CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
I've been thinking about starting a thread like this for a while but since it's International Women's Day today it seems apt to start it now.

The idea is a thread to highlight music written/performed by women, and also to discuss stuff relating to gender in music, such as representation in music, what differences (if any) there are between the music men produce and women create, and so on. And, as alluded to in the title, that notion (expounded upon by Simon Reynolds in e.g. the quote below) of music that women and men (generally) like/dislike, or that has 'masculine' and 'feminine' coding...

'Feminine Pressure is the name of an all-female Garage DJ crew. In a very real sense, UK Garage is organised around the pressure of feminine desire; a key factor in the scene’s emergence was when women defected en masse from the junglist dancefloor, fed up with the melody-and-vocal-devoid bombast of techstep. Two-step Garage bears the same relation to Jungle that lover’s rock did to dub reggae: it’s the feminised counterpart of a “serious” male genre. Like two-step, lover’s rock was a UK-spawned hybrid of silky US soul and Jamaican rhythm that restored treble to the bass-heavy frequency spectrum and replaced militant spirituality with romantic yearning. UK Garage pirate MCs send out shouts to couples cuddling at home (“or even engaged in horizontal activities”). The mic chat can get seriously lewd, in the beyond suggestive, explicit style of modern R&B; on one station I heard an MC rap “to the ladies, undo my zip/and you’ll find I’m well equipped”! There’s even a pirate station called Erotic FM.'

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writin...core-continuum-series_6_two-step-garage_1999_

Obviously we're more or less a bunch of middle aged blokes so this could be an embarrassing failure - but it could also be an embarrassing success!
 
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CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
Found this interesting from a Gruniad article on the subject of female/male musical taste https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/feb/20/popandrock.news

If we are to cautiously agree that women are more at ease with discussing emotions, and therefore more comfortable with the idea of embracing their emotional response to music, then it is logical to assume that the songs which aim for the emotional jugular might appeal more to women than to men. How else to explain James Blunt? This is not to say that men do not have an emotional response to music, rather that the emotion is expressed differently. In Nick Coleman's excellent article about how his partial hearing loss has affected his relationship with music, published in G2 yesterday, he wrote that he had always heard music three-dimensionally, architecturally: "I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion." I would further suggest that the framework of music appreciation, the lists and the cataloguing, the trivia and the multiple copies of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, gives men another kind of structure through which to examine their emotions.

The problem - and it is one exacerbated by Douglas's opposition of "emotional" and "intellectual" responses to music - is that there prevails a notion that to take anything other than a masculine, cataloguing approach to music is a weakness; that loving the way Bob Dylan sings the line "And I was standin' on the side of the road/ Rain fallin' on my shoes" in Tangled Up in Blue is somehow not as important as knowing where he recorded that song (his farm in Minnesota, in the winter of 1974) or countless other facts (that it was originally composed in the key of E, later changed to A, for example). I know these things, but they don't matter that much to me. Should a total recall of labels and recording studios and session musicians and chord changes really be described as "intellectual"? We might just as easily call it "clinical".


This rings true for me as a music nerd - it's a predominantly male word of knowledge acquisition and the competitive demonstration of superior taste. And in terms of how we talk about music, us nerds do tend to be more interested in structure and technique than emotion. Would also help explain the apparent female/male division on techstep, which aside from being extremely aggressive is also fairly monotonous, emotionally speaking. Or perhaps if women are more emotionally receptive, they feel the depressing bleakness of techstep's emotional register more vividly than men for whom it is simply quite a cool and aggressive sound.
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
I think there's a risk of essentialising what women "are" and like... as if that is somehow innate.

Also a real risk of men talking about music which is made and DJed by men as if this is some kind of liberatory experience for women.

img_8690.jpg

I went to this party and it was great. All the DJs were female. And they played the usual Dead by Dawn stuff like breakcore, speedcore and gabba. As usual there were a fair few women in the crowd also.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's about a spectrum of experience stretched across the two poles of will and surrender with will coded as male and surrender coded as female.
 

luka

Well-known member
"and please do remember,
people,
the inbreath is will
the outbreath,
surrender"
 
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CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
Yes I agree - perhaps so risky that it's bound to shipwreck any such thread as this...

Wait til Jordan Peterson sees this thread. :eek:
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
I don't know what i was thinking creating this thread actually because its bound to turn into a 30 page argument like the its great when you're straight thread

I guess I was just interested in the recent shift I've noticed (perhaps illusory) towards female DJs in house/techno, and wondering if that will in terms of the music actually have an effect, or if it will be more or less the same music as before, only played by a healthy mix of men and women (which I'm all for before you feminazis get started)
 

luka

Well-known member
no need to worry about eden's liberal palpitations if you adopt my objective schema.
 
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luka

Well-known member
obviously both rely on the other. theres a biting point at the apex where the magic happens /\ that's like, the whole point of sex, and art and life and etc
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
Redemptive wordplay idea:

'FEMININE PRESSURE' = ALSO THE PRESSURE WOMEN FEEL TO BE FEMININE/MEN FEEL TO BE MASCULINE'
 

luka

Well-known member
it's why you know perfectly well what is being implied by 'feminine pressure' or what is implied by any attempt to code music as masculine or feminine. becasue there are norms of usage.
 

luka

Well-known member
im saving the thread from a very boring debate by providing poles which AVOID having to use male vs female.
 

luka

Well-known member
a man can swoon after all. can sigh and flutter and enter into that domain of experience. and vice versa. it's about a geography of experience.
 

luka

Well-known member
politics is boring. 'science' is boring.always better to return to the experience.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
do you not understand? its not tricky i dont think? strictly about usage not about biology or ethics or anything else

Except you fucked that up by coding active things male and submissive things female? ❌
 
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