The Great Grrls

My first suggestion:

1) Leila - who I reckon has managed to invert one of the more cliched gender distributions by being the writer/producer of trip hop who then gets male and female sirens to sing her songs. The Spector/Eno role of shadowy studio auteur/inventer seems to be one of the most male-dominated roles of all; I can't even think of any other examples off the top of my head, though obviously there must be.

bjork is the greatest female musician of all time and i'll fight anyone who disagrees with me.

Rose from the Poster Children could kick Bjork's ass, so bring it on. Though I do like Bjork too.

Okay, Pauline Oliveiros and Yoko Ono for a start. More later.

Electrelane

Bjork is just embarassing -- anytime her music comes on I turn it off out of mortification more than disgust or dislike. To me it seems so obvious and trite, a great marketing head's idea of what hep young kids would like to listen to Her music is trendy without being truly experimental in any way -- like Bowie she's good at borrowing ideas off of other musicians, but unlike Bowie the results are usually unsatisfactory.

It's also a case of the voice being very important. For some strange reason I rather liked her vocals when in the Sugarcubes, but she's become unlistenable solo (w/the exception of Venus As A Boy). It's not because they've become more experimental, I would say they are just far more mannered.

For me someone like Missy Elliot is far more inspiring. She can do simply everything well, and doesn't conform to any easy stereotypes.

what's all this crap i'm always hearing about people being just mortified ('gasp!') at the very CONCEPT of bjork? bjork has 1) good tunes 2) great voice 3) neat production 4) good image/concept. i admit the whole 'childlike wonder and delight' thing is a little contrived, but cut her a fucking break. she makes good music and is popular and this good music is popular. still, i'll take back my original declaration just as a peacekeeping measure. the greatest female musician of all time is now nina simone.

Yup to that re: Elliott. About the only thing I could complain about her is that she seems to have a weird idea of what a concert is supposed to be, based on what Jane said about the London show.

Nina is pretty damn good for things like "Wild is the Wind" and "Mississippi Goddamn," true...

note: missy is just a chubbier rapping aaliyah. no sane person is buying missy elliott albums for any of her 'skills'. she is puppet in the hands of a svengali producer, and pretending to not be a puppet. therefore, not good musician.

I'm waiting for Bjork to cover "Ride a White Swan." Hawhh.

er, re-reading my comments re: missy, very inflammatory + i'm not sure i really believe them + i'm not too sure of her role in the music-making process on missy albums. really i don't know enough to barely have an opinion at all, yesterday i was asking what her best album is. i give up, i just can't get into this new stuff. i now officially declare myself the pinefox of rap.

Homogenic is such an original work. Bah.

I like the fact that Missy does go out and take Timbaland's role on other records - "Lady Marmalade", Destiny's Child's "Confessions", 702's "Where My Girls At?" etc. etc. With all that heavy breathing she has this strange, spectral presence on these records. It's just a shame that she can't actually match Timbaland production-wise; her productions always sound curiously tentative and/or dated.

I love Bjork and I reckon her own production skills are underrated (note how the work that Nellie Hooper, Tim Simenon, Graham Massey, Howie B etc. etc. do with her nearly always walks all over their work elsewhere), but I wonder if she's actually working against traditional ideas of women's roles musically or if she's just working within them exceedingly well.

I saw an add for Mira Calix this morning that raved "Warp's only female artist!" as a selling point, but it just strikes me as further evidence that the idea of women as producers/soundsculptors is still something of a novelty.

both missy and bjor are excelent artist even if I 'm not intrigued by the ubermaterialistic subtext of missy's lyrics . what about the gree american diva diamanda galas

sorry my lovely mac seems unable to write the last letter in gree and bjor . I'll follow Mr Bush suggestion and call Gree.s Grecians .

valerie solanas: beside whom all pale, greatest art-work of 20th C, shoulda been number one but the So-Called Critics WaddaTheyKnow preferred Sihran Sihran's derivitive and confused xerox of ? and the Lee Harvey Oswald's 1963 classic.

"Lee Harvey Mysterians'" woulda been funnier. Sorry.

Missy was the first that leapt to my mind too. She actually is, afaik, timba's closest collaborator -- she cowrites the songs with him on their records, she does magnificent vocal arrangements, et cet. Madonna is of course the classic answer, for obvious reasons (i.e. creating an entirely new way for a woman to operate in music) and Deborah Harry from blondie probably as a girl leading an otherwise male band, but really LEADING it and not just being the pretty mouthpiece. Kim Deal in tha Pixies -- important mainly as an inventor of insanely great basslines. Mamma Cass, of course. The two women from Abba were clearly playing a nontraditional role. Hannah Marcus, who rilly should learn to produce her own albums, but whose music doesn't fall into any of the accepted categories. Sally Timms, of the Mekons, particularly operating in them as part of their collective magic rather than her lovely but more gender-trad solo work. Eve, to me, somehow stands apart from the Lil Kim, Brat, et cet. generation of female rappers. I think that's because she raps about sex the way male rappers do, rather than in this hypersexualized porn-reclamation style.

patti smith rocks

ok - a little bit drunk, but I just got my arse kicked by 'Seagul screams kiss her, kiss her'. They deserve acclaim and mass MTV2 rotation...

Bjork - magpie, should stick to acting (DITD all-time great film)

I'm not really convinced by this Missy-is-Timba's muppet argument. So she counts as does Björk. Liz from Neotropic is a good producer, K.Hand from Detroit is good, as is the aformentioned Leila. Some of my favourite Dj's are female: Miss Djax, Lady Aida, Storm and the woman who yesterday opened for DJ Assault with an incredible tight electro-set (must find out who she was).

My favourite rrrrriot girl would be Exene. I don't know what happened to her though. Didn't she open up a shop in LA?

She was -- "You've Got Bad Taste," in Silverlake, though I think it's closed. Right now the band is overseeing a new slew of reissues.

Lauryn Hill, duh. Sure she's schoolmarmish at times (OK, a lot), but she still writes good songs and arranges/produces them with real panache. Lucinda Williams ditto. Le Tigre, too.

Seely seems a good candidate (though I'm told they broke up). Gay man, gay woman, hetero man, hetero woman. Great band.

Fleetwood Mac could have used a band arrangement like that.

omar, i just knew you were going to say Miss D-Jax ;)

The Force is strong in you then Gareth...or i'm probably very predictable :) But it's true, she's one of the hardest house DJ's I know.

Looking at the whole issue kinda tangentially (principles of defying archetypes, tokenism etc), I kinda thought of the mother tongues label, which is a all female Sydney-based hip hop label. Rather than confining female mcs into a gender based ghetto, it seems to have facilitated greater acceptance of the principle of the female mc: to the point where mc Trey is fairly well known outside the hip hop community.

As someone who doesn't primarily listen to hip-hop, it's almost as if the binaries of taste-preferences have been inverted: I come to see the female voice on Australian hip-hop as natural, with male mcing as the 'other'. Even with the increasing prevalence of female voices on hip-hop internationally this seems to me to be a positive thing, insofar as increasing gender equalities are concerned (though I'm not sure how it would apply outside a small scene).

Björk. Not Bjork.

'Björk', not 'björk'.

Bork! Bork! Bork!

*cue Swedish Chef talk*

How do you make the dots over the O's?

I haven't listened to more than three songs by any female singer in almost a year. They bore me suddenly. I can't answer the question. This is quite a change.

The Velvet Underground's "After Hours" is amazingly cute, though. Moe sings in it. It is, pathetically, my theme song.

Dots over o -- all depends on the set-up, for my Mac it's always been option+u and then the letter you want to type. Thus ö as the end result of option+u and then o, etc.

Umlaut! Umlaut! I wonder if it's called that when used in Icelandic though...

I didn't read the earlier post, so I may be off base, but I think you have to look outside of pop for an answer here. Women have been "doing it all" in pop music for a long time. I'd say Missy Elliot is probably the new Carole King & she goes back more than 40 years. King wrote and produced massive hits from behind the scenes, for men and women, and nobody knew what she looked like until 15 years into her career.

Jazz, on the other hand, has had very few female instrumentalists (Mary Lou Baker, maybe? And the drummer for David Ware, whose name escapes me?) So that would be a good place to look. Any ideas? And then in the experimental scene, here's another vote for Yoko Ono, also Laurie Anderson, Merideth Monk and more than any of these Maryanne Amacher. They all triumphed and rewrote the rules in the male-dominated art music world, and definitely w/out conforming to "roles."

Oh yes. Laurie Anderson certainly. Susie Ibarra is the name of Ware's drummer, and is often Shipp's as well, I think. Mo Tucker, speaking of female drummers. And her solo career has similarly been groundbreaking in an odd way.

Carla Bley = semiwellknown jazz pianist and, more importantly, bandleader and composer. There have been some number of other women, I think, but not famous ones.

In jazz I think it has a lot to do with the way the music grew up; a lot of it was taught to new players by older ones; the older ones being men probably cause some conscious and unconscious barriers to more involvement of women. (Cuz it's hard to just learn jazz by sitting at home listening to records.) Not sure how much this has changed; maybe jazz's presence in the conservatory system means more women learn it than before.

Yes, Ibarra plays with Shipp as well, and does some fine work. Sounded to me like kind of an amalgam of Elvin and Rasheid Ali.

The classical world, speaking of conservatories, seems to be integrated, genderwise, amongst performers of almost all instruments (perhaps slightly fewer in percussion?) but lacking to some degree in female conductors.

Ah, but what about across instruments? I.e. flute players vs. trumpet players vs. tuba players, etc.?

OK, wait, that's what you said. Really? I just find it hard to believe since the people in conservatories probably started out younger, and most of the instrumentalists I encountered when I was younger were segregated/integrated to different degrees. Trumpets = most integrated, then maybe saxes, percussion, with flutes (gurls) and low brass (guys) at bottom.

True. I'm probably biased on the brass question coz I've known quite a few talented french horn, tuba, trombone players who were women. Flutes? Yes, less integrated, now that I think about it. I defer to Josh's wisdom. Strings? Integrated? What say y'alls?

I've known talented low brass women, too. They're significantly outnumbered, though. My school was too little to have strings. I bet PHIL knows somethin about this tho.

Ikue Mori

Adele Bertei too

Joni Mitchell.

There's something about threads like this which just throws me into a rage. I know that you didn't intend it this way, but it just smacks to me of tokenism. I can't articulate my upset right now...

I find it irritating as well, especially when I open it and find crap like, "X is the greatest female musician alive."

Sadly I think it's very difficult to be non-tokenistic in discussing *successful* female artists (ie. who have managed to make a name for themselves in spite of the system) who actively work against typical roles for women within the music industry (why, say, Joni Mitchell doesn't really count - too much of a feminine archetype? - and Bjork only half counts. That I love both of them is irrelevant). Even if we came up with a hundred examples it would still be a foregrounded by an endless procession of males unfortunately dominating so many levels of the game.

I asked this question because I was suddenly irritated by the strange gender segregation in my collection - I've got heaps of singer-songwriters, a large amount of female fronted rock bands and a smattering of riot grrls, but when it comes to music with an emphasis on production the number shrinks to a handful. I was interested in discovering whether this was usual or strange; whether the paucity of results reflects the state of things generally, or the people on this forum, or just general disinterest or distaste for the question, is another matter entirely.

I think that the question and the way you raised it were perfectly fair - I should have said this. I've probably wondered something similar myself, re: production and more "formal" musics. It's just some of the responses that irritated me.