Am I Missing The Point Of This Article? (Warning: More P*Fork Bitching)

But if this spearheads another wave of "Ohmigod, remember when GIRL GROUPS ROAMED THE EARTH!!!" pidgeonholing, I think I'm going to be sick.

OTM. I wish they'd ditch the jingly jangly guitars, get basslines and drums, and be a bit more danceable.

HANG ON THIS IS NOT A PIPETTES THREAD!!! It is a bitching about Pitchfork and a bitching about "My Gender Is Not An Agenda!" demeaning articles about people with vaginas that dare make pop thread.

I agree with you though, it's hard to know the agenda behind an article like that. Is it patronising, is it trying to be positive, is it just an excuse for eye candy?

"He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" came on randomly last night, and it made some of my bandmates quite uncomfortable, but the truth is, it's an astonishing song in a number of ways - both as emotional and political artefact, and as a piece of music.

Anyway, none of this is important. I'm just annoyed by this idea of gender being used as a hook or angle to sell a tiny subgenre of music. But that's just my bugbear.

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I don't know. And I don't want to think the worst, but that's just the question that springs to mind - and why SHOULD it? If someone wrote an article about the influence of free jazz on indie rock, would they bring gender into it?

Bah, I'm contradicting myself, I know. This shit makes me inarticulately angry.

And if this is the case, why do those "Now That's What I Call Indie!" type compilations suck so hard? (Unless they are comps made by friends, which are much more amazing.)

Ideally the three vocalists in the Pipettes should be sifting through submissions from professional songwriters:

Well, that's one thing, but it's only a half step away from the fetishization of the "artist" he so seems to want to avoid. Wasn't the model of these girl groups that an unknown manager or recording company was matching songwriters on one hand, and singers on the other to come up with the final product? So it wouldn't be the Pipettes that would be sifting through submissions, it would be the people at Memphis Industries.

Moreover, when I get to the end of the article, I still don't understand how what he wants is anything different than Girls Aloud. A lot of other current pop singers still buy into the "artist" myth, albeit often as a consequence of the vicious marketing circle (what is being sold is their image, later if not sooner successful stars will assert themselves in the process of maintaining that image).

Nice to see Tom posting, btw.

GA not Indie enough.

Cos they only put shit "indie" bands on those. A comp of the best songs by Stereophonics/Coldplay/Starsailor etc is still going to suck

So I can think of a whole lot of seemingly "obvious" reasons why that's the case, but I'd be more interested to hear someone else try and explain it.

It sounds like there's a certain aesthetic (+ authenticity) wanted, one that Girls Aloud and other pop groups operate outside of though they may occasionally try and dip into it such is the fervent magpie-like nature of their producers and songwriters (totally fair game tho).

Girls Aloud et al don't tend to get played at club nights where 'classic' girl groups are played alongside Indie throughout the ages.

(Which actually backs DiCrescenzo's argument up).

xpost to Nabisco: a big part of it is that girl-group pop is a larger reference point than doo-wop. In the last 2 years I've seen beautiful indie kids dance enthusiastically to girl-groups in public. The only time I've seen doo-wop referenced in public was Robert Christgau talking about vulvas.

Also, with the huge overlap between "girlgroup" and early "Motown" why is that not picked up on?

If the boys go with that sound/style/image, then they are called Mods and that is authentic and gritty, while if you are a girl doing it, it is automatically twee.

I think also this conflation is part of what's getting to me - that anything girlgroup must also be retro - the Pipettes are utterly, shamelessly retro. Yet if you are a girlgroup who is *not* retro - use the magpie approach to sound and technology - you will be lumped in with that aesthetic, simply because of your gender.

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line-ups of girls singing someone else's songs (Girls Aloud and Shimura Curves).

OI!!!! What am I? Chopped liver?

Anyway, not to derail, but I think maybe that Ratty was on to something.

That there is this conflation of girls playing pop (especially indie pop) with this idealised 1960s version of girlgroups - svengalis, songwriters and all that. Which *is* much more in line with Girls Aloud, but indie boys want their girlbands (like their bands) to be, you know... indie and a bit shit.

If it were left as a genre - 60s Early Motown/Spectoresque Pop that would be fine - leave gender out of it. Stop viewing the gender of the performers as this novelty thing to be remarked on.

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But at the same time I don't see Brent doing anything of that sort in this article! He talks about the Pipettes, who are very intentionally a retro girl-group. He mentions a boy group (the Clientele) finding a stylistically retro moment. He talks about the Raveonettes having an actual Ronnette guest on an album. He talks about Johnny Boy and Saint Etienne finding retro space. He talks about Juelz Santana interpolating "Please Mr. Postman." As far as spotting a trend of girl-group retro his examples seem totally uncomplicated by gender and mostly spot-on.

If boys did Frankie Lymon it would be called twee

Tom OTM re: the nature of indie. My initial question was lazily worded.

Yes, I think this is what irritates me the most. That they are used interchangably - and because the words get used interchangably, people assume that the concepts are, too.

Which would be absurd if you did the same thing with a term like "boyband". Even though Boyband very specifically means that kind of male pop harmony vocal group as evidenced by Take That or NKOTB and their progeny. Can you imagine anyone calling, for instance, Radiohead a "boyband"? (OK, people around here call Guns'N'Roses a boyband, but it is because of the archetype, not because of the gender.)

I understand that my annoyance is rather fluid and mixed up and unfocused. But so, I think, is that article.

Do you object to girl-group or to retro, Kate?

Well, retro, I utterly object to, in reference to Shimura Curves because, FFS, it's laptop pop. Girl-group is more nebulous. Sure, we're influenced by the Shangri-Las, but we're influenced just as much by Neu! But very few people seem to pick up on that.

I guess I'm just feeling uncomfortable about the gender as genre issue, as I stated up above.

I once read a similar argument about comic books and the superhero genre. That to a lot of people, the stereotype about comics is that they are all superhero related. And that's weird - the first film was a Western, but can you imagine if all cinema, ever became just associated with being the one genre of Westerns?

I also think there's a qualitative difference between male vocal groups of the 60s and what we think of when we say "girl groups" (which is not at all representative of female vocal groups!).

The fact is, "girl groups" under this conception rely heavily on harmony, one thing modern, non-R&B songwriters are remarkably bad at. Even the Pipettes don't seem to have much; their charms are basically as a female crunk group with live instrumentation. Brent's article actually makes me think of groups like Au Revoir Simone, who not only write their own material, but do so to greater effect than I think anyone else could, if for no other reason than they're so attuned to each other's abilities as well as their own ability as a group to harmonize.

But, I mean, if you want something that actually sounds like a girl group, the Pipettes should probably be covering "Bills, Bills, Bills."

by Brent DiCrescenzo

Um, that should've immediately tipped you off that this was not going to be a very good read.

Except for, erm, those male indierockers that were raised as choirboys or singing in bands that had strong Beatles influences like, oh, the Stone Roses, Ride, etc.

It's a fashion thing that indie boys should shout or mumble, and nothing to do with natural ability or learning, because boys could and did do it when it was fashionable. Which it isn't at the moment.

Actually, hrmm, I wonder about that. Is "Influenced by the Beatles" the "influenced by the Shangri-Las" of boyindiebands?

Also, I don't think many indie-rockers in America grew up as choirboys, if for no other reason than a lot of American middle-class churches seem to avoid choral music, but whoa, this is getting to be a speculative tangent par excellence...

The Beatles' harmonising came out of the same tradition of Irish and/or English folk music that fuelled a lot of British Invasion boybands.

Motown style harmonising (in which I would put girlgroups) came out of the gospel/church singing tradition. (There was some crazy academic who was saying that this, also, was derived from traditional Celtic folk singing, based on, erm, harmonies and call and response in various churches in the Western Isles, but I think that's revisionist bullshit - especially if you've ever heard African folk music.)

White American boys don't sing in church, ergo they don't learn to harmonise. Ergo, American indie music has terrible vocals.

So where do white girls learn how to sing harmonies, then? ;-)

and Ride could harmonise perfectly live. Mark Gardener's still got one of the prettiest voices I've heard in my life.

I'm pretty certain that no-one in the Beatles ever sang a folk song in their lives. Ditto every other British group of the era.

This idea of folk as being a whinging old man with a guitar is an artefact of field recordings, and nothing to do with traditional music, which was more likely to be a bunch of people down the pub or wherever singing together.

But anyway, this is a total derailment.

I think the crappy American vocal state in a lot of contemporary music is a cultural thing more than anything. Kind of a macho thing in the case of the hard rockers and a "god forbid anybody think I'm trying to hard," thing for the indie kids. America was king of harmonies for a long time leading up to today.

I have no idea where white girls learn to sing... the Old Town School of Folk music?

Skiffle?

Actually, that's true if you think of the folk/country influence of bands like the Byrds. Or even going back earlier, the Jordanaires and the like. Which is also coming from the gospel/choir tradition.

I don't imagine they had too much of that going on in the old days tho did they! Most folk songs are kind of designed to be sung by one person, tho if you want to join in, fair enough - but as they probably don't say in Glasgow pubs anymore: "Wan singer, wan song!"

This reminds me of my days as a session player back in NYC, where every single ad I answered would be for "girl bassist (or guitarist) with backing vocals" because it was just assumed that if you were a girl, you could sing harmonies. But the thing is, every band I was ever in from when I was 15 on, *was* all about the vocal harmonies. I mean, maybe that's just my taste.

Or maybe it is because most girls I knew (this was back in the 80s mind you) were not pushed or encouraged towards instruments, especially not rock instruments like guitars or drums or - gasp - synths, in the way that the boys around me were. Every bloke I knew, growing up, had a guitar lying around somewhere, but I was the only girl I knew who had one - simply because I'd nicked my dad's. Girls played girly instruments like flute or maybe piano.

So when it came down to wanting to make pop music, we sang, because that was all we had lying around to make the music sound bigger with. (While the boys would make the music bigger by adding more volume and the racket of a drumkit.)

I wonder if that has something to do with it.

The Pipettes are a revival, not of 1960's girl-group, but of late-80's indie bands like The Darling Buds, The Primitives, Voice Of The Beehive etc that were themselves an immature pastiche of Blondie's 60's revivalism. This is borne out by their luddite attention to obsolete genres ("We've got a 7" record out!"), "I Love The Pipettes" badges and an obligatory manifesto that nags you about the "true" meaning of POP while name-dropping Sonic Youth, John Cage and Joe Meek. Fanzine editors have been churning this shit out for decades and the fanzine culture of the 80's was rife with it.

A lot of female singers of the 1960's were the talented and attractive faces for slick business operations involving dozens of songwriters, producers, accountants, marketing executives, choreographers, stylists etc that were all focussed on maximising the business opportunities that existing in the music scene at the time. Despite the Pipettes idiotic manifesto claiming descendancy from the likes of Phil Spector and Mowtown (it's on their website) it's obvious that it's Girls Aloud who have inherited this role. All that The Pipettes have taken from this period are the chord structures and the prissy posing of the women.

The Pipettes will likely be condemned to the same fate as their 80's forebears, that is one half-assed major label album that loses them their indie-cred, possibly followed by one final shambling nail in the coffin release with a re-jigged line-up then kaput. This is so inevitable that it's hard to see why anyone would even get excited about them now.

Fortunately, the indie scene that throws up crap like the Pipettes also gave us credible female musicians like The Slits, Electralane, Dolly Mixtures, Elastica and dozens of others who don't prance around like 8 year olds playing dress-up, none of whom are mentioned in the article. Saint Etienne, who ARE mentioned, are one of the few bands who have done something contemporary and interesting with this whole 60's sound, though Sarah Cracknell undoubtedly provides the eye-candy public image for two or three anonymous toby-jugs. But that's pop music for you, by anyone's definition.

Also note that the Darling Buds and the Primitives were nowhere near so self-consciously retro as the Pipettes, and their retro touchstones were awfully different -- the Primitives' was a mostly visual thing drawn from early-80s new wave's obsession with greasers and bobby-soxers (and their sound was more a glossification of the way the Jesus and Mary Chain came at "classic pop"), while the Darling Buds were more or less entirely up to date in their dance-combo mode and mostly just picked up the retro idea of the pop band as happy teenie-magazine idols.

Not too sure about your pledging allegiance argument. I still stand by my point that the Pipettes are an 80's throwback more than anything else.

their two covers i know of were the stones and buddy holly, by the way, which also isn't v. "60s" as such. i mean i suppose there were elements that drew on things that prior music had done, but that's like all music ever. i'm thinking like "secrets" which had the nonsense syllable vocal harmonies still wasn't using particularly retro progressions with them and led them into a little accel. and then a very 80s bassline.

on the other hand, i've never thought of blondie as particularly retro either except fashionwise.

Huh??

But back to my original point - there were groups inspired by girl groups in the punk era, in the new wave era, and in the indie scene in the nineties. It's a little played out at this point. As for 'mainstream' music, they never really needed that 'fad', as there are always echoes of that stuff in the most popular female stars. So what form exactly is this purported 'trend' supposed to take?

As far as an alleged 'revival', 'One Kiss' is actually quite late in the game. Surely people have heard of 'Growing up Too Fast' or the 'Here come the girls' series? I don't get the fuss about this particular release.

Something very strange is going on here. Neither indie nor mainstream music needs a 'new fad' or 'shot in the arm' and especially not in the form of Brill Building retro-ism.