Cock Rock on the Radio

So The Hoydens have a pretty awesome conversation going at the moment about Triple J’s Man Week and the lack of, dare I say it, Cunt Power in the brief history of post 60s music someone-or-other has compiled on their website. Man Week (although creepily named) seems to be mostly something that the triple J news program Hack is doing. They often have weekly themes to stimulate discussion and report on and to be honest this one doesn't offend me that much because some of the conversations they're having are really important like talking about prostate cancer and mental health. I mean, I think we spend enough collective time wringing our hands and worrying about men in what is essentially a male-authored world, but I'm not going to begrudge any person getting info about their health.

But honestly, I do begrudge the exclusion of women from the writing of histories, including pop culture histories. I mean, seriously? Is this list the best Triple J could do to represent the 1960s- 2000s to the youth of Australia, who were not there and probably never find out about it except from them? orlando is thinking of writing a letter, which triple j obviously need to read, but triple J’s defence of this list is inevitably going to be that while female artists have contributed to music since the 60s they were never the avant-guard, and that they always followed the lead of male artists in terms or creative risks and commercial success. No doubt they’ll make some sort of blanket statement about the list being "incomplete" and remind her the judgments made by those who complied the list are subjective, and hey why not vote for yourself! It'll be totally sweet maaaaan. I've seen this defense used by shitloads of academics to defend thier phallocentric history of philosophy and art history, and it's disingenuous and lazy.

Mostly because this list-making business is always necessarily arbitrary and imprecise (very different to subjective), no matter how much you've studied music history. Who is deciding where hardcore ends and metalcore begins stylistically? When glam rock started chronologically and the difference between 'foreshadowing' a genre and it's proper 'beginning'. When grunge became insanely popular did it also become a different genre (popgrunge? I don't know) from underground grunge or not? And why the fuck is the Riot Grrrl movement (presumably) a subset of punk according to Triple J? We're going to tell this story based on the way it's been told before and the way we like to see the world. Genres are lines in the sand, and as such are a pretty imprecise way of drawing up the list. But if Triple J were to do it differently how would they measure it? Rely on the market and collate a list of commercially successful artists? Who the author personally likes? There's nothing objective about this list and in the absence of facts Triple J are just falling back on patriarchal yardsticks.

The problem with this list is that it relies too unreflectively on the way this story has been told before. Living in a patriarchal world means that all the tools we use to interpret and order that world value men over women, white over black, hetero over LGBT, cis over trans, able bodied over PWD. Individuals and institutions not being critical and deliberately mindful of that valuing and ordering is what perpetuates the patriarchy. And phallocentric histories are undoubtedly patriarchal. Even if this list wasn't utterly arbitrary (actually, precisely becasue it is arbitrary) it's such a fail on Triple J's part not to examine why women are underrepresented on it. They could've looked at how they are implicated in the marketing/ consumption of female musicians as either
1) untalented wank fodder (jokes about Brittany Spears)
2) talented women whose sex life is more interesting than their music (BUT WHAT IS MISSY'S HIGGINS' ORIENTATION!!???), or,
3) talented female musicians who are presented as a novelty (Bjork, P J Harvey, on and on).

But of course reflecting on sexism, internalised and institutional, is an inherently feminist thing to do and... opps got left off the list.