The Pitchfork People's List and the 12%

Or why men still really don't listen to female artists.

Or why so few women participated in the Pitchfork list in the first place.

Or why we're still talking about OK Computer.

As promised, Pitchfork published its readers' poll  this week; as expected, white boys with guitars dominated. Disappointingly, but again, not shocking if you've spent any time reading Pitchfork the past decade-and-a-half, of the nearly 30,000 readers who filled out a ballot, only 12% identified themselves as women.

Kelsey Wallace wrote a great piece for Bitch magazine  about the venerable site's lack of parity:

What this list does do, though, is underscore how heavily male the music industry still skews, especially when it comes to higher-minded "indie" fare. If we look at album sales during this same 15-year period, many more women top the charts, but since they're pop artists like Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Carrie Underwood, they aren't considered when it comes to lists like this one.

In other words, "pop" stars like Britney and Beyoncé make music to move units, but they aren't making "art." It's an argument that most indie or rock fans wouldn't hesitate to support, and given the subjective nature of music, I'm not going to argue the artistic merits of one artist over another, but the problem is two-fold: men still aren't listening to women and women are being shut out of the kind of community music fandom has to offer.

Lindsay Zoladz, a contributing editor at Pitchfork, asked a few of her female friends  why they didn't make lists of their own. Writer Rachel Maddux also posted to her blog a number of reasons why she didn't participate. And as a women who has spent a lot of time in fan circles,  I can tell you, it's not always fun when you're constantly being "mainsplained." Of course including women solves only half the problem, and puts the onus on those women to make sure female artists are given the same respect as male artists.

Links & Bits: 8/24/12

Pitchfork's People's List i s out. I'm writing a longer something about this for tomorrow, but really, it's exactly what you'd expect from a list of Pitchfork readers' favorite albums of the past 15 years: lots of white dudes.

Jezebel's Katie J.M. Baker wrote about Taylor Swift's new single  and being an unapologetic pop music lover.

Feministing posted this pro-choice cover of "Call Me Maybe."

The one in which I come clean with my truly provincial taste in music

I have a twisted relationship with all things listicle. My painfully linear brain likes anything ordered and numbered and easily classified, but the music fan in me knows what a Herculean task it is rank one's favorite records. Not to mention that most best-ofs are rip-offs of last year's best-of with current darlings added.

But I'm hypocrite. And a sheep. So I added my ballot to Pitchfork's People's List.

I realize I'm probably far outside Pitchfork's target audience. Wearing my age on my sleeve, I didn't try to be cool, filling up my list with obscure bands for whom even the too-hip-for-the-room twenty-somethings writing for Pitchfork would approve. I didn't pick records that "should" make the list (no OK Computer anywhere to be seen), but forty albums from the last fifteen years that meant a lot to me, or spoke to me, or altered what I think good music is supposed to be.

The top five are pretty accurate; the rest I filled in arbitrarily. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is kind of an obvious choice, and I think it's just strange enough that it doesn't smack of any particular era anymore. It has a good, probably now-forgotten story surrounding it (dropped from the original label, went on to score gold status, blah blah blah) along with the weird conspiracy theory that it somehow predicted 9/11 with songs like "Ashes of American Flags," and the "towers" cover. I Am a Bird Now is just gorgeous and I never tire of it, even half-a-decade later. Rufus Wainwright, I could have picked any of his, but Want One is the album I'd want as the soundtrack to my life. Stereo renewed my interest in all things Replacements and laid the foundation for comeback of sorts for Paul Westerberg. Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road inspired many a bad karaoke, and I still love her for it. In other words, I chose albums solely for their nostalgic value. I'm pretty okay with that.

The only "rule" I adhered to was to limit one entry per artists. I'm an all-or-nothing fan, so I could have easily listed four Rufus Wainwright record, three of Lucinda's, and so on. Narrowing down 15 years of music to twenty or forty or even one hundred records is harder than it seems, and the late 90s and early 00s are a little over-represented, given that I'm probably at least a decade older than the average Pitchfork reader.

Fifteen years, but where are the ladies?

I hate making Pitchfork the scapegoat for everything wrong with music writing, particularly, music blogging, but considering that their list of best music writing was roundly criticized for having few female-penned books, it's incredibly disappointing that their 15 Writers/15 Songs feature contains exactly one song from a female artist. Katherine St. Asaph  wrote this on her Tumblr, and it got me thinking about the ways we as fans use music:

It’s still much rarer than it should be to spot more than zero or one woman on people’s lists of favorite musicians (or authors, filmmakers, etc.), and — unfounded speculation starts now — I wonder if it’s because people are more receptive to seeing female musicians’ work as good but not so much personally meaningful. There’s focus on musicians’ technical prowess, songwriting skill, etc., but it doesn’t seem to translate to repeat listens or to connecting with the music beyond simply admiring its construction as much as it could. The solution’s obviously for more people who do to write about it and write about it well, but then you crash into the writer gender ratio again. Ugh.

Had you posited before I started writing about music, before I began really paying attention to the lack of parity in the rock blogosphere, that fans find more person meaning in dude rock, but aren't averse to acknowledging a female musician's technical prowess, I would have probably said, "Don't you have that backwards?" I mean, when I read personal accounts of "records that changed my life," Exile in Guyville comes up, as well records from Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney, Hole, Queen Laifiah, and hell, even the Spice Girls, but that's only because I rarely leave the (relative) safety of a few ladyblogs. I think there's definitely a lot of truth there, but it says more about the insular world of indie rock in which Pitchfork came to prominence.

More On Women who (Write) Rock

In reaction to Pitchfork's list of the best books about music, which was more than little stingy with female writers and critics,  Newsprint-Frey also published a list of their favorite music bios and criticism penned by women. Check it out. There are some really good choices here.

Pitchfork's 60 Favorite Music Books Short On Female Authors

I don't fault Pitchfork's writers for only including two female-penned books -- the new Ellen Willis anthology and Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell's Rock, She Wrote -- in their list of 60 Favorite Music Books. When I think of the volumes of music criticism I've read over the course of the last two decades, just as a fan, not enough of them were written by women. I'm trying to rectify that.

And if putting together a list of music writing where women are fairly represented is hard enough, designing a list of criticism solely written by women is near impossible, not because women aren't writing about music, but because women's music criticism is largely unread. Though to read some of the selections on Pitchfork's list, you'd think women weren't interested -- or worse, in capable of -- critically thinking about music. What's most disappointing, though, is more than a few of the writers whose books made the list have some pretty archaic ideas about women as music fans. I'd like to see a list where a Tricia Rose shares billing with Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, but it's no secret that music criticism is still overwhelmingly a boy's club.

Is Pitchfork Biased Against Middle-Aged Women?

(Disclaimer - I am not an investigative journalist. Everything here is part speculation, part nagging suspicion, and part whatever I was able to cull together in one afternoon. No actual science was involved.)

As a woman, and one who is closer to her forties than her twenties, I have more than a passing interest in how sexism and ageism intersect in the music blogosphere. This link a grammar, a writer for Pitchfork, left on his tumblr says that the popular music blog has a bias against music made by women over the age of forty. According to Flavorwire's research, Pitchfork's reviews for a handful of recent albums by female artists are substantially lower than the averages given by Metacritic which pulls in reviews from many sources. Some of the examples given are Hole's Nobody's Daughter, which scored a 55/100 according to Metacritic, and a 29/100 from Pitchfork. Madonna's Hard Candy gets a Metacritic score of 65%, almost 10% higher than Pitchfork's.

Yeah, that smells a little like bias. But wait. a grammar says their research is "is missing several control groups, including but not limited to: (a) how Pitchfork ratings as a whole compare to Metacritic averages, and (b) how Pitchfork ratings of men over 40 compare to Metacritic averages, plus also things like (c) genres/label-origins/how-long-they’ve-been-making-music of Pitchfork-reviewed albums by men/women over 40, and how they compare, etc. (Is there a male Madonna to compare with here? Is it George Michael? A male Liz Phair?) See also: how do Pitchfork ratings for albums with Metacritic scores compare to Pitchfork ratings for albums not indexed on Metacritic? Let’s not invoke science unless we’re invoking SCIENCE!"

Because I am a nerd like that, I tallied some of the scores for albums made by men over forty, and compared them to Metacritic's cumulative score:

Wilco's The Album
Pitchfork - 73%
Metacritic - 76%

Morrissey's Year of Refusal
Pitchfork - 81&
Metacritic - 79%

Bruce Sprinsteen's Working on a Dream
Pitchfork - 58%
Metacritic - 72%

Pearl Jam's Backspace
Pitchfork - 46%
Metacritic - 79%

To be honest, I had to do a bit of digging to find Pitchfork reviews of albums made by artists over forty of either gender. That itself should be addressed, but from the few I did find, I'll hazard a guess that a) Pitchfork does have some bias against music made by women over forty, b) Pitchfork has some bias against music made by middle-aged people regardless of gender, or most likely, c) Pitchfork has some bias against artists not currently in the indie rock, pop, or hip-hop pantheon. (Wilco and Morrissey remain in the critics' good graces despite crossing over into "elder statesmen" territory, and among the albums made by women, Laurie Anderson's reviews were consistent across the board.)

This is not to pick on Pitchfork -- I think you would probably get the same results from any popular music blog. We live in an ageist, sexist society, and our popular culture unfortunately reflects that.