Sometime during my stint as a student at the U of O, I found myself standing amidst clearance books on the busy ground floor of the Duck Store, patriotic students garbed in green and yellow bustling by with their coffee and smoothies. I was peering intently at the back of a book, when a voice commanded, "SMILE!" I glanced up, and a man was looking at me pointedly from across the stack of books. Having been absorbed in what I was reading, I didn't know what to make of him. I wish I had already developed my saucy middle-school-teacher skills, but instead I gave him a fake smile akin to something Bart Simpson might manage for a family portrait.
The appalling thing is that this man, who insisted that I needed to smile at all times, is not that unusual. It is incredibly difficult for some people to figure out that women don't need to smile to be doing just fine. I've witnessed this with female students, seen it happen to peers, and observed it in music culture as well. The music industry proclaims,
IT IS NOT OKAY FOR WOMEN TO BE SERIOUS
and
IT IS NOT OKAY FOR WOMEN TO BE SERIOUS ARTISTS
It's infuriating that people treat women in the music industry like they are in a separate sports league from men, comparing them only to other female songwriters, charting musical descendents without including the men they begat, and insisting that if any of two female artists play the same instrument they are essentially the same person writing the same tunes. Even more perturbing, when a woman writes an album about pain, fear, love, power, anything that authentically empowers the artist, makes her real rather than plastic eye-candy, she becomes a COW, a WHINER, SCREECHY, etc. Is there nowhere a woman is allowed to yell?
WE WILL WRITE YOU OFF
and
WE ARE WRITING YOU OUT OF HISTORY
In the burgeoning era of garage-rock rediscovery, who will tell the story of the Riot Grrls?
I was reminded of all this upon reading the closing paragraph from Kate Bush: The Biography, covering one of the greatest English music acts of the last century.
"The new album and how Bush fits in with today's music scene brings us round to the question of her place in musical history. Without a doubt she is one of the most talented, most enigmatic, most unusual and most successful female performers of all time. The only downside seems to be the lack of humour in her work. There is a little, but you have to look pretty closely to find it. Surely no one likes everything to be taken too seriously...
"The relentless drive for new ideas and perfectionism from this five-foot-three woman with the cute dimples is legendary."
What male artist would be burdened with such preposterous criticism?
It is not our job to fix ignorance.
But who else will do it?
