Here's an interesting article on Slate that for some reason I'm just seeing now. (Is anyone else catching this one?)
The 30-second version: Slate critic Jody Rosen makes an argument, which I think is pretty flimsy, for female dominance of the pop music charts. ("But rivalry among these women should not obscure their larger collective victory—the widening gender gap at the top of the pops.")
Slate's reader response forum,
the Fray, featured some predictable responses to the article, decrying any positive valuation of pop music based on different criteria, such as
production values,
jumping on the pomo/hipster "junk-is-cool" bandwagon, and even
tour work ethics. These types of responses to pop music aren't uncommon, obviously, since popism (an appreciation of pop music as a genre) as a mode of music reviewing isn't terribly popular.
One
comment, on the other hand, makes a distinction between artists who write their own music and those who don't...
To compare Nelly Furtado, Janet Jackson, Pink, Christina Aquilera or Gwen Stefani to this celebutante karoke wannabe is disgusting. Say what you want about them, but each of those girls can sing, and a couple of them have superb musicianly instinct and I hear "write their own music." Can you imagine Paris writing anything other than her name on a Barney's bill? No.
...to extrapolate, does this mean that pop divas somehow venture into a more credible artistic space when they don't employ a professional songwriter, or collaborate with one? Does it really make a difference in terms of the final product? Jewel came from the singer-songwriter school of music and did a pretty good job of popping it up with "Intuition" a few years ago.
I am not a huge consumer of diva-pop, but does it actually make a qualitative difference in an album when a performer is writing her own material? Success within the diva-pop genre relies on vocal prowess, production aesthetics, and celebrity image. I agree that authorship demonstrates a performer's overall musical talent better, but what happens when the writer-diva is the only one deserving of success?
What about all of the 15-year-old gay boys, weened on Madonna and Annie Lennox, whose musical genius manifests itself in hooks and annoyingly catchy choruses? Think of the children!
On another note, the feminist gut reaction to this piece is, obviously, that the current crop of pop divas owe some of their success to being skinny, pretty, and sexual. And even giving Rosen a healthy serving of benefit-of-the-doubt, his laundry list of this summer's divas never fails to mention the physicality of each performer, and conflating this with dynamicsm:
...pop's female superstars recognize no limits, playing all these roles and a dozen others, often in the course of a single torrid love song, all the while executing tricky dance steps with bared midriffs glistening beneath whirling strobe lights.
Granted, Rosen isn't saying the theatrics make these women better musicians, but I think it's necessary to point out that it's never been hard for women to succeed in the media when bare midriffs are involved. I think there's some sort of talent agency just for bare midriffs, in fact. And honestly, it's great there are so many successful women, but their accomplishments in the testosterone-filled music industry aren't nearly as impressive as women like Janice Joplin, Melissa Etheridge, or even (in the early days) Sheryl Crow, who became major stars within genres where masculinity is woven into the mold for success.
Perhaps there's hope, in
this announcement from Paste, that pop stars like Pink will do more crossover projects...?
