http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?hp

Hi Kat, thanks for the link to your post! I think the key line from it is

men and women who are equally passionate about the same music will probably bring different experiences of it to the table.

Thanks for commenting. All good points, particularly:

A lot of the female artists who were tremendously important in a snapshot of the mid-to-late 90s are half-forgotten now. Not necessarily because they’ve been reassessed negatively: simply, guys are building the lists, and they have other acts at top of mind, so artist #101 falls by the wayside.

The 90s were the decade in which I grew up, and I distinctly remember that when I got into contemporary music it was via about as many female artists as male. In early Britpop for one, women were far more prominent than a retrospective look at the genre would suggest, because as you say, that process of canonization focused around the Blur-Oasis-Pulp axis has given them less attention.

But ultimately, I can handle the lists. It’s the currently fashionable way of writing and talking about music (in the U.S.?) that Tom describes in his comment above that’s my major mental obstacle. I’ve been a blogger and professional writer and my responses to music are primarily analytical. The question I always ask is “what does it mean?” which includes many, many kinds of meaning, including emotional. But I always find myself subtly at odds with male peers and it seems to have something to do with not articulating my emotional responses in the “right” way. Sometimes I read what strikes me as an emo-ish and unnecessarily gushy review or think piece thick with unproved assertions and assumptions (and tons of references to obscure bands) and it’s like reading a foreign language. But the piece receives such an enthusiastic response from the writer’s (mainly male) peers that I have to wonder, am I just stupid–or wrong? Same goes for most tumblr conversations about music. I’ve given up trying to participate in those–it’s not worth the aggravation.

Subdee linked to me to this (I’m the friend she mentioned in her comment). I’m also quite wary of gender essentialism – for one, I tend to be tremendously analytical in my approach to art I like! – and, going back to the “this is how it is for me” thing, equally wary of generalizing my personal dislike for list-making and ranking, which is my major bone to pick with music criticism as it stands. Simply put, I don’t like top 10, 50, 100 lists, and I don’t like rating albums on 10 or out of 5 stars – it’s not how I approach music personally, and what’s more it doesn’t add value for me when others do it. Literally, if I see you’ve ranked a single at #35 and another at #40, it tells me nothing that two separate blog posts on those two singles wouldn’t. Are they even comparable apples to oranges? If it’s a best-of-year overview, probably not. And yet the ongoing conversation revolves around the expectation that one would produce and compare these lists, which I find frustrating and deadening.

Any evidence I have supporting a gender basis to that is anecdotal: I’ve participated in online spaces and conversations that were majority female, and others that clearly skewed male, and I have never seen a female space devoted to *any* topic where numbered lists and scoring systems formed the backbone of the conversation. In male spaces, it always crops up, music criticism being no exception. And one subtle but pernicious effect is that as time passes and lists are built and rebuilt into canons, representation drops out. A lot of the female artists who were tremendously important in a snapshot of the mid-to-late 90s are half-forgotten now. Not necessarily because they’ve been reassessed negatively: simply, guys are building the lists, and they have other acts at top of mind, so artist #101 falls by the wayside. Is 101 that much less important or deserving of canonization than artist 100? Of course not. But if the list is the paradigm…

This may be only one of a number of ways in which music criticism is subtly discouraging to female participants, or it may be the biggie. That I couldn’t say. It’s the biggie for *me.* A difference of opinion that fell along gendered lines, that’s just shouting and posturing, which I can do with the best of the boys! But process is more difficult to fight.

Oh, no offence taken, and thanks for engaging! It’s interesting to see how the assumptions embedded in music criticism can appear bizarre or transparently counter-intuitive to an observer who’s less familiar with that environment. I do think that the assumption of male=rational and technical, female=hysterical and emotive is one that needs challenging wherever it crops up, as it’s not restricted to music criticism.

Thanks for the very good points you raise. This article is primarily based on my experience of British and US criticism, and it would indeed be interesting to track the influence of factors like regional/national variation.

I agree with your second point, too, and the blogs I listed could certainly be expanded to include writers who, as you put it, lean less on their gender (Anwyn Crawford, Frances Morgan, Ann Powers – feel free to list your own!). That said, I do support the idea of dedicated sites for female writers and artists purely because their visibility is often relatively weak. To refer back to my conclusion, though, ideally music writing would involve breaking down divisions between not only genders but also ways of ‘doing’ criticism, moving towards a point where the writer’s gender is not necessarily the prime determinant in either their writing or in the amount of attention they receive.

Thanks both. I think my problem is just that I’m coming at the whole thing from a completely different place. I think this may just be something that is Not For Me, in the sense that my perspective on it is totally different so I can’t really engage with the mainstream view, even to the point of criticising the mainstream, because I don’t know or understand what it is. That might be sad but there you go. I mean no disrespect or attack Rhian (as I hope you know).