So I was gonna blog about how the music biz is giving ladies the short-shrift but then I got drunk and forgot what my argument was supposed to be about in the first place: Something about Bob Dylan forgetting he ever had anything to do with Karen Dalton, an obscurified genius/Dylan enabler who succumbed to booze and smack in 1993...Karen Dalton is the most glorious folk artist you've never heard by the way. She's been compared to Billie Holliday in the same breath as having been described as 'an acquired taste'.
Acquired taste?! For real?!
It really didn't take too much in the way of a narcotic sedative for me to appreciate Lady Day the first time I heard her. Do we really need a Timbaland at the knobs to twiddle us male-dominated music-consuming public to feel a female songstress? If that's the case, then god help the Joanna Newsomes and the Joan As Police Womanses and the El Perro Del Marses because their hysterical Wiccan rants are gonna leave them crack-addled and starving if they don't flash their respective vaginas for US Weekly. (NOTE: Anne Coulter, you're no better than a vag-flashing Britney, you haggard, cocktail-swilling shill).
I really feel like ladies in the music biz are being shafted but I'm unclear as to why and how right now...I'm a little tipsy...why is Martha Wainwright unheard of in the shadow of her bro Rufus, why doesn't Cibo Matto's lovely foodie chanteuse Miho Hatori have a slew of never-ending solo gigs stretching from Coachella to Billboard Music Awards...can you name one single female artist who isn't under the thumb of some Svengali/Impresario?...Pink, I guess...still feels manufactured. Maybe Norah Jones...but she's no Joni Mitchell, a tad formulaic...Madonna, yes...but William Orbit really is her Svengali/Impresario/Phantom Of The Opera...if we're gonna call a spade a spade here.
My point here is that lately I've been listening to a lot of chick music (Tegan & Sara, Azure Ray, Goldfrapp) and I'm confused as to why none of their music impacts the Billboard charts. Tegan & Sara's 'Where Does The Good Go' would have have been a smash in the mid-70's. KT Tunstall charted briefly, and that gave me some hope, but 'Black Horse And The Cherry Tree' was almost a novelty single...something to be featured on K-Tel's 'Dr. Demento's Best Of Whacktacular Koo-Koo Shit You're Embarrassed To Admit You Like To Friends And Relatives', it's so anomalous, even though in it's pristine incarnation, it's breathtaking .
Maybe we don't give a shit about Billboard charts anymore, thanks to the iTunes revolution, but I'd really like to see a chick-artist(s) hunker down and build a body of work and prosper without Alpha-Male Hip-Hop Nation calling the shots. Nelly Furtado surrendered. Good for her.
Liz Phair's playlist on iTunes (as posted on October 31st, 2006) restored my faith in her 'Guyville' vision. Her playlist reads like a short story and it makes me pine for her crabby, failed-romantic voice. Also she has stellar taste in music (that strangely chimes with my own...call me, Liz!).
Her voice is necessary. This bitch needs to write tablets worth of prose because there's a world of pie-faced boys & girls who ache to read her shit.
Word to Patricia Arquette and her crazy-quilt playlist. I only wish she would have expanded upon her picks. I have a feeling that I'd like to sit and nurse a cocktail or two with her and pick her brain but I'd like a trailer or something...I'd like to know what I'm in for.
More iTunes Playlists!
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