What in the name of all that is holy is Feminized Noise? (And can we eat it)

it was an enjoyable read and it was a long time ago since I picked it up but my prob with it is that it didn't quite cover a big enough area.

I don't think he was better on men than on women: he set this out as some sort of investigation and just found that women's contributions weren't as sizeable as men's. correct me if i'm off mark.

"a minute on the lip a lifetime on the hips," i yelled, "but matmos made me eat all the pies nevertheless"

starting a paragraph with the phrase "the only thing that I can possibly imagine" is a bold move indeed...

if only she knew that the Neptunes and Matmos were the ones who were soft, wet, wide and open.

It'd be like saying Molly Shannon was trying to be a guy just because she was the first female laugh-hog on SNL. Cuz egomaniacal laugh-hogs are "masculine", right?

I haven't read the piece, Anthony, but you shouldn't have to accept ideas about what's male and female to deal with "feminization" -- "feminine" is a gender construct, not a sex one, and because it's a social construct there's nothing to it apart from what's already accepted. (In other words saying something is "feminine" does not really mean it has anything to do with women or what women are like -- it has to do with a social construction of roles or behaviors or whatever that just happen to be assigned to the female sex.)

Nabisco, that's valid. Though I still get shaky about it because many still think feminine=what women are SUPPOSED To be. There for a women that makes noise rock like Lightning Bolt would therefore be masculine. Thanks.

And so like where's the traditionally *masculine* musical or free jazz or whatever?

"The upstarts of punk reviled Pink Floyd, officially because of their pompus conceptualism and musical grandiosity, but at a deeper level, because of their bucolic quietude."

As has been discussed recently on ILM.. uh, no.

And precisely cuz they're doing mother-complex stuff and etc. this is where the clearest Freudian influence is and the classic criticism of Freud holds vs. reynolds & press too -- they speak in absolutes but draw from particular minds of people in a particular class and time. Just as Freud's ultimate insight was the subconscious and his descriptions of its workings were drawn with class/gender blinders in place, so too Reynolds & Press.

The whole book is written from a freudo-feminist standpoint with the attendant contradiction: as woman-positive as it is, the lens is of a streamlined male psyche and it's most accurate in the last section on women precisely coz the ones described were operating from the same standpoint here, and the picture drawn of male-rock is that which *they* imagined and confronted too. As a guide to how post-punk & riot grrls concieved of their own work its strong, but their ethos is so pervasive that it can only give their version of history prior.

Tellingly, the stuff on rave & techno is the weakest I've ever seen it from Reynolds, but more importantly I can hardly recognize any of the music dealt with in the descriptions except the grrl stuff.

Also the ahistoricism of tracing the post-punk AFTER the post-postpunk shoegazer & dreampop is rather grating, and utterly Hegelian (ideas manifest thru people rather than people generating ideas).

It seems like the man turned himself inside-out to produce Energy Flash (stood on his head, even!).

Anthony, I don't think you meant it that way, but I nearly choked with laughter when I read this.

Unless I'm missing something.

I wish I could listen to the radio track though (work computers have no sound, sadly). It reads like the most academic quiet storm show ever.

i larfed bcz i am an english simpleton

N., you're going to have to explain/unpack this passage quite a bit before I understand you. For instance, general usage of the words "sex" and "gender" is not settled enough for me to make sense of the statement "'feminine' is a gender construct, not a sex one." Nor do I know what distinction you're drawing when you call something a "social construct." Bridges and apartment buildings are social constructs, but I would not say that "saying something is a 'bridge' does not really mean it has anything to do with bridges or what bridges are like." And though "U.S. citizen" is a social role, nonetheless the role is very real and for sure does have something to do with citizens and what citizens are like, in that a citizen can vote in U.S. elections and noncitizens can't. You're not claiming that social roles are unreal, and that real people don't play them, are you? Also - and this is a different point - there's no necessary incompatibility between calling something a social construct and calling it a natural construct. For instance, no planets are manmade (though perhaps at some time a planet will be manmade, and many features of the planet Earth are manmade at this point), so in that sense a planet is a natural construct; but the concept "planet" is a social construct; get rid of human society, and the concept disappears with it. I bring this up because we have abandoned our old concept of "planet" ("a luminous celestial body that wanders through the heavens above the Earth") and replaced it with something very different ("a nonluminous body that revolves in a fixed orbit around a star"). Nonetheless, that doesn't make our current concept bad, or mean that it has nothing to do with actual planets. As a matter of fact, having nothing to do with actual planets would be a very good reason to abandon our concept "planet." Actually, to say "it has nothing to do with actual planets" would signal that we already had changed the concept/construct.

Now what I think you might be after is something like this: Our use of the word "feminine" has a lot to do with women and what women are like, but it doesn't altogether describe all women and what all women are always like. This is because the word is sometimes used to distinguish between women (and between men as well), e.g., between women who are close to average in their sex-role behavior and those who are distant from the average (and "ultra-feminine" can be as distant as "masculine"), also used in various battles over what women's behavior should be like, and in battles over what should be considered "feminine." "Amazon" and "sugar and spice" and "earth mother" are all competing roles of femininity. But don't tell me they have nothing to do with what actual women are like. What you can tell me is that they don't necessarily prescribe what women have to be like. We're in a time when various sex roles are changing, for a lot of reasons. "Feminine" is something of a Superword.

Because it's a social construct there's nothing to it apart from what's already accepted.

I don't find this statement helpful, since the word "feminine" isn't used only to describe "what's already accepted" but also to dispute what the role should be, and to change people's behavior. Electrons and clouds and traffic lights and unicorns are social constructs too, but we accept them nonetheless, unicorns in stories, and traffic lights and clouds in everyday life, and electrons in science. We accept them because there are no competing alternatives. Whereas the word "feminine" is used in conflicts among alternatives, to create alternatives and to suppress alternatives. I haven't done studies, but I assume that even in "traditional" societies the word "feminine" is used mainly because of the ever-present possibility of someone flouting the sex role. Without the flouting, "feminine" would be as rare as "traffic light" in everyday conversation. So there's a lot to it other than what's already been accepted, given that the concept owes its livelihood to the possibility of its not being accepted.

Having said all that, I don't think I've said much beyond platitudes, haven't told you anything you don't know. The phrase "social construct" doesn't have any explanatory power; we generally use it on constructs like "feminine" that are already up for grabs, so it doesn't explain why the construct is up for grabs.

First person to say tATu is as right as the last one!

I heard my first t.A.T.u. record yesterday, "All the Things She Said." The disco mix was better than the radio mix (which was dance-oriented rock), but I was disappointed by both. No threat to displace "Lollipop (Candyman)" in my heart.

But my argt is partially that "feminine" as a value-system does not apply to rock because rock has never had a particularly "masculine" as a value-system and assignation of certain traits seems somewhat ahistorical and arbitrary

Word missing, but I don't think I'd understand it anyway. "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" were virtually the only hard-rock hit singles with a woman singer up until "Crazy On You" and "Barracuda" (this is a huge long time) [did Big Brother ever have a hit single? if so, was it one of their rockers?]. This fact is hardly ahistorical or arbitrary.

the traits weren't feminine except by accident of historical association

Which seems fairly nonahistorical to me.

...and since the idea of "feminine" traits in music is a critical saw rather than a widespread social one

Give an example of a feminine trait as a critical saw, and explain how it differs from widespread social ones.

"The upstarts of punk reviled Pink Floyd, officially because of their pompus conceptualism and musical grandiosity, but at a deeper level, because of their bucolic quietude."

I have nothing against Mr. Floyd, nor any member of his band (other than the fact that I find his bucolic quietude real icky).

Man, that's sad if that is the case. We're what, 12 years on from "riot grrl"? And god knows how many consecutive years of Greil Marcus and other toadies telling me that Sleater Kinney are the greatest rock band ever?

Yeah so rock was a boy's playground and carried those traits. My point is then does the converse syllogism neccessarily hold? i.e. "BECAUSE loud guitars are a rock trait and BECAUSE rock is a male world THEREFORE loud guitars are a MALE trait" and etc. My point is that this conclusion is rather arbitrary as a general proposition but then of course acquires some social capital at time and females playing loud guitars DO disrupt this -- but to argue they disrupt some deepset psychological pattern and not just the culture-of-the-moment is where it gets dicey.

Give an example of a feminine trait as a critical saw, and explain how it differs from widespread social ones.

"For the bohemian culture, the 'feminine' signified domesticity, conformism, or an ideal of sanctuary and succour" sez Reynolds/Press, as though this weren't what the 'feminine' has signified throughout the past century at least in most of society, forget bohemia alone. So that's a widespread social view of the feminine say. But how do we link this to a *sound* or set of *sounds*. For example when Reynolds/Press find the thrash at the end of the stooges' Funhouse a retreat to the "womb-tomb" after dionysian excess but similar sounds from Patti Smith are a liberatory assault on gender roles. So it's not the sound but the context.

But other times it isn't the context but ONLY the sound which they address as though the sound were itself something, and sometimes they address how artists concieved of their gender acts and sometimes they simply invents how THEY view them and sometimes simply take some OTHER critic's word for it (and of course their own agenda with it).

This is what bugs me most is this indeterminacy of causality which makes the whole analysis get all circular.

Look at this passages on Eno for example "The idea of the feminine that he's impelled towards is problematic for real women: passive, immobile, graceful; close to nature; skilled in the healing arts and decorative crafts; non-verabal; linked with childhood, dreamtime and Eternity." But the case for these traits as part of ENO or anyone else's idea of the feminine is barely made. And certainly I don't see any "real women" listening to Eno's album and finding in it a case that they SHOULD be passive, immobile, graceful, etc. or even finding in it on their own the presumption that women ARE this.

Maybe because it's a too author book but there's too much slippage like this throughout like because it traces the play of ideas absent the evolution of sound or the rest of the world it keeps losing track of who's supposed to be responding to which idea in which fashion.

if only she knew that the Neptunes and Matmos were the ones who were soft, wet, wide and open.

What makes you so sure the guys were calling all the shots? It’s a collaboration where the men and the women together constructed the women’s sound as wet and wide open. Men helping women to come across as wet and wide open isn’t altogether new.

By the way, what do you think of the Amy Phillips (real name Yma Spillihp) prose style? Do you find it tricky, feminine, curvaceous? I find it appealingly emotionally feminine (or appealingly femininely emotional), though not tricky.

Yeah so rock was a boy's playground and carried those traits. My point is then does the converse syllogism necessarily hold? I.e. "BECAUSE loud guitars are a rock trait and BECAUSE rock is a male world THEREFORE loud guitars are a MALE trait" and etc. My point is that this conclusion is rather arbitrary as a general proposition but then of course acquires some social capital at time and females playing loud guitars DO disrupt this - but to argue they disrupt some deepset psychological pattern and not just the culture-of-the-moment is where it gets dicey.

OK, I understand much better. But I wouldn’t say that the general proposition is arbitrary, even if it’s wrong. As you say, it wasn’t arbitrary in its time; for whatever reason, hard rock (tough singing, hard drumming, loud guitars, etc.) was a male trait, in that it was males who did it. (Doesn’t mean it had to be a male trait, just that it was.) And since there had previously been women in rock ‘n’ roll, and there were women in softer rock, and in folk rock, and in pop rock, it wasn’t just that ‘60s rock was a boy’s playground: people (for whatever reason, whoever they were) chose to make it a boy’s playground, even though the predecessor musics in the ‘50s and early ‘60s and the descendant musics in the late ‘70s included women; in ‘60s rock, some women chose to stay out and some others were probably kept out. And this has to do with pre-existing sets (call them cultural or psychological or whatever) in men’s and women’s minds about what women were expected to do, and about who gets to sound or wants to sound hard and aggressive. But there were women in hard rock. They were publicists, they were groupies, they were screaming teenies, they were in the audience. So I wouldn’t say it was strictly a “male” sound if a lot of women were listening to it (though of course women can listen to something because it’s “male”). I actually wrote something years ago about this that I’ll have to dig up. No time right now.

Look at this passages on Eno for example "The idea of the feminine that he's impelled towards is problematic for real women: passive, immobile, graceful; close to nature; skilled in the healing arts and decorative crafts; non-verbal; linked with childhood, dreamtime and Eternity." But the case for these traits as part of ENO or anyone else's idea of the feminine is barely made. And certainly I don't see any "real women" listening to Eno's album and finding in it a case that they SHOULD be passive, immobile, graceful, etc. or even finding in it on their own the presumption that women ARE this.

Yeah, this does seem like bullshit. It’s the venerable “male glaze” theory.

(And of course there’s a general bullshit Sunday-school trend throughout rock criticism and cultural studies where the music you like has to be validated as “subversive,” and the validation procedure gets played both ways: a woman playing hard rock is subversive for playing boy music, and a woman going curvy and feminine is subversive for resisting the boy sound. Chuck Eddy quote to come, if I can find it.)

From Chuck's 1991 Pazz & Jop ballot (favorite album Yvonne Chaka Chaka's Thank You Mr. DJ, favorite single Bananarama's "Long Train Running," favorite EP Pavement's Perfect Sound Forever): "And I'm not a fan or anything, but it really bugs me when people complain about Mariah Carey's 'lack of constraint.' Constraint is what is wrong with most pop singers lately. (And her sense of syncopation's better than Seal's or EMF's, too.)"

From Chuck's 1992 Pazz & Jop ballot (favorite album Dede Trake's Dede Trake, favorite single Loco Mia's "Loco Mia," favorite EP Mariah Carey's MTV Unplugged EP): "On the most depressed day of my year, one of the most depressed days of my life, the day the hacks at Harmony Books decided they didn't want to publish my second book (Pour 'Sugar Sugar' On Me: A Misguided Tour Through Rock History, which I'd spent a year on), the first record I played to help me cope was Mariah Carey's MTV Unplugged EP. She balanced my lithium somewhat, but mostly she reflected my rage a la '60s punk rock: 'Someday the one you gave away will be the only one you're wishing for/Boy you're gonna pay 'cause I'm the one that's keeping score.'"

Later on the same ballot: "This year, as always, many of my favorite records were made by women. Last year, six of the ten albums and seven of the ten singles I voted for were by women, but I never realized until Poobah Christgau (who voted for one lady's album and no singles!) worried in his P&J essay that pop females aren't getting enough respect. When Ann Powers passed through Philly last Spring I told her she seemed to have an extremely limited definition of 'women' - I asked how come she cites timid noise-skiffle shrinking violets like Barbara Manning and Juliana Hatfield as evidence that women 'haven't vanished from the pop scene,' but none of the recent women-fighting-phallagocentric-rock roundups praise Mariah Carey or Lorrie Morgan or Corina or Amy Grant (none of whom play guitar much, two of whom wear new wave haircuts anyway, and all of whom move plenty of product). If you're just another teacher's pet kissing Babes in Toyland's butts because they 'state their women's rights stance firmly and clearly,' exactly what 'paradigms' are you smashing? (Seems to me the only clear thing about Babes in Toyland is that they try too hard like any dumb boy band. You want feminist firmness and clarity, try Judy Torres selling her baptized soul to the devil to escape domestic abuse in "My Soul.")...

"I will now hereby demonstrate to Evelyn McDonnell that I am as humble as any rock critic without a penis: 'ALL THESE COMMENTS ARE ONLY MY OPINION. PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M TRYING TO PASS MYSELF OFF AS A MUSIC EXPERT.' Did I pass the audition?"

Maybe it's because of my lack of traditional male-role upbringing (my family is basically my professor mom and currently-at-Smith-College little sister) that I've always balked at the idea of forms being masculine, therefore feminizable. Too many people of both genders doing everything. I don't like telling people they're rebels because they're doing something that their gender isn't associated with. I prefer to associate the accomplishments with the individual rather than the social subgroup they're in. Like my sister says, being a woman ain't exactly an accomplishment.

I love the Chuck quotes. But like, duh, of course I would.

I think you're reading them inside out, especially Jessica. Her piece isn't about perceiving a band but about using a band in her social relations incl. family relations from her pre-teen years to the present (e.g., as a kid taking an outcast cousin on as a mentor and then recently switching roles with the cousin) - just as Chuck uses Mariah Carey in his social and class relations with writers/readers of the alternative press.

I've always balked at the idea of forms being masculine, therefore feminizable.

OK, I don't blame you, but I don't want you to balk at the discussion of such things. In postwar Anglo-American pop, it's been boys who bring the noise and mostly boys who buy the noise, at least through 1975, and even now noise is mainly a boy thing, just as noise writing is mainly a boy thing in rock criticism. Notice Chuck's aggressively aggressive response to Evelyn McDonnell's passive-aggressive girl style. The dates are probably different for jazz and "serious music," but not the chronological order. That's why noise is called "masculine." And when women start making/buying noise, and if the resultant noise has a different character (I'm not sure it does), a person would be simplistic in calling it "feminized," but would still be pointing to a real phenomenon. (By the way, noise is also a class issue: bohemian noise sounds different from metal noise, and for metal musicians in the early '90s, noise was a metaller's vehicle of would-be class mobility up into bohemian and punk acceptability. And if I can call a sound "bohemian," why can't I call it "masculine"? - Not a rhetorical question, since I'm more likely to do the former than the latter, maybe because the former seems less prescriptive.)

By the time the Byrds' "2-4-2 Foxtrot (the Lear Jet Song)" and the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" made psychedelic drug music inevitable in 1966 or so, cacophony was well on its way to becoming an accepted rock "norm" in and of itself - especially in heavy metal, where barely anything was ever taken for granted except loud noise.

Which invariably rhymed with "boys" - this is extremely important. Thus did Slade rhyme "Cum on Feel the Noize" with "girls rock your boys." And thus did Mott the Hoople claim in "One of the Boys" that they don't say much but they make a big noise.
--Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll, p. 245.

Which is a good question, except I think it tends to cut under or at least crosswise to the entire point of sex revolts while nominally starting with it. Which i suppose makes it interesting, except I have no clue from the writing how these pieces work and I don't know most of them.

But then it tends to trip on itself when it deals with James Chance I think, coz I don't think the noise DID "subvert" him or that he was particularly looking to be ultra-masculine in the first place -- there was more complex intentionality there from the start, and he knew the elements of absurdity he was fusing.

I really wish marcello would post here.

(Also I think that Reject All American is a more exemplary Bikini Kill song than Rebel Girl, genderfuckwise)