Hottest 100 Reveals Chicks Can’t Play Music
Seems triple j listeners will vote a dude in a dress to number one, while only five women featured in the rest of the countdown.
This weekend triple j announced the final songs in its latest Hottest 100 Of All Time. Number one was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana, with Rage Against The Machine, Jeff Buckley, Joy Division and Radiohead rounding out the top five.
Reflecting on the final countdown in The Age, Andrew Murfett wrote: “The most surprising element of the top 20 was its lack of currency.”
Uh, Murf, how about a far more obvious and embarrassing shortcoming – the fact that the only women who were regular members of bands in the entire 100 songs were Kim Deal of the Pixies, Meg White of the White Stripes and D’Arcy Wretzky of the Smashing Pumpkins?
Then there were female guest vocalists: Elizabeth Fraser (’Teardrop’, Massive Attack) and Shara Nelson (Unfinished Sympathy’, Massive Attack). The two Massive Attack songs were the only ones in the countdown with female lead vocals.
We aren’t the only ones to have noticed this. “weird yes, but dont complain, your the ones who did the voting…” opined Twitter user Angeline Burnie.
“no women but can’t think of classic female tracks, can u? plus never realised how heavy rock dominates triple j,” Twittered Michelle Williams.
“Justifying the lack of women … by thinking women have a much more diverse music enjoyment & thus results highly fragmented,” pondered Gai Le Roy.
“if there R alot of older songs on Hottest 100 there won’t be a lot of women - women musicians have only gained recognition recently,” added Allison Miller.
However, Miller’s comment isn’t borne out by the four previous “Hottest 100 Of All Time” polls. In the 1989 poll, 15 songs included female performers; the 1990 poll had 22 female-contributed songs; the 1991 poll had 11; and the 1998 poll had seven songs involving female artists. Women are actually faring worse and worse in more recent polls.
The Hottest 100 doesn’t actually ‘mean’ anything, but it takes apparently ‘definitive’ polls like this one to remind us that music is always subjective. The danger, though, is that people use these lists to create an imaginary musical landscape that subtly omits the contributions of women. On Twitter and Facebook, The Enthusiast has recently noticed people listening to the countdown, digging out forgotten CDs and ‘remembering’ how great certain artists are. How frustrating that female artists don’t get to have their work – which, let’s be blunt, is no better or worse than the work of male artists – revisited in this way.
The Hottest 100 also legitimises radio industry strategies that ignore women. Sure, these lists can be cynical ratings-boosting strategies, but they are also ways to work out what listeners want to hear. The danger is that radio music directors can look at these lists and think, “Clearly people don’t want to hear songs by women.”
So, let’s look at the wider gender balance at triple j, Man Week notwithstanding. Of the 40 on-air staff and regular guests featured on the station’s website, 15 are women. Anecdotally, women are highly represented among the off-air producers, and its management team is all-female.
triple j TV is largely presented by Lindsay McDougall, Steve Cannane, Sam Simmons and Hack reporter Antoinette Chiha. And five of the seven key editorial staff of triple j’s magazine, jmag, are women. Of the 23 most recent issues, seven had a woman on the cover. (Chris Lilley and Luke Steele do not count. And is Jemaine Clement a man? Yes, technically, he is.)
When the station asked some of its staff for their own Hottest 100 Of All Time suggestions, Craig Schuftan’s list included ‘Deceptacon’ by Le Tigre; Marieke Hardy included tracks by the co-ed groups the Gin Club and Toots and the Maytals; Robbie Buck included a PJ Harvey duet; Rosie Beaton included Regina Spektor; and Scott Dooley noted that Fiona Apple was “a great guy at music”.
That ought to remind us that participating in a public poll like this makes a public spectacle of our taste in music. Perhaps voters simply didn’t want to be embarrassed by their choices. Perhaps they felt more comfortable admitting they liked mainly sexist rock music.
ABC arts reporter Rosie Ryan reminds us that another poll – of the songs most frequently deleted by Last.fm users – reveals that female artists are overrepresented in the songs we are most ashamed to have other people know we like. The most frequently deleted artists were Lady GaGa, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Rihanna and Paramore. Furthermore, of the top 100 artists tagged with “guilty pleasure”, 49 were female or included female group members.
Almost all these 100 acts are commonly heard on commercial radio, and their albums and singles often appear in charts. They aren’t neglected by the music industry. However, people do admit that they’re embarrassed to like this music.
There’s more to this than we can get into now, but one thing is clear: gender equality in music has a long way to go when music performed by women is deemed “uncool” and “embarrassing”.
Disclosure: At one time I was deputy editor of triple j’s magazine, jmag, to which I continue to contribute on a freelance basis. In case anyone was wondering, I am also a woman.
Here’s a theory. Male musicians are more likely to produce epic songs, songs that take themselves very seriously, songs that make an overt grab at posterity. Whereas female musicians have tended to make pop or folk records that voters in a poll like this might adore, but consider too much fun or too sweet to have the kind of serious musical worth implied in an intimidating title like “the hottest 100…of ALL TIME”.
I guess the rationale is that a song can’t truly be said to stand the test of time unless it makes you want to slit your wrists or go out and hit somebody. I mean, if all a song makes you want to do is dance, or kiss your boyfriend, it can’t really be art….can it?
Also, I just wanted to say that most of the Hottest 100 list was so predictable I’m sure I saw it in Q magazine circa 1999.
At the end of the day…JJJ is just MMM for people with haircuts anyway…so what did you expect?
Great post, Mel. I was truly floored by the phenomenal gender discrepancies in the final countdown. I’d heard all week about the lack of female representation, either in the final list or in the initial suggestions provided, but three bands with even a single female member? That I was not expecting.
Music is a matter of personal taste, and it’s undoubtedly the case that just as I tend to prefer music by female artists for purely visceral reasons (not because they’re better or worse, but just because that’s what appeals to me), so too will others tend to prefer music by male artists. I suspect that this outcome is just as much a matter of canonisation though; about the fact that when we’re asked to pick the 10 Best Songs of All Time, most people are going to pick some that have already been critically acclaimed. And Melinda’s comment expresses beautifully the criteria on which this tends to happen.
But women artists aren’t just making folk and pop (not that there’s anything wrong with songs about dancing or kissing). What about Bjork, The Breeders, Hole, Bikini Kill… etc etc? Women are rocking out, and always have, but they get forgotten in the rush to include a few more generic blokes who’ll be forgotten by the time the next Hottest 100 Of All Time rolls around.
The other suprising thing is as far as the Top Ten goes, no one found a song from the last 11 years worthy. Can we read that as youth cringing at their own culture?
Most of the music I like is made by women.
Most of the music I like is not to be found on Triple J.
I call ‘bland’ on the whole thing. Sorry, indie-heads.
It is clear from the scale of the voting that although music appreciation may be a subjective activity, it is an activity shaped by structural forces.
The failure of absolutely ever artificial collection of objects, such as 100 songs on a CD, to include exactly half women in some pre-specified way, such as lead singer, is clearly a massive conspiracy.
Andrew, your flippancy pisses me off because it’s not as if anyone is demanding precisely 50 per cent representation of women in absolutely everything.
Also, remarking on a really striking absence of one gender in this poll is not calling a conspiracy.
I think you’ll find that Toots and the Maytals were all male.
You missed:
32 Blue Monday - New Order - Gillian Gilbert was keyboardist.
81 Common People - Pulp - Candida Doyle was also a keyboardist (according to wikipedia also credited as a writer on the song).
What struck me before I read your article was the lack of Frente, Bjork and Breeders. But I did not connect that they were all with female singers. It would be interesting to see the voting by act. Maybe someone like Bjork with a long career simply has too many good songs to make the list.
However another band that’s missing is the Sex Pistols. Surely at least one of their songs should have made it? Perhaps it is just a deeply flawed exercise.
Doesn’t Jeff Buckley count as a female vocalist? Sounds like it to me… On a serious note, you’re right. Mind you, there are other problems with the list, like how on Earth Radiohead is better than Led Zepplin. And as for the number one most over-rated song of all time, oh well, whatever, nevermind.
Whatever point was trying to be made about people being embarassed about liking female music is basically nullified by the author’s own examples.
For a start it is stated that 49 of the 100 (so less than half) ‘guilty-pleasures’ are female or feature females. Less than half.
Which radio directors is the author concerned about, by the way, if it is readily admitted that the staff of triple j included female artists in their top ten list. To imply they did it out of some kind of guilt complex is a stretch and fairly insulting. To imply half a million people, a fair number of whom would have been female, didn’t put a female artist in their top ten on the off chance this anonymous vote would have caused embarrassment is a Fantastic Four standard stretch.
Also, as a last.fm user and one who is fairly active in its community, I can attest to the fact that more often than not people delete songs that they don’t actually listen to, but have either family members or boy/girlfriends who use their computers and don’t wish to have music in which they have no interest effect the recommendations last.fm generates based on their listening habits. While I admit it is not out of the question that people do delete songs they might like, the point of the whole operation is to find new music you might not know about. As is pointed out, the bands on the guilty pleasures list are generally well supported by labels and radio stations alike.
Also triple j has historically been a predominantly rock oriented station, and the list reflected that. While there are plenty of great bands featuring females they are heavily outnumbered by male bands, good and bad. It’s hard to expect any greater ratio of representation than you seen in participation.
In any event, the only thing that should matter in both a user generated popularity list and radio director’s choices is merit. Merit should not be based on whether a band is from Australia or who is in it.
Heheh, I knew it would be only a matter of time before the pedants came out. I love the way pedants begin their pedantry with “I think you’ll find…”
You got me with Gillian Gilbert and Candida Doyle but I stand by Toots and the Maytals, who – according to their MySpace, have two female backing vocalists, Leba Thomas and Marie ‘Twiggi’ Gitten. Their Wikipedia also lists another female band member, Michelle Eugene.
But really, if we descend into these kinds of shitfights we – ironically – continue to demonstrate that the public demonstration of one’s excellent taste and mastery of music’s terrain is so often a macho manoeuvre.
Sure, JJJ is currently “predominantly a rock station”, but are we obliged to be content with that state of affairs? I thought JJJ’s remit was to be a *youth* station, and last time I checked, young people don’t listen exclusively to rock music, let alone the narrow subset of rock music played on JJJ. (And incidentally unless my memories are rose-tinted, I seem to remember the playlist was a lot more diverse in the late 80s, the only time I ever regularly listened to the station.)
But ignoring all that, Divinyls’ “Boys in Town” surely ticks every possible JJJ box. I’m surprised I haven’t seen it cited as a notable absence.
We should enforce equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity for polls. We need a Fair Poll Commission stacked with hairy legged lezzos to tell us what to think.
In the 1960s, when “54/46 Was My Number” was recorded, the Maytals were an all-male vocal group. Like Bob Marley after the original all-male Wailers, Toots Hibbert later formed a full band with female vocalists (Toots and the Maytals), to which Marieke Hardy, in the course of ruining my day by liking three of my favourite songs, erroneously attributed the track.
It would have taken, what, 90 seconds for you to check this?
“In any event, the only thing that should matter in both a user generated popularity list and radio director’s choices is merit. Merit should not be based on whether a band is from Australia or who is in it.”
And herein lies my major problem with JJJ today. They are loading up their playlists with predominantly Australian music, purely because it’s Australian, and not necissarily because it’s better than everything else.
The oz music show used to be a one night a week thing, showcasing the best of Australian music, and it did a pretty darn good job of it, now it’s on 4 nights a week and the station seems to be flooded with ‘meh’ Australian artists. Remember when Austrlian artists used to have a unique sound, remember Custard? Regurgitator in their prime? Snout? Artists that got played because of merit, not because they were Australian.
Not to mention the hip-hop show seems to be 90% Australian hip-hop, clearly the worst brand of hip-hop the world has to offer. Why play Hilltop Hoods when Beans and DOOM amongst others have both released fantastic albums this year?
once again the sh*ttest 100 proves that JJJ listeners are those who should be kept farthest away from any kind of publically available music. jackals.
Hmm, well I think we’re entering murky waters when we talk about “merit”. As I wrote in the article, music is subjective, and way too often when people talk about “bad” music, they’re not talking about music that’s technically incompetent, thoughtlessly churned out, or that claims to do something it’s clearly not accomplishing. They’re talking about music that they, personally, do not like.
So issues of “merit” get sidetracked into debates about who has the cultural authority – the ‘right’ – to decide which music is good. And I don’t think I’m being ‘hysterical’ or ‘paranoid’ (or other veiled ways of putting women down for pointing out institutionalised male privilege) to say that music curatorship and criticism have always historically been the domain of dick-swinging blokes, who use their ‘knowledge’ in an aggressive way to dominate debate.
Just look at the retarded ‘argument’ over whether Toots and the Maytals had chicks in the band. Turns out I was, technically, wrong about that – and I’ll readily admit when I’m wrong – but really, it doesn’t have much to do with the wider point I was making about the Hottest 100. So to me it comes across like sheer point-scoring intended to undermine my argument by ‘revealing’ that I, a female writer, ‘can’t get my facts straight’.
Let me say, as well, that comments about “hairy legged lezzos” and the like add nothing to the debate and display the kind of unimaginative misogyny and homophobia that have no place at The Enthusiast. So we won’t be publishing any similar comments in future, on this or any article.
An even more glaring observation: of all the listed artists only 4 are non-white (Freddie Mercury was a Parsee, and Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson were black).
I suppose I could stop there and say clearly the list is racist and so are all of you for not noticing it until now, which would fit in nicely with the ham-fistedness of the original article, but I am inclined to offer a more mundane explanation.
In my experience, most womens’ musical tastes skew towards pop. Most black people tend to prefer hip-hop or R &B. These are stereotypes to an extent but there is more than a grain of truth to them. The audience for rock is primarily white and male.
Rock, as a whole, tends to look over its shoulder much more so than hip-hop or pop. Rock audiences will flock to see an esteemed artist even if he is 75 and has only two teeth rattling around in his skull. Mostly, this is not the case with pop artists, who tend to have a much more ephemeral following that lasts for a year or three and then rapidly dies out.
There does not seem to be any great impediment to female artists obtaining airplay on commercial stations - indeed a quick look at the top 10 singles this week shows that at least two-thirds of the artists are female. Its just that most of them will probably be unheard of a few years from now.
Rather than trying to paint top-40 or Triple J as sexist, the explanation would seem to lie in the greater male tendency towards “brand loyalty”. A male person might drive Holden cars all his life, drink only XXXX beer, wear a certain kind of suit and faithfully purchase every single AC/DC album on their day of release. Its probably related to that whole atavistic tribal loyalty instinct that supposedly beats within the heart of every male.
Either way, I don’t think complaining about it is going to achieve a thing. The record execs these days say that women have more purchasing power in the music industry than men, and there’s every incentive for them to chase that dollar as hard as they can. If women choose to spend their dosh on anonymous-synonymous pop acts that die within the year, that’s their choice.
All this poll has done is thrown into sharp relief the discrepancy between popularity and most of all record sales between male and female artists.
Female artists always sell less records than males, and always have.
The poll merely reflects this inherent bias.
Blaming radio stations or anyone else is merely passing the buck from the ultimate arbiter of such things: The music buying public.
I agree that even merit is subjective, (and obviously that stupid comments about lezzos need go ignored) but surely there are obvious factors that everyone can agree (such as it not mattering who is in the band or where the band came from) can be excluded from reasoned critiques.
What I find annoying is your contention that disagreement with your argument has anything at all to do with you as ‘a female writer’. In my eyes you are just ‘a writer’.
Dave 13 Jul 09 at 8:55 pm -
The fact that 49% of “guilty pleasure” music is by female artists supports Mel’s point. Music by women figures much more highly in “embarrassing” lists than in “best of all time” lists.
Who should be on the list, then? I can think of some bands/artists with female leads I really like - the Grates, Peaches, PJ Harvey, Basement Jax - but I wouldn’t say they’re massively popular in the way that Nirvana, Rage, Jeff Buckley, the Chili Peppers and Led Zeppelin are.
If you can’t think of any hugely popular girls acts that should be there but aren’t, then why should the punters be able to?
It’s basically just a matter of there not being enough awesome girl rock bands around. If you want to change things and you’re a girl and can write good songs, start a band.
I’m completely with Natasha, here. I wouldn’t say that I mostly listen to female artists, but the ones that I do listen to are not played on Triple J. Triple J has always seemed like a radio station that appealed to 15-25 year old man-boys who think they’re really getting into something deep and ‘alternative’ by listening to JJJ. The poll is only reflective of their listeners - and most people with a generally ‘broadened’ knowledge of music DON’T listen to JJJ.
Interesting discussion. I argued on my blog today that the gender of the musicians in the hottest 100 is irrelevant to whether a poll is sexist or not. Why does no one seem to think about the content of the songs in the poll itself?
Gender should not be a issue when it comes to what songs mean to different people. When compiling the list, I doubt the JJJ listener would have thought ‘oh I wonder what gender/race/class distinctions will be create when my ten votes are incorporated into the other millions of votes..”
As Roland Barthes infers in his famous essay “The Death of the Author”, the authors personality, idealogy or identity, and I would say gender, should not distract people from the message or emotions that make an individual song or album.
People should be looking at whether the songs themselves are sexist if they want to know whether Australian music lovers, particularly JJJ listeners are sexist, and not the gender of the musicians who make them.
Sorry, I am the original Nick who pointed out you missed two prominent women (there are two Nicks on this thread). I did so not because I was using my “‘knowledge’ in an aggressive way to dominate debate” - but simply because you had missed out crediting two women who were important in shaping the sound of two very influential bands.
While getting the numbers wrong detracts from your point slightly, the position is still bad whether it is 5 bands or 3 bands and there is a very interesting discussion to be had around why that is the case. Personally, I lean towards a combination of a flawed survey methodology and the current JJJ audience not being born when the majority of us on this thread were first listening to the station.
Mel, if the wider point you want to make is that “people use these lists to create an imaginary musical landscape that subtly omits the contributions of women”, you haven’t.
There are any number of more likely explanations, including Mystikiel’s excellent point about brand loyalty, the fact that a bunch of real and very depressing social issues mean that women have been much less likely to make, or be able to make, the sort of music canonised in the JJJ outlook, and the possibility of vote splitting between songs by individual acts.
I absolutely agree that people will edit their favourites to make themselves look good, but there’s no reason to believe that would necessarily distort things in favour of male acts - there’s no shortage of embarrassing but delightful male pop - or that a bunch of individuals of both sexes would have any motive to do so.
In any event, women have made somewhere between 0 and 100% of the best records ever (my top 10 would include, at least, songs by Sleater-Kinney, the Shop Assistants and Laura Nyro), and perhaps you should be pushing the ones you feel are insufficiently recognised instead of abusing your correspondents.
So posting “hairy legged lezzos” is out of order, but “15-25 year old man-boys” is ok… right….
Interesting article and some thoughtful responses too. I’m a 40-plus JJJ listener (well that is the station that is most on in the car, that or ABC local radio), and you got me to go back and review my long-list that I did for the Hottest 100. The only solo female artists in the top 25 (a self imposed limit) were Madonna, Neko Case and Aretha Franklin, none of whom made my top 10. Sonic Youth, New Order, The Pogues (Kirsty MacColl) and The Go-Betweens were the bands in my top 10 songs that had females in them. I was a bit surprised by the overall make-up of the Hottest 100 - it seemed overly representative in some areas (90s, rock) and under-done in others (2000s, electronic/hip hop). I wonder what the breakdown of the 100 to 200 songs would have been like?
Mel, it seems a little unfair to lash out at the odd pedantic fan for correcting a fact, implying they are attacking you because you’re a female writer. I’m just guessing that a raving Toots-ophile would’ve set you straight if you were a feller too. “Sexist” is a harsh label to throw at someone, particularly when a simple “you need to get out more” would suffice.
But interesting article and debate.
On reflection, isn’t this a little like complaining that the chick-lit section at your local bookshop lacks male authors ? – It’s a reflection of the taste of a limited demographic and really doesn’t have a great deal of meaning beyond that (despite anything that marketers may choose to claim as part of any attempt to hype the “hottest 100” product) - So really, who cares ?
[...] Town. Clem Bastow covered it for The Age, listing the women who did make it into the poll, while Mel Campbell, at The Enthusiast, worried that ‘the Hottest 100 also legitimises radio industry strategies that ignore [...]
[...] My friend Mel Campbell writing for the awesomely titled The Enthusiast described it as an embarrassing shortcoming. Mel argues that there is a “danger [...] that people use these lists to create an imaginary [...]