Vote for the Best Album of the Decade (from rateyourmusic.com top 50)

here's the thing, Kate -- if you spend some time on RYM, you'll see that plenty of women are highly rated and well loved by the RYM community. so the question is this: why are so few current female artists represented in the very highest ranks of the list, while so many female artists are rated quite highly elsewhere?

I think the answer has a lot to do with controversy. people (i.e. aspie men on the internet) take female artists seriously enough to place them on a pedestal, pat themselves on the back and say "ya, we respect the wimmin," but not seriously enough to hotly debate their place in the canon, write frantic 5-star reviews about why x female artist is more groundbreaking than y female/male artist, et cetera. to take an artist seriously is to passionately stan for them with insincere 5-star reviews and to call all your internet friends to your side on message boards when someone dares to challenge their greatness. but female artists are kept apart from this fierce debate, and therefore they don't inspire quite enough fanboy fervor to trouble the upper ranks.

it's like sports: men's teams tend to inspire front-page news articles and foaming-at-the-mouth editorials, whereas women's teams end up in the Lifestyle section where they're interviewed politely about motherhood and cosmetics. cf. the load of angry 1-star reviews about Meriwether Post Pavilion and the relative lack of fierce jabs directed at, say, Aerial. women aren't outright hated: they're just protected from serious, two-sided discourse and serious, potentially reputation-solidifying controversy... and that can be just as troubling as outright hatred, sometimes.

Maybe that's generally true, but like, CocoRosie to thread.

there are always exceptions, yeah. but I'm mostly talking about the very very top echelon of artists in the RYM canon, and Cocorosie (and even Joanna Newsom, for that matter) don't really occupy that position. they're open to controversy, yeah, but they inevitably fail to come out on top, for reasons I don't totally understand.

if it's not true that the albums with the largest number of positive reviews are generally the ones with the largest number of negative reviews, then part of my argument falls flat, to be fair.

Yeah, I totally agree in a general sense (with yr xpost). Actually, the thing that surprises me more is that like Tori freaking Amos doesn't make the cut! Her fans are fucking crazy dedicated to her, and they seem exactly like the sort who'd spend time discussing and defending her on the internet (if you'll grant the wild assumption). Maybe not on RYM? Or maybe the votes are split on her recent stuff? I dunno.

tbqf i think a lot of men simply don't "get" female artists (maybe because they don't try), which leads to music collections with 99% male artists and cracks about lilith fair or whatever. maybe male listeners just aren't as empathetic in their listening? i dunno.

Something I've noticed about ratings sites (like IMDb, f'rinstance, where I've spent some time) is that they often skew heavily towards male users. IMDb helpfully includes demographic breakdowns of its ratings, and they're pretty illuminating. I've also noticed that dedicated horror and metal fans tend to be very vocal, social and active -- hell, they're often/usually the same group. Finally, a pronounced anti "girly shit" sentiment is more common on such sites than I'd like to think. Maybe specifically among the horror/metal demo, maybe just among (internet) dudes in general. I dunno. Anyway, I suspect it all combines to give us perfect storms like that RYM list.

rym only seems to break it down by country. Dunno if theres any less female artists on the uk or us lists than the general one.

but id bet that there's more males voting than females. So perhaps thats why theres such a difference in female acts. Perhaps we can also ask why dont more ladies vote in these things?

generally ladies seem to spend their time more wisely than we do

because they generally seem less interested in obsessing about lists and rankings and record store completism? there are no female artists on the list for the same reason that there are relatively few females on ilm. this is not some crazy new phenomenon.

xp

otmotmotm

Why is ILM almost exclusively male?

well what im saying is that its not just guys who arent voting for female acts.

Yeah, but I think it's mostly guys, and the few women who do participate are probably the ones who feel more comfortable in a largely male-defined social culture.

nah, i think there are just some women who like some of the same things as guys and they'll be part of the scene regardless of the gender breakdown. i don't think comfort level necessarily comes into play.

Maybe that's a better way to say it. Happiness in vs. comfort in...

Do think that the social texture of ILX would be very different if it was mostly women, even if the point of focus was still music crit.

enjoyment of vs. comfort in. or whatever...

considering that list, the type of music that the rym crowd seems to like, the proggish/metal side of indie - I mean, it's not like there are tons of women making this type of music, and it's not like there are any bestofthedecade classics that they seem to be ignoring just because a female made it. bjork is on there, and that sorta makes sense.

if the rym list was nothing but pop albums and it was still 100% masculine, that'd be weird and suspicious. but that's not the case.

i do know some people who dont like female vocals in their rock/metal.

but their loss

i looked at this and did not think "wow, the ppl who hang at rateyourmusic must hate women!" i thought "oh, i guess rateyourmusic is big with metalheads"

there's not a single thing on this list that i love, some of it i like.

its not just a lack of female artists though, it's a lack of country,hip hop,pop,punk,reggae,various sub-genres of loads of genres (inc lots of metal).

It's a weirdly perfect encapsulation of the current equivalent of the semi-intellectual duderock that was popular with nerdy guys in my high school: sabbath and floyd + peter gabriel and talking heads + i dunno, like king crimson, zappa, kate bush, maiden, v.u., violent femmes, the clash, etc.

dig the difference if you will...

http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=2000s&genre_include=1&genres=pop+&include=both&origin_countries=&limit=none&countries=

um, that's sorted by genre "pop", btw.

i was about to ask

call me a poptimist (gah!), if you must, but i do prefer this list.

at first i thought it might be your countries

(ie show us the greek overall best of 2000 list)

http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=2000s&genre_include=1&genres=&include=both&origin_countries=Greece&limit=none&countries=

we dig our metal to the pedal!!!!!!

\mm/

why do so many stoner metal people post on rateyourmusic.com

I didn't expect my answer to be dopethrone but then again this list is kind of weird

fwiw I don't think dopethrone has any actual songs, it's just a great sounding recording of dudes on robitussin trying to play 50 foot instruments, plus I prefer the original mix with the out-of-control bass frequencies over the widely available remaster

make that 50 foot tall instruments, it's not like they're trying to play 50 pump organs at once

oh, but they are

hardly surprising that rotted christ feature so highly in the greek one

can somebody, anybody, make a best-of-the-00s list that doesn't smell of ass?

I find it hard to believe the decade was that dire

Geir to thread! ;)

uncut have a best of the decade list issue out i think

and im sure the Q one when it comes will blow your mind with its awfulness

i do know some people who dont like female vocals in their rock/metal.

Those ppl need to hear Madder Mortem.

Out of those, "Yoshimi".
But the proper, de-RYM-bias-ized, version of their 2000s list looks like this:
http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=2000s&genre_include=0&genres=metal%2C+experimental%2C+avant-garde+jazz&include_child_genres=t&include=both&origin_countries=&limit=none&countries=

No this:
http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=2000s&genre_include=0&genres=metal%2C+experimental%2C+avant-garde+jazz%2C+modern+classical&include_child_genres=t&include=both&origin_countries=&limit=none&countries=

(Had to remove "modern classical" too)

It's hilarious that RYM minus "metal, experimental, avant-garde jazz, modern classial" = PFork

How is it "proper" if everything is taken out?

it's proper Geir is what it is.

Geir why shouldn't classical,experimental,metal,jazz et al be in top album lists if people think they're good enough to be? Isn't that the point of these sites?

OK, "hate" was kind of a jokingly extreme word. I mean, of course, IGNORE, which is perhaps worse than hating.

I mean... well, sorry for hijacking this thread, but it's been listomania around here today. And I have just noticed this in all these lists. The others, people were saying all "oh, it's because it's canonical rock crit shit" - but this is supposed to be a reader - or rather, user based thing. And the results were even MORE extremely skewed than the canonical rock crit lists.

I mean, someone brought up a good point - I would never use a site like RYM. Because I'm from the old Plan B way of thinking that I just don't believe in ratings. I really have only two ratings - Good and I Don't Care. So perhaps it's that the whole idea of making lists and ratings and canons and league tables is such a masculine endeavor that I shouldn't get hot under the collar about it.

Because, really, ILM does debate and discuss female artists. (When I look at new answers, I see Fever Ray and M.I.A. up there.) They just don't rate them.

for once brian is happy.

geogaddi is ok but best of the decade? apparently it has been even lousier than i thought.

That's ILM for you

Didn't realise anyone had actually listened to that album more than a couple of times.

5 votes for Agalloch, cool.

I'd probably have voted for 'Relationship of Command' on this list, but the list doesn't contain any of my favourite albums of the decade.

Got down to no.695: The Knife 'Silent Shout' to find anything which might have a chance of getting into a top 10 I might make (not that I'm going to.)

5 votes for Agalloch, cool.

8 actually in total.

geogaddi is ok but best of the decade? apparently it has been even lousier than i thought.

― alex in mainhattan, Thursday, October 29, 2009 7:27 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

I think it's just that the top 50 RYM albums suck.

(Coil, Unwound, Ligeti excepted)