So I'm going to be up-front with you now at the beginning, so we can establish some trust early on in our relationship. The truth is this: The whole reason I'm writing this particular article—and perhaps the entire reason I sought out my own music column—is that I've had a joke in my head for months that I have to get out before it takes up legal residency. But for this joke to work, you see, I have to put forth a certain argument. And, because this is a music column, I'm going to put forth the argument like this: Men and women tend to create wildly different kinds of music.
There's a Dan Bern song I really like called ""Chick Singers,"" and my favorite line is ""Some of them are good / And some of them are bad / But it's always kind of cool / That moment when they first step to the mike."" Because it is cool. To a male musicaphile (totally made this term up, but ""musica"" is Greek so it's etymologically sound (""sound"" is an entendre though granted not a very funny one)), a naked woman holding a guitar is the second greatest sight there is—the first, of course, being a naked woman not holding a guitar.
Consider for a moment: in this mental picture of women and guitars, in your own mind are you picturing acoustic or electric? I'll bet an autographed copy of Sticky Fingers that you're thinking acoustic.
It seems to me that ""female music"" (that would be by woman, not for women) is somehow fundamentally different than ""male music."" Think about it: The Rolling Stones vs. Bananarama; Bob Dylan vs. Joni Mitchell; Marilyn Manson vs. Jewel. I want to say that for every Mick Jagger there's a Jack Johnson just as for every Natalie Merchant there's a Janis Joplin, but I don't know if this is true. My political correctness training is yelling at me to back away slowly from this discussion, but for the moment I'm going to ignore that and forge onward anyway.
One thing I want to make clear: I'm not saying that women create inferior music—some of my all time favorite recording artists happen to lack the Y chromosome (I'm listening to Aimee Mann as I'm writing this!)—it's just to say that when I'm browsing the racks at B-Sides and come across a CD by a female artist, my immediate assumption is that it's going to be a low-fi, contemplative and emotional album. You know, acoustic guitars and slow songs with beautiful melodies.
Now, it's possible that I'm just a chauvinist and my assumptions really do prove that old saying about assumptions and a certain barnyard animal. I wonder, though, if a pan-gender study was to ever be conducted on all recorded albums if the results wouldn't back me up on this claim.
I think part of this divide is simply a numbers game. Despite the fact that there are more women than men on the planet, when it comes to recording artists, women are a bona-fide minority. Using a test that admittedly doesn't come close to passing any kind of scientific muster, I went through my own personal collection and figured out the female to male ratio. It comes out to 19:211: out of two hundred and eleven artists, only nineteen of them are female. That's 10 times more men than women. Again, chauvinism isn't out of the question. My larger point, though, is that because there are more men on the scene, it's harder to pin one particular type of aesthetic on them.
But numbers aside, I wonder if men and women really don't interpret and interact with the world differently, and if perhaps difference can actually be heard in the types of artistic output each gender makes. Maybe I'm totally wrong about all of this, but it seems to me that the difference between men and women isn't just biological; it's psychological, too, and the difference can be found in the gap between ""Jumpin' Jack Flash"" and ""Big Yellow Taxi.""
Yes, it's true (ready for the joke?): there's a vas deferens between men and women.
