This CD was part of the Kerrang! Hometaping series, in which various leading lights of the hard rock scene, invariably men (do shout me if this has changed, as I have since given up on K!, but my optimism’s economy-size) compiled mixtapes of their favourite tracks past and present. This one, compiled by Casey Chaos of parental-guidance-sticker-collecting Cali-punk-metal outfit Amen, wasn’t a bad mix, looking at it now. For the most part.

But it was the presence of I Am A Cliché on the tracklist that put the CD on regular rotation on my Discman. That track stood out, sparking nicely off The Distillers and The Adverts (the sum total of female input, there) and kicking defiantly against the roll-your-eyes-or-lose-your-lunch misogyny of Let’s Fuck by the Murderdolls (at least the CD had range). And the more I listened to Poly Styrene‘s life-affirming shouts, the more alert I felt to the complete shit that passed (passes!) for acceptable attitudes to gender in some of the rest of the bands on the CD, in the mag, in my music collection, in general. (For that jarringly educational juxtaposition, Casey’s at least to be thanked.)

From there it was a short leap to the rest of Germ Free Adolescents. Nobody forgets the first time they hear the crisp, sing-song pronouncement that opens Oh Bondage, Up Yours! : Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think… (when I set up this blog, I entered it as the mousefloat text description for the Music Box category on the sidebar). Every time I hear it, I feel that emphasis on but I think… reverb through me: powerful, unabashed and instantly compelling. And funny. “Playing with words and ideas, having a laugh about everything, sending it up”, as Poly herself put it to the Independent in 1998 (this approach was arguably worlds away from Amen’s bloodied-up on-stage histrionics, so it’s perhaps faintly ironic she made Casey’s list of hometaped heroes, but anyway).

Poly passed away this morning, having, as her site team have aptly put it, “won her battle to go to higher places”. For me, it’s the loss of a personal hero – she formed the Spex in 1978 by throwing an ad in Melody Maker with a header demanding the attention of YOUNG PUNX WHO WANT TO STICK IT TOGETHER.

She’s on record, in a recent interview with 6Music quoted in her BBC obituary, as saying, “I know I’ll probably be remembered for Oh Bondage Up Yours!… I’d like to be remembered for something a bit more spiritual.”

For me, the impact of X-Ray Spex actually was akin to something spiritual. Poly threw into stark, uncompromising relief the lack of female voices normally in play in mainstream rock, in Kerrang!, and so on. She made me wonder, for the first time, what I thought about that. (Clue: it ends in “up yours”.) So I think in a way, although the Spex’s one album probably will always be her most famous music, that’s okay.

Cheers, Poly. Here’s to you. Rest in peace. (Say hi to Ari Up for us.) The world’s a little bit less day-glo now, and much the worse for it.

• Listen to Germ Free Adolescents on last.fm
• Visit Poly’s official site and find out about her solo projects – her newest album Generation Indigo came out last month
• Poly Styrene Remembered: a photo set on NME.com





Team BadRep is currently on holiday and will return to the usual posting schedule next week

]]> /2011/04/26/a-little-less-day-glo-goodbye-poly-styrene/feed/ 2 5146 /2011/01/26/women-men-and-music-the-xy-factor-part-2/ /2011/01/26/women-men-and-music-the-xy-factor-part-2/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:00:20 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=2696 Part One of this article identified a split in approaches to music between the intellectual and abstract and the personal and emotive. This is, of course, a false dichotomy, as is the concomitant view of the former approach as a male preserve and the latter a female one. It’s not like emotional engagement can’t be channelled into sharp and intelligent critique. And it’s not like girls are incapable of dry and po-faced analysis (an album review of mine once received the amusingly disgruntled response “I bet you write for The Wire, you pretentious cunt”. I mean, chance would be a fine thing). Neither are male writers incapable of experiencing or articulating an emotional reaction. Gender has no intrinsic – as opposed to socially and culturally instilled – effect on how an individual engages with music. But the effects of cultural conditioning in creating this false dichotomy, and the degree to which ‘male’ ways of music writing are privileged – the existence of what Everett True describes as a dominant male hive mind – goes some way towards explaining why female music writers are so scarce in the mainstream press.

Music criticism as presently constructed has an undeniable tendency to discourage female participation. Sarah Barnes recalls that when writing her first album review:

I felt out of my depth, because my experiences of music reviewing told me that what I wrote had to be very technical, almost cold. All that technical knowledge seemed very male, and I think I had picked up on this as a pre-requisite in music criticism from reading copies of Kerrang … or listening to my boyfriend reeling off genres and sub-genres until my head starts spinning.

More recently, Aoife Barry’s study of gender imbalance in music magazines compares reading The Wire to ‘poring over academic texts in an attempt to formulate an answer for an essay due the next day; the feeling that out of the dry sentences I have to pull something tangible that makes sense to me’.



Image by Flickr user happyfacesrock, shared under a Creative Commons license.

The masculinist bent of mainstream music criticism has seen certain forms of engagement with music – attention to the emotional, the pleasure-seeking, the glittery, the silly, the frivolous, the undeadly serious – conceptualised as less deserving concerns, and downgraded accordingly, along with musical genres – pop, glam, disco – which are seen as primarily catering to these concerns. So in order to be taken seriously, to do ‘proper’ criticism, one must elevate cerebral, scholarly Pure Music and implicitly disparage the dizzy, gushing immediacy of the personal Applied. Better a nitpicking Hornbyite geek than a groupie, regardless of the degree to which these categories can and do overlap in the same individual.

However nebulous or subconscious this construction may be, it ties in unhelpfully with rock-solid sexism and gender imbalance within the media and the music industry to reinforce both the image and reality of music writing as a boys’ club. As this excellent overview explains:

Periodicals like Rolling Stone and websites like Pitchfork Media – which have largely usurped print publications – tend to discuss the appearances of women more often than those of men, take their music less seriously, stereotype them and incorrectly attribute their successes to male coworkers. These double standards govern how women and men are viewed in general, rather than being specific to music criticism and reporting. Music journalism is a product of its culture’s gender roles and consumer demands. When this culture combines with mainstream pop and rock publications’ largely male staff and the sexism already prevalent in the music business they address, critics unwittingly carry on tropes that they have the power to ameliorate.


So, as noted ice-skater V. I. Lenin once asked, what is to be done? First, let’s acknowledge how many women are interested, engaged, and actively writing about music. Female music bloggers may still constitute a niche, but as all these sites show, we are out there. Blogs are necessary and useful – journalist and promoter Sara Sherr urges female writers to ‘pitch, pitch, pitch… If no one publishes you, start a blog’ – but should be accompanied by a concerted attempt to address the mainstream’s failure to acknowledge the validity of other voices, and to recognise the benefits of a personal and emotional contribution, in its construction of a credible approach to music.

The more women who are seen to be writing about music, the more women will write about music, and the more the dynamics and conventions and hierarchies of writing about music (by both women and men) change because of more equal participation in it, the more we all benefit, the more the form progresses. – Frances Morgan

Active and visible participation by women is a key part of promoting perspectives beyond the mainstream, an expansion which can only enrich the analysis, understanding and enjoyment of music. The road we take from here needs to pass through the land of a thousand dances as well as a thousand doctorates.

For Rhian Jones’s own blog, hop over to Velvet Coalmine.


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