0.17.1 - We used to talk about girls who play guitar
I took a swing at the intro to this article a couple of different times over the last few days, and I couldn't quite figure out how to frame it correctly. I was wandering off into weird writing cul de sacs and never felt like I was getting any nearer what I was trying to say until last night, when I was driving to play tennis, when I remembered a story which helped frame the whole thing for me. So, lets start again shall we?
This is a true story, the context of which will hopefully become apparent as it relates to my larger point. In my life, I have witnessed and been involved in many misguided attempts to express to a long-term or passing object of someone's affection their heartfelt desire to end up in bed with them. It's the eternal question of adolescence, "How do I talk to (meaning seduce) people of the gender I'm sexually attracted to?". No attempt has ever been more misguided nor doomed to failure than the night I spent around a campfire at a music festival in the year 2000. A young man I recall being called Mark (but I could have that wrong), who we'd not met before that weekend, had taken an obvious interest in a young woman I knew. It was late, and we'd been talking about music around our fairly expansive campfire when Mark, deciding to swing for the fences, says "Hey, why don't you let me play something for you?". He's addressing the group, but he's talking to her, the woman he's looking to impress. There's some general murmuring - it's hard to say no to something like that at a festival to someone you've only met 24 hours beforehand - and he disappears into his tent, to emerge from it bearing a didgeridoo. He'd picked it up while he was backpacking, he tells us. He's getting pretty good.
Less than a minute in, I mutter something about needing to get something from my tent. I retreat inside and crawl to the far end, as far away from the fire and the people and the stuttering, mournful honking now filling the air, and I curl into a ball and bite my lip as I try desperately not to laugh out loud. Forty seconds later, the friend I'm sharing the tent with joins me inside, biting his fist, tears of laughter welling in his eyes. For the next ten minutes we are cramped with silent, constant laughter as my face runs wet with tears. To this day I think it's the hardest I've ever laughed at anything, the cries of a dying goose with hiccups resonating through the campgrounds around us.
The question I've been asking myself for the last few months, since it first popped into my head is this - do young men not want to be musicians any more? I ask this only because what's been a growing trend in the music I listen to, and the music people I know listen to, is that it predominantly seems to be made up of bands fronted by and/or consisting of women, with a couple of notable genre exceptions. Even Rap and Metal, the two genres where I don't have to struggle to think of new young male performers in those spaces, share them equally now with their female counterparts - something that felt out of the question a decade or so ago. I asked myself what bands, what music fronted by male performers I regularly listened to and outside of Sam Fender, Inhaler, and The Lathums I don't think I've listened to a single new musical act with a male voice which didn't already exist ten years ago***.
Once upon a time, it seemed the dream for all young men was to become a rock star. Sure, we fantasised about going on tour, living the lifestyle of sex and drugs and rock 'n roll; but stepping out of the world of fantasy, there was a time when young men would learn an instrument because they believed it gave them an opportunity to display their artistic soul to whichever person they most wanted to try and sleep with that day. While it's now settled law that anyone who whips out an acoustic guitar to try and play you a song they "wrote while thinking about you" is an unrestrained fuckboy waving a giant red flag, at least they learned a skill. I think back to the story of Menswear in the mid 90's, a band who's primary musical skill was looking hot in slim fit suits, a group of young men in their early twenties who formed a band primarily for sex and money reasons. Well, Spotify and the corporate streaming giants made sure the money part wasn't going to encourage any to become a musician in the hopes of financial success any time soon, and maybe being a musician just isn't sexy any more. Maybe young men have been told that writing songs or singing isn't alpha enough any more; maybe young women are inclined towards music because they have so many successful and positive role models, and many young men just do not.
Maybe it's just where we are in the cyclical wheel of musical history, and two years, three years, five years from now there will be a chorus of angry young male punk voices, soulful protest singers with acoustic guitars played with intent, the disaffected frustration of a new wave of grunge. I hope so, if only because music should be a universal good, a creative outlet regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, ethnic background. Fortunately, in the meantime, we have a lot of incredible and talented women to keep the flame of music burning.
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
This all mainly started because, after listening to and remembering how much I enjoyed American Thighs last week, I wanted an excuse to go back and listen to the second Veruca Salt album as well. Eight Arms To Hold You trades some of the raw energy of the first album for polish and production, I think slightly to its detriment, but it's still Veruca Salt and when Louise Post and Nina Gordon deliver the harmony choruses on The Morning Sad and Don't Make Me Prove It and The Sound of the Bell it still gives me a little shiver up my spine. I'll never understand why they weren't a bigger success really, apart from gender dynamics. You can't help but feel like they'd be a bigger deal if they hopped forward in time and released American Thighs and Eight Arms To Hold You in the closing years of the 2010's instead.
I just wanted to also point out they released a mini-EP in 1996 called "Blow It Our Your Ass It's Veruca Salt" which is just more evidence that anyone who self-titles their album is not trying hard enough.
That line of thought brought me to listen to Blame My Ex by The Beaches (after checking I hadn't already listened to it, as I approach 500 this is becoming more of a problem) which are pretty much as close to a modern incarnation of the Veruca Salt sound that I have found. They came across my radar as a recommendation from...somewhere? God, my memory for the minutia of what happened 20 years ago seems unclouded by age (or polluted with invented detail and nostalgia) but I can't remember what drove me to listen to this band from 18 months ago. Regardless of where it came from, I listened to this album on-and-off for a month solid in 2023 and I dip in an out of it still (or did before this year redefined my music listening habits). You can tell I like a band when I check to see if they are touring (they are doing some festivals this year, but no solo gigs in the UK announced*) but their new single from a month ago gives me hope some kind of album tour is coming (though god I have a lot of gigs booked in for this year now)**.
Tracy Bonham exists as another musician I would have bet money (if I had any spare) would reach viral crossover potential, and I would have lost. I don't know if Mother, mother had any kind of presence or airplay in the UK; I was given it on a mix CD (which also contained Bitch by Meredith Brooks and You Oughta Know by Alanis on there) and then ordered The Burdens of Being Upright after hitting the 'skip back one track' button on my CD player 10 times in a row listening to it. I kept waiting for Tracy Bonham to appear in the charts, for Mother mother to end up in the top ten, but it never happened. Maybe there was only room for one Alanis Morrisette style artist in the UK charts, and that space was already taken. Regardless, Tracy Bonham deserved better and if you've not heard this album but like Jagged Little Pill, give this a spin.
While we're talking about unreliable memory, until just now I could have sworn blind that I had already written about L7's Bricks Are Heavy back in 2017, but either blogger has erased all evidence of it but kept all my other posts, or I am wrong. I was never super into the Riot Grrl movement (I mean, it was not aimed at me), but L7 had a few things which made them hard to ignore; Pretend You're Dead from this album is a 90's grunge classic and was an alternative nightclub staple, and L7 themselves having a knack for high publicity controversy, like throwing a used tampon into the crowd at a music fesitval, or the one and only time they appeared on live television in the UK (Content Warning for unexpected exhibitionist waist down nudity from lead singer Donita Sparks). This album is unashamed angry punk, Shitlist is a great song and the whole album still feels painfully relevant.
While we are talking about women who are willing, nay eager to court controversy, I never really know how to feel about Hole and Courtney Love in general. She gets a lot of heat from people about the death of her husband, and she picks up more than a few strays from other members of the music industry both in press and in song - my inclination is always to expect some kind of Yoko Ono effect unfairly blaming her for how things unfolded, but when half the music industry is referencing you in their songs, and you stand up and say "You're no-one in this industry unless you've feuded with me or slept with Winona Ryder" maybe it's possible she's just comfortable being the outspoken asshole. I like Celebrity Skin (and Live Through This, both of which I own) but Courtney is also the third or fourth worst live performance I have ever seen (it was a mid-afternoon timeslot at a Leeds festival and I suspect drugs might have been involved) so I don't know what to make of it, apart from to be sure that she knows how to get and keep your attention.
It would be criminal to have run through this collection of female rock icons of the 90's and not included Alanis. It's outlandish how unreasonably successful her transition from the Canadian equivalent of a Mickey Mouse club singer into the rock voice of rejected angry young women everywhere was. It would be like Sabrina Carpenter recruiting half of the Foo Fighters and releasing a powerful collection of rock anthems for her next album - not that I don't think she could do it, but its a jarring transition to manage. I guess we can all thank Dave Coulier or whichever other Canadian dirtbag broke young Alanis' heart, because now nearly thirty years later, Jagged Little Pill is a classic and deserving of everyone's respect. It's possible this might have been the one album where three copies of it existed in our household - mine, my sisters, and my fathers - briefly, before I moved out. I have a still frame photograph in my mind of seeing the music video for You Oughta Know, hearing it for the first time on D's lounge television. While she maybe never achieved the heights she climbed to on this album ever again, to have got there even once is phenomenal.
With some foundational female-led bands from the 90's covered, I branched out a little and listened to some of the more modern bands of the same persuasion. I enjoyed English White-Stripes-A-Like band (perhaps my most reductive comparison yet) The Ting Tings and I heard Katie White (that is her name) in some radio interview mention Sleigh Bells and the song Crown On The Ground. Goddamn that song. It's incredibly simple, but amongst the hype-est musical expressions that there is. I am listening to it again as I type this and it blows me away. Nothing on Treats quite makes me want to jump through a brick wall like Crown does, but a lot of it comes close. I'll certainly find a way to listen to Reign of Terror, Bitter Rivals and Jessica Rabbit at some point this year as well, because I love them all.
I like an album with a theme, and Women In Music Part III both expresses it's feelings about being said women in said industry through its lyrics, and also in the way the Haim sisters borrow the distinctive styles of other successful women in music across the songs on this album to make their point. Man From The Magazine sounds so much like Blue era Joni Mitchell I was initially suspicious that they would be so direct in their reference; the lyrics, which describe a real backstage interview where the male interviewer asked Este Haim if she made the same faces in bed as she does on stage while playing, made me so embarrassed for my entire gender that I decided they can do what they like. The Steps is another karaoke banger from them as well, and with a new album 30 days away and a tour coming, I'm very excited to be seeing them live again, hopefully this time not during a 40C heatwave.
Remember when I said last week that The Black Keys and The White Stripes remind me of the kind of honest, upfront blues rock that feels like it belongs in a dive bar somewhere? Add Alabama Shakes to that mix; with a side of righteous gospel and motown blended through it. I always thought it was a damn shame they only produced two albums, though apparently there are rumours of some kind of comeback tour/album/something this year (I guess the imminent collapse of society has put everyone on something of a deadline), but Boys & Girls to be will always be the definitive Alabama Shakes album for me.
Bad luck haters, you all probably thought I had given up but nope, I just needed a couple of swings at this one to get it over the line and I've been busy with work and the snooker is still ongoing so my schedule has been a bit constricted. I'll have a few albums to wrap up tomorrow (before going to the cinema with Catherine to see My Neighbour Totoro on the big screen and then going to the pub) but I've already started listening to some albums for next weeks article.
Till next time.
*They are doing a DJ set in London but someone will need to explain to me what the value is of going to a venue to see a band play recordings of other peoples songs that they like.
**This year currently:-
Wet Leg, Nine Inch Nails, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Tramlines Festival, Nova Twins, Self Esteem, CMAT, Haim, and flipturn. Note - all women (we are seeing Pulp at Tramlines to break up the estrogen party)
Wet Leg, Nine Inch Nails, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Tramlines Festival, Nova Twins, Self Esteem, CMAT, Haim, and flipturn. Note - all women (we are seeing Pulp at Tramlines to break up the estrogen party)
*** this out of sequence footnote comes to you courtesy of me proofreading, and exists to say - obviously that's less true this year than before - I've listened to several bands with male vocalists either as recommendations from others (like KALEO) or from best-of lists (like Aaron West and the Roaring Twneties) - but prior to actively seeking of a very wide net of music to hit my 1000 albums, not much has come with significant male representation.
