Women: Please make yourselves more appealing to the NME

temp jobs?

Suicide Girls.

http://www.drownedinsound.com/images/7027.jpg

L-R: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Twat.

are they groupies? are they djs? whatever it looks like they done gone on holiday.

Hey, give a list! (I'm not kidding, what are yer choices?)

The big muthafucka here is the distinct hommecenticity in the gig world as a performer - you could have a band, manager and several other roles that are filled by women but the gig promoter will be a bloke, the soundguy will be a smelly bloke, the barstaff and bouncers will be smelly, unhelpful blokes and the other bands will be comprised mostly of smelly, unhelpful, annoyingly up-their-own-necks blokes who stand around farting and drinking Labbatts whilst commenting audibly on how you can't lift your amp properly because your a GIRL. Nobody bats a single eyelash when yet another bunch of ratty 18 year old skinny Crispins takes the stage despite overwhelming, damning past evidence that there is an almost 100% chance that they'll be piss poor beyond everyones ability to last the end of their set. Get a 50/50 or above girl ratio and everyone in there from soundguy to door staff will be looking at the soundcheck with arms folded waiting to turn to the git opposite them and say "bit shit aren't they?". Other bands are no better and usually the worst offenders.

Seriously, kill these people. Fuckhaired muppets who are the modern equivalent of those blokes who spend each Saturday re-creating the Battle of Agincourt on a public field in Seffam except that the battle in this case is the Stooges or the VU or whatever the fuck best suits their haircut. Spending thirty five joyless, ear-piercing minutes "getting the guitar enough warmth in the monitors" which equates to the rest of me and my girls having to sit there whilst Fucko McLesPaul takes his finger off the E-string on a D chord and puts it back on again whilst staring into the blue spotlights like he's the first person in the world to come up with the idea. Finally they relent and let you take the stage with six minutes to go before doors, sneering at your kit on the way down until The Chicks set up, rock out and look twice as cool as them with only half the makeup.

Okay, ranting, but that's not too far an exaggeration.

Seriously, kill these people. Fuckhaired muppets who are the modern equivalent of those blokes who spend each Saturday re-creating the Battle of Agincourt on a public field in Seffam except that the battle in this case is the Stooges or the VU or whatever the fuck best suits their haircut. Spending thirty five joyless, ear-piercing minutes "getting the guitar enough warmth in the monitors" which equates to the rest of me and my girls having to sit there whilst Fucko McLesPaul takes his finger off the E-string on a D chord and puts it back on again whilst staring into the blue spotlights like he's the first person in the world to come up with the idea. Finally they relent and let you take the stage with six minutes to go before doors, sneering at your kit on the way down until The Chicks set up, rock out and look twice as cool as them with only half the makeup.

Okay, ranting, but that's not too far an exaggeration.

-- A / F#m / Bm / D (

Well I did and I thought it was such a great post I'm reposting the part I like best!

You even get that DJ-ing, idiots coming over saying things like "are you alright love? See you've got [insert drunken drivel about eqs, cross fader, levels etc]"

"No. The reason you can't here any music is not because I've pressed the wrong button, but because the PA has cut out. Why don't you go and patronise the male sound engineer?"

very good.

I was actually DJing the other night and a guy came over and turned down the volume on the mixer by leaning over the desk, disgraceful. He said it was hurting his ears. I turned it back up, invoking the "if the dancefloor is full and people are dancing a solitary person has no rights" law, which is good for requests too.

The other time I can remember a girl coming in (and this shop is in an Urban Outfitters, don't know if that makes it more or less intimidating, I was about to say less) she bought a few records or whatever and one of the regular customers was like, as soon as she'd left, "good taste in music and really hot!".

Or then there's always this weirdness when guys are listening to records and a girl walks up the stairs to the women's clothes section and they look over and make a "LOOK HOW HOT SHE IS" face and you have to try and get a look somewhere in between "I am not taking part in this" and "I'm glad you're enjoying yourself" cos they're a customer and actually in reality probably a nice person beyond the whole thing.

It's maybe worse in dance music. That said there are lots of girls at our night always, more than guys I'd say. But as I say, I have worked in a record shop for a year and sold vinyl to no more than 3 girls, at the absolute maximum. It can be very awkward though, sometimes in your efforts to be fair and nice etc you probably end up being rude, and offering less help than you might to a guy who didn't know what he wanted to buy, for fear of seeming like you're being patronising!

Maybe you should have a "ladies day" promotion.

The fact it persists is a symptom of a wider malaise thats dragging the whole thing down - gigging/bands/NME's etc are very old now for a cultural phenomenon. The gig circuit in its current form hasn't really moved on in nearly 50 years. In many ways the greatest challenge for Popular Music in the coming century and beyond is if/how it can adapt to not having the huge push of being The New Thing, if/how it can react to an increasingly set-in-stone organisational structure and if/how it tries to maintain any relationship with what's current or whether it becomes Battle Re-enactment.

You'd think Finance would dictate that the answers to all these questions are to keep things as they are until it stops making money then shut it down - but pop music is to heavily woven into so many other arms of the entertainment industry and beyond that it can't really disappear.

The path we're headed on at the moment will probably result in Cover Bands furthering their climb up from their current position of taking over a large part of the bookings at Trad Gigging Venues (all the Rock Venues etc. that opened in the 70's and 80's are now booking tribute acts for a huge proportion of their schedules to make money, you can't blame them) to a situation where we get credible in-the-charts tribute acts. Not things like your Erasure Abba thing or whatever, stuff like the Bootleg Beatles - all it needs is an advert, a TV show or something to pin itself on and it's there. The Elvis impersonator on TOTP was another step in this direction.

Jeez - I could talk a hell a lot more of this - the huge levels of separation in different strata and areas of the music industry, release schedules tailored to quartely returns, the silent NHS-trust-esque takeover of the middle indies, technofear, the fact it persists because no-one wants to rock the boat when they're aiming to be captain etc. But my Sunday lunch is ready.

British labels figure they can't do what the Americans can do with Avirl, The Faders, Slunt, Kelly O etc. Tho funnily enough I can't think of many 'credible' American female-driven rock acts right now either. When you look back at the bands that came out of grunge and altrock in the early 90s there seems to be an abundance of prominent women (Breeders, Hole, L7, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Darcy of Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, Helium, Luscious Jackson)...what happened to them?? and what happened to that?? you would think that ratio would've increased in the charts rather than decreased.

http://www.manifesta.co.uk/manifesta_menu.htm

but it's confusing do explicitly pro women type ventures infact reinforce a sort of marginalization?

am i on drukqs or does justine in fact have a writing credit on 'galang'?

Cuz Boys buy records by bands of lads. And so do girls.

Whatever you think of Everett's list his point stands. Besides, there are plenty more artists you could mention, whether obvious ones like Chan Marshall or Kathleen Hannah to new bands like Gin Palace, The Pipettes, Afi Rampo etc.

Ha yes, Pashimina you've got a point there...but I think women are particularly ill served by the NME. Yes, they reviewed Joanna Newsom, but then it's easy to paint her as a kook, ignoring her individuality in order to fit her into time honoured stereotypes of women in rock.

And Lauren, the new Scout album is bloody superb, at least for the first half...

New Electrelane is great too, apart from the odd bit of farting about with free improv.

Then you've got Glasgow's wonderful Lucky Luke, who work as an equal partnership between their male and female members.

I could go on...

the SUPERB piece on FEMINIST CLASSIC 'anchorman' certainly adds a WHOLE NOTHER PERSPECTIVE to the debate

I agree that this is the clear crux, it just remains staggering how it persists.

aha. that 'straight on straight' scene. keeps families together, yeah?

The NME is covering 'alternative' music made by guys?
I thought they'd abandoned all that a long time ago.

The NME doesn't focus on female musicians because they prefer to focus on what the 18-25 male demographic wants to read.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0505,tracker_writer.inc,60381,.html

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0511,eddy,62065,22.html

That demographic's been more than happy with a decent if not exactly super proportion in the past. Bless the NME, maybe they know that their best past successes have been trumping fairly seperatist, reactionary everything-else-is-shit movements, hell the whole thing is based on exploiting small generation gaps and social divides in order to sell nice safe rebellion back to the hormonal seeking a temporary identity until the acne goes away. Actually, you'd think that it was about the age they'd be wanting sexy ladies to fixate on but thinking about it even the really ugly ones will probably be getting some real gurls at that point. Alcohol breaks down so, so many barriers for the wide-eyed fresher.

Maybe as a lot of us come out of the 90's theres a bit of rose-tinting going on as it was quite acceptable then for Underworld to sit next to Elastica on the Trainspotting soundtrack (to be a stupidly simplistic about it). There's no Cool Brittania inclusive attitude anymore, just a post 9/Iraq distrust of anything different to Us. Maybe the NME is doing the right job of representing the current climate then? I suppose like all things that become hideously popular beyond their means to sustain, mid/late 90's British music just started eating its own cash-tail until it's now in danger of becoming a little lizardy ball.

The upshot is that the money that came in via Britpop was re-invested in narrowing the remit. Oasis to Travis to Coldplay to Keane, to be crude about it. The Britpop-era hoiked up the financial expectations from parent companies to unsustainable levels and as a result A&R policy gets more and more to a narrow point as it needs to make its returns for people to keep their jobs. People like their jobs. I don't know about previous eras and if things were any better and tinty rosy. Someone I spoke to once from a rather large entertainment megacorp once who told me they'd signed someone as they "needed 2 "cool" electronica acts and one guitar band to complete the roster". The new blood was filling whatever boxes that market research had demanded, and then release schedules were governed by hitting quarterly targets. This is why release schedules are getting more fractured and the small 2-year-max musical movements that the NME of old fed on aren't coming up outside of the NME's Fake Genres like Shroomadelica. They're trying, bless their ickle cotton socks, but its like making soup with instant packet mix. People ask where are all the electroclash hits were. Well, many of them never came out or are STILL waiting. I know artists that have had their first-album-era releases spread over 3 years. That's a longer lifespan than most bands used to have and usually leads to people giving up in frustration. Grime's suffering horribly because of this and it's probably going to be the death knell for that genre too, which is one of the biggest crimes going on at the moment given its potential. By playing it safe they're commiting financial suicide as any student of how these things work will tell you that everythings based on maxxing-out when you get a sniff of success and running things as loud and as hard as you can til the wheels come of. That's what McGee did so brilliantly with Oasis, Epstein did with the Beatles, Noel Edmonds did with Mr. Blobby.

What's crap for the indie/dance/indiedancesphere is that Chartpop and the like is fine on this new model and's been using it for years as it's a pretty inexhastible resource that can tailor to so many predictable things like Xmas'es, Comic Relief, films etc. but it's not really suited to the more now-orientated fizz-bang student-fashion genres that the NME thrived on. One of the worst faliures that happened that's dying out now is that the Indie world tried taking on the Dance Music Model in the early 00's as the Oasis boom started to fade - the whole Miami premiere, clubs in Ibiza, release when people get back of holiday thing - but they based it around the festivals. It didn't work as it left to too much vying for too little space at a certain point of the year, which happened to clash with the summer cheese smashes.

I'm not saying that this is an unavoidable downslide - supply and demand will dictate new avenues eventually, but it might take a very, very long time compared to the merseybeat / psychadelia /supergroups /prog /punk / new wave etc arc that when you look back too a frighteningly short space of time to get from Love Me Do to Loveless. They're just really up against it these days as rather than the industry looking for what Ver Kids are doing next in the hope of catching it and riding it they're recycling to keep the future profit projections on an upward arc and minimising risk. And you can't recycle forever, neither can you remove risk from a world that's so dependant on it.