2002-12-24

2002 was a strange year for me. I spent more time this year not listening to music than any year since I think grade school -- I found that I was enjoying it a lot less. Maybe it was because I wasn't in a position to "discover" music anymore -- moving to New York made my WPRB gig a lot less feasible, so I gave it up; things just cost more in New York, so I didn't have as much record-buying income as before; I'm trying to not use credit cards so much (see previous reason); Audiogalaxy died a horrible death, and most of the programs that bubbled up to replace it aren't what you would call Mac-friendly.

In what was probably the strangest manifestation of my depressed record-buying, I hated "modern rock" radio a lot less than previous years -- you had "Chop Suey!" and its followup singles, that Foo Fighters remake of "Add It Up," Queens of the Stone Age, "You Know You're Right" (I'm totally curious as to where this will place in the Pazz & Jop singles poll, btw), and the Hives and the White Stripes. Now, these are probably all records that I would have liked whether they got airplay or not, but it still felt strange to me, because I still really vehemently dislike what the format has become -- a "no girls allowed" playground for second-string high school linebackers.

But indie -- is it much better? Not really. The landscape has evolved to be, in many ways, a carbon copy of the structures it (supposedly? Honestly, I can't even tell anymore) repudiates. And nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the ways gender politics played themselves out this year, or, rather, the way they didn't.

It all felt so reactionary, almost on a Durst level: You could feel the boners being popped beneath every writeup of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs by all the guys who loved the stylized "fuck me" pose of their lead singer. (See also: electroclash.) It was eerily reminiscent of the hype around "Exile in Guyville" -- so expect, when Karen O ditches her stylist and settles down, tons of "what? I never liked them" denials -- and it was made all the more frustrating by the fact that the Gossip, which was led by a singer who, you know, wasn't, like, hot, did what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs did with actual passion and glee instead of runway gloss, but got maybe a tenth of the press. Every band with a chick singer got compared to Sleater-Kinney, whether they sounded like them or not. The Voice music section's slate of female writers seemed to only be able to speak in the parlance of notes passed between classes.

It just felt like females, in terms of what was being written about and talked about, were being turned back into ornamental devices -- does the world need a rock-tinged slew of Ashantis? (I guess Rolling Stone's Women in Rock issue answered that question for me.) And I'm not even saying this in terms of focusing on "Women in Rock" -- but how about focusing on some women who play rock music, not even as women but as people who put out records?*

You can probably tell, but I'm totally speaking from the point of view of someone whose full-on immersion into this culture came in large part as a result of the riot grrl/K/Kill Rock Stars Axis -- my view of the past may be a utopic view, but I think it's very telling that, in the Pitchfork top 50, the few female artists who are named are all people who have been in the indie consciousness for a while. (Are the members of Sleater-Kinney the only women IN THE WORLD who can play their instruments?)

Some might criticize me for being essentialist and focusing too much on gender. But isn't so much of what makes music vital for people the way it speaks to them, or for them? The overarching message I got from the collected weight of so much of the music I heard this year -- even a lot of the records I liked! -- was "If you can't look hot while you're dancing to our beats, you can't be part of our revolution."

And, seriously, fuck that noise.

*Like: Nina Nastasia, Scout Niblett, Julie Doiron, Marianne Nowottony, Quixotic, the aforementioned Gossip, etc. Also I really like what I have heard of the new Cat Power record, but I think that record getting shitloads of press is pretty axiomatic.