The results from Pitchfork People’s List were published today, and 88% of voters were male. (12% were female, there wasn’t an “other” option, fwiw.) Since I Am The Twelve Percent and I spend a lot of my time talking about and thinking about and writing about music, I wanted to ask a couple of women who didn’t make lists why they didn’t make them, because I thought they’d have more insight about this skewed percentage than I would. So I took the very unscientific and lazy approach (which is to say: these are four individual opinions, not meant to be indicative of What Womankind Thinks About This) of emailing a couple of my closest lady internet friends and here is what they said.
Friend #1: “Oh let me talk about this.
[Dude Friend Of Ours] told me about [the People’s List], otherwise I probably wouldn’t have known it was a thing because I don’t read pfork too often. And I looked at his list which was like 50 albums and then this girl he’s crushing on’s list, which had like TEN only. And I was like you cant like her she ranked Spoon too high and obviously doesnt CARE about music since she only listed ten.
ANYWAY the point is that I love making things like that and I went to make mine and I had 70 albums and got overwhelmed with ranking them and forgot and never published it. Honestly I think it takes some things to have the energy to make one of those: a) some degree of narcissism to assume that literally anyone cares what albums you like b) enough self esteem to believe your choices are correct or to not care if people disagree with you or think less of you because of which albums you like c) the fastidious patience to actually complete a task that is based mainly in narcissism.
I have some of these things, and there are many women who also have these things, but I would say in general that men are more apt to have all of them.”
Friend #2: “My issue is that I don’t listen to a ton of new music. So whenever men are like, "What are you listening to these days?” (and ONLY men ever ask that as an ice breaker), I’m like, ‘Um this album that came out in 1983.’
And then they quiz you on the artist’s entire catalog. For instance, I really like this one Mission of Burma album, but I am hesitant to bring that up to a man, because I don’t listen to ALL of their albums.
I agree that men are more likely to think their opinions are Definitive and Correct.
As per women not finding as much pleasure in solitary activities, maybe? But a lot of our lady friends love to read and to discuss books and articles and etc. I’m turned off from talking about music because I’ve encountered so many men who are mainsplain-y about it, while I haven’t had that same experience with books, because a lot of men are dismissive of, like, Jane Eyre, so we never have those convos to begin with.“
Friend #3: "I change my mind every two days about what my favorite record is, so that was a reason I didn’t participate, plus what others said about it being a personal thing, PLUS what [Friend #2] said. I absolutely despise musical discussions with men and when they come up in my life (rarely, nowadays) I get hostile. When I do talk about music, I talk about it with women, or with [Cool Dude Friend Of Ours Who Is A Good Listener And General Ally in Fighting The Patriarchy And Stuff].
Friend #4: "Same with everyone. I love music but for me it’s more of a personal thing that I don’t really care to spend a lot of time talking about / discussing / researching, etc. I spend most of my time doing that with books and literary things which is a bigger interest of mine. Also, it is one of those things that men in my life have been so annoying about that I think at some point I was turned off from giving it a lot of attention. I never really felt included in the conversation therefore I started to pay less and less attention to it?
I also am very rarely listening to new music. i keep up with punk/garage etc. but the land of most new 'indie’ music i don’t know much about. Right now I’ve been going through all the crates of records my mom gave me ie: listening to strange handsome men’s folk music, and also listening to various radio programs I like of international music, soul/funk, etc.”
Friend #1: “Sorry I keep yapping about this but it feels important for me to note that I have spent my entire life very passionately invested in learning about and enjoying music. My older brother is a professional musician, my longest relationship was with a professional musician, and my whole life I have felt constant pressure that if I wanted to participate in a conversation about music that I needed to be on this male influence's level. To be able to fully discuss music in a world where men are going to grill you about a band’s discography and mansplain the double bass line on a Hella song to you, you have to either bow out or try to keep up with them, which is majorly bullshit. But it sounds like I’ve chosen to play along and the rest of you/women in general are OVER IT.”
When I Asked If I Could Post This On My Tumblr
Friend #3: “By all means, and if you want to add the quote, 'In the end, white dudes are superior at making fun things much less fun,’ then you have my permission.”
Friend #1: “Yes, make sure that you leave in that I hate Spoon though.”
Here is something I wrote about Chantal Akerman when I was very young, aka like five years ago. It was originally posted on Canonball, the feminist blog I ran with my friend Mia. This piece sort of makes me cringe now, the way things you write in your early 20s probably should, but I am reposting it in the spirit of Akerman, who taught me about the radical power of writing your own story, particularly when you are young and “untrained.” Consider a placeholder until I get a chance to write something more meaningful and up-to-date about her.
Even though Akerman herself had qualms about being labeled a “female filmmaker,” I believe that when we lose a female genius we have a responsibility to make as much noise about her as possible, because we can’t trust history to do the same.
*
“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very
rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least
for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very
young.” – Joan Didion
Lately I’ve been compiling a mental list of books and movies
about the experiences of young women in the city that do not contain any
references to any of the following: expensive shoes, lattes the size of Big
Gulps, or, above all things, appletinis. Too many books and movies about Young
Women in the City seem to act as though this holy trinity is the key to female
happiness, but my life in the city has found a way to persist without them. I
can’t afford nice shoes (ain’t getting paid to blog, as they say), I prefer
Slurpees over lattes, and I’ve only once tried an appletini (fresh-faced and
under the influence of said books and movies, no doubt) and found it so
sickeningly sweet that I couldn’t even finish it. The stereotypical trappings
of the Young Woman in the City have always felt ill-fitting to me, and so I’ve
sought out writers and artists who embrace a different and more honest
representations of this familiar trope.
Which brings me, first and most obviously, to Joan Didion. Her
1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” has got to be one of literature’s
most definitive statements about being young, female and living on your own.
Didion writes, with stinging clarity, about her time spent in New York in the
late 1950s. She was twenty when she arrived there from Sacramento. “All I
could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I
would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six
months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turns out the
bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”
“Goodbye to All That” – and more or less all of the
other personal essays that appear in Didion’s collection Slouching Towards
Bethlehem – pulls off the tricky feat of being both particular and
universal. Her prose pivots from striking personal imagery (the gold silk
curtains she hung in her stark apartment and the way they’d get “tangled
and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms;” the movements of a cockroach on
her neighborhood bar’s tiled floor) to universal sentiments (“I began to
cherish the loneliness of [New York], the sense that at any given time no one
needed to know where I was or what I was doing.”) The material things that
Didion catalogues are never things in themselves, but rather triggers for the
memories they elicit. After having moved to Los Angeles, she wrote, “Now
when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically
detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with
which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a
perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L'Air du Temps, and now the
slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the
day.” The feelings conjured by these flashes of memory range from joy to
despair, but Didion’s careful cataloguing of the good and the bad makes for a
refreshingly multi-dimensional account of her days of being young, broke and
female in New York.
I can’t think of a film that conjures and celebrates that urban
“loneliness” that Didion describes (“the sense that at any given
time no one needed to know where I was or what I was doing”) as accurately
as Chantal Akerman’s 1977 film News from Home. Its premise is simple:
Akerman documents her experience arriving in New York from Belgium in her early
twenties by filming the city in wide, emotionally detached exteriors. The
soundtrack records the ceaseless hum of traffic and sidewalk chatter, overtop
of which Akerman reads aloud the letters her mother wrote her from home. The
letters progress in chronological order and recount very little narrative
drama: news of family members getting married or having children, accounts of
family members’ minor illnesses and Akerman’s mother’s expressions of boredom,
loneliness and dissatisfaction. We’re privy to so much personal information
about the filmmaker – the visual details that fascinate her, the intimate
words of her mother – but the film creates an element of detachment since her
responses to her mother are omitted.
News from Home is an exercise in duration and, for many
viewers, patience. It rejects the traditional rules of film narrative and
suspense in favor of minimalism and formal experimentation. But if you can get
lost in its meditative pace, it’s a hypnotizing film that I think really
captures the banalities of everyday life in the city and forces you to look at
them in a new way. The closest thing News from Home gets to a dramatic
climax comes in the pattern-breaking moment when Akerman’s mother’s voice
becomes, in mid-sentence, obscured by the whoosh of a passing car, never to
become fully audible again. It’s a tiny detail, but it speaks volumes about
detachment, disconnect and the freedom that comes when no one needs to know
where you are or what you’re up to.
True,
none of these accounts are as exciting or melodramatic as many writers might
want you to think the experience of being a young woman in the city actually
is. But they capture some of my favorite things: the quiet moments between the
bits that make it into the montage, the poetry in the stuff of everyday life.
Maybe they’re not as sweet as appletinis, but I’m starting to believe that
nobody really drinks those things anyway.
“Somebody with a flair for small cynicism once said, ‘We live and do not learn.’ But I have learned some things.
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep—leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”
There is a photo hanging in my childhood bedroom of me and a bunch of my high school friends on the Tower of Terror, faces frozen in theatrical screams, and seated in the front there is a young boy looking at his father with what we later, laughing, identified as “not Roller Coaster Terror, but real, genuine terror.” There is a story among my college friends about the first time we watched Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, during the final 20 minutes or so in spite of myself I started sobbing uncontrollably, not the accepted way people cry when they’re watching a sad movie but something louder and uglier and a little too real. The last 20 minutes of this movie are magical, terrible, miraculous; you already know this you’ve seen it. I don’t even want to try and approach it with words in case you haven’t. Instead I’ll say that my early twenties were defined by these constant and sort of manic oscillations between wanting to make movies and very melodramatically losing faith in wanting to make movies and then suddenly, powerfully reconnecting with that faith, usually through movies that took up questions about a particular kind of faith that was of little use to me anymore. Before that night I was all about Bresson and Dreyer but by the next day I was calling Breaking the Waves one of my favorite movies of all time. When it was over I felt some kind of holy combination of humiliated and exalted and cleansed.
Last night I watched this movie for only the second time. I stayed at home alone on a Saturday night to watch it and reverentially turned off all the lights and loud appliances. I think I’d been terrified to revisit it, because I was afraid it wouldn’t have that same effect on me again, and that that would say something important and definitive and depressing about a dwindling ability to focus or connect or feel. I felt a kind of performance anxiety as I loaded up the Roku. Technology has progressed in the six years since that night my friends and I had first watched Breaking the Waves (on an out-of-print DVD checked out from our college library) but not exactly in ways that make a viewing experience more immersive. The Wifi giveth and the Wifi taketh away. For the first forty-five minutes or so, the picture kept breaking up and Hulu Plus would return to the purgatory of the lime green progress bar and I would get angry and check my phone to take my mind off being angry; at one point the screen just inexplicably went to black. I started worrying that I wasn’t connecting with it in the same way, and that my worrying about it was sabotaging my ability to do so. But then it played on uninterrupted for the last hour and a half, and the spell it cast on me was so identical to the one it did when I was 21 that it freaked me out a little. “I could write an entire fucking thesis on this movie,” I caught myself thinking, because I once again felt that young. Then came the last 20 minutes, and by the part where the young, sandy-haired doctor tells the judge, “Instead of writing ‘neurotic’ or 'psychotic,’ I might just use a word like… good,” I was crying so hard that I mistook a knock at an adjacent door as one of my neighbors asking me to keep it down; real, loud, ugly tears, only slightly diminished by the fact that I am coming here to tell you about them.
Today I ran into an old friend who told me that whenever she is wasting energy freaking out about something that will probably work itself out very easily in the end, she thinks to herself in Paul McCartney’s voice, “You’re doing fine, Chris.” It was only after she’d gotten off the train that I realized this was one of the wisest things I’d ever heard.
Hey I’m presenting at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle on Friday, come say hi if yr around.
On the shuttle bus that was taking us from Port Authority to the Miley Cyrus concert, which I had affectionately dubbed the Bangerz Express, Jordan, Dombal and I were having a decidedly un-#Bangerz conversation about the lack of effective ways to record interviews on an iPhone. This is what writers do when we hang out with other writers, and we rarely even realize how lame we’re being until someone outside our bubble reveals that they’ve been listening. When we had exhausted the topic, a Miley fan sitting behind us popped up above our headrests and asked, “Are you guys, like, interviewers?” We had to admit that we were, yes. “Are you interviewing Miley?” Sadly, we were not. “We’re just going for fun,” Dombal said. Genuinely surprised, this Miley fan said, “Wow, it’s really cool that you guys would do something like that.” As in, like… have fun.
I want to believe her shock there is unwarranted. But unfortunately I think she might be onto something, because sometimes I worry that “fun” and “music writing” are like oil and water.
Dombal was lying, slightly. We were there to report on the show, but we’d sort of created the assignment ourselves, based off the fact that we just thought it would be fun to go to the Bangerz Tour. And, duh, it was. The next day, while we were putting together our report and trying to find usable footage of Miley Cyrus singing “FU” to a puppet that has been accurately described as “Puff the Magic Dragon’s deadbeat son,” everybody on Twitter was up in arms about some op-ed the New York Times Magazine had run decrying the rise of “poptimism”. Now, I agree with the general concept of poptimism, but that word never fails to make me want to barf, because 99+% of people who listen to pop music do not have to come up with some kind of factionalized team name in order to enjoy it—they just fucking like what they like. And maybe that was part of the reason why going to the Bangerz Tour was so refreshing and yes I will even say life-affirming: Nobody there was trying to debate, like, Ted Gioia’s Daily Beast article between sets. 99+% of the girls (yes, they were mostly girls) there would not know/care about what “rockism” meant, or whatever insider-baseball circle jerk the “music writing community” was engaged in that day. They were just there to freak out over the music they loved. And I looked around at them with their pigtail buns and their BOUT THAT LIFE crop tops and their “Miley Cyrus Bangerz Tour” inflatable bananas (I am very jealous I did not get to buy one of these before the merch kiosk sold out) and I remembered being like them and feeling like nobody took seriously the things I liked, all I wanted to do was write things for them. Not above them, or below them, but to them. I am so profoundly bored with writing for the 1%.
A little while after we posted our write-up, a few Miley fan accounts started tweeting it. One of them called it, “a thoughtful and in-depth review” of the tour; a girl whose Twitter name was Katniss Everdeen called it “one of the best reviews I’ve read in a while.” Maybe it was the lack of sleep of the #BangerzHangover or most likely the tragic death of Floyd Cyrus, but I was already feeling kind of emosh on Friday and seeing those tweets almost made me cry. For some reason, this immediately felt like the highest praise I’ve received in a long time. Everybody going on and on about this poptimism thing had only reminded me that there is a tremendous gulf between most of the people who listen to music and most of the people who write about it. I have started thinking lately that social media has made us all too connected, has made it too easy to find like-minded people at the expense of unique viewpoints, too easy to burrow into niche conversations and tune out the larger world around you. For music writers, it’s easy to write something that will rile up that 1%; it’s harder (but in my mind, a much more noble challenge) to write something that resonates outside the bubble. So I don’t know, maybe next time you’re wasting time and energy on some shirts-vs.-blouses/poptimists-vs.-rockists/us.-vs.-them debate, remember the girl sitting behind you on the Bangerz Express, the one for whom the whole idea of being “an interviewer” is refreshingly foreign and novel. She’s listening, if you’re willing to treat her like a potential reader.
You know that feeling when you’re playing a game of Tetris that you already know you’re losing and then it speeds up and out of nowhere a cruel and previously unimaginable amount of blocks fall on your head? That’s how I felt when I heard it was going to snow a foot today. Another foot. This winter has taunted me and tested me and done really shitty things to people I love. In one last attempt to counteract that, I asked one of my most optimistic and level-headed friends to come with me last night to see Julianna Barwick play at a church in Brooklyn Heights. “This winter is killing me,” she said on the subway platform. That is how I knew we were all doomed.
I can safely say I have never experienced anything quite like this show. I can’t remember the last time I saw an audience express emotion so openly and unashamedly; the house lights weren’t even down. When I listen to Julianna’s music, and her latest record Nepenthe in particular, I picture it as this cool mist over a grey lake. Last night it felt more like steam, as though she had poured this huge vat of warm water on our frozen but now thawing hearts. During every single song I could hear people around me crying. I could hear my friend crying. I cried a little, too. Something about this winter has been exceptionally difficult for every single person I know, and when I glanced around the room what I saw was a bunch of people locked in their private winter tragedies, probably thinking to themselves on top of everything, “Another foot?” So how generous of Julianna to bring us all back to life, to gather us in the folds of these things she very humbly calls songs. (At a Julianna Barwick show, you almost have to laugh when she floats back down to earth to dispense with formalities like “Thanks for coming out tonight” and “OK I have one more for you guys.”) When it was over I felt lighter, cleaner, ready, strong. My friend and I blew our noses and walked back out into the world. “Let it snow,” I said.
This time of year, the nights fall longer/ So grow a spine or catch cold/ The winter months, they do make you feel stronger/ But in the end, it’s all getting old.
I don’t know your situation and I’m not you and I kinda don’t do advice, because advice is presumptuous! Like there’s general living-life stuff, a lot of which turns out to be really profound but which when I was younger seemed like “shit people tell you just because it’s what they say.” For example: it’s in my nature to get up and start working on stuff. On whatever. Songs, books. Playing video games back when I played video games (I haven’t renounced them but I have lost interest so all I play now is those annoying Facebook games that when you see people’s status saying I JUST ACHIEVED LEVEL ELM IN FOREST SAGA! you judge them. I am he. I am the judged). But then I became a dad, and if me and my little dude are both awake and it’s seven and I see the daylight outside, rain or shine, I think…you need to not be conscripting little dude into your I-tend-to-stay-inside lifestyle, which is a learned behavior anyway. So we get outside. I haven’t run a spreadsheet on this but it feels like to me if I get a walk in with my little dude in the morning, the very worst the day has to offer thereafter pales in comparison to how I started the day, and on lousy days that can be really meaningful to me. Again, I’m not saying “whoever you are, whatever your situation, just take a walk!” That would make me an asshole, saying that. I’m saying “you asked for advice, but I don’t do advice, but I can tell you things I do and if they sound useful to you, they’re things you might try.”
Mornings when I put off opening the laptop for several hours almost invariably result in better days for me than the ones (usually on the road) when I wake up and PLUG INTO THE FUCKIN MATRIX HERE WE GO and then irritate myself with news of all the terrible people doing and saying terrible things that I can’t do a damn thing about anyway. Do I stay engaged enough with the news cycle to know about what’s going on? Of course; I care. Do I have to know every last hateful thing about all the hateful people? No, of course not - I don’t need all that stuff inside me. I only need to know enough to figure out what positive change I might be able to help effect.
Again, this isn’t advice. I’m not qualified to give advice. (If I write good songs that help people, that’s rad, but it no more qualifies me to give advice than a good carpenter’s table qualifies him to tell me how to deal with anger.) I’m just reporting what works for me: keep an umbilical connection to the outside world - trees, light, solid ground; avoid obsessive behavior; seek the delightful, shun the hateful. My son taught me this last one. He is a philosopher.
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