rawkblog asked: I think it's not a question of "if" but "when." Artists portray sexual matters and discuss their personal lives in their lyrics. Fans have relationships with the artist behind the music that has to do with a personal, perhaps sexual, connection. I like female singers whose voices make them sound nerdy and cute, for one. It's an issue of addressing these feelings honestly and in context.
Absolutely, but I think we’re running into a difference between “music writers” and “me writers” (which I think was a distinction BMichael wrote about at one point, though in a very different context so sorry for co-opting it!). Which I am going to use here to distinguish a style of writing, more closely linked to journalism, in which there is a goal of understanding and processing what an artist is trying to do and whether he or she was effective in that goal (“music writing”) and a style of writing in which an individual is working to express a particular experience or connection with art, one that is necessarily linked to one’s own experience, but one to which hopefully others can relate (“me-writing”).
There’s certainly a place and a time for discussing the personal connection a fan has with an artist and that connection, necessarily, includes physical attraction. It always does, and you’re right, in that context it’s much more honest to discuss these sorts of things openly with regards to both men and women. On the other hand, that’s the sort of thing that is always done better on a very personal level.
That sort of discussion is always, inevitably, more about the writer than it is about the artist in question. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Most of what I do falls into this sort of “me-writing” - hell, most blogging ends up in this category.
But your preference for female singers whose “voices make them sound nerdy and cute” has little to no place in a piece that is written to profile an artist, or review an album (which should be “music writing”). What happens so often is that, under the cover of being a music writer, one that helps people to sort of translate and process the art that they are experiencing, men project their own preferences onto an artist. So that, if Lana Del Rey’s voice (for example) appeals to that preference, that’s what the piece ends up being about. That personal connection has little to do with whether an artist is effective in her goal, and rarely allows one to write to an audience that doesn’t come from largely the same background, with largely the same sexual preferences.
An artist lives or dies, then, on the constructed and shared sexual desire of a group of largely men that dominate the discussion around “serious” music. That’s not really “music writing” and when it is done under that banner it sets up and then perpetuates false ideas of what women can and should be.
Women will always, as long as sexism and the patriarchy exist, be subject to these personal whims and desires to a more harmful degree than men will. I just don’t see the increase of sexual discussions concerning men (1) really and truly happening, given demographic makeup of people who write and blog about music, or (2) really being able to change anything, as we instead end up with writing that appeals to a different demographic still without doing what it actually needs to do.
-
bmichael liked this
-
absurdistaudio posted this
