"feminists" pt II: music through the gender cracks

gloria s?

and norah jones and vanessa carleton sorta broke that mold anyway i think.

does alanis cause gender trouble?

(nb i love the term gender trouble but have plenty of problems with how butler used the idea)

or are you arguing the opposite? i can't tell.

She normally DOES get dismissed out of hand though... and I think one of Tim's points was that criticism of female singer-songwriters inevitably conflates them with each other regardless of how much or how little they actually have in common. That's true for all women in pop/rock to an extent: they get compared with each other on the flimsiest of excuses, and in ways that men rarely do.

I've seen very few reviews which praise Tori as a 'skilled craftworker' - a few token nods to her piano virtuosity in the "she was a freaky child prodigy" sense, but nothing about her stylistic shifts and self-production (eg criticism of From The Choirgirl Hotel focused on the miscarriage which inspired much of it rather than the fact that she'd gone electronic, and nothing I've seen even attempted to tie those two things together). And from what I've read... I think Tori actually prides herself more on her craft than her emotion.

Even with the quotation marks round "proper" this strikes me as an odd notion of the kind of coverage artists (female or not) actually want or need. Like feeling sorry for Oscar winner on the grounds that they would obviously rather have played the nurse in a touring production of "Romeo and Juliet".

What I meant was Tori ties emotion and craft together pretty tight in how she views music (and this is evident from the music even w/o the interviews). But maybe that *was* what Tim meant too and he was saying the crits often didn't -- but then maybe i've just missed all the bad Tori-crit or lumped it in with bad X-crit and not looked at how gender plays a part in making it a *difft* sort of bad-crit.

Do you really think many people liked Hitchcock but felt "invalidated" because the critics didn't agree? Surely the solution to that isn't critics getting it right but people feeling less apologetic about liking what they like?

ie. hardly anyone *ever* talks about the sexual or emotional content of female-produced music the way they might about, say, Maxinquaye or Vocalcity etc.

maybe its becuz of my own bias towards the upwardly mobile (some might find that ironic), but I'd equate this with folks trying to make MONEY more so than art. So I guess I'd say Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson (ESPECIALLY - read the new Blender article for scary-ass proof), stuff like that. Arguably Madonna is the real pioneer here (though my love of You Can Dance demands I point out she's like, a great disco diva too) Yeah sure they're not wearing power suits, but in a theatrical world like pop music, next to nothing is on some level a power suit, it's what you wear to move up. It's not like the dudes are dressing much classier. And yeah people are threatened by it.

(Actually, Tori is victim victimizer and benificiary all at once.)

(And also for this problem.)