Feminists and Feminist Sympathizers Unite: A Bold Call for Pazz & Jop Activism

about half of my votes went to females or female-fronted bands, but it's because i really liked those records, you know? it's not like i voted for barbara morgenstern to 'smash the patriarchy', i voted for her cuz she made a good record!! (plus she's german...swoon)

My feelings on this issue are very strong, and very well-chronicled elsewhere on this board. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the glossies do, for better or worse, have a tendency to dictate the greater rock-critical discourse (there are exceptions, naturally, and many of them post here); it's no accident that so many of their writers were in the upper echelons of glenn macdonald's critical alignment ratings. And they tend to favor coverage of female bands with 'hot' singers (photo needs, you know), and they also seem to only have room for one of these particular bands at a time in their news hole -- unless they are doing one of those execrable women-in-rock features, which i have been absolutely sick of since about 1994.

If this proposal is serious, though, then you get into the Lilith Fair Problem -- is it only bands with female vocalists that count? What about a band like the Pixies, where the secondary vocalist and bassist is a female? What about someone like Avril Lavigne, whose backing band and material is very male-dominated?

It just seems like a Band-Aid solution to a cut-jugular problem.

signed,
half of the records I voted for this year had dudes in their bands.

You mean like segregating the P&J voters according to how many votes they gave to a particular genre of music? Oh wait, that would be patrinism.

(sorry, bad joke)

I made a conscious effort, but no deserving guys got bumped for less-deserving women. I am good.

So far this year 8 of my favorite 10 records are by women or part-woman bands, I think.

We're always looking; if you know other women who review records regularly, by all means have them email me. But women writers don't necessarily vote for female artists, though, obviously. At least not as much as, say, Jimmy Draper or Metal Mike Saunders do.

</sarcasm>

Anyways, I dont vote in P&J and I didnt buy enough new music this year, so really, the year in female-lead music for me was dominated by Alice Coltrane's old records on Impulse. I wonder if more women would be inspired to participate in music by hearing her music, which EASILY competes with the best avant-jazz ever made without being relegated to the sides by hard-relativist multiculturalism?

What it all comes down to is more editors need to seek out more women writers to begin with, though I've done such a shitty job in that respect (esp compared to Chuck) I hesitate to bring it up. More women need to be part of the ongoing discussion, not just rounded up at the end of the year for polling purposes. We don't need more female winners, we need more female perspectives.

Ha, I sound like I'm running for office!

"Patrinizing" is my new favorite word.

The problem is not that we don't vote for women: It lies in the labels who sign or don't sign them, and the inherent sexism of a society who holds them to different standards. Women in music are still stuck in roles that are notably filled with stereotypes: Their images/music are filled with blatant references to sexuality, humility, overt "cuteness," or reactions to said things.Granted, MUCH of music is filled with this, but with women, it's often assigned to them. When compared to so many male artists, women have yet to undo this preset role, in music or other places, which is something you're celebrating/creating by seperating them.

If you truly want to be more aware of women artists, then why not petition labels to send you more music? Why not make a petition that the MALE critics don't outnumber female critics 10 to 1? Why not petition more women to write about music, instead of "granting them your vote" based on the fact that they have a vagina? That is the real sexism.

Will someone please keep Chuck Eddy away from the jailbait?

Funny; when I've assigned pieces to male critics Amy Phillips's age (or much younger - i.e., Daniel Dimaggio starting when he was 16!), nobody ever accuses *them* of being jailbait. Though maybe that's because young male critics are more likely to ramble confessionally about their record collections than about their lives, I dunno....

And I don't really think adding more female writers would include more votes for female artists (music can't be divided down gender/race lines), but it would provide a better sample of the listening public.

A simpler implementation can be had if 75 percent of the male voters are simply cut from the roll. Most of them are probably ignorant, white middle-aged shitheels. Get rid of all that toxic flab.

-except for, you know, mark sinker and any other good stuff that might have slipped thru the cracks in past years.-

When I worked for the Morning Call in Allentown, there were more women working the pop music entertainment beat than men. The section was run by men but the best editors were the women. In the intervening decade, the men boss editors were either retired or run out of town for malfeasance. They were replaced with women who, generally, are as shitty as the men were.

Even the most recent one, clearly the weakest yet, had some really good bits: Tery McDermott's article on NWA, Bill Tuomala's "Best Band in the Land" from Exiled on Main Street," and Elizabeth Gilbert's piece on Tom Waits.

Is the response rate for ballots sent to men higher than the response rate for ballots sent to women, incidentally?

i don't hate them cuz i'm not in them. i don't even really hate them. they just bug me. cuz i know that there is better stuff out there. the stuff i usually end up liking is stuff like the orleans shaggs piece or the more historically-inclined articles. the kind of stuff you could read in any halfway decent magazine. but a lot of the straight crit stuff is often boring and bad or both. i dunno, i don't like most rock writers actually. for whatever reason, there are a bunch of people who post here who i don't hate and who i enjoy reading. but that's about it.

I want a Gore girl
Maybe two or three
They show up on TV
and I like what I see

Gore Girls
Wanna make Al my pal
so I can take out his gals

(solo)

http://goregoregirls.com/graphics/gallery4.jpg

The problems of separatism are many, but since men dominate the arts and pop culture, highlighting the work of female artists in an exclusive forum is one reasonable means of striving toward balance. I cover theater as well as music, and there are many excellent women’s-theater companies who focus (though not necessarily exclusively) on female playwrights, or interpret male work from a female perspective. There are often some men involved in the productions, and the audiences are a mix of men and women. Of course, a great many female artists want no part of such stuff, and resent being ghettoized as, for instance, “female directors” as opposed to simply “directors.” Still, if it weren’t for women’s-theater companies, a lot very fine work wouldn’t be seen at all

that depends how you define "notable". theres probably a shitload of really great stuff that didn't come to your attention.

yuck, double yuck, triple yuck.

matos-i've heard some latter-day stuff i like. i've heard some live stuff that was great. course, that was probably 8 years ago. i thought the britney thing was cute.(i do hate to be one of those knee jerks who thinks early is always better.i don't always think that way.)

i actually considered putting it on my nashville scene country ballot as a single. (acutally, a few records i list way up above as "albums" by women are actually, like, three-song EPs by women. which are real short and easy to listen to. so i'm not THAT insane or unhealthy.)

Ha ha I'd like to point out that some of my work has been nominated for inclusion in the Da Capo series, which was nice (as I've said elsewhere, I'm always keen to have something I can show my parents), but nonetheless I've found the books terribly disappointing both before and after.

One thing I think needs to be said: gay guys -- probably over-represented in the P&J, not to mention ILx!

i'm pretty sure half the people i voted for are gay men, but you know, i can never tell with the microhouse guys anymore. they're so goddamned ambiguous it kills me.

I even have a 1973 Sylvester poster on my wall behind my desk! (PRE disco -- is that cool or what???)

How could you NOT love that? (Sorry for brief thread hijack, folks.)

Maura, guess what? I just ran a critics poll featuring 732 critics!!! So let's just say I am somewhat familiar with this concept....

You're suggesting that women would be more likely to vote for women? Why?

'Cos we're making a list and checking it twice...

"There is no such thing as purely objective taste in matters of music. How can you judge a song about an experience that you've never had? This may be a crude example, but do you really think that I, as a male, could appreciate a song about, say, PMS the way a woman listener could? No, undoubtedly there would be some nuances I would miss. You may think this is a contrived example, but it's not. It's not as if most pop songs are about gender neutral topics. Themes of sex and romantic love are ubiquitous - topics that are intricately bound up with questions of gender roles and sexuality. To think that one's own sexual background would have no bearing on one's ability to appreciate the nuances of songs about such matters is naive."

First of all, I don't relate to PMS in song...and that includes Mary J.'s infamous turn

as for identity limiting your ability to appreciate (certain) music, my *ENTIRE* "career" has been based on my identifying (some might say a failure to...) across lines that I have no "divine right" to. of course Race Men and assorted "haters" would dismiss my yen for southern rock, alt-country etc as symptomatic of the dominance of white males in the West...the result being that as a black/colored WOMAN I am so enthralled by the (redneck) phallus that I cannot see straight and thus all my criticism is suspect at best

However, despite being raised in a hardcore proto-Afrocentric household, we were simultaneously taught to recognize EVERYONE's humanity, made to see that it's "different strokes for different folks" (whether we like it or not) and I have tried to LISTEN that way...I don't love Gram Parsons or Gene Clark or Neil Young or Steely Dan or Big Star b/c it's cute and hip to do so and means I can chuckle knowingly over VF's Rocksnob Dictionary annually...My ears (and assorted other body parts) are just in love with that SOUND and still would be if, say, "Hot Burrito #2" came from a gazelle in the Veldt instead.

The world would be a shitty place if everyone only kept their heads down, focused on their own little parochial patch. So I guess if EVEN I can find a smidgeon of value in David Allan Coe...then it's way overdue for more white male critics to give Patti LaBelle some serious consideration (and no, no veering towards Nona Hendryx instead for cool points)

As black/woman/Native American/young/Yankee impostor, I have always been up against IT in this field and always shall be...y'all don't know from tired. Making empty gestures to enroll more chicks in the Pazz voting rolls ain't gonna change much...I rather think that by the time chick crits got to 50% balance in the thing the profession will have ceased to be...or at least will be transformed radically from how we now know it.

I readily admit that all of my votes were for men...and they likely will be for as long as I'm around. With notable exceptions, I have never liked women singers in any genre...and it don't matter what race or orientation they are. That said, I DID quite like Shelby Lynne's, Pink's, Cyndi Lauper's, Emmylou, Roseanne Cash & the late June's records this year...just not enough to topple the Top 10. Even remotely "curious" about Brody Ono. Sadly, Missy and particularly Kelis were not hitting on as much as in the recent past. I am beyond bored by the predictable fetishization/tokenization of Karen O. And if anyone's willing to be honest: other than Rich Harrison's (or rather Eugene Record's) vital contribution, Beyonce's disc was a piece of utter SHITE.

Past aesthetics, I'm here to tell you there's definitely separatism, apartheid, whatever in the field --- as there is throughout Yanqui society. The trick is not merely to round up more chicks at the end of the yr for assorted polls but yes, to get more women editors, and to allow women writers to be as diverse as the boys. Using the Amy Phillips thing Chuck linked above as example, perhaps she (or any other ladycrit aspirant) is only encouraged to do certain things or only specific parts of their voice are deemed of value (by, inevitably, men)? The music that makes me most passionate --- the late modern cock rock of New Southerners w/ bad attitudes and twang-idolaters (and the Crunk, as well) --- is viewed as the preserve of white male composers, fans & critics. I cannot get arrested at No Depression to save my life. While they may just think I cannot write (and probably do), the real challenge for all of you is to break up these genre and other cartels that so obviously exist but few concretely acknowledge. And it would help if very prominent editors did not deride certain respected women's writing as too anti-intellectual to make the grade. I guess women, like blackfolks, write from their ass not their head --- we're so "emotional" --- so anything they say is irrelevant. Well, I know scores of whiteboys who travel all over the country a lot of the year to see the DBT or the Mule or the Allmans and some of 'em are respected for writing about it --- so why is it suspicious if I do the same?

Whoever said it's down to the people you drink with hit the nail right on the head. The cronyism is deplorable. I don't drink, don't got a J-school degree...and --- key to those asking why more women eschew rockcrit --- I have had no mentors. I grew up reading the big willies from Bangs & meltzer to ben fong-torres and John Mendelssohn and the 80s Spin bunch like most everyone up in here...nowhere did I *really* notice any women other than Annie Leibovitz. Only knew about Ellen Willis when I moved here and met her accidentally. And the way the annals would have it, the only black music writer of any substance EVER was LeRoi Jones. I never knew I *could* be a rock critic...it just somehow came to pass.

As a direct product of desegregation --- my life would be impossible w/o it --- I'm here to tell you that young kids of color STILL need role models to demonstrate that something can be done. Simple as that. So as an editor you have to foster that. How I personally came to embrace rock w/o any records, brothers, whitefolks or diehard fans around me remains the mystery of the ages.

But then I suppose everything i've said will be dismissed as hogwash since my #1 album of the year was by a "fey", "whiny", "feminized" Canadian whose oeuvre largely harkens to the pre-rock

And if anyone's willing to be honest: other than Rich Harrison's (or rather Eugene Record's) vital contribution, Beyonce's disc was a piece of utter
SHITE.

Couldn't be more accurate. Jesus what a dull trawl it is.

I'm all for people trying to identify with people of different backgrounds, across various identity lines, etc. I just think that it requires effort - the natural tendency is to like things that one understands - or else to fetishize difference without necessarily understanding it. In one sense, the cliche is right: music is a universal language. I can enjoy listening to Magma (a French prog band from the 70s that sings in a made-up language) even though I haven't the slightest clue what they are singing about. Yet on some level I still feel like I understand it, and the parts I don't understand create a sense of mystery, which can be appealing as well. I think a lot of times the problem with male critics listening to music made by women is that they assume that they do understand it, and they are quick to dismiss it as unoriginal, unexciting, and uninteresting. For instance when someone wrote earlier this thread that "Women in music are still stuck in roles that are notably filled with stereotypes: Their images/music are filled with blatant references to sexuality, humility, overt 'cuteness,' or reactions to said things. ... When compared to so many male artists, women have yet to undo this preset role, in music or other places...", I couldn't escape the suspicion that someone wasn't listening very hard. Perhaps it's not a failure of women to escape stereotypes, but a failure of the listener to get past their own stereotypes.

I obviously meant Rufus Wainwright...

...and shall see him tonight at the Beacon so I am overdue for a long disco nap

Ta ta

I don't think that would necessarily be the case, but it might. In any case more female viewpoints in the poll wouldn't be a bad thing.

Females just make less good music.

I'm one of the "groovy women" (according to Scott Seward, a pretty groovy guy himself)who Chuck Eddy published in The Voice, and I was almost 30 at the time, way over jailbait age. So I've got lots to say on this thread.

First of all, I've known Chuck from when he lived in Philadelphia in the mid-90s, and he was/is a great friend and one of the biggest supporters of my writing endeavors, even when I wasn't...or the psycho female editors that I dealt with at a certain alt-weekly that I wrote for at the time. Many of my supporters in the business have been men (Derek Davis, who was my very first editor ever at the Philadelphia Weekly when it was called the Welcomat, Tom Moon and Dan Deluca at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and just other writers of note who probably had better things to do than read and support little old me like Frank Kogan and Rob Sheffield, the list goes on).

So basically what I'm saying, is that the writer-editor relationship (like any professional relationship) is too complex to say that women editors will always support women writers. (This was one of the saddest lessons I've learned as an adult) Being a rock critic (or any kind of critic) and the whims of personal taste are too complex to assume that women will always support women. When I started writing at 24 or so, I wrote about everything to get my foot in the door, and my tastes were probably pretty evenly divided (under the umbrella of "indie") between male and female artists, but when encountered a kickass lady rocker, it was an added bonus and I would do what I could to write about her. When I started in 1994, it was the year of Exile in Guyville, Hole, The Breeders, L7, Bikini Kill. It wasn't just about being female. It was a hole damn movement and I wrote about it becuase I wanted to express being caught up in it and I couldn't play a guitar. If I could, I would have formed a band and made my own noise with anyone who would make noise with me (male or female).

As I've gotten older, I've leaned towards more female artists. Part of the reason for that is that in 2001, I started an event in Philadelphia called Sugar Town, a showcase for female musicans and DJ's, because for some reason, the ratio of women making any kind of aggressive or challenging or damn near any music at all in Philadelphia is depressingly low and hasn't changed much since we started. There are are probably more female promoters, DJ's, and writers in Philadelphia than in bands. I don't know why this seems to be unique to Philadelphia. We get more demos from bands and artists from all over the damn country.

But still, I don't like female artists just because they are female. I have to like their art too. And if I relate to their art, yes, it might help that I'm relating to their female perspective. But it's got to be a sound that moves me in some way. There are lots of female artists that I don't like because I don't like their music or sensibility (the Lilith variety, Alanis, Jessica Simpson, Celine Dion, Ani DiFranco).

That being said, my P&J Ballot was overwhelmingly female with a lot of mixed gender combos (which I frequently find more interesting...I like bands that are the sounds of men and women fighting and flirting with each other and fighting the good fight in general. I think Boss Hog's Christina Martinez described her band as the sound of her and Jon Spencer fighting, but I might be wrong). Usually, my ballot ends up favoring records that might not get as many votes (which is why I didn't bother voting for the White Stripes whose singles and album both would have made my lists).

Also, you have to take Singles and Albums into consideration. Who is a beter Singles artist and who can actually hold your attention for an entire album? While I love Missy Elliott, for example, I don't think she placed as high as she could have on the album chart because her singles are much stronger than her entire albums, at least for This Is Not A Test. At least that was my reasoning.

I have so much more to say! My goodness.

To answer Chuck Eddy's post about how younger female writers are more likely to write about themselves than men of the same age, is that at least in my experience, men of that age find it easier to talk about records than talk about their lives, because their life is records, instead of records interacting with you and your life. I'm probably going to get shit for saying that, but it's not as bad as the person who just said that "females make less good music."

I like Amy Phillips as a writer and a person, and even though I didn't think the Sonic Youth piece was her best, I found the Jailbait Thread really distasteful. More people were attacking her age and her alleged relations with Chuck than her ideas or her words. When Chuck and I first became friends in Philadelphia, everyone assumed we were sleeping together. Like my writing and my brains couldn't stand for themselves. Yet, if Amy and I were male, no one would say that kind of shit about us. And by the way, there are just as many women who talk smack about other women. Hang out at a playground or an office or a public restroom for about a minute. Often times the worst critics of women are other women. And that's another post entirely.

Sure, the "Maxim"-ization of rock mags isn't helping much either. It's been a decade since I started writing about rock music, and it's heartbreaking how much things stay the same.

Okay, I'm really gonna shut up now!

Hey what about me?

It's not unique to Philadelphia at all, it's basically the case across the country--it's certainly true of Minneapolis and New York, at least from what I've seen. (It seems like Seattle has a higher percentage of female musicians than those two cities, but maybe that's wrong too.)

Nice to read all these great posts. Some people have mentioned some pioneering female rock critics. Is Lillian Roxon considered the first major one? I didn't much like the book she wrote in the late '60s, but maybe it's worth mentioning here.

Dave Marsh also usually gives it up for Gloria Stavers of 16.

Frank Kogan's favorite books of 2003:
1. QwestDex Metro Denver: The White Pages
2. Verizon SuperPages Greater Denver
3. McLeodUSA Denver & West Suburbs feat. Evergreen, Golden, Lakewood, & Wheat Ridge

I'm being serious. For just about any definition of 'good', make a count yourself.

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrr, to get all arithmetical on yer asses that should read four-to-one shouldn't it? Women have squeaky high-pitched voices and only sing about their boyfriends - who wants to listen to that? Plus they look stupid holding guitars tho holding them is about all they are able to manage 'cos their hands to small to play the feckin' things.

here's me thinking 'did i come off as a militant bitch in the comment Chuck/Bob picked abt 'not calling people on their shit' and pointing fingers at Blender,' but all of that came off my recollection of the maybe infamous EMP Pop Conference/Ego Trip panel where the Trippers were hellbent on saying that white critics couldn't write about hip hop, that non-English hip hop was all shite, and that there were no good female MCs.

If I remember correctly (and all that free liquor might have done me wrong) In that situ, only Ann P. really held her own and went to battle with those boys about their sexist, racist standpoints. And why? Because maybe women who write about music have to deal with the gender negotiation/comprimises all the time and can smell a rat from miles away. And re: women don't pitch hi-profile mags, HA HA HA! People don't pitch Spin, right?, they get THE CALL. Blender has how many women on their masthead? You have to try REALLY hard to have so few women there. Dunno about RS, but I had a (fem) friend who is in P&J, has been writing for prolly 10 years and has yet to even get a returned call/rejection letter/comment for any of her pitches.

I agree with all the posts abt needing more women in editing positions/writing, but it all comes down to the subtle gatekeeping of 'your style doesn't fit,' which is something both Amy and I have gotten from Blender, or the not so subtle boys-club drinkin'/chat chat assignment stuff that makes it so hard not living in NYC/not being a crafty bar word slinger (am I the only person hear who thinks more clearly on page?). Of course it's not a pure meritocracy, and there are prolly 20x more people wanting to write than do, but that's no excuse for privledging those in immediate view or freezing out other intelligent/crafted views (male or female) because of some sort of unspoken 'style' which, I fear, is more reactionary than forward-thinking to begin with (in the case of Blender).

Final thought, responding to KCH's most excellent post - mentors. Because there are so few female critics from the first wave in the game (see Evelyn McDonnell's piece in Rock She Wrote for a good argument abt that), and because apparently, men can't sympathize with all the girlie stuff that girlie girls do (like wear skirts, or umm...different biological functions and all those other things) there seems to be a huge dearth of older critics mentoring women into writing. I've been writing since 1997 (96 if you count my zine) and have had a few great female editors, but I've never ever had a male editor write back with comments/suggestions/critique of my writing. I have a distinct feeling that this is different for male critics my age. In my view, good criticism of criticism leads to better criticism, and feedback and guided editing are essential to that. Who has time? I know Chuck is totally awesome at this, and great at mentoring both men and women, but Chuck but one man among many.

So, I don't know abt the stuffed ballot idea (wasn't that one of the NYTimes 'best ideas of 03' re: the Xtian right subverting affirmative action...eeick!), bc what the (critic's) world needs is less symbolic action and more actual action re: gender/racial diversity.

And re: there not ACTUALLY being that many women writing about music - there were around 95 in P&J, and the recently started Girl Group listserv (plug plug, about women who write about music) has 127 members, and growing. Hmm...

I guess I’ll go ahead and say again, since it’s a pain to wade through all these posts, that the ballot-stuffing idea was kinda dumb. Oh, and I deeply regret not reducing that fraction.

Anyways - Kandia: I feel you on multiple levels, not the least of which is that Rufus was my #1 for the year as well. If they hadn't changed the rules on this a few years ago, I might have just given Rufus ALL my points just to get him moving up the ranks a few since I knew that Outkast wouldn't need my help given how the rest of the pollsters were likely to vote.

I also feel you about the issue of mentorship, and by extension, cronyism (i.e. not enough of the former for those of us who aren't white men and too much of the latter for those aforementioend white men). The Catch-22 of course (and perhaps someone mentioned this elsewhere) is that the entrenchment of the latter is part of what limits the expansion of the former. I don't think there's a conspiracy - some music criticism oligarchy - that's consciously plotting against women or people of color from rising through the ranks, not anymore than everyday society (ok, maybe there is a conspiracy then).

But I do think it's tough for folks who aren't white folks from Minneapolis (jokes! Don't hurt me) to crack into those same circles, maybe of which are reinforced by personal relationships abetted by people having things in common (of which gender, race, class, etc. all factor in.) I mean, I don't live in NYC but even if I did, I'm not sure I'd end up on Andy Greenwald's photos page, know what I mean? Normally, that fact doesn't bother me except when I want to pitch something where I'm in competition with people who DO drink with the editor. Hell, I don't even drink to begin with. Hmm....

To go all the way back to Dylan's initial point - I'm not against your idea. Shit, I'm probably one of the few Asian Americans at Berkeley who still supports the principles of affirmative action. However, and I really don't mean to say this with cynicism, I don't think it'll really do much good and even if it did, what kind of victory will we have scored?

I have never thought P&J reflects my critical reality and I doubt it ever will. It's hilarious for me to go back to the polls of the early '90s and notice that PM Dawn ranked #5 in the same year that Cypress Hill, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest all were 20 or below. But hey, that was the Village Voice's critical world back then and as Nate demonstrated elsewhere, like WC or Nice & Smooth would say, "ain't a damn thing changed." I'm not mad at that though b/c I do think it accurately reflects the consensus opinion of who's included in the Voice's larger networks.

I don't think the point is to try to alter the poll or to even hijack the Voice's pollster population but to offer an alternative. Put together a critical mass of people who you think would better reflect the views you want to see and offer that up. I always though it'd be interesting to see what happened if all the folks in the hip-hop magazine world could get over themselves and each other and do that though I doubt their poll would ever resemble mine in any given year (somehow, I don't see Rufus being high on their list either) but at least you'd have an alternative set of musical sensibilities where it's the "Black Album" over the White Stripes and when people talk about the New Pornographers, they think you're mentioning Snoop Dogg's "Girls Gone Wild" series.

...and with one thread, ILM redeems itself for all time.

(2) That said, the stereotype that women are more likely than men to be emotional/personal in their prose is probably correct.

(3) When I was a boy (a bit before WWI), boys played with boys and girls played with girls all through elementary school. So back then we were socialized differently. Probably still true.

(4) Tone of voice in commercial magazines and newspapers is appallingly narrow, absurdly narrow, morbidly narrow. Reading commercial magazines and newspapers is like reading death.

(5) But I stopped reading them during the first Bush administration, so perhaps this has changed.

(6) But it hasn't.

(7) Somewhere high in the chain of command of almost all mags/newspapers is a hard-news asshole with little reflective ability and no awareness of his own bigotry who doesn't like "personal" writing because, well, it's just unprofessional. He - it's probably a he - simply has never given a thought to the idea that by suppressing "personal" characteristics he is also suppressing social characteristics, and that this might be destructive. Or if he has given it a thought, he believes - possibly correctly - that vividly experessed social characteristics will scare off some of the readership. Cf. the reaction here on ILX to Jessica Grose's excellent Breeders piece. Her sensibility came through loud and clear, it didn't match up with a lot of yours, and you didn't like it.

(8) Mr. Hard-News Asshole will make exceptions in special circumstances, if he believes that the writer represents a colorful "primary audience" ("the first-person-as-other syndrome" you might call it). So teen girls may not only want to use the first person more than adult white men, they may be allowed to. Since teen girls are, you know, teen girls, and therefore of social and anthropological interest. (Not that Mr. Asshole might not also be willing to print a piece here and there by an adult white male reminiscing about what it was like as a teenager to first hear Bruce or Lennon or - in my case - Fanny Brice.) So it's less of a risk printing Amy or Jessica sounding personal than to print me sounding personal. But their getting away with it also makes me more likely to get away with it. So thank you Amy and Jessica.

(9) For 2003 I voted for one woman (Celine Dion) in my singles list and one woman (Celine Dion) in my albums. In retrospect, I should have voted for Beyoncé/Sean Paul "Baby Boy," but that would have knocked Celine off the singles chart. For 2002 I voted for Paulina Rubio, Tweet, Kylie Minogue, Celine Dion, Truth Hurts f. Lata Mangeshkar, Ian Van Dahl (w/ woman singer), and Brandy on my singles list and Various Artists (f. a whole bunch of woman), Paulina Rubio, Celine Dion, LeAnn Rimes, Northern State, and Gore Gore Girls on the albums. I list all those names to ask this question: How many of those performers would ever be allowed to write for the Village Voice? By "those performers" I also mean "someone sharing their sensibility." My guess would be Northern State, Gore Gore Girls, and no one else. (Of course, if Chuck were editor in chief rather than just music editor...) And my guess is that you can get many more women on the editorial staff and in the pages there and you still wouldn't have anyone with Paulina's et al. sensibilities writing for the Voice. The women there'd be as likely to stop it as the men. (Though as Steve Kiviat pointed out back in '87 when we had this discussion in my fanzine in regard to Teena Marie, the Paulina and Teena and Celine types might not be interested in writing for something like the Voice anyway, and might wonder why anyone would do what we do.)

Well obv. Xgau and Chuck think that the thoughts and conclusions need to be addressed (that's why we review those people, after all), the question is whether Xgau and Chuck would be allowed to let those thoughts and conclusions be presented as Voice prose. (Like, my David Banner piece uses a lot of David Banner words, but they're in quotation marks, so those words aren't perceived as coming from the Voice but merely as being reported by the Voice. (See first sentence of this post.)

But anyway, how many people actually feel that we're losing something by losing the Teenas and Paulinas?

I'm usually not of the "don't speak to issues where yr. not a member of group X" school but this thread stumps me in a way coz i increasingly don't even have stabs at maybe-answers at all. Like everyone's conflicting gripes seem about equally legit (a few notable exceptions aside).

mark s' points on that thread still resonate though about the dual-edged fetishization of teenage years. like how confining roles are also the roles where ppl are *allowed* to have traits that everyone should be allowed to have. (but then those are the ONLY traits they're allowed to have).

Stephanie Coontz' "The Way We Never Were" really underlined for me that in the idealized family structure of the 40s, say, it wasn't just that women had the "emotional caregiver" role and were relegated to that but man SOMEONE had to be the emotional caregiver & men not only weren't supposed to but often actually didn't have the time to do that.

But then there's a question say that do the people who listen to Teena/Trina want to read Teena/Trina? I don't even have a good guess as to what Teena/Trina would write like.

Lets try this question instead -- posit that there were more female writers, even a 50/50 ratio. How would that change music discourse? How would that change muisc lists? How would that change music *production*?

Or maybe totally differently -- what music *isn't* being lauded because it falls outside of a spectrum of "proper" gendered music? what music is overhyped coz it falls within it? What music by women/listened to more by women is already popular *in society* but not music discourse?

What music by women/listened to more by women is getting talked about but in a way which ignores how people *actually* listen to it or which is getting dealt with so as to take for granted how ppl. listen to it?

[by now these questions could get rid of the by/listened to by women criteria and apply equally well *generally* i think]

is the problem judging female bands by their hotttness or disproprtionaly so as opposed to male bands? is the answer to talk more about julian's ass and usher and pharrell without his shirt on?

i mean you have "sexuality is empowering" performers and "sexuality is limiting" performers and they're *both* right and maybe the problem is that the articles don't interrogate the performers enough but instead either endorse or dismiss out of hand?

maybe the personal voice is the answer *here* coz gender relations (on an individual basis as played out in individual lives) can be all sorts of things to ppl. at difft points in their lives and there's somewhat a place for all of them.

which brings me back to -- instead of looking at how critcs can disrupt gender imbalance in society it might be more fruitful to start by looking at how the gender imbalance disrupts *criticism*.

I’m not only interested in art that conforms to my ideological or moral beliefs—in fact I’m interested in stuff that doesn’t--but I do like to see the ideas being debated. Lots of critics, including some here, enter into that debate all the time, but they’re in the minority, and I’ll bet some of them get indignant letters for being too shrill, too deconstructionist, too uptight, whatever.

Oliver, I appreciate your post (and agree with some it), but the illustration above confuses me -- I mean, I liked PM Dawn less than Cypress Hill, more than Tribe Called Qwest, who cares (haven't listened to any of those acts in longer than I remember), but I don't understand what you see them as an *example* of -- certainly not an example that carries on a poll year when the highest hip-hop finishers were Outkast, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent. (In the early '80s, I could see somebody equating them with, say, Arrested Development, who actually *won* the poll once, but I can also imagine somebody putting De La Soul and Tribe Called Qwest {even now Outkast maybe?} in the SAME category, which category is now called "underground hip hop" in many circles. Or is your point that "real" hip-hoppers -- like, say, KRS-ONE, right? -- didn't like PM Dawn? And if so, why should I care what real hip-hoppers like in the first place? Often they're right; often they're full of shit. And often, they love Outkast a lot more than I do. And I can't think of many female critics and critics of color who'd argue with that.) But maybe I'm missing your point, or at least your taxonomy of this stuff. (Also, Matos is right -- the poll has *never* allowed more than 30 points per album. And I didn't even know Andy Greenwald *had* a photo page, for whatever that's worth.)

If anything, actually, the Village Voice's critical world (which I'm somewhat in charge of) would seem to be pretty damn CRUNK lately (though Frank Kogan would be right to point out that I have yet to assign Lil Jon or either Ying Yang Twin a piece, and may well not in the near future, though possibly it would make the section more like the world if I did.) And give or take Outkast, who probably don't count by now, the poll results really aren't very crunk at all.

This is exactly the bemused V-day chat I was having w/ a friend last night. Critical attention means that some vested interest believes that the music is worth talking about, worth debating and on some level, worth promoting (I'm thinking in Xgau terms) or, by negative criticism, anti-promoting.

So, by extension, does it follow that women writing about music would seek out *new* or *different* music than their male counterparts? And that this exposure of new, different artists would create a sort of conversation which would foster the development of *other* types of music -- more female voices? less blatently sexist imagery (I'm thinking about Nickelback's recent strangler jam)?

The jury is out on whether most female critics actively support female musicians or go the 'i like what i like' way - and both ways of listening and relating are valid. I'm willing to bet that what most women like ISN'T the lyrics to Ying Yang Twins tracks, even if the beat is fierce, and that this kind of thing would get brought up more often if more women were writing about traditionally male genres. That's what I was talking abt with my quasi-militant P&J comment, anyway.

And maybe this would make it easier for some female artists -I'm thinking about Missy - who are so blatently pro-women (quasi-feminist, not gay which is a whole diff. can of worms) but afraid to say the F word for fear of a community backlash.

In regards to types of music listened to or different uses of music by women, I just read "My Music," which is a collection of interviews done mostly with rather passive listeners about their music habits. As a critic, it was incredibly frustrating to read these comments bc I'm so vested in this bizarre cocoon world of pure listening, of the album as sacred object outside of society, and maybe this sort of anti-utilitarian mindset makes it hard to recognize/respect more passive listening. Then there's always that ironic moment when you hear the Beatles while your grocery shopping, like 'ya what do they know...' Not to say that women are exclusively passive listeners, but perhaps some of the more traditional ways that women use music are looked at as inferior to the collecting and comparing aspect of traditional male listening.

And jazz, of course, doesn't even exist.

I like the idea about the Jawhawks critics, for what it's worth.

I guess my problem with this is that I don't see male critics seeking blatantly sexist imagery (certainly not Nickelback's), and judging by the people I hear requesting music on the radio, I don't see female listeners necessarily avoiding it (have you ever seen the crowd at a Limp Bizkit show during "Nookie"?).

ha ha, maybe Chuck is provoking argument that race/gender/ethnicity don't predetermine taste - and i agree. but it's a simple thing to know that someone threw a rock at you, not so simple to explain why. Isn't that part of the beauty of being a critic? hardy har - i just like seeing the rock from many perspectives. (a pun so bad, it should be a pitchfork clincher.)

I would love to read--and edit--more women who want to write about Ying Yang Twins, or anything else, really. but the bulk of my writers are male--I can't deny that. last night I sat down and figured out that approximately 20% of my regular writers, both staff and freelance, are female--better than the P&J turnout, worse than I'd prefer. which isn't to say I'm going to just give women work for the sake of gender balance, because I get a lot of crappy submissions from female writers as well as male. (the m-f balance is way higher on queries I pass on, btw--three-to-one, easy, and probably more.) if it sounds like I'm making excuses, well, I probably am--it's never fun to realize you're part of the problem, even if I do think that I've snagged some great ones as regards the women who've contributed to my section.

xpost to daphinator's second to last post

Next year, I'm gonna shoot for dead fucking last.

Can't you delete your posts from this crazy thing?

Chuck did answer though and say that there wasn't a particular pattern in the non-response - if so then while probably a lot of women don't like polls, not liking this particular poll isn't *more* of a female thing.

I think you're right to bring up the point though b/c it's asking the wider qn - "Is the Pazz and Jop poll even relevant as an index of female participation in music journalism/criticism?"

By the way - what is My Music?

But then it's easy for me to set aside - or not even set aside but feel really attracted by - the coyness and girly mannerisms. No one is going to take Jessica as speaking for someone like me. I know a woman writer Jessica's age and demographic (social category: bright rambunctious women likely to like the Breeders) who said the piece made her want to vomit. "it was a real moment of truth. i realized that i have to make a decision about my writing. do i want to be
a cute novelty, or a 'serious writer'? i don't know if i'm capable of the latter."

And this is my point: people take "personal" prose personally. You don't get anguished threads on ILX in response to the thousands of reviews full of dull expository prose, vacuous buzz words, and unintelligible cross references. So a magazine that runs stuff with too much personality - or more to the point, that prints a range of personalities - puts itself at risk with its readers. There's a payoff when someone's personality hits big - personalities attract as well as repel - but generally magazines don't want to risk it. If there's personality in the prose, the mag will try to ensure that it's the same personality from front cover to back.

If I were editor I'd encourage a lot of people to write first-person accounts of their life, not because I love first-person accounts more than anything, but because most people suck at musical and social analysis and when doing the latter reach for the nearest platitude or idiocy rather than think for themselves. Whereas in the first-person personal they might inadvertently say something that, in its modest way, has social import.

Also, if I were an editor I most likely wouldn't print Paulina Rubio, since on her Website she comes across as an idiot. She's couldn't be an idiot in all aspects of her life, or she wouldn't make good music. Maybe if I were a brilliant editor I could elicit her nonidiocy. But in suppressing her idiocy, would I not be suppressing ideas that I disagree with and sensibilities that I don't share? This is the hard question that comes with cultural pluralism and affirmative action (which I favor in general): In searching for qualified women and minorities, does "qualified" mean "resembles me"?

By the way, my answer is "not necessarily," but I'll leave that for another post.

Lil Jon is better than the White Stripes. Teena Marie is better than Sonic Youth. Paulina Rubio is better than the Breeders. By and large, my "social category" (which I shouldn't have called "people likely to like the Breeders" but "people likely to be like the Breeders") makes mediocre music, and worse music than it made 30 years ago. So one reason we'd want to hear from Teena, Paulina, and Jon is that they obviously know something that we don't.

The former. It only covered the Motown years, I should note.

Also probably indispituable, I think, and something I think nobody has bothered to bring up here, is that the tastes of female pazz & jop voters and pazz & jop voters of color have not in general been any less conventional than the tastes of white men. Sometimes they're conventional in a DIFFERENT way, which means SOMETHING, I suppose. But I doubt that greatly increasing the number of either demographic would have helped Teena Marie much, back when she was still making great records. (Ned: Start with *It Must be the Magic* and *Emerald City,* and work from there.) More voters of color in the late '80s or early '90s may have helped Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul (who actually WON one year, what a fucking joke), but who gives a shit; it wouldn't have helped L'Trimm or Mantronix or Maggotron, who made far more compelling records. All the women critics in the world would never have pushed Joe Dee Messina or Shakira or Stacey Q or the Real Roxanne or Mindy McCready into the Pazz & Jop Top 40 where every one of them deserved to be, I don't think. Probably not the Gore Gore Girls, either. Maybe Northern State, but I doubt it. PJ Harvey and Bjork and Sleater Kinney and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (and maybe Missy Elliot) get as much a free ride from Pazz & Jop voters as Wilco and Flaming Lips and Beck and White Stripes (and maybe Jay-Z) do; I want more people to vote for the sexist (or whatever) Ying Yang Twins (who yes, I'd ALSO love more women to write about, assuming those women writers have anything intersting to say about Ying Yang music otherwise, and though male critics ALREADY express misgivings about Ying Yang objectification of women by the way -- I know I did, and I voted for them anyway.) So I guess what I'm saying is that, as much as I want and would welcome more female voters and black voters, I'm not very convinced it would CHANGE anything, results-wise. At least not anything that really matters. (Where do non-white-male voters tend to gravitate in those critical alignment ratings, anyway? Toward the top, bottom, middle? The same places white males do, I bet.)

And more metal voters would be mean more votes for mediocritics like Tool and the Deftones and Jane's Addiction, probably! So we're sunk.

(Somebody should figure out what the top 40 albums among women or non-white voters were this year, by the way. I'm really curious now.)

Noted -- yer review of the latter is of course well known by me!

And more metal voters would be mean more votes for mediocritics like Tool and the Deftones and Jane's Addiction, probably! So we're sunk.

Aw man. :-( Though these days I agree with you on the sorrowful pit that JA has become.

I meant "mediocrities," but I kind of like this word anyway!

Haha! Oh, the names I could attach to that term.

Seconded (not me tho!)

My point was stating the obvious - P&J reflects a certain community of critics that has been traditionally dominated by white men with a rockist bent. That is NOT a criticism just an observation and I doubt one that many could contend with. As others have pointed out, Outkast won this year b/c their album crossed over enough between genres to gain critical support on all sides of the musical/racial line. Same as Arrested Development and PM Dawn in the past. I'm not angry about that - I was simply pointing out that P&J is going to come with certain built in realities - biases if you really want to make an issue out of it - but I willingly participate in the poll with that in mind and I'm certainly not complaining about the final tally. Read over what I wrote - I never said that P&J was a bad thing, on ILM and in my blog, I've very pointedly noted that I like the fact that, as a greater critical community, we can get together and do this once a year. yeah, I'm not in agreement with people and yeah, as a person, I think voting for PM Dawn in 1991 was a show of poor taste but c'mon, I'm not calling bullshit on the whole process.

My point about looking at the past P&Js is that I never thought P&J represnted my PERSONAL critical opinion ten years back and there's been nothing that's changed in the critical community since then that would have shifted this. As you point out - most people have issues with the P&J in not representing what their personal outlook is (ok, except for Miles Marshall Lewis, and just for the record Chuck, I don't call being in the 400th percentile being exactly "populist". Like most, yourself included, P&J only represented a fraction of what I personally would have propped for the year).

What I was trying to say though - and this was in response to Dylan's initial post - is that if you got together a different community of critics - let's say people who write exclusively for online hip-hop sites (a scary bunch to be sure), you'd end up with a different polling list and one that would be JUST as contentious for some but would more adequately represent other people's opinions. Likewise, if Dylan organized a poll based on getting together female critics, I think this would make for a valuable and interesting contrast to P&J. It would be NO LESS CONTENTIOUS but as an alternative, I think it would be valuable, just like how Matos posted up that link to the top country albums of the years.

I mean this quite kindly but as you write, "maybe I'm completely missing your point as far as that goes..." and I'd have to say that maybe my point was made poorly to begin with but your response to me seems to be responding to accusations or criticisms I never made.

Is P&J broken? No. Do I think it reflects my critical community? No. Are these two things contradictory? No. None of this invalidates Dylan's initial concern however, simply b/c P&J does carry a lot of weight nationally. And like her - like most I would hope - I think it'd be great if P&J was ONE voice among MANY alternatives. Do I think P&J would do a better job in reaching out to more folks? Truly, I don't know. I can't imagine this process is very fun for you and Bob and I don't envy the logistical nightmare it must be to collate and edit all this stuff together. And I, for one, am not clamoring for greater outreach per se since, looking over your current invitee list, it's fairly massive already.

I think what's at larger issue here is the demographic reality of who is part of the general "music critic community" and the fact that a cross section of that community would likely not reflect the social diversity of Americans. But hey, that same bias would exist in many places, from Fortune 500 CEOs and the House of Representatives to high school teachers and auto workers. Music critics, writ large, tend to be from similar class, racial and gender backgrounds and yes, I do think that these backgrounds become reflected in how people vote - not 1 to 1. There are ALWAYS going to be a multitude of exceptions, enough to shred the rule practically but I think it's fair for Dylan or anyone else to point out that P&J has some built in biases simply based on who is polled. Again, my suggestion is that rather than reform that polling list, creating alternative polls could help ameloriate any perceived imbalance as well.

Just to note, I think this is different from the recent controversy concerning Da Capo. In the that case, we're talking about a far more subjective process in which certain articles and authors are elevated for attention rather than something like P&J which simply collates opinions solicited from hundreds of people. In the case of Da Capo, I think there does need to be a more earnest push to diversify its inclusions and improve its selection process. I don't think P&J suffers from the same issues, at least not nearly to the same extent. I hope I didn't just open up another can of worms with this...

In any case Chuck, I hope all this above better articulates what I was trying to say the first time. For the record, I think the Voice staff does a great job with P&J and it's one of my favorite reads year to year. I posted here more to echo Dylan's concerns about the issue of representation within the larger community rather than trying to isolate a criticism about how the P&J is handled. If you want, email me directly and we can continue this convo off-line. Sincerely,

Then there should be more 'metal' voters, so Tool would get the votes they deserve.

You, you, MEDIOCRITIC!!!

Lil Jon's best songs are better than White Stripes's best songs. His worse songs may or may not be worse than White Stripes's worst songs. He is the more intersting artist by far, though. No fucking question.

i don't think you can ever say "no fucking question" about matters critical. i believe dizzee rascal's album to be the most important, innovative and brave album of 2003. there is "no fucking question" in my mind, but that's because it means something to me and i understand it. for rock-oriented critics or those who have no handle on it other than thru the filter of US street rap, i can see it being much more problematic and perhaps less convincingly pivotal. criticism is a subjective enterprise. everything hinges on the critic's opinion. where it is possible for me to make qualitative assessments of music, these are only made within and according to my personal parameters and criteria. if certain critical judgements are deemed unquestionably right and others unquestionably wrong, surely this removes equality of opinion from the pazz and jop and renders it pretty pointless. you might as well gather a few right-thinking individuals round a table and decide what you think amongst you, leaving all the dead wood out of the process. for the record, i believe lil jon is better than the white stripes. after all, i own and play records by lil jon and couldn't really give much of a fig for the white stripes. however, that's just me.

New question, for Oliver or whoever else wants to answer it: How exactly do black critics or female critics (say) have less a "rockist bent" than white male critics? I don't buy that at all, Okay, I guess some of them might not like guitars as much (though few of them like loud guitars as much as Kandia Crazy Horse or Jeanne Fury do, I should note.) Critics in general - white, black, Hispanic, female, male, gay, straight -- seem to gravitate toward music that they think is "important," or that they think is "art" or whatever you wanna call it. Big statements, concepts, all that *Sgt. Pepper's* horseshit. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the (stupid as it's ever been) word, but isn't that what being "rockist" MEANS? So. The problem may not be gender or race; it might be the critical mindset in and of itself. Which probably has a lot to do with class, educational background, brow (low/middle/high), all that stuff. How do I get people who take for granted that Celine Dion and Amy Grant and Josh Groban and Clay Aiken and Kelly Clarkson and Justin Timberlake and Creed and Nickelback and Shania Twain and Tim McGraw and Maroon 5 and Good Charlotte and Hillary Duff are the best music out there to BECOME critics? How do I find writers who don't speak in music critic language AT ALL, but who have stilll have strong opinions about what they like? Not until that happens will we have any hopes at all of a "cross section of that community... reflecting the social diversity of Americans." But I think it may not be possible.

In spite of the shift towards list-making in rock magazines (SPECIAL ISSUE: MOJO'S TOP 100 TOP 100 ALBUMS LISTS OF ALL TIME!), most critics don't spend the bulk of their time on lists so much as listening and writing reviews. And since people are asked to write about their general impressions of the year, filling out a P&J ballot isn't just a list-making enterprise. Doing the P&J is a fairly atypical rockcrit exercise.

Speaking from my own experience, I honestly think my list-making obsessions are less a "male thing" and more symptomatic of clinical obsessive-compulsive behavior. I'm not being cute when I say that, either. I could give examples, but they're too depressing to relate.

2) Matos - thanks for the correction.

3) Nathalie - I agree with what you're saying. I think P&J reflects a good representation of the overall music critic community but I do not believe that community reflects a good representation of American society.

4) Chuck - Actually, I was arguing that if you chose a different selection of critics - not based on race or gender exclusively but based on publication, you'd get a different critical consensus. Within that, I think you would find variances, perhaps some substantial ones, from the P&J. For example, the staff at Vibe is both largely people of color plus has a higher percentage of women, as does XXL. If you had those two staffs create a P&J-like poll, I don't think it would resemble P&J very much, at least not the Top 25.

In a sense, race and gender is more incidental in that situation but I also don't think you can wholly remove it as a factor. I do think the trump card there is that these publications - and thus their critical focus - would be far less rock-oriented since the magazines themselves are far less rock-oriented.

5) "Rockist" simply means having a preference or loyalty towards a particular genre (in this case, rock) and I don't think most people who are into rock would call themselves rockists. That term, for me at least, comes up among people with a preference/loyalty to hip-hop or urban music writ large b/c for most of the '80s and '90s, the latter camp always felt like they were being excluded from the critical conversations by forces in the former camp. Whether that was real or perceived is besides the point - either way, it fed into an "us vs. them" mentality where the musical world was split into (however myopically) "rockists" and "hip-hoppers". "Rockist" isn't intentionally meant to be a pejorative - it's simply a classification and like I said, it's one that many people who would likely be included in that category would reject wholeheartedly.

I guess the better question is whether or not this dichotomy A) ever existed and B) continues to exist today but that's a much bigger topic.

6) Dave - while I agree with the spirit of this sentence "it's a matter of having good critics of whatever race/gender/age/sexuality," I do think it comes very close to replicating the kind of "color blind" rhetoric that social conversatives have been doling out for YEARS as an implicit attack on the basic principles of affirmative action and social parity.

What it fails to address is what exactly a "good critic" looks like and who gets to determine that? There's no objective scale out there - it's all relative, based on the opinions of editors, publishers, readers, other writers, etc. but if we look at the head of the current canon - Rolling Stone or Blender for example - who they would determine to be a " good critic" is likely going to be different than who, say Murder Dog or XLR8R would offer up. I mean, I've heard the publisher of Murder Dog say that any one with a journalism degree (or maybe it was a college degree, period) makes for a bad writer on rap music b/c their ear isn't to the street (they've been bougie-fied). I somehow truly doubt that Jann Wenner is sending out memos, instructing his editors to only hire on writers without a BA.

My point is that just calling out for more "good critics," without seriously questioning how such a determation already gets made in our critical community, woudl like just result in more of the same of what we already have. to put it another way, who is against employing more "good writers"? No one. What people have concerns about is how that decision gets made to begin with. It's not just about representation, it's about power. And I think it's fair to say that no one thinks power is equally shared throughout our larger critical community.

7) back to Chuck - "It's much rarer to come across a hip hop critic or dance/electronic music critic whose writing doesn't have a stick up its ass than a rock critic without one." Chuck, I'm actually inclined to AGREE with you but I think you're leaving out some historical context here. HH and EM critics had to contend with a storm of scorn from the mainstream critical community throughout the '80s and '90s, defending music that many others were more than happy to dismiss as a superficial fad. It's no wonder that many HH critics would be a little defensive about what they wrote about, to the extent that they became overly cheerlead-y.

Adam Sexton, in the intro to "the Rap on Rap' nailed the fundamental problem back in the mid-90s and not much has changed: writing on hip-hop has swung between Stanley Crouch-like condemnations and David Mays-like pandering so that you either hate hip-hop with all your spirit or you blindly defend it no matter what. I'd like to think this has ameloriated itself better in the last 10 years - after all, no one can claim that RS, Spin, Blender, the Voice, etc. don't cover a huge share of hip-hop anymore but that "us vs. them" mentality that I mentioned before is still in full operation elsewhere. Yeah, I agree, it results in a lot of stick-up-the-ass criticism, much of which I personally don't like, but there is a history that explains it - one based on very real inequities in how hip-hop was initially treated by mainstream music mags. I can't really speak on the EM world but I speculate that similar things happened there too.

8) On list-making. People might want to check out Will Straw's essay on "Gender and Connoisseurship" from "Sexing the Groove." In it, Straw talks about how the accumulation and control over musical knowledge is used to both reinforce homosocial ties among men while also keeping women out of the party. I would think "list-making" would totally fall into exactly what Straw is talking about.

Perhaps the most perfect example of this would be something like S**lS**k, where file traders -- mainly men -- gather together in chat rooms, download stuff from each other's HUGE collections of obscure MP3s, and...um...refrain from doing anything even remotely social. Not even a hello. Hmm. Nevermind, then.

Arre you thinking what I'm thinking?

Hip-hop critics who fit into the category, for example.

Funny -- I can think of a few people around in the '80s and '90s who defended metal or country or Top 40 pop against a mainstream critical community even MORE antagonistic to their tastes than said community was to hip-hop or techno, and somehow the people I'm thinking of did it without becoming either stick-asses OR cheerleaders. As did some hip-hop and techno critics, as a matter of fact. And the hiphop and techno people WITHIN the mainstream critical community were frequently less stick-ass and cheerleaderly than the ones who limited themselves to speaking to the converted (though not at *Ego Trip* or *Grand Royal,* from what I remember; and I'm sure there were other exceptions as well)! So I wouldn't say I entirely disagree with you, Oliver, I just think your argument here is somewhat flawed, as well.

hear about some band, people say are good.

rockism: buy the first lp, move through the ouevre
non-rockism: start with the greatest hits/best of...

Dave, point blank, that's bullshit. Get tits, a brain, and a big mouth and then come back with your story. Sorry, dude, but it IS harder and I know the people who can prove it with their own experiences. There are obvious exceptions -- some women critics made it without much of a fight -- but by and large, it's more difficult. (Look at the mastheads of the major music magazines for further proof.)

In response to Jeanne's point though, I think maybe one reason why you see a disproportion is that the critical world is perceived to be homosocial and exclusionary, and therefore, not a very encouraging space for women to enter. I think that's partially what Jeanne was trying to point out and it makes perfectly good sense when you apply it to other communities with similar, homosocial qualities that expect their members to possess a basic body of shared knowledge. We could, for example, have a similar conversation as to why DJs are 90% male. Or CEOs for that matter. How about Oscar nominated filmmakers? Not only do men dominate who's at the top in these communities but men also dominate who become INTERESTED in them too. In simpler, playground logic, why would girls want to join a boy's club if they think it's a boy's club?

I think a lot of women would find becoming a music critic distateful if all they see around them are male music critics who express a particularly male sensibility in how they approach music. I'm sure this is just repeating comments made earlier in this very thread but it seems to speak to Jeanne and your (Matos') most recent comments.

Chuck - I wonder if the crucial difference b/t defensive hip-hop critics and defensive heavy metal critics didn't have something to do with race and its relationship to said genres. For a long time, I think hip-hop critics really wanted to keep hip-hop as their intellectual property, because they were concerned about having what they perceived as a Black subculture becoming assimilated into the white mainstream. I'm simplifying things here but I saw these attitudes openly flouted in various rap critic circles over the course of the '90s. That 'us vs. them" mentality I keep referring to certainly seemed quite pronounced, both then and now - I don't know if that same kind of divide existed b/t the mainstream critics and Top 40 writers or heavy metal writers.

In any case, why do you think hip-hop and techno writers have been so anal-retentive? You make the observation but don't state an explanation in your earlier post. Would be curious to hear your analysis.

Which is interesting because then it becomes a case of what was formerly underdog status now potential shifting into triumphalism -- except, of course, the arguments about what hip-hop is and 'should' be are all the more fierce as a result. (So a vaguely similar comparison might be when glam metal took over the world, even though it didn't.)

Anyways, I think it might be worthwhile to look up Jeff Chang's recent essay, "Word Power: A Brief, Highly Opinionated History of Hip-Hop Jouranlism" which appears in Steve Jones' "Pop Music in the Press." I think his points would help illuminate the argument that Matos is making above about how rap journalism diverged from the same route that rock criticism took.

Hadn't noticed this one. It's exactly what I said two posts ago.

I always wondered what the hip hop magazines would have done if a critic there wanted to WRITE that, say, Rakim or Biggie or KRS were boring and "Ice Ice Baby" and "Jump" and "Cars With the Boom" and "Parents Just Don't Understand" and stuff like that were the true classics, or if somebody wanted to write that hip hop went downhill when it got arty in the late '80s (as lots of rock critics did, say, at Creem or Phonograph Record Magazine in the early '70s.) Would they have been ALLOWED to write that stuff? I doubt it. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe somebody even DID! If so, they're my hero. (To be fair, I do know Daniel Smith wrote a positive lead review of Hootie and the Blowfish in Vibe in the mid '90s. Which definitely made her my hero that day, even though she was totally wrong!)

I'm actually somewhat (not entirely, though) surprised at how PM Dawn has become this lingering punching bag for liking hip-hop the 'wrong' way or something. To me the first album and a good chunk of the second remain elegant hip-hop/pop records, and they scored a fair share of radio/MTV hits, so it wasn't like they were being prized for being underground -- anything but, actually. In fact the more I think about it much of the discourse and annoyance with them (then and now) reflects that which Outkast gets these days...

And their biggest hit sampled a beautiful Spandau Ballet song!!!

Actually, I never even had any idea that PM Dawn WERE a hip-hop punching bag (for anybody except KRS One, that is), until Oliver's initial post way up thread. I am so out of it!

And their biggest hit sampled a beautiful Spandau Ballet song!!!

And it was fantastically done as well. I think I might listen to the album here tonight!

"I love you because you make me sick."

Near-stereotypical grunge/gen X line out of context if you had no idea where it came from beyond the year of release, in context a moody rumination in a striking arrangement.

Frankly, I think PM Dawn would have been disliked for a variety of reasons (Matos already hits upon some of these) - Prince Be didn't fit into the testosterone model of MCing that dominated the late '80s/early '90s (ala KRS, Rakim, Chuck D, etc.0, and sampling Spandau Ballet was seen as being crassly commercial (keep in mind, this was post-Vanilla Ice backlash).

Arrested Development though - the backlash against them had much more to do with the fact that so many white critics loved them. When "Tenneessee" first dropped, they were getting all sorts of love on urban radio but this changed by the time "Natural" (their third single) came out. (You saw similar things happening with Digable Planets too but that became very complicated when their 2nd LP dropped a Black Power album, thereby alienating white fans and they had already lost their black fans based on the backlash to the first LP).

I could be wrong, but I think the Fugees were the first to maintain their credibility among hip-hoppers despite getting mad love from the alternative and mainstream press. But by that time, hip-hop had become so much a part of the pop mainstream that rap heads could stop tripping off this fear that "their music" was being co-opted.

So if they had sold but not had all the hosannas-in-print they wouldn't have been minded as much? Hm.

You saw similar things happening with Digable Planets too but that became very complicated when their 2nd LP dropped a Black Power album, thereby alienating white fans and they had already lost their black fans based on the backlash to the first LP

Basehead to thread! ('This is a song about the problems white males face in America today...*guitar blast*...okay for our next song...")

what about Public Enemy?

Sterling - I think it's a little of both but sensibility wasn't the main issue I think. There wasn't a lot that separated the DPs' sensibility from Tribe's but Tribe had the Native Tongues cred backing them whereas once DP got swooped up by the cafe crowd, that triggered knee-jerk skepticism from the smaller-minded hip-hop faithful. I'm just idly make conjectures but had DP not lost the support of the rap heads, their 2nd album would have done for them what "Resurrection" did for Common Sense.

PM Dawn, compared to say, Kwame or The Future Sound or a host of other post-New School acts, were not that different in their sensibility either but even Kwame with his "fucking polka dots" was never rejected to the extent PM Dawn was. Their dismissal came initially on the wave of all the attention that "Set Adrift" received. Just to be subjective, Prince Be was weak as a lyricist. His attitude may have been very similar to De La Soul's but he was no Trugoy or Posdnous. Hell, he wasn't even PA Mase. So when all these people went ga-ga over "Set Adrift" (which hit, let's be honest, on the strength of sampling Spandau Ballet and mostly that), the rap nation (ill-defined but stay with me) decided, "oh, here's another Vanilla Ice pop act" and promptly kicked PM Dawn to the proverbial curb.

Furthermore, in the early '90s, you simply did NOT diss KRS-One. Here was a rapper who might well have been a blowhard but circa 1991, the man was godly. He practically ended Melle Mel's career. Dude embarassed Queens for half a decade until Nas and Mobb Deep redeemed the borough. You did not step to KRS no matter how big of a hypocrite he was. With one magazine interview and one altercation later, Prince Be was forever known as "that fat rapper who KRS threw off the stage." At that point, PM Dawn's sensibility could have been more hardcore than the Wu - their career, in the eyes of the general hip-hop community was beyond salvagable. I mean, dudes were already dead, KRS just drove the stake through.

oliver, it is uncomfortably close and i had to think about even saying it. but the bottom line is that it's genuinely what i believe. i could try to be more sensitive about the way i phrased it but there wouldn't be much point in doing so as i'd only be veiling an opinion that i knew would come in for that kind of criticism in slightly more palatable terms to save myself having to justify it. the thing is that i know i'm not making an implicit attack on anyone at all, simply making an explicit statement re the kind of music criticism i'd like to see more of. the bottom line is that i couldn't give a flying shit who writes it, provided that it says something interesting. for the record, a few less middle-aged, straight, white male music critics would be a good thing in my book, but only if the numbers are made up with people of differing gender/race/orientation who are gonna give me something worth reading. that said, i'm sure there are certain bars to entry/offputting factors/glass ceilings in journalism that need to be removed for this to happen. however, i think these are less an issue for women than they are for people of other ethnicities/educational backgrounds etc.

what about Public Enemy?

run dmc, too...

Dave again - I hear you about wanting more "good" writers irrespective of background. All I can say is that I think different people have a different sensibility and that background plays a role in that. I would NOT want to try to make that statement out to be scientific or anything and I agree- there are some definite glass ceilings out there that make new, different (but compelling) voices harder to hear. Again, I think having role models is tremendously important in that regard.

absolutely - then again we weren't exactly disagreeing in the first place, were we?!

>>Where's Jeff Chang in all this? Isn't he the expert on who's racist and who isn't? Oh wait, this thread isn't about black people. My bad.<<

>>Just for the record: this thread is largely about black people, to the extent that so many Latin musical styles are African diaspora musical hybrids, and so many great "Latin" musicians are, you know, black. But I take Waldo's point. In fact, one of the reasons I posed this question in the first place was my feeling that all the self-righteous talk about hip-hop's critical disenfranchisement was a bit ridiculous. That argument might have made sense ten or fifteen years ago; but now, hip-hop clearly is American pop music, and anyone who doesn't get it -- any critic who doesn't listen to hip-hop/understand its beauty and power, etc. etc. -- has more or less opted out of the game. So it seems to me that Chang et. al. are preaching to the choir. Latin music, on the other hand, actually is largely ignored...

-- Jody Rosen (jodyrose...), February 19th, 2004.<<

What the PnJ results would look like if only women voted.