Louise Wener's piece about the lack of women rockers for the Guardian makes me think about a question Simon Reynolds asked me athe MIA show this Saturday. Innocent - "what music do you like, when you're not writing?" which got me thinkin 'man i really have been enjoying a lot of women MCs, dance music artists and pop stars lately' like Lady Sovereign, MIA, Chicks on Speed, Enon (okay, dance rock), Fannypack, Masha Qrella, Gravy Train!!!, Adult., Scissor Sisters, Stero Total, etc etc, and well, it is a weird and fundamental shift in my listening to women who make popular music - the only sorta folkie/rockish thing that's lit me on fire is the bizarre but wonderful new Martha Wainright record. I suppose that I've moved away from rock guitar oriented listening in general, but I wonder if there isn't some sort of shift in the world of how women approach making music in general - I mean, the docu Skratch was all about how kids would rather get turntables than guitars, and there is something even more revolutionary and sonically inspiring about a generation of new music makers who don't go straight to the six-string at 15 to make some noise.
So maybe there aren't so many female rockers cause there's Joanna Newsom (say what you want but I agree with Bob - she's damn smart, and talented, even if a little flakey and annoying), Lady Saw, Otep (okay, I don't know much about Otep but she seems fucking cool), Amy Lee, Gwen (girl's got a business, you know?), MIA, etc etc. It's all about diversification, spreading all around, normalizing, taking over, right? Not just about being the next cheesy fucking Yellowcard...I think this why I loved Courtney Love when I was in high school, and couldn't get behind Kathleen Hanna - the rage and outside-ness of Love spoke to the Ohio, 'what the hell is 'riot grrrl' i hate all the popular girls' in me, where Hanna's politics and hipness were totally lost on me - it was too much too soon. When I got to college I didn't get into riot grrrl, I was in college - actually learning all the things Hanna mentioned in her songs and later projected as slideshows - but I wanted to hear transgression, difference, and weirdass noise in some other way - monday free nights at the cooler, the NYU Noise Collective, Throbbing Gristle, and then later Jay-Z, Nas, the Coup, etc...Now that all that's inside of me, do I want to see my female peers playing three chords for 3 minutes 15? Sometimes, fuck ya! But god forbid the "chick rock" I love be anything but MIA, Newsom, Jessica Rylan, The Tiny, Yoko Ono, [ad infinitum]
4 comments:
of course Joanna is smart and talented. it's the flaky and annoying that makes those of us who dislike her do so.
I'm kinda surprised that you wouldn't consider Masha Qrella to be a folk/rock artist. I definitely think of her that way, at least the new solo album.
but there are electronic beats on it, so maybe it's electro-folk...
Definitely. But in my mind, it's way more of a folk rock album than an electronic record - it's just a folk record done with current technology. I think that she's the first person to really nail electro-folk. Other people were being too selfconcious or weren't well versed in electronic music to seem like anything but dilettantes. Her album seems natural, like she never thought about it as a novelty, just a logical thing for her to do given her musical background.
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