
• Kate Bush is an important and extremely influential artist with some great individual songs, but as I will argue in my next post, I don't see much that fits the bill for great albums. The one that comes closest for me is not on the list.
• Sinead O'Connor's I Do Not What What I Haven't Got is again chosen.

All of these are respectable artists, but the judgment about their best work, both from critics generally, the NPR Pros and the Readers, is just off, in my never very humble or popular opinion.

Worst of all (and a bit too politely acknowledged by Ann Powers in her introductory essay), in spite of the welcome inclusion of two more Laura Nyro albums, and more Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox as well, the Readers list has a ridiculously strong slant towards contemporary artists, suggesting that the vast majority of the voters were 20-somethings only vaguely familiar with the history of popular music. Lana Del Ray unsurprisingly gets the nod from the readers, while Suzanne Vega, who could give her songwriting lessons, is again nowhere to be found; nor is Judy Collins, though offbeat contemporary folk entries like the annoying Joanna Newsom and sullen Cat Power get on this list. Joan Armatrading, the game-changing British rocker, is still excluded, and Fanny, duly recognized by the pros, have been inexplicably nixed; but the more currently hip Melissa Ethridge, who owes a lot to those great pioneers, is included instead. Fiona Apple and St. Vincent are each recognized multiple times, which I might not object to except that Siouxsie and the Banshees are infuriatingly knocked off the list altogether. Brandi Carlisle's 2007 album The Story is now on the list as the 72^nd greatest album made by a woman – is that supposed to mean that it is better than any album by Janis Ian, who is again perversely excluded? Such judgments can't be taken seriously. In fact, while I like some of them okay, are the various contemporary folk entries better than every album by Shawn Colvin, Lucy Kaplansky, Beth Orton, Dar Williams, Amy Speace, Gillian Welch or several other songwriting women in the folk tradition who are not on the list? The folksinger-songwriter entries have been picked by people who don't have the background, interest or patience to discover many of the artists on whose shoulders their second-rate choices stand.

And those are only the more interesting contemporary additions. Multiple listings for Taylor Swift is a joke: her trite lyrics and formulaic country-pop do not display a shred of uniqueness or originality; she takes no risks whatsoever, not in her puerile complaints about relationships, nor the melodic or harmonic structure of her songs, nor in her production values. As a singer she is not the equal of either country divas like Reba McEntire or Carrie Underwood, nor of pop idols like Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera. The idea that anything she does is the best of any kind of music at all is utter nonsense; at most she gets honorable mention for being a prolific songwriter at a young age. But Swift is possibly slightly less guilty of pandering to immature tastes than Carly Rae Jepsen, whose pure fluff E*MO*TION of 2015 stands at an incredible #42 on the readers' list of greatest albums by women! Did someone drop a couple of digits in that ranking? Also, two albums by Lorde?! On the basis of what highly original creative contribution? At least Britney Spears fell off the chart, but one feels that that is less a result of more discerning tastes than the substitution of the current moment in Top 40 trash for its earlier incarnations. (Where's Abba, anyway?)

So this list is in no way any more definitive than the Pros list, even if it does swap out some bad choices for some good ones. Which is not surprising, if you compare it with other radio listener polls. People know what they like; that's terrific, but it lacks both the breadth and the depth of music critics' judgment. The critics, on the other hand, suffer from not only their own bizarre individual prejudices but an equal and opposite feeling of not wanting to be seen as too far from mainstream opinion, at risk of sounding ignorant. And both Readers and Pros, frankly, don't consistently judge albums even when they claim to be doing so; they tend to praise an albums with a couple of outstanding songs even when the product as a whole is not particularly noteworthy. Avoiding that fallacy will be one of my goals in my own list. Stay tuned.

*****

Here, then, is my response to the Readers' choices, to the extent that they differ from those of the Pros. I'll highlight a few of them that may make my own list as well.

#9, Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes; #17. Boys for Pele; #40. Under the Pink;  #123. Scarlet's Walk

Little Earthquakes moves up from its position on the Pros list, and the others make a new appearance. While I no longer think Boys For Pele is her best album, it was the first Tori Amos album I owned, and there is a sequence of four songs on it, including "Hey, Jupiter" and "Caught a Light Sneeze", that made me a lifelong fan. I wish the whole album were that good, but that would be like asking for another Tapestry. There are few songwriters, male or female, who have four such brilliant songs on a single album. Scarlet's Walk seems to me roughly as good as From the Choirgirl Hotel, Unrepentant Geraldines and a couple of her other albums, in terms of the number of really outstanding cuts on it. But Abnormally Attracted to Sin is her masterpiece, brilliant almost all the way through, so I am baffled at its failure to be included by either the Pros or Readers.

#13, Taylor Swift, 1989; #19, Reputation; #33, Red; #148, Fearless

On a mission to inform the world of every single thought she has ever had about every single relationship she has ever been in, or imagined being in, whether it is of the slightest emotional or philosophical interest or not, Swift offers a slew of rigidly formulaic Nashville-style pop tunes to those who need a musical accompaniment for their fried chicken and apple pie. Calling her prolific would be both obvious and misleading: on Fearless alone I counted five songs that are entirely or in part carbon copies of her hit "You Belong with Me". (The album title is not exactly original either; since Family's brilliant 1971 album Wikipedia lists 17 other albums by that title.) There are other prolific songwriters, from Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Laura Nyro and Van Morrison to Freedy Johnston, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe, and they do not sound like they are channeling the same idea again and again. Country pop does have a limited stylistic range in general, but Swift just goes on and on with the same song structures, same syntax, same production, again and again. Nevertheless, I encourage everyone to buy a few copies of each of these albums, as she contributes a lot of money to disaster relief, school arts programs and children's causes – the only reasons I can think of to own any of them. (Oh, dash it, true confessions time: I picked up up the Platinum version of Fearless in a thrift shop for $1; I suppose there are worse objects taking up space on my shelf. And I do have a copy of Red too... bought it for one of my kids, when I thought they still listened to CD's and liked Taylor Swift. Turns out they didn't, and they don't.)

#20 (tied with Hejira, of all things), Joanna Newsom, Ys; #150, Have One on Me

From the predictable and formula-bound Swift we move on to the endlessly rambling and improvisational Newsom, whose voice seems as little tethered to any vocal tradition I can think of as her songwriting does to the concept of verse and chorus. Where does all this leave us? I infer from the listener comments on the YouTube version of Have One on Me (her albums are not available on Spotify) that she has admirers who have actually played her 2+ hour album more than once, but I would need an awful lot of free time to join that group. I'm good with concept albums (see below, Janelle Monae's The Archandroid for one example). But too much of her work seems to just drift by, making no particular attempt to engage the listener's attention, giving expression rather to her lyrical and musical whims, as if someone were handed a long poem, given the instruction "Sing this!" and put in front of a microphone. There are a few tracks that do feel a bit more compositionally integrated, like something by the roughly sympatico Decembrists. But beyond that, the problem with these albums is that she has opted to let her thin and frankly uninteresting voice carry almost the entire weight of the vocals. Those who admire her, if they have any interest in the singing at all, must be taken with the absence of tone or inflection rather than any any positive quality of it. The improvement in her voice after surgery, which has been widely commented on, is just the thickening of the most wirey reed into something ever so slightly more robust. Dylan's voice was not great, but his singing style was very interesting and became highly influential. I don't get anything like that here; it's like listening to half a voice, with a lot of lethargic background instrumentation. As for the lyrics, they are certainly not formulaic, but they do include a good number of clichés, and there is a certain smugness to some of them that I don't really appreciate. Thus, to put it mildly, I do not get the elevation of Ys to the 20^th greatest female-made album, and I don't even think either of these would be bringing up the rear at #150 on my own list.

#22, Bonnie Raitt, Nick of Time; #96, Luck of the Draw; #97 (tied), Give It Up

Every once in a while in this project I feel like I'm walking on hallowed ground and spitting out chewing gum rather than showing the expected reverence. So how do I say this? I own three Bonnie Raitt albums  – two of the ones selected by the Readers, and another, Sweet Forgiveness (a response to John Prine's Sweet Revenge?) I have played all of them often enough, and heard others as well. I've seen her in concert. But I do not consider myself a Bonnie Raitt fan. Why? Because as likable as the albums are, as strong and gutsy as her voice is, as much as I respect her being a longstanding female musical force in a male-dominated industry, there is hardly a song I have ever heard from her that grabs me by the throat and and screams "creative genius", or anything very close to that. Sheryl Crow and many others may owe her an arm and a leg, but there are at least a dozen Sheryl Crow songs that make me sit up and pay attention every time I hear them. Bonnie Raitt's music, both her own songs (from none to 4 or 5 per album) and her chosen covers, seem like perfect background music for a barbecue or informal cocktail party; they demand no more attention than you would normally pay to standard lyrics, standard chord changes, and well executed, slightly bluesy vocal lines. In 40 years of listening to her I have not been able to say whether I am listening to folk, country, rock or the blues; but I can say that each of those genres has artists and albums that excite me, while Raitt's work, when I am trying to do more than just let it be, always leaves me waiting for the spark to ignite a flame. It is not out of the question that a collection of the most interesting songs from her 17 studio albums (so far) might be a wake-up call. But as for the three albums here, my issue with them as picks for this list can be gleaned from the Wikipedia comment: "In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time." So, both Pros and Readers zeroed in on the "major hit" which was a "commercial success", and the Readers added a follow-up "commercial success" (Luck of the Draw) and, finally, what is probably a better album than either of those, her second (1972) album, Give It Up. Honestly I find only shades of difference between any of her albums; they are all pretty much on a par. All good, when you're in the mood. Great tracks that I want to hear again and again I don't really find on these three or any of the ones I've heard.

#25, Sleater-Kinney, DigMe Out; #129, The Woods

Given the content of the two NPR lists I am happy, on the whole, to see Sleater-Kinney promoted to the Top 25. I had commented in a previous post that their #81 position did not seem to correspond to their achievement. They were far from the first all-female punk band, nor were they one of the original Riot grrrl bands. They were simply the most musically interesting and successful of the many all-female or female-led neo-punk bands in 1990's. Adding The Woods is a courageous choice, but I tend to want to walk a fine line with groups that spend a lot of their time in vocal assaults – they need to deliver some solid music behind the screamo stuff. Dig Me Out definitely has it, not so sure about The Woods.

#26, Melissa Etheridge, Yes I Am; #77, Melissa Etheridge

No surprise that the Readers picked Yes I Am, the one with her power-pop hit "I'm the Only One". The earlier Melissa Ethridge is pretty good too, and so are some of her other albums. I mean, she is channeling Pat Benatar and other earlier female rockers, including Joan Armatrading, as well as more contemporary voices like Alanis Morisette and Sheryl Crow, so the challenge is to say which albums represent the very best of this trend. One thing that has to be acknowledged, but not overweighted, is her fearlessly aggressive lesbian romanticism. She is far from the first openly lesbian singer-songwriter but she sort of took it to a new level with her hard-driving female-to-female love songs. (She didn't "officially" come out until the later Yes I Am but her sexual preference was known, or "rumored" as it is diplomatically put, well before that.) By itself it doesn't make an album better or worse but it adds a touch of gutsyness that generates more heat than a standard pop love song. Last thing: I am a lot more partial to her bluesy inflections than I am to those of Annie Lennox, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt or Florence Welch. She doesn't sort of wander into them for lack of a better melody, she inhabits them.

#28, Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; #127, Middle Cyclone

Fox is such an obvious choice it makes you think the Pros need to have their credentials examined for having overlooked it. Middle Cyclone is just about as good; I'd rank it a lot higher than #127. You want to know how to continue the folk tradition into the 21^st century, losing none of the authenticity but capturing its feelings and sounds in a more modern way? Done. Next case.

#31 Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel... (long title); #45, When the Pawn... (even longer title); #70, Tidal (full tidal, I mean, title)

I admit to having pretty much neglected Apple's later work and not really appreciated Tidal prior to engaging with these NPR lists. While she has been characterized as an angry-young-woman songwriter, I suspect it was me who was more angry when Tidal came out in 1996, being a 40-something musician struggling to make my first album and bleeding cash when along comes this so-called "child prodigy" (she wrote the album at 17) from the Upper East Side getting promoted all over the place with her melodramas and whatnot. Gave it a listen, shrugged, forgot about it. Okay, I'm over the grudge. Tidal holds up as one of the most original and interesting products of that decade; and The Idler Wheel... is just about as forceful a musical statement for the 2010's. Indeed, it is one of the boldest musical statements I've ever heard that still keeps a toehold in the pop idiom. I do like When the Pawn, too, but it slides more easily into a neo-soul and quasi-jazz genre that makes it less daring and exceptional, for me, than the other two. I have to credit the Readers with forcing the issue about her two later albums, as the Pros stuck conservatively with Tidal. With her last album being six years old now, and she being still quite young, one hopes that there is more to come from her in the future.

#34, Lorde, Melodrama; #51 (tied), Pure Heroine

I mean, it's hard to dislike Lorde, she does not exactly pander to rock bottom tastes as some other pop singers do; but what makes either of these a particularly great album, one for the historical record books? Nothing that I can hear. I do think that for all their superior choices, the Readers are awfully prone to think that New + Good = Great. This is the vein in which Lorde and many others seem to be recognized.

#42, Carly Rae Jepsen, E*MO*TION

Whatever the deconstructive qualities of the title may be, the only emotion I really feel in listening to this is sadness, at someone wasting what might conceivably be some hidden songwriting talent on the creation of pop tunes so trite that Taylor Swift fans might find them vapid. Not long ago I attended a reading by several rock critics in which one young woman touted this as a kind of landmark album. I didn't get it then, and I don't now, though it may indeed be a new low of some sort (or it may just be that rock criticism has hit a new low). All surface, no depth, to put it as gently as I can. It tells you what sort of "Readers" are checking in when this ranks 42^nd among greatest albums made by women.

#46, St. Vincent, St. Vincent; #74, Strange Mercy; #97 (tied), MASSEDUCTION

And this tells you that there are also Readers of an entirely different breed! Though Anne Clark is not exactly unknown she is a bit under the radar – some of her albums have ranked fairly high on Billboard and other charts, but it doesn't take much in the way of sales these days to do so; and though a couple of her singles have registered, she is not really the pop singles type. She has conservatory (Berklee) creds, though no degree, and the tracks on her albums include original electronic elements while still hewing close enough to the pop vein to have mass appeal. Overall I would classify her as trip hop, but with more depth and breadth than Portishead, Mandalay and other groups I've heard in that genre. Her eponymous album (if "eponymous" applies to glib stage names) is most likely going to find a lofty place on my own list of the greatest albums by women (see next post). Strange Mercy is another excellent outing, maybe just lacking some of the high points of the later effort (like the ingenious "Prince Johnny"). MASSEDUCTION, on the other hand, seems like a dubious attempt to seduce the masses of pop music listeners, though it does get a bit more interesting about half way through.

#48, Annie Lennox, Diva; #145, Medusa

Diva is a respectable album of backward-looking, original, blue-eyed soul (she's about as blue-eyed as they come, though I find the label a bit dismissive) and another style or two thrown in. The singing is awesome, but where's the electricity one might expect when the co-author of "Sweet Dreams" is let out of the pen to do her own stuff? As for Medusa, she has at least two other albums of originals so I'm not sure the NPR Readers picked an album of nice but not exactly inspired covers for their list. It all leaves one with the feeling that her best work was with The Eurythmics; which is not a bad legacy to have, but it does not qualify as music "made by women".

#54, Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid; #85, The Electric Lady

Amazing, brilliant – The ArchAndroid is one of the most interesting and satisfying things to come out of the pop world in a long time. I will go into more detail in the next post. I will also say a little about The Electric Lady, which seems to me just a tad less consistent, though with some major high points.

#64, Sade, Diamond Life; #105, Love Deluxe

About Diamond Life I will say very little, as I will have enough to say about it when I present my own list, where it will occupy an illustrious position. But I must say I find it extraordinary, in spite of the wildfire that her first album ignites in me, that not a single one of her later albums even sets off a spark. There are other artists like that (Tracy Chapman, for one) but it is particularly striking with Sade because her first album announced a whole new musical world, while each of her later ones seems to settle into a comfortable place in that world without really finding anything new and exciting in it. The most interesting follow-up to Diamond Life would have to be Erykah Badu, not Sade's own work. Love Deluxe, like Soldier of Love and the others, gets into that wide open space way down on a list where albums reside that are not particularly interesting, but are reasonably pleasant as background music to a cocktail party or romantic evening.

#65, Dixie Chicks, Wide Open Spaces; #141, Taking the Long Way

I'm not sure why Wide Open Spaces is considered the superior album; the Pros chose that one alone and the Readers placed it way ahead of Taking the Long Way. The latter seems to me superior in both lyrical and musical content and in social significance. They certainly bucked longstanding Nashville tradition in "Not Ready to Make Nice", which can be read different ways but is most obviously a response to the derision they received for making a public statement in England against Bush's war in Iraq. As for the music, it is almost as close to early 70's folkrock (CS&N, America, etc.) as it is to a traditional country sound. If anything from these "chicks" belongs on the Greatest-By-Women list it's this one.

#72, Brandi Carlile, The Story

She's a fine songwriter and guitarist, a lot of people have covered her work, she has musical integrity... it's all good. But as I said above, there are too many people in this musical space to make an individual album like this stand out. If I were to put together a representative list of the best albums by the 150 best female folksinger-songwriters this might well find a place on it. I'm just not convinced it is so clearly better than dozens of other albums in this genre as to merit a place among the 150 greatest among all recordings by women.

#75, Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy; #121, Surfacing

Not sure why, but these seem more legitimate entries in the horse race of "150 Greatest" than many of the other folk-style entries, though they share some of the quality of quietude with much contemporary folk that makes me pass into dreamland before the album is done, rendering a thorough evaluation difficult. I wish there was more effort at making a musical statement, as opposed to channeling through an existing musical genre; that is what made Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young  and others stand out from the general run of folk rock. There's something bubbling under the surface here but I keep waiting for it to emerge. Lots of good songs, but greatness seems to be lurking just around the corner.

#79, Grimes, Art Angels

This is an example of what I think is the New + Good = Great tendency of this list. It's basically electronic dance-pop, modern-arty enough that it attracted Elon Musk (or did the music not have much to do with that?) but to my ears, other than a new noise or two, nothing much that we haven' heard before. Interesting to compare her with St. Vincent though: I hear Grimes as taking more risks with the electronics, but less risks with the songwriting and formal elements. Others may hear it differently; such are the vicissitudes of taste.

#82, Florence and the Machine, Lungs; #90, Ceremonials

I cannot get into Florence or her Machine for more or less the same reason I cannot get into Stevie Nicks and her Mac, or Bonnie Raitt: rather than offering carefully constructed melodies they make do with bluesy vocal riffs that don't really create a feeling of blues or gospel authenticity. That may sound over-intellectualized, but the feeling is gut level: it just doesn't grab me. (Ditto for an awful lot of male-made Top 40 hard rock, for the same reason; but that's another diatribe.) To my ears, Lungs picks up a bit about half way through, but not enough to put it on a greatest albums list. Ceremonials doesn't do any more to trigger my interest. It's slightly affected rock, having a bit of a goth slant, but otherwise sounds to me like someone doing the best she can to conjure up her momma's AOR favorites. Pretty amazing how some groups will get Platinum albums out of this kind of music (they were heavily promoted by the BBC) while others who do practically the same thing, just as well or better, get absolutely nowhere. I've heard any number of local rock bands I like better than Florence and the Machine, so rather than forcing me to admit how terrific they are, their album sales just make me mad on behalf of all the groups who have been sidelined to make way for such stars.

#83 Sinead O'Connor, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got; #118,The Lion and the Cobra

I do not get what I am supposed to like about O'Connor's second album, which the Readers follow the Pros in honoring; like many albums, I suspect it is held to be great largely on the strength of one hit single, in this case Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U". But her first album is a whole 'nother story, a blast of rock and roll with a lot of variety and harmonic interest. O'Connor is one of many artists, male and female, who came out of the gate at full gallop, and for the rest of her career slowed down to a barely perceptible trot. She is also one whose public statements – e.g., about politics, religion, and sexuality (including her own) – push buttons all over the place. Like Nina Simone, she can manage to be quite irritating even when you agree with her, or at least with what she says at the time, since it is difficult to discern a consistent point of view from one statement to the next.

#86 (tied), Lana Del Ray, Born to Die

Well, speaking of brutally "honest"... I was surprised and pleased to see that the Pros did not pick this. I do not really appreciate the influence she has had on folk-rock, with her wan voice that seems to almost be pleading for absolution for being a folk artist. The music is likable enough; nothing so brilliant as to get on a greatest-by-women list, though it would certainly go on a "yeah, that too" list. (Tied with Ladies of the Canyon? In her dreams.)

#97, Tegan and Sara, The Con

Why this album was chosen from among their eight studio releases (so far) I don't know, and I don't have time to compare them all. But as far as this one goes, it is a viable but far from outstanding entry in the comtemporary rock scene, musically appealing (for lack of a more serious critical term) and lyrically somewhat banal. Though its credits suggest a large production influence from current and former Death Cab for Cutie and Weezer members, and they cite as influences everyone from Kate Bush to Smashing Pumpkins to The New Pornographers, the album says nothing so loudly as "We love The Strokes!" Is their forgetting to mention Julian & gang an example of the anxiety of influence? The indie folk-rock subgenre they inhabit is roughly the same bailiwick as that of Greta Kline's recordings as Frankie Cosmos, which is also appealing (for lack of a more serious critical term – I think I'm running out of them after my sixth post on music made by women). I have nothing against this stuff; it certainly rises above the self-indulgent, formulaic, chart-hopping pop drivel that characterizes a lot of pop music. But I don't hear it as one of 150 albums that jumps out from the crowd and demands recognition.

#104, Lady Gaga, The Fame Monster

I was wondering which of the current pop superstars who were denied entry by the Pros would be chaperoned in by the Readers. Would it be Katy Perry? Rihanna? Nicki Minaj? And the answer is, Stefani Germanotta. Who? Just think Blue Swede, "Ooga chaka ooga ooga..." which is pretty close to her most famous line as well as her name. I have no real objection to an album of outrageous dancepop hits getting on the list, and this fits the bill as well as any Madonna release. But if you're going to go with that sort of thing, there may be a slippery slope to Katie Perry, Britney Spears, Abba, and other triteness that I have generally nixed. It's sort of an all or none proposition, and I'm going to go with the "none" option. Mainly because you could not twist my arm far enough to let any such album displace, let's say, X-Ray Spex' Germfree Adolescents, which they will if you take your thumb out of the dike. So no Gagas for me, even if I admit to having a much ligher level of tolerance for this (and Nick Minaj too, by the way – something about that lawnguyland accent just turns me on!) than I do for the countrypop efforts of Taylor Swift.

#108, Pat Bentar, Crimes of Passion

Pat si, this album no, and not because I don't like it. "Hell Is For Children" is one of the best pop hits of the decade, and covering a Kate Bush tune was awfully prescient back then, whatever you think of her version. There's more to say, but I'll say it in my next and final post.

#109 (tied), Aimee Mann, Bachelor No. 2

Okay, it's warmed-over Sheryl Crow, if you like; but it's damn good warmed-over Sheryl Crow. At some points she sounds like the winner of the Judy Collins sound-alike contest; and where's Judy on these NPR lists (I ask, for the 3^rd or 4^th time)? But for all her influences and derivations, practically every song on the album has some moment where the lights go on and she feels like the real deal. Does it reach high enough to get on a best-music-by-women list? I dunno; we'll see how things work out when I make my own list. It's a more likely entry than a lot of the folk-rock choices on the Readers list.

#117, Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

Down Under and almost under the radar, she writes brilliant lyrics, plays a mean guitar and has a post-punk sound that is equal parts punk and "post-". Happy to lose M.I.A. and acquire this one for the list, but if one of her two albums belongs on the list, don't three or four by Siouxsie and the Banshees? That question aside, this is definitely an interesting pick. She is a bit aversive to writing melodies, landing the style somewhere between rock and rap, though the punk aesthetic can sort of accommodate that too. It will be interesting to see where she goes as a songwriter. One of the 150 Greatest? Maybe.

#120, Cat Power, Moon Pix

I'm not sure if this album was the root cause of the headache I had earlier today (I suspect it was probably the overcast weather) but it was certainly a facilitator. I wonder about people who claim to actually like certain albums, as opposed to admitting that they are simply intrigued by them. Suffice to say that the persistent vegetative state signified and possibly induced by her soporific songs, in conjunction with the slightly off key character of her vocals, is a bit more than I can take, and I did not hear much to write home about in her guitar arrangements either. (To anyone who thinks I am just aversive to offbeat female singer-songwriters, I can cite one Mark Kozelek, a.k.a. Sun Kill Moon, as a parallel nuisance of the male persuasion.) The music feints in the direction of contemporary folk while simulating actual fainting by never rising much above a depressive whimper. (Sorry, I don't mean to make her more depressed by expressing my sentiments about her music, but I am trying to give some quick and honest feedback on a lot of stuff here, so my reactions are mostly of the unexpurgated variety.) Since I could not bear to listen to much more of this without a long break I have not explored her numerous other albums.

#121, Emmylou Harris, Wrecking Ball

This one was also picked by the Pros, but I didn't comment on it in my critique of their list. The choice of this, among her 26 studio albums, illustrates one difficulty with producing a list of albums "made by women". She recorded a lengthy string of albums that hewed largely to traditional country music boundaries, though like Bonniee Raitt she was often a bit bolder in her choice of material, reaching into the classic rock portfolio and often sounding a bit more like a folk-rocker than a Nashville artist. Suddenly, after decades of this sort of material, a member of the Grand Old Opry and collaborator with a lengthy list of country stars, she bursts the chains of Nashville oppression and emerges as an alt-country rocker. At least, that's the narrative we are supposed to buy, and apparently both the curators of the NPR list and their readers have opened their wallets for it. The reality is a bit different. She was dropped from the cutthroat country music playlists due to being old and in the way (at the age of forty, after one of her best albums, Cowgirl's Prayer – in case you thought agism was less virulent than sexism in this business!) So she teamed up with Daniel Lanois, the famed Quebecois producer and musician who has lent his modernist aesthetic to albums by everyone from U2 to Bob Dylan, to transform her into something that was once again marketable. Lanois certainly worked his magic, giving her an entirely different sound. He wrote two of the 12 songs and co-wrote another, played electric guitar on all but 3 tracks, mandolin on all but 4, and several other instruments. He also brought in Malcolm Burn on keyboards, synthesizer, vibes and more. The sound of the album, in short, is a Lanois artifact; it had little to do with Emmylou Harris, who did her usual smooth job providing the lead vocals, co-wrote two songs and played acoustic guitar on about half the album. (You can read about Dylan's struggles working with Lanois in Chronicles, Volume 1; who could believe that the all but washed up Harris had more control over this album than Dylan did over his?) The end result is an unusual and generally intriguing collection, more synth-country than alt-country. Half the songs were written or co-written by women; the title track is by Neil Young. I would be inclined to include it in a generous list of "greatest albums..." of some sort, but to call this one an album "made by women" is as absurd as listing Cheap Thrills under that heading. On other disks both Janis Joplin and Emmylou Harris put together their own bands, chose the songs and were responsible for the overall sound of the music. Not on these.

#125, Angel Olson, My Woman

This is about the most under-the-radar, and one of the most uncommercial, picks on the Readers list. She has only a few albums out so far, none of them anything like chartbusters. The album has "indie rock" written up one side and down the other: bare bones, low fi, underproduced, with lyrics that just manage to depart from your average lonelyheart complaints. Picture a slightly more depressive Exile in Guyville, or for that matter, Lucinda WIlliams with a cheap DanElectro and a Fender Champ. It's an intriguing if not entirely convincing choice for the list, and shows that at least a few of the Readers are listening outside the mainstream. "Honorable mention", perhaps, but I'm pretty sure it's not among the 150 greatest albums ever made by a woman.

#132, Jewel, Pieces of You

A bit different from most of the folk entries, her fingerstyle guitar work is outstanding (more musically than technically) and her lyrics are, er, disarming? Not sure what's the best word for them. But for all that, I don't hear a lot of terrific songwriting here, more like songs looking for a place to happen. Perhaps worth a few more listens, for her syntax and rhythms are at least interesting. If this is the best of her early albums, and her later albums veer more towards standard dance-pop formats, I am not inclined to award this one the gold star for best-of female-made music.

#137, HAIM, Days Are Gone

A decent exercise in white retro soul and pop of roughly the ABBA or Michael Jackson era, appealing enough on a purely visceral level... But one of the 150 greatest albums made by women? Is there any musical statement or innovation whatsoever going on here? None that came to my attention. I think music by women deserves more respect than to place something like this among its greatest products, even if at the same time one is moved to say that the album is likable enough.

#143, Mariah Carey, The Emancipation of Mimi

Interesting how the Readers nixed Daydream, the choice of the critics. In a previous post I said I was not totally against this pop superstar occupying a position on the list, but described the hit "One Sweet Day" as "a syrupy, sentimental, bottom-feeding piece of trash". Maybe they agreed? I also find the songwriting uninspired and feel that the vocal melismas have already become a sort of self-parody. Anyway, The Emancipation of Mimi may be a better choice, but my personal response is "a pox on both your houses" – the Mariah Carey album that belongs on the list, if any does, is her first, Mariah Carey. Like Madonna's first album, though it hardly rises above basic pop, it is the sort of album you can write off as a guilty pleasure, in the way you can similarly excuse yourself for spinning a Michael Jackson's disk once in a while. It's the purest expression of her talent: she co-wrote initial versions of several of the songs while still in high school, did many of the vocal arrangements and sang both lead and backup vocals. The album's Wikipedia page relates how "Love Takes Time" drove the executives so wild that the album was remastered and packaging recalled just to include it. As for the singing, there's not much I need to say – she's probably the singing talent of the decade, and by the time the first cut on the album is over she has redefined the style of pop vocals, albeit in a way that owed a lot to Whitney Houston, and that got overdone very quickly. There are many later high points to her career, including writing one of the two best contemporary Christmas songs (the other, of course, belonging to George Michaels). But if we are going to go down the commercial pop route on this list of women's music (and it's impossible to completely avoid) then her debut is what we want, not an album so decorated with male music industry bigshots and peppered with trendy hiphop memes that it's hard to know how much it is really Carey's album.

******

Great music happens; it is just surrounded by so much mediocre music that it's hard to find it all. There are a couple of hidden gems, and some not so hidden gems, on the Readers list. I have no illusions that my own list will be either comprehensive or definitive. I think it will filter out all the dubious selections so far and include some of the most unfairly overlooked items, that's all. See my next post.