Gunslinging Bird

When I say I love something I do not say so ironically. You can consider everything that I recommend on this blog to be something I legitimately enjoy unless I explicitly say otherwise. If you need proof that I listen to what i say i listen to you can go to my last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/absurdistaudio

rawkblog:

Frankly, I’d like to see writers start writing about male artists’ looks rather than having everybody stop touching the subject entirely. It’d be more honest. It’s part of the presentation, there’s no pretending it doesn’t matter. 

But does it really matter when we’re reviewing records or discussing music? There’s always going to be that piece of description in interviews or live performances and you’ve got a point there - writers should mention men’s looks too; of course, it’s always done so poorly that the solution is obviously not as simple as just pushing writers to talk about the way men look; it requires a serious reevaluation of the way that we think about sexual objectification and art. 

I don’t think anyone is (or at least very few people are) actually making the claim that it’s never appropriate to talk about the way an artist looks; and the problem is not so easily boiled down to an imbalance in the attention men and women get w/r/t “hotness” or whatever. I would argue that that imbalance is rather a symptom of how out of hand we’ve gotten with the idea that women’s ‘attractiveness’ and their art is somehow intimately connected. By virtue of the society we live in, elevating the discourse on male attractiveness wouldn’t have the same effect on men as it has on women, but it would result in a bunch of shitty articles and album reviews that don’t actually say anything about the merits of a particular artist.

That’s the sort of thing that happened after D’Angelo made the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” - everything (prior to his music hiatus) became about him being the sexy naked guy in the video. On a certain level, I have less sympathy for him in that situation than I do for, say, Lana Del Rey because, for me, it’s like “Dude, D’Angelo, welcome to the shit women have to deal with every time they do anything that features their image, naked or not.”

On the other hand, it was a shitty thing for him to have to go through, and though he did make the decision to place the aesthetic for that video in a highly sexual realm, there was no reason for the reputation placed on him as strictly “that naked guy” and a lot of shoddy profiles and record reviews resulted because, while the song and the album have their sexual elements, you can’t reduce the entire thing down to looks. 

The problem, then, is not that we don’t talk about male artists’ looks, because we do sometimes. And the problem is not that we don’t talk about male artists’ looks enough. Rather, there’s a no rational separation between music writers’ (a group made up disproportionally of heterosexual men) sexual desires stemming from the decision that a woman is attractive, and appreciation or hatred for the music that woman makes. That is, it becomes impossible in men’s heads to separate the fact that Lana Del Rey is an attractive (or unattractive depending on who you’re reading) woman, while also making mediocre music; such that, (maybe subconsciously) it becomes understood that she makes mediocre music because she can skate by on her looks, her music is diametrically opposed to Lady Gaga and Rihanna not because her music is actually the antithesis of that style, but rather because she looks like the kind of girl that would be nothing like Lady Gaga or Rihanna. 

That sort of assumption is unfair to Lana Del Rey, it would be unfair to any male artist (where, say, Bon Iver is opposed to D’Angelo because Bon Iver has a sexy beard!), and it represents really lazy assumptions about the way the world works. It lets looks drive the discussion in a realm where, most of the time, looks really don’t matter.

Maybe D’Angelo’s abs mattered in the “Untitled” music video, and maybe Lana Del Rey’s video for “Video Games” pushes an image of her as a sexual being, but Voodoo and Born to Die are audible entities that would be better approached as if the reviewer has no idea what the artist looks like. The thing is, when you’re a musician, there are few places where looks really and truly matter.

  1. mlee525 said: Conversely, I’d like to see writers write less about female artists’ looks. (Specifically anything related to Adele’s figure or Lana Del Rey’s rumored plastic surgery.) Not saying it’s not part of the package; just not the most important part, imo.
  2. absurdistaudio reblogged this from rawkblog and added:
    But does it really matter when we’re reviewing records or discussing music? There’s always going
  3. barelyeducated said: Was it you who mentioned that Foster the People definitely got famous off the fact that they are straight out of an Urban Outfitters lookbook?
  4. thenewblack said: You should read my blog more. All I do is talk about how indie bros. haha
  5. rawkblog posted this