Unfortunately, I ended up writing about my other topic for my actual essay, which is "How Much I Hate The Bachelor".
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Music is pretty much the main thing I think about these days. I spend all my free time listening to music (which is a big reason why I never really get into TV shows and movies, because I’m using up all my time for music). So bonding with people over music is really important and exciting for me. However, I almost always feel like I have to “promote” the genius of female singers to my friends. I know a few people who only listen to one, two, or zero female artists. (I know this one funny meme reaction picture I saw that could apply to this that’s just an interviewer guy going up to people on the street saying “For one dollar, name a woman” - I saw it on a reply of one post of a person naming all the best actors but they were inexplicably all male.) When I tell them that my music taste these days is mostly women (I actually used this website made by Spotify that tells you the gender of artists you listen to, and it said I listen to 91% women, while most other people commenting on the website said they had 99% men or something like that), they usually respond saying that they’re not sure why they don’t listen to a lot of women.
I think this might have to do with how they’re disparaged by the industry and always get the short end of the stick. Their art is not taken as seriously and their innovations are thought of as immature, but when men do similar things and stretch boundaries, they get praised for it. One comparison I’ve seen someone make is Kate Bush and David Bowie. Both were extremely innovative in the new things that they did with their music. But while David Bowie is a worldwide famous icon, Kate Bush is not much more than a “cult artist”, meaning very few are familiar with her work (especially beyond her hit songs), especially outside of her home of the UK. And it probably has to do with how Kate Bush is a woman and how her high-pitched voice (in earlier recordings) and dramatic vocal experimentation (in later recordings) is not taken seriously at all. I guess Bjork, another one of my favorites, is also included here. She is one of the most innovative and experimental singers to ever make it big, but people (especially Americans) only seem to know her for her “infamous” swan dress, which is not even the wackiest thing she has worn and was not even that bad! I think her refusal to make the kind of music that people expect women to make, and the femininity of her fashion are two big reasons why she mostly gets disregarded these days.
At my school we have a club called “The F Word” where we talk about feminism. I suggested we talk about women in the music industry so that ended up being the topic for one of our meetings. As a very vocal fan of women musicians, I was really excited about this meeting. We pointed out that most female representation on the top pop music charts were by the same few artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna, while men got represented by a big variety of names. I also played a game with my friend where we put our music libraries on shuffle, and 5 out of 10 songs that played from my phone were by women, to which my friend responded, “How equal”. At that meeting, I also jokingly said that all music made by men was boring, which almost everyone disagreed with me on. But for real, I do not understand how some music that boils down to “Mediocre white guys with guitars who can’t sing” gets so popular. That is another thing, too, how women are held to a much higher standard than men for vocal abilities. I can’t name a single popular woman in music who had rather limited vocal abilities except for maybe Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, but even she’s not that popular. But on the male side of things, you have lots of mediocre singers like Billy Corgan and Bob Dylan who just get a pass on vocals because the songwriting is good.
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