In order to incite participation in the making of culture, it seems important to have an aesthetic that is a little bit messy or unpolished, so that girls and women can see the process of creating on stage as part of the performance. | | | | Alexis Marceaux of Sweet Crude at New Orleans Jazz Fest, April 27, 2019.
(Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "In order to incite participation in the making of culture, it seems important to have an aesthetic that is a little bit messy or unpolished, so that girls and women can see the process of creating on stage as part of the performance."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// In 2000, the 150 most-played songs on U.S. country radio included 100 songs by men (and male-led bands), which were played a total of 5.9 million times, and 50 by women (and female-led bands), which racked up 2.8 million plays. You might have been inclined to complain about this if you were a female artist or someone who wanted to hear more women's voices on the radio, and you no doubt would have heard counterarguments explaining how there are more men making records and/or that's just how it is and/or what's the big deal and/or sorry but life is unfair. "Shut up and sing," you might have been told. Or, more accurately, "shut up and don't sing." But there's one thing neither you nor anyone else one could have known: Things would never again be so good for women in country. In 2018, only 17 of the top 150 songs were by women, and they were played 1.1 million times. The top records by men, meanwhile, got 10.3 million plays. That's a ratio of nearly 10 TEQUILAs for every one CRY PRETTY. Over the course of the 21st century, country radio programmers have been playing women less and less and less and men more and more and more. This is the "self-fulfilling nature of gender-based programming," as DR. JADA E. WATSON, a professor at the UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA, dryly puts it in her comprehensive study of "Gender Representation on Country Format Radio: A Study of Published Reports from 2000 – 2018." The more male voices radio plays, the more radio listeners become attuned to the sound of male voices. And the worse, therefore, it gets for non-male voices. "Right now," ROLLING STONE's MARISSA R. MOSS writes, "a whole generation of girls are growing up barely hearing themselves represented on the radio—a scary reality for what the future of the genre could ultimately sound, and look, like." Radio programmers frequently say they're simply playing what their listeners want to hear, which is not only an abdication of their role as cultural curators, but a cultural fiction: What they're playing is what they've spent all these years grooming their listeners to hear. "You are training the audience not to hear female voices," warns CMT senior VP LESLIE FRAM. Watson's paper, produced in consultation with the activist group WOMAN NASHVILLE, is loaded with statistics that all point in the same direction. Any way you look at the numbers, the ratio and the erasure are basically the same. Watson ends her report with suggestions for radio ("spin more women, more frequently"), labels, industry associations, promoters, fans and male artists—basically everyone except "the women that have been knocking on closed doors. They have done their part." This is not country music's first wake-up call on this issue, but it's one of the most statistically frightening. It makes clear that what you choose to play now has a clear impact on what listeners will have a chance to hear 20 years from now. The burden is on programmers, and the industry around them, to protect country's climate now... Music festival programmers across the genre universe: You, too... The TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL continues serving up the goods to music fans, premiering documentaries on the WU-TANG CLAN, LINDA RONSTADT, MICHAEL HUTCHENCE and OTHER MUSIC in the past few days... RIP PHIL MCCORMACK. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | |  | Medium | | By giving us everything of everything, we overload and take nothing of anything, overwhelmed in the face of it all. | | | |  | Complex | | TikTok, known as Musical.ly in a past life, is a video app that is launching rappers to viral success, from Lil Nas X to BoyBoy West Coast. | | | |  | Los Angeles Times | | On a freezing winter day, boys as young as 7 are running shirtless in a Beijing Park, training to be "real men." It's part of a backlash in China against flawlessly made-up Chinese pop stars and an existential fear for nation's "virility." | | | |  | SongData | | I have been researching issues related to gender representation, discrimination and censorship in country music since for the last 12 years. Since 2015 and the infamous #TomatoBarb, researching gender inequality via chart data has been at the center of my work. | | | |  | Slate | | From Buddy to Biggie, Janis to Freddie, Otis to Kurt. | | | |  | The New Yorker | | The seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter provides a covertly girlish perspective on the current male-dominated wave of moody and pessimistic "sad pop" music. | | | |  | Pitchfork | | Jenn Pelly speaks with Bikini Kill's Tobi Vail and revels in the first of their reunion shows. | | | |  | The Canadian Press | | While a feast of rock idols the likes of Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Nickelback dish out epic anthems at the Roxodus music festival this summer, groups of VIP concertgoers will be chowing down on a more lavish experience an earshot away. | | | |  | The Muse | | I think I understand to a certain degree why celebrities seem so thin-skinned and intolerant of anything less than entirely credulous praise: The sensitivity that allows these people to express themselves in public also makes them vulnerable to whatever comes after. | | | |  | Caught by the River | | Or "The Accumulation and Maintenance of Wealth," or "If You See Him Tell Him No." | | | | | | | blue eyes crying in the rain | |  | Vanity Fair | | Stevie Wonder, Chris Rock, Keith Richards, Alicia Keys, Mavis Staples, and many others recall their memories of the legendary Harlem theater, celebrating 85 years of American entertainment, and the subject of an HBO documentary to air in the fall which kicked off the Tribeca Film Festival. | | | | | Slate | | The new single and video say even less than they want you to think. | | | |  | Music Industry Blog | | User-centric licensing (i.e. stream pay-outs based on sharing the royalty income of an individual user split across the music they listen to) has stimulated a lot of debate. I first explored the concept of user-centric licensing back in 2015and stirred up a hornet nest, with a lot of very mixed feedback. | | | |  | Vox | | Heavy metal versus the USA. | | | |  | Red Bull Music Academy | | Tony Rettman details the hits and misses of a formative scene that would go on to reshape rock. | | | |  | CNBC | | Amazon disclosed on Friday that it spent $1.7 billion on video and music content in the first quarter, providing a new number that investors have previously been forced to predict. Investments in video and music, which are included in Amazon's Prime membership program, increased 13% from $1.5 billion a year earlier, Amazon said in its quarterly financial filing. | | | |  | Toronto Star | | Record labels are spending more than ever to build buzz online, but social media followings are the best marketing strategy for pop stars like Johnny Orlando. | | | |  | Billboard | | Beyonce's "Homecoming" album and Netflix special contains the entirety of her groundbreaking April 2018 performance at Coachella. As the first black woman to headline the festival, Bey ran through the biggest hits of her career with the help of Destiny's Child, Jay-Z and a marching band made up of people from HBCUs across the country, thus christening it Beychella in the process. | | | | | Los Angeles Times | | On Friday's opening day of the 2019 edition of the Stagecoach country music festival in Indio, current and veteran stars unite behind a love for the 1990s. | | | |  | Los Angeles Review Of Books | | Andrew Zingg reconnects with his grandfather's bossa nova legacy through Alfredinho Jacinto Melo's influential club Bip-bip in Rio de Janeiro. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |
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