Women and Music Writing, 2012

One of the first blogging gigs I had was writing about music for a site dedicated to promoting women's blogs. Finding other women writing about music was a challenge, not because they didn't exist, but because many of them wrote as part of a larger group blog, or as part of the feminist blogging community, but not necessarily as music bloggers. The latter is pretty important: some of the most vital music and entertainment writing comes from within the feminist blog world.

As traditional music blogs become less important in discovering new music, where does this leave the handful of female-penned blogs? Blogs by definition have a short shelf life. This one is already two years old, and I've transitioned from writing exclusively about music to writing a more generalized entertainment blog, but through a feminist lens. Some of that is a function of age: do I want to be a forty-year-old music blogger? I wish I could unequivocally say, "Sure, why not?" but with few examples to model myself after, I don't have the hubris to be "that old lady who wrote four posts about Lana Del Rey last month." (Truth: I already am that old lady.)

I think not having enough examples is an important point: there aren't enough well-known women music critics, period. Off the top of my head? Ellen Willis, who was one of the best when it came to viewing music through a feminist's, and through fan's eyes,  Tricia Rose, who's written some really great books about hip-hop and culture, and Ann Powers who currently works for NPR and the LA Times. If you asked me to name "canonical" music critics, it would be an overwhelmingly male canon with obvious offenders: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, and Robert Christgau.

So what do we do to change the boy's club mentality in music criticism? For one thing, encourage women and girls to think critically. It's often taken for granted that women do think critically, particularly in a male-dominated arena like music writing. It's easy for self-doubt to sink in, especially when one well-respected Rolling Stone writer said in his book, "The archetypal girl fan doesn't have to worry about whether music is cool or valid or authentic. It it makes her dance or she gets hot, she screams. [...] Boys do not scream, so we get threatened." What's that supposed to mean? We don't have to tax our brains worry whether music is valid or not as long as we shake our asses? It's the ultimate backhanded compliment, and speaks volumes about the gender essentialism in music criticism, even among the most well-intentioned writers.

Most importantly, I think we need women writing about women -- as artists and as fans. I hate the idea that a fan's viewpoint is considered less worthy than a professional critic's. Aren't most critics at their core fans? And why would I want to read someone who wasn't?