Craftsmen and Dancing Pixies

last.fm

Check out Emily Manuel's brilliant post for Tiger Beatdown, "The Ten Objectively Best Songs of 2011." When I initially read it through my newsreader, I didn't see the addendum and took it for another year-end best-of list, but something about the reviews was as little askew:

So basically, I used a lot of small cut n pastes from actual reviews – using the reviews of men for the women, and vice versa – then finessed to make them artist-appropriate. I wanted to spotlight the way that music criticism minimises women’s achievements through using ”objective” aesthetic criteria that work to privilege male artists as a whole.

The two that really stood out to me were Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass": "Minaj’s consummate craftsmanship as an artist—in image, flow and production choices—makes her nearly anachronistic among contemporary hiphop acts," and Manuel's rework of Radiohead's "Lotus Flower": "Thom Yorke is not a very talented singer, but the clear tone of his voice works well enough for his indie-electro records. Over a soundscape clever crafted by his producer, Yorke dances through the videoclip like an ethereal, beguiling pixie." When has a review ever alluded to a woman's sense of crafsmanship? Or described a man's dances moves as beguiling and pixie-like? (Though watching Yorke dance through the video for "Lotus Flower," that's pretty accurate.)

It perfectly illustrates the kind of invisible bias that's deeply woven into music criticism. Even when women have control over image, production and creating, they're still perceived as having less agency.