Tag: music

The crapness of music videos

Whenever I go to the gym I tend to put my earphones in and try to avoid watching the music video screen, which is huge.  Instead I focus on the display on the treadmill, other people at the gym, or the TV shows on the tiny screens.  However, every now and again I see something interesting out of the corner of my eye, or a film clip I actually like, and I catch myself watching the music videos… and wow, some of them are terrible.

As a generalisation, the film clips shown at my gym, when sung by male singers, feature women as objects, as tits and arses, as thin, gyrating people who are clamouring to have sex with the singer, or the viewer.  Interestingly though, those film clips of songs sung by women, have women front and centre, as entire beings, and generally as free agents.  The two messages don’t really go together, and I am increasingly grossed out by the male-dominated film clips at my gym (hence me not watching them).

This is a gym, a gym that believes to be fit and healthy, one has to be slim and preferably muscular.  This gym believes that I have joined solely to lose all that fat that keeps following me around, because clearly fat is an unwanted thing and not part of who I am.  And that being fat is a bad thing, and being thin is a good thing.  None of this has been said to my face, but it really doesn’t have to be with all the posters extolling the virtues of their boot camps with before and after photos.

So imagine my surprise when I saw a film clip of the Beth Ditto song, “I wrote the Book”.  Here was a proudly fat woman, singing a great song, dancing like she had every right to, and in the film clip being desired by several gorgeous men.  I was amazed – mostly because I had completely failed up until this point to even notice Beth Ditto (not watching film clips didn’t help), and also because this was so subversive.  I was exercising at the gym, an activity that many people looking at me would assume be because I hated my fat body and wanted to be thin (I just want to be fit and strong), and here I was watching a proud fat woman, dance and be desired, knowing that although outside the gym this is actually a normal part of life, inside the gym it was subversive.

So thank you to whoever programs those songs for sneaking in a Beth Ditto song.  Please note that I’d like a whole lot less of the “women as sexual objects” and a lot more of the “everyone, regardless of who they are and what they look like can have a good time” clips for the future.

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Growing older

Bluejuice, one of my favourite Australian bands (they’re very funky) released a new single this week called Act Yr Age.  I watched it because I thought, “Hey, awesome… new song by cool band” and then continued watching it wondering what the fuck I’d just seen.  My initial reaction was revulsion, because that’s what we’re trained to see in this clip, that’s what society tells us is revolting and wrong and icky, and that’s what I want to explore.  (Clip and the rest under the jump)

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Hottest 100 Australian Albums of All time – time to vote!

Triple J are running a poll to vote on the hottest 100 Australian albums of all time, and I highly recommend that you go and vote if you’ve ever listened to Australian music ever and enjoyed it.  I’d really appreciate it if when people voted that thought long and hard about their choices.

I voted for:

Clouds  –  Octopus
Crowded House  –  Woodface
Divinyls  –  Desperate
Kate Miller-Heidke  –  Little Eve
Love Outside Andromeda  –  Love Outside Andromeda
Machine Gun Fellatio  –  Paging Mr. Strike
Midnight Oil  –  Blue Sky Mining
Regurgitator  –  Unit
Tripod  –  Box Set
Yothu Yindi  –  Tribal Voice

I’d really be happy if this poll did not become yet another sausage fest as the Hottest 100 Albums of All time did two years ago.

The “Hottest 100 Of All Time” has since aired, and audiences have been shocked to find that only two songs in the top 100 – two! – were sung by women. Only six female-fronted songs made it into the second batch of 100, so it wasn’t as though the men just edged women out in the final vote – women are just overwhelmingly absent. This sort of discrepancy doesn’t happen by accident; we can quibble about the locus of the problem till we’re blue in the face, but it’s a clear sign of entrenched, largely-invisible sexism in action. Quibbling about the locus is pointless because the locus is everywhere. This is the Matrix. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

It is possibly the modern music industry’s greatest tragedy and shame that it has, collectively, worked so hard to exclude women, keep them to the margins or, at best, channel them into narrow moulds. Given everything that worked against them being acknowledged as musicians it is a testament to the astonishing talent, dedication and sheer strength of will of women that any managed to break through and be heard. But break through they did, and they did amazing things, and now Triple J erases them all over again. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

The Hottest 100 is a major Triple J brand, and I guess I’m coming at this from a branding and marketing perspective. It’s a major plank of the station – of the network’s promotion, and to hold it up and say ‘Here’s what our listeners think are the greatest 100 songs of all time’ when there’s no women, I think is a major problem for the station, in terms of its representation of diversity and the diversity of views among youth in Australia. It suggests that Triple J is perhaps playing to, or certainly in the case of this poll, is attracting a very narrow sort of white male oriented audience. What it says about the audience, what it says about the station, what it says about the relationship between station and audience, I think is of concern for Triple J as the – let’s face it, the Government, the ABC’s youth broadcaster, and one that’s funded by all Australians. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

 

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