The “Female” Problem

Whenever music comes up as a subject, I inevitably end up mentioning that I mostly listen to female singers (as if I just listen to all females who sing indiscriminately), which is often met with something like: “Oh, really? Well then, you should check out [woman folky-pop singer that is actually nothing like the music I listen to]!” It’s always a bizarre conversation, because you’d never hear this: “I mostly listen to male vocalists.” “Oh, really? Well then, you should check out this band called U2. They have a great male singer.” This is indicative of a problem with how women in music are discussed: bands with men are just bands, but bands with women are defined by their gender.

As someone who listens to predominantly women, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “female as genre” issue and how to reconcile it with my listening habits and preferences. It’s really obvious that “female” isn’t a genre: women perform all kinds of music –some good and some bad — just the same as men do, and even though my collection is mostly women singers, there’s a ton of variety in there. I get really annoyed when two bands with women singers get compared when they have absolutely nothing in common except a non-dude singer.

At the same time, the fact that I enjoy women singers so much more than men (on average) says something, and sometimes I wonder if it makes me complicit in the “female as genre” thing. I think a lot of my earlier posts on this topic did feed into that, because I couldn’t explain why I liked women singers so much and ended up thinking more about the lyrics and rooting it in some trendy misandry, like “men are boring, “who cares about what dudes have to say,” etc. That all may be true, but it didn’t really get into the heart of the matter, which is the music.

The explanation I didn’t consider is possibly the most obvious one: I like the way women sound more than men. Instead of being about politics or some weird psychological complex, maybe women are simply more suited to the kind of music I like listening to. The song that caused this light bulb to go on was “Loomer.”

“Loomer” is my favorite song on Loveless, and is probably the closest of any song to achieving what I would consider the perfect sound. Its defining characteristic is the low, heavy, almost metallic guitars which contrast with singer Bilinda Butcher’s higher pitched, dreamy vocal, creating an effect where it feels like Butcher is floating above the music, just avoiding getting crushed by the guitars. A lot of the music I like falls into the “loud guitars and higher-pitched vocals” zone typified by “Loomer,” and I think it has to do with that contrast. Something about it just appeals to me for reasons I can’t fully explain, much like most matters of preference/taste in music.

Given that what I love about “Loomer” is the contrast between the guitars and Butcher’s vocals, a sensible (yet maybe controversial) conclusion can be reached: if a man with a typical lower male voice sang this song, it wouldn’t be as “good,” or at least would feel different enough that it would no longer fit my “perfect sound” mold. Depending on your taste, the opposite could be true. Another song on Loveless is “Sometimes,” which has similar guitars and Kevin Shields providing vocals instead of Butcher. On “Sometimes,” Shields’ lower voice blends in more with the guitars, making for a more monochromatic song, which couldn’t have been achieved with Butcher’s vocals. Even though I like “Loomer” more because I prefer the voice/guitar contrast, I wouldn’t change anything about “Sometimes” and recognize that the right singer was picked for each song given what the band was trying to do.

What I realized about looking at the music this way is that what makes me prefer Butcher’s vocals isn’t necessarily that she’s a woman, but that she has a higher voice, which sounds different and evokes different emotions than a lower voice would. It’s possible that I don’t really love “female vocalists” as much as I prefer various characteristics that are naturally more common in women singers than men. In this sense, gender isn’t really a factor in the music itself, because the human voice is just an instrument, like any other. Butcher doesn’t sing on “Loomer” because she’s a woman: she sings because her voice was the right instrument for that song.

This isn’t to say that gender can or should be ignored entirely — men and women have different experiences that likely inform their art in some way, and some music has undeniably feminine or masculine themes that should be a part of the conversation around it. I just think I tended to overrate how big of an impact gender had on music I liked — that just because the common denominator of so much music I loved was “woman singer,” that didn’t mean I liked all of it because they were women. And when I praised those artists on here or elsewhere, my focus should have been on the music, not on the fact that it was women making it.

Colleen Green – “I Want to Grow Up”

Something I’ve found interesting about getting older is that people seem to grow up at different speeds. I know some people my age who breezed into adulthood and are already grown-ups. Things have always moved much more slower for me, and my life usually feels like a series of very cautious baby steps compared to the confident strides that other people are making.

The Facebook era makes this even more stressful by turning growing up (and life in general) into a quantifiable competition: you can now measure the quality of someone’s life by how many likes their posts get, how many photos they’re tagged in, or how many “friends” they have. If you’re lagging behind your peers, Facebook does a good job of informing you by using an algorithm to make sure all of their momentous accomplishments are shoved in your face every time you view your timeline (which only happens because you set a Facebook bookmark years ago that you’re too lazy to remove, but still accidentally click on sometimes while going about your Internet business). The grown-ups always have those big highlighted Facebook posts that take up 90% of your computer screen and get dozens of likes and comments. Meanwhile, mine is mostly some sparsely read blog links with some intermingled bad jokes.

Colleen Green’s latest album, I Want to Grow Up, as you could probably guess from the title, captures this not-quite-adult feeling I’ve had with a brutal level of accuracy. I’m not normally big on the idea of lyrics “speaking to me,” since I find it corny and self-absorbed, but in this case it was hard to ignore that every song on the album was basically my internal monologue for the last few months. On each song, Green describes these anxieties — ranging from TV addiction and a short attention span to the ultimate fear of dying alone — as if she’s constantly facepalming after just screwing something up (some sample lyrics: “I’m shitty and lame and I’m dumb and I’m a bore,” “I can’t hold a conversation,” “I’ve gotta stop doing things that are bad for me.”) It’s a familiar mindset for anyone who has been stuck in life and knows they need to do something, but isn’t sure exactly what they should do or how to do it.

All of the negativity and self-loathing would make this a hard album to listen to if Green didn’t have a gift for writing catchy, addictive pop songs. I Want to Grow Up is full of bright, grungy melodies, which along with Green’s voice provide a dissonance between the sound of the music and the dark lyrics. At least half of the songs have been stuck in my head in the last week, with the title track, “TV,” and “Things That Are Bad For Me” leading the way. But the most jolting track on the album is “Deeper Than Love,” a painful song about the fear of intimacy and the possibility of never finding the one — or a one. (It also has another lyric I relate to a lot: “I don’t wanna think about it. It’s too scary.”)

I Want to Grow Up is not a very subtle album. The lyrics are as literal as it gets, and the songs are all mostly familiar sounds to anyone who likes 90s music. I actually think this is part of why it’s good. It takes familiar structures and signifiers (slacker pop songs) and warps them with the lyrics, which have a real edge because they are so straight-forward. Ultimately, your enjoyment of the album probably hinges on those lyrics. If you get where she is coming from, are in a similar place, or have been in that place yourself, it’ll be an enjoyable album that has real emotional depth. If you’re one of those people who grew up easily, I could see her annoying you, and you would probably be better off spending your time playing croquet and drinking tea or whatever it is that real adults do.

Sleater-Kinney – “No Cities to Love”

About 3-4 years ago, I absolutely worshiped Sleater-Kinney. I listened to all of their albums a million times, wrote about them here a bunch, and just generally would gush about them to anyone that listened. Unfortunately, I was late to the scene (as usual) and never got to experience them as an active band. This led to me developing a sad ritual where I would frequently google “Sleater-Kinney” and hope for some news, any news, that indicated they’d be reuniting. At some point, I stopped googling, stopped being hopeful for a reunion, and pretty much stopped listening to the band altogether — not because I suddenly hated them, but because it felt like there was nothing new to discover in their music. I didn’t need Sleater-Kinney anymore.

Of course, then they actually did reunite last year, and I had some mixed feelings. Most of these had to do with guitarist/singer Carrie Brownstein, who has ascended to some level of celebrity in the last few years as a star of the TV series “Portlandia.” She’s stated in interviews that Sleater-Kinney needed to be a full-time thing, and I was worried that it would be treated more like a side project, which doesn’t seem like a context the band can function in.

My other big concern was Sleater-Kinney being the subject of the modern album hype cycle. This is more of a niche thing for people overly plugged into the music press, Twitter, etc, but it’s a phenomenon I really hate, where the lead-up to a band’s album is treated like a coronation that results in a ton of mostly uncritical hyperbole and excitement. This has the unfortunate effect of making any band feel like the music equivalent of the New York Yankees — an overly popular powerhouse team you never stop hearing about, get really sick of before you even see them play, and desperately want to see lose. To me, Sleater-Kinney has always felt like an underdog band of sorts, so seeing them pushed into this Yankees role was pretty lame, and I eventually had to tune it all out as much as I could.

None of this even gets into the actual music, which is the other problem: at the end of their initial run, the band had seemingly pushed themselves as far as they possibly could with The Woods, an album I still love because of its towering ambition and ferocity. Following it up seemed virtually impossible to me, especially after a ten-year layoff, so No Cities to Love had an insurmountable task from the get-go.

A lot of these concerns pretty much stopped mattering once I actually, you know, listened to the damn album. The band hits their groove immediately on “Price Tag,” a fiery working-class anthem, and keeps it going through my favorite track “Fangless” and the roaring “Surface Envy.” The rest of the album doesn’t quite reach the heights of those first three tracks, but there is still a consistency and solidness to No Cities to Love that would be surprising after a ten-year layoff if this wasn’t Sleater-Kinney, a band with incredible chemistry that spent years routinely churning out great music.

My favorite part of No Cities to Love is definitely the re-emergence of Corin Tucker, who still has one of the most essential voices in rock music. I actually liked her albums with The Corin Tucker Band and thought they were generally under-appreciated, but she is really at home fronting this band, and her voice always gives the songs an urgency and jolt they might otherwise not have. On guitar, she also provides more of a low-end on this album than she has before, giving the usually trebly band a more full sound, and her vocal interplay with Brownstein hasn’t missed a beat since The Woods. Meanwhile, Janet Weiss is still a monster on drums, giving the songs a real drive and purpose.

There is a tendency to assume any album made after this big of a layoff needs to be a huge artistic statement, which No Cities to Love avoids — for the most part, it’s just a really good rock album. I find that makes it a bit less compelling than something like The Woods or One Beat, which were more ambitious, exciting albums, but I also don’t really see that as the purpose of No Cities to Love. This is the start of a new era for the band — a reintroduction of sorts — and it shows that they can still make thrilling, smart rock music. And after all my reservations, it convinced me that I do still need Sleater-Kinney after all.