Why are all "great" songwriters white guys with acoustic guitars?

I try not to do too many 101-posts here. A few years ago, I wrote for a site where the bulk of my posts were 101-level, usually along the lines of "here's another thing where women are grossly underrepresented. Let's discuss why." Those posts are important, but it gets tiresome after awhile when you expect women to be underrepresented, and let's face it, when asked to name "great songwriters" most rock fans will go through a progression of (mostly dead) white guys before they name a Joni Mitchell or a Laura Nyro.

Throughout the past decade or so, I've been a member of a handful of music fan forums. I'm not a member of No Depression (though I did at one time read their print magazine), but this is pretty typical of most fanboards' High Fidelity-like nature: Who are your five favorite songwriters. Ooh wait. I think I know the answer to this one:

dylanneilyoungtowneshanklennonmaccatheboss...

Never really varies much. A few ladies were named: Lucinda Williams, Laura Nyro, Patti Griffin, and Joni Mitchell came up more than once. Some women were completely written out of history, in particular Kathleen Brennen, Tom Wait's songwriting and romantic partner, who is never mentioned while Waits himself gets full credit. Save for one vote for Bob Marley and a handful for Robbie Robertson (Native American), POC are entirely absent.

I'm not trying to single No Depression out; they're no different from any other blog or forum I've been on. Not so curiously, when I've pointed this out, those same fans are able to remember tons of female and non-white artists. But unless prompted, they revert to the familiar. One promising thing is that maybe the High Fidelity school of music criticism is dying out (or aging out). Paste magazine, when it was still a print publication, asked its readers to name their favorite songwriters in connection with its critics' favorites. The readers' lists was a lot more diverse.

Warning: Your iPod is a tool of the patriarchy

A big part of why this blog exists is the sheer number of people who've told me, "I just don't like female artists. I don't know why. It's not that I don't think women can be good songwriters or performers, it's just..." which makes this post all the more disappointing.

Granted, I don't think we should be checking our playlists, tallying up the number of women and if parity is not achieved, there goes your feminist cred. (Lord knows I swapped mine for some magic beans and glitter nail polish years ago.) But it's disheartening still.

Music, more than any other medium, is tethered to emotion. Those songs that smack of that moment in time, what you were doing, what you were feeling, when you first heard them are hard to let go, and you shouldn't have to let them go even if they don't jibe with who you are now. I'm the first to admit that I'll spend weeks listening to nothing but old Whiskeytown records, and that my most played artists are sad white boys with acoustic guitars. I'm fully ensconced in indie land with its black jeans and alternative haircuts and bands largely consisting of guys. Sexism and racism in indie and punk remains one of popular music's most overlooked concerns; look at any critics' list, and it's no secret whose music is considered "art." But it's 2012 and the days of one or two good radio stations are long gone. Anyone with an internet connection and some spare time can browse youtube or spotify for new artists. The excuse that "it's harder to find good female artists these days" simply doesn't work anymore.

One thing being a music blogger who tries sees things through a feminist lens has done is force me to look beyond the pop music spectrum and find interesting artists in genres that I wouldn't had I to rely on what radio is telling me is worthwhile. It might be a little harder to just be lazy and just let great music fall in my lap, but it's much more rewarding.

Links & Bits: 10/7/11

With all the coverage of Steve Jobs 's death, there were a few other noteworthy deaths that got scant attention: activist and scholar, Derrick Bell , and singer-songwriter Bert Jansch .

Cassette Tape is cut from the Oxford English Dictionary. How will we explain that shoebox of old mixtapes to our children?

Colorlines suggests Eight New Albums for Your Fall Playlist.

Out.com interviews composer Nico Muhly.

The Willis Test is the Bechdel Test for Music

I vaguely remember lamenting the lack of a way to evaluate music for sexism, a la the Bechdel test for movies. Enter the Willis test :

Over the weekend, I went to (and took part in) a conference dedicated to [Ellen]Willis' work as a music critic, feminist, and thinker, writing in The New Yorker and the Village Voice and more. [...] That's when one participant, Molly Templeton, took a line the writer Rob Sheffield and others kept praising, and called it the Willis Test. (Irin Carmon for Jezebel)

In a 1971 essay called, "But Now I'm Gonna Move," Willis suggests taking a song written by a man and flipping the gender:

A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like [the Rolling Stones'] "Under My Thumb" is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens' gentle, sympathetic "Wild World"; Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female—in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots" — but it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there.

Despite having aging record nerd taste in music, I tried this. It's actually an addictive little game with some pretty surprising results. It works the other way, too. A number of comments mentioned that Taylor Swift's "You Belong to Me," sounds downright creepy and stalkerish when imagined being sung by a man. It kind of reminds me of one of my favorites songs from childhood, Cyndi Lauper's "I Drove All Night," (which, incidentally, was written by a man), which give off an icky stalker-vibe if sung by a man.



Disappointing, but not surprising, some of my favorite highly-acclaimed songwriters, from Tom Waits to Richard Thompson to Ryan Adams, fail the Willis test. (Not always, but a lot more than I'd anticipated.) That these guys have a ton of respect in the music industry says volumes.

More on the Willis Test:
Finally, a way to evaluate music for gender bias (What Tami Said)
Some people work very hard/But still they never get it right (Pandagon)

Rewind: Kathleen Brennan

I'm an obsessive reader of best-of lists. I seek out, especially, the cumulative ones than span the now five decades that make up the rock and roll era. Tom Waits, heralded as one of the great songwriters of the past thirty years, is frequently seen on these lists, but rarely is his co-writer, his wife, Kathleen Brennan. Am I missing something? Isn't she credited as a writer on his most famous songs? Why is that she doesn't make those lists alongside her husband?

Not surprisingly, her mysterious nature is mentioned more often than her talent.In a 2002 article for GQ, writer Elizabeth Gilbert said of Brennan's elusive persona:

But who is Kathleen Brennan? Hard to know, exactly. She's the most mysterious figure in the whole Tom Waits mythology. Newspaper articles and press releases always describe her as the same way as "the wife and longtime collaborator of the gravelly-voiced singer." [...] She's everywhere, but invisible. She's private as a banker, rare as a unicorn, never talks to reporters. But she is the very center of Tom Waits -- his muse, his partner and the mother of his children.

It makes for a great story: the rarely-seen muse/partner, but the partner side is often overlooked or downplayed. The "woman as muse" trope is as old as there is, but I think it's a comfortable position for fans and critics to take. Also, Tom Waits music is inherently, even stereotypically, masculine, and that the actually voice behind some of those tales of pirates and sailors and one-eyed dwarves might be that of his wife unnerves fans.



Whatever the reason, Kathleen Brennan needs to be recognized for the songwriter she is, alone and alongside her husband.

Joan Armatrading in American Songwriter

American Songwriter has a nice piece on Joan Armatrading talking about touring, songwriting, and creativity. Here are some of the highlights:

"When I’m touring I might get ideas and I might get a feeling I want to write, but when I write I need to be in a quiet place, and not distracted, and just on my own. On tour there’s too much moving around–you’re getting to the gig, and you’re doing the soundcheck, then you’re doing interviews, and your day is kind of busy…but I might write something down in a notebook, and then when I’m off the road, I just wait for the writing experiences to come to me."

"So I don’t just say “OK, today I’m gonna write.” It’s the other way around, dictated by the song. I’ll start to write, and stay with it for however long that’s working. If I’m in the mood for it for 15 minutes then that’s how long I’ll do it; if I’m in the mood for it from whenever I start ‘til 5:00 the next morning, then that’s how long I’ll do it."

"..my form of writer’s block is writing rubbish! I can always write, but to me they’re just not very good songs. But I must complete whatever it is I’ve started, so I don’t have lots of unfinished songs and stuff like that. I finish everything, even if it’s bad. And then once I finish it, I will just put it away."

Women of Nuggets: Nancie Mantz and Annette Tucker

I had intended to write a post about women as bandmates in 60s garage rock, but after a search through Nuggets, the bible box set of psychedelica, proved fruitless, I noticed Nancie Mantz and Annette Tucker turned up a couple times in the credits as songwriters:

"Nancie Mantz was a songwriter whose 1960s work in collaboration with Annette Tucker helped jump-start the psychedelic punk boom and, 15 years later, became one of many flash points for the paisley underground. Mantz was principally a lyricist, trained on piano, guitar, and violin but proficient on none of them. Her focus was words, and she was good enough as a song-poet to get signed to Four Star Publishers in the early '60s -- her collaborators there included the company's head, Dave Burgess, and 1960s Crickets member Glen D. Hardin, as well as a young composer with bigger aspirations named Harry Nilsson. She collaborated with Hardin and Nilsson, among others, and had some successes with Keith Colley ("Human Kindness," "Ladder of Success") and with Burgess ("He's a Big Deal"), but it was when she was teamed with Tucker that some very interesting lightning seemed to strike. Tucker had gotten a band called the Electric Prunes signed to a company owned by engineer turned producer Dave Hassinger, who had gotten them a contract with Reprise Records and now needed some songs that could be potential hits. In the interim, Tucker had presented her with the proposed title "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)," which the pair knocked off as a finished composition in less than an hour." (Answers.com)

What makes this kind of unusual, especially in light of Rolling Stone's recent update to their 500 Greatest Songs where women feature prominently, if at all, singing songs penned (overwhelmingly) by men. This flips the script, and produced probably one of the most well-known songs to come out of that era.



And for good measure, "I Had Too Much To Dream" covered by Wayne/Jayne County: