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we are tired of your abuse
The first draft of this posted started: As you have probably gathered by being on the same planet as me, I have some sort of Henry Rollins thing. It’s complicated.
And then there were like 1,400 words about Henry Rollins and a digression into my Glenn/Henry OTP. I deleted all of those words. You can thank me later.
The salient bits are that Rollins has a new book out called Occupants, which is photos from his travels along with essays for each of them. If you already like his written work, you will like this book. If you don’t, this isn’t going to convert you. If you have no idea, let me sum up all of his books for you: Winter is coming.
To promote the new book, he has been doing in-stores and signings across the country. One was at the Oak Park Public Library, and so off I went.
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give me the things that make me insane
Last week’s shows: Stiff Little Fingers, and The Dwarves / Nashville Pussy.
nashville pussy @ bottom lounge, 2011-08-20
If I take a great photograph at a concert, it’s all luck. I don’t shoot for very long, the lighting has to be exactly right, no one can be running into me too hard, the musicians can’t be moving too much and they can’t be very far away from me. And so I take a lot of okay photos, but I’m not willing to buy a better camera and I’m not willing to leave the pit, and so I get what I get. Sometimes I get something I’m really proud of, though, like the above picture of Nashville Pussy’s Karen Cuda.
I went ahead and threw that photo, and all the others I could find, into a flickr set called ladies rock. There have been many ladies on stage at my shows lately, and I’m liking it. (I looked around for a flickr group, but really only found this one, Women in Music, but it doesn’t seem very trafficked. Hrmph.)
nope, still don’t need you
As a follow-up to my last post, 25 awesome music books that happen to have been written by women, here are like 30 more. Some are ones I just plain forgot about, some are recs my friends sent that either came too late or I chose not to include for my own weird reasons, and some are culled from comments in various places.
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we don’t need you
Earlier this week, Pitchfork published a list of their 60 favorite music books. It is pretty wide-ranging and there are many good books on the list. (And some I really hated.) But only one was written by a woman, and two had lady coauthors. Come the fuck on.
This pissed plenty of people off, and lists have been sprouting up. This amazon list has 50 music books by women, but it’s a straight-up list with no commentary and some books I do not think are very good. Flavorwire’s ten great books about music by female writers does a more thorough job, and includes many of the books on my own list (and one I hated). Their list of 33 female music critics you need to read is also pretty good.
So I also made a list! You can find it below. Min was kind enough to write a few sentences about the books she loved, and I did the rest. There are a few books on here that neither of us has read but which have come highly recommended by several people I trust; in those cases, I have provided a synopsis, but they’re not blind recs. Her paragraphs are marked with [asd] and mine with [pez].
TWENTY-FIVE (ISH) AWESOME BOOKS ABOUT MUSIC
that happen to have been written by ladies
or at least co-written in a few cases
i go out walking
detroit cobras @ bottom lounge, 2011-06-02
The internet is a weird and wonderful place, you guys. Almost all of these bullet-like points have long and convoluted backstories that I’m skipping, and then I was going to say something like, “let’s talk about ladybusiness!” except fuck that. Let’s talk about rock & roll. This is a really rambly grab-bag of a post; you’ve been warned.
1. I have absolutely no idea why, but I went to see The Detroit Cobras last week. They are a five-piece garage rock band from Detroit, and I don’t know if I went because Vic Victor of the Koffin Kats listed them as a good Detroit band or because they’re on Bloodshot, but either way, I am super glad I went.
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we weren’t the losing kind
title: Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture
author: Lauraine Leblanc
other shit: 1999, Rutgers University Press. 231 pages + appendices (including a hilarious punk glossary!), notes, index.
rating: 3/5 safety pins
According to my records, I have apparently been working on this post since the beginning of April. I kept starting it, and then I’d realize that I’d written a few thousand words about combat boots. About the first pair I ever got, at 13, about the years of fighting I had to do to get them, because “you can have combat boots when you go into combat.” I think that’s a thing people say as a brush-off, but I come from a military family; my father meant it. Which is to say that wearing combat boots was never about wearing combat boots.
At any rate, I sometimes wish I’d hung onto that first pair. I can still picture them by the door in the last apartment they were ever in, patched with duct tape. I can feel them on my feet, lopsided but comfortable, the outside of their soles worn noticeably lower than the inside. I remember when I finally replaced them, putting the old pair next to the new, realizing that the new pair was a full inch taller than the old. I believe this is my fourth pair.
i’m sure we can be friends
Show roundup for last week: Frank Turner x 2, and yet another Social Distortion show. (Note: Not much of a roundup.)
frank turner | 2011-05-02 | jbtv studios, chicago
There are things I talk about when I talk about shows. Sometimes I say I cried, and sometimes it’s even true. Not often, though. Usually I manage to rein that shit in. Usually I mean, “it got a little dusty in there.” I sniff, and I wipe at my eyes, and I get myself under control.
Sometimes I talk about getting chills or being moved, transported somewhere else. My memory is very reliable but my senses are less so. I will remember the things I made a point to notice (what does that tattoo say? which guitar is that?) but almost nothing of what I don’t (where did this bruise come from? why am I drenched in beer? what happened to my shoe?). Maybe that makes sense, maybe not.
I saw Frank Turner twice last week, and all of those things happened at his second show. It was strange, because normally a show builds up that kind of momentum, and by the end I might as well be high. This one happened backwards. I was immediately in it. Frank is entertaining and engaging and energetic and hilarious, and he sings about music and wanderlust and heartbreak and alcohol and the redemptive power of rock & roll, all things I like to think I know a little bit about, and so his songs resonate pretty deeply with me. It started off great and got greater, chills crawling up and down my spine from the first song (“I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous”), and there weren’t a lot of tears during “I Still Believe,” but there were enough. I did try to rein it in, but I failed.
and we don’t give a shit about your blue balls
The front door of Dischord House in 1982. Screencap from Another State of Mind.
I was going to review American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and I still might. The author, Steven Blush, came through town on a speaking/book-reading/whatever publicity tour last year (this is the second edition, recently published, so he was making the rounds). At the end of his talk, another woman in the audience — it was pretty evenly split between men and women — asked him about the role of women in hardcore. He said that he’d been accused of misogyny after the first edition came out, but he was just telling it the way it was. There weren’t any women in hardcore. There just weren’t. He was very sorry about this fact, and seemed honestly confused about this charge of misogyny. After all, he was just telling the truth.
“The truth is,” he writes, on page 37, “few gorgeous women participated in Hardcore — many of them were nasty, ugly trolls.”
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we had barely left the prairies
There’s this band I really like, The Rural Alberta Advantage. They’re a Canadian acoustic indie rock trio with one album out, Hometowns, and their second due out shortly. I’ve seen them several times, and they put on a very good show, light-hearted and hard-rocking, and Hometowns was a bit of an underground hit, so the crowd is into it and knows all the words, and generally, it’s a good time.
On twitter this morning, they linked to their video for a new song. I initially embedded it, but it’s at Rolling Stone and there’s an advertisement you can’t pause, so instead here’s the link. Watch it or not; I’ll wait.
Okay, back? Right. So I guess the song is pretty good; I heard them play it last time they came through here, and the studio version holds up. But while watching the video, I mostly wasn’t listening to the song itself; I was reading the subtitles. If you didn’t go watch, let’s review.
The band plays their song. There is a lady watching, and there is a dude watching. There are subtitles showing their thoughts (and keeping you from paying much attention to the song). The dude’s subtitles go something like: “There should be pyrotechnics. Maybe Bald Eagles flying through lightning. But what is this song? I don’t recognize it. Is it new? It’s definitely not on Hometowns. I would know, because I have it memorized. I have the limited edition vinyl, number 221 of 500.” You know, stereotypical fanboy, socially awkward and way too into music. Fine. Yawn, but fine.
The woman’s subtitles go something like: “OMG, Paul looked at me! He’s so hot! I wonder if I should talk to him after the show. I should have dressed sexier. Like a sophisticated airline stewardess. Although Nils is also pretty cute. He’s got that wounded-warrior thing happening. Paul or Nils? Nils or Paul?”
Aaaah, right. Boys like music, and girls like cock. Not once does she say anything about the song, or the performance. And not once does the fanboy drool over the third member of the band, Amy. No offense to Nils or Paul, but Amy is by far the most attractive person in that band.
That’s Nils on the left, Paul on the right, and Amy in the middle. Amy is hardly in the video at all. Because… what, that’s not how bands work? Boys are in bands, and other boys love them platonically and geekily and not at all homoerotically (the number of dudes who I have heard say things like, “man, if they play $some_song live, I’ll cream my jeans!” Gross.), and girls don’t give a shit who you are or what you look like; as long as you are IN A BAND OMG, girls will put out. In the video, the fanboy tries to hit on the girl, but she is totally uninterested, and it’s heavily implied that’s because he’s not in the band. I bet she would totally do him if he were in the band, though. That’s what chicks care about!
But anyway. I get it, I guess. Both of the fans in the video are irritating stereotypes. They’re not necessarily the sort of fans that bands want, and they’re the sort of fans that other fans hate. But they’re boring stereotypes that don’t add anything to the conversation, they’re inaccurate, and watching that video felt like someone slapped me across the face.
As previously mentioned, I go to a lot of shows. I went to one last night. I go to 90 percent of them alone. I stand in front, close to the band. I’ve been two feet away from Nils and Paul (and Amy). Do they think I’m there because I think they’re hot? Because I want to get in their pants? Do they think I know the words to their songs because that will improve my chances? Does everyone else in the crowd look at me and think, “slut,” which is pretty obviously what we’re supposed to think about the girl in the video?
I’m sure some of them do. That’s how the world works. I know that, and I’m used to that. I don’t usually dwell on it, though, or even think about it much (I CAN’T; if I got worked up about every instance of sexism I encountered, I’d be catatonic). But I don’t necessarily expect to have it thrown in my face by a band I love, either. Happy Friday.
I think the only suitable way to end this is with: And also? Fuck you.
you yellow-bellied freaks
I go to a lot of concerts. Maybe not as many as some people, and definitely not as many as I’d like to, but still: I go to a lot of concerts. I believe I have been to about 20 so far in 2010, so that’s one every two weeks or so. Sometimes they’re in sketchy dive bars, sometimes they’re at renovated theatres with padded seats, sometimes they’re in run-down general admission shitholes where my shoes stick to the floor before the show even starts.
Sometimes there is a good mix of men and women at these shows. Sometimes I’m the only woman on the rail (against the stage / in the pit / whatever you want to call “in the fucking front, thanks”). Sometimes there aren’t any men up there at all.
For the most part, I go to concerts alone, and I prefer to be front and center. True, the sound there is not always best. Musicians spit on me and sweat on me. Audience members pour beer on me, and they push me, and they crush me to the stage, and they kick me in the head when they decide to crowdsurf. I get in fights. My back hurts and my knees complain and my ears ring, as if there is some conspiracy of my body to point out to me that I am not, in fact, getting younger. Sounds great, doesn’t it? So you can imagine how many people I can regularly talk into coming with me to shows. I have to get to a lot of these venues very early, and then I spend a long time in line by myself, and then I spend a lot of time camped out in my spot, also by myself. And mostly, I pass the time by listening to the people around me talk. Sometimes I talk to them, but mostly I just listen.
Here are some things they say.
At The Hold Steady (mostly dudes): “I really wish I could meet a girl who wasn’t introduced to The Hold Steady by her boyfriend!” Because, you know, the gender of the person who introduced you to a band you love is totally relevant. And it is especially relevant if you’re a woman, because women have shitty taste in music, and we need dudes to show us the way. Except that if a dude has to show us the way, other dudes resent us because we did not figure it out ourselves like they did. (This is sort of like how you can’t be a real fan of a band if you have just discovered them. You have to have been here forever, you have to have shown up knowing everything there is to know, otherwise we hate you, you ignorant fuck. Get off my lawn.)
At Wolf Parade (mostly women): “Look, I’m sorry, but the only way your band plays the House of Blues is if you’re a fucking mainstream sellout, so there is no way they’re any good.” That dude, there with his girlfriend, admitted that no, he had never heard Wolf Parade, and knew nothing about them. But clearly they suck! Also that other band she likes that he doesn’t listen to? They suck, too. In fact, her taste sucks, full-stop. His taste is superior in all ways, based on… the fact that he has a penis? Must be, because he surely did not base his My Music Is Better theory on anything as silly as, you know, the music.
I have many more examples, but those two are sticking out right now because the gender balance of the shows was switched, but the snobby dudes were saying the same thing in different ways: Dicks >>> Chicks.
In response (not that any of those dudes are reading this), I would like to say: Fuck you, snobby music dudes. You are not actually superior. You are assholes.