velvet coalmine – Bad Reputation A feminist pop culture adventure Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:00:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6 37601771 Topical Linkpost /2011/08/12/topical-linkpost/ /2011/08/12/topical-linkpost/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:00:34 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6858 Some viewpoints on this week’s events.

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STOP! Make a cup of tea. And have a linkpost with that biscuit. /2011/06/03/stop-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-have-a-linkpost-with-that-biscuit/ /2011/06/03/stop-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-have-a-linkpost-with-that-biscuit/#comments Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:00:21 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5882 It’s Friday! Have some links. Ta for flying Air BadRep, etc etc.

  • First up, if you spotted McSweeney’s the other week and saw the mashup of PG Wodehouse and (yes) Brett Easton Ellis, PG Wodehouse’s American Psycho, that was Team BadRep member Rhian. Jean, in the Jeeves role, is neatly recast as the brains behind Bateman literally getting away with murder. Nice one!
  • Following on from that, Rhian blogs about gender and being a fan of American Psycho over on her own blog, Velvet Coalmine. (It’s been a busy week for Rhian; she’s already exploded VS Naipaul’s bizarre blathering without even trying, as several McSweeney readers immediately assumed she must be male on the basis of her writing…)
  • Texas! Not a good place to be a feminist! Right? Or… is it? Andrea Grimes over on Reality Check asks and answers the question: Why Should Feminists Stay In The Lone Star State?
  • Been up a couple of weeks now, but Michelle Dean at The Awl draws together the range of responses to Bridesmaids very well in a nice indictment of the sacred cows of Hollywood comedy.
  • The F Word are on the hunt for music reviewers!
  • Flippin’ ‘eck. The Empowering Girls blog pops to Hamleys. I knew they had floors for “GIRLS” and “BOYS”, but sometimes you need a pictorial tour to really get the reality of what that means. Christ. When I take random detours into Hamleys of an afternoon (and I do, because I like seeing what kids are into, PLUS I refuse to grow up), I stick to the ground floor, with all the gadgets and the 15-foot plush giraffe. And… well, I just remembered why. Also notable: why are all the art materials apparently on the “Girls” floor? I mean, seriously?
  • That Wikipedia gender gap debate: Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words), from Sue Gardner (Exec Director of the Wikimedia Foundation).
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Gaye Advert and the Great Cock ‘n’ Balls Swindle /2010/11/30/gaye-advert-and-the-great-cock-n-balls-swindle/ /2010/11/30/gaye-advert-and-the-great-cock-n-balls-swindle/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:00:41 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=1217 GUEST POST SHOUTOUT: Please welcome Rhian Jones of Velvet Coalmine.

******

Sexuality in Rock’n’roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.
– Ian Penman, NME, 1979

I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.
– Gaye Advert, 1977

Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.

I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved The Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And most of all, I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.

Despite their intelligent, era-defining songs like Bored Teenagers and The Great British Mistake, you have to dig through several layers of punk sediment before the Adverts come to light. They were one of the first punk bands to gain commercial success, and how much of this achievement was down to Gaye is open to depressing debate. A groundbreaking example of the Babe on Bass, her experience prefigured the problems faced by lone women in bands from Blondie to Paramore: scepticism towards their musical ability tied to a disproportionate focus on their looks.

She could have the impact of five Runaways, Patti Smith’s armpit, and Blondie’s split ends on Britain’s vacant female scene.
– Jane Suck, Sounds, 1977

Gaye’s elevation to national sweetheart began as a generic punk fairytale. In 1976, she and her partner TV Smith made an escape in time-honoured fashion from their Devonshire coastal town to London, where they swiftly formed a band. The Adverts became a fixture at pioneering punk venue the Roxy before being snatched up for a tour with the Damned and a contract with Stiff Records.

A devotee of Iggy Pop and the Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, Gaye made her musical presence a vital part of the Adverts’ brand of thuggishly intrepid punk. Their breakthrough single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes hinges on her instrument’s ascending throb. Most Adverts songs are played as though they’re throwing punches, TV Smith’s vocals advancing in one-two jabs while Gaye’s bass lines bob and weave. On stage, she was a static and self-contained sounding-board for Smith’s livewire showmanship.

Photo: artwork of Gaye Advert, uploaded to Flickr by user ariel awesome (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigalittlea/)

image by Flickr user ariel awesome

But her visual presence hit equally hard: she caught your eye, you caught your breath. Her iconic look – battered black leather and a kohl-rimmed thousand-yard stare – drew on Suzie Quattro and Joan Jett’s effortless rocker fundamentalism rather than the try-hard iconoclasm of Jordan or Siouxsie. Gaye was punk’s terrifyingly blank, stark, dead-eyed minimalism made flesh, the girl nihilist next door.

For Greil Marcus, both Gaye and the Slits were punk’s ‘pretty people who made themselves ugly’ – although clearly not ugly enough. As the reminiscences of her admirers on tribute websites and YouTube comments testify, Gaye was punk’s first female pin-up. Her press and TV appearances stirred hearts and hormones across late-70s Britain, pulling the plug on her wish to be one of the boys.

I wasn’t made to feel as conscious of the fact that I was female [at the Roxy], as I was by the rock press.
– Gaye in Vacant: A Diary Of The Punk Years, Nils & Ray Stevenson

In a 2001 interview with the website Punk77, Gaye recalled that “the media would concentrate on irrelevant things like clothes or be extra critical of my playing in the same way that some men are prejudiced against women drivers”. The hackneyed trope of whether girls can play seems especially incongruous in punk, a musical movement studded with gleeful and defiant amateurism. Nevertheless, Gaye’s playing was picked on as “plodding” and her mute ‘fixed sultriness’ unfavourably compared with the vocal talent of other punk women. This latter criticism betrays, among other things, a peculiar disapproval of girls in non-singing positions, as though there were a correct set of requirements for band composition, with musical preoccupation on the part of female members an intrinsically suspicious transgression of their allotted role.

1978 single cover for Television's Over/Back From The Dead, b/w image of the band posing, uploaded to an extensive Flickr gallery of punk single cover art by user Affendaddy.

1978 single cover, uploaded to an extensive gallery of punk singles cover art by Flickr user Affendaddy

Dismissal of Gaye’s musical credentials went hand-in-hand with an insistence on her value as eye-candy. According to the NME, their bassist’s ‘superb squeakers’ were the best thing about the Adverts and the only conceivable cause of any mainstream notice they might attract. Stiff Records instantly latched onto Gaye’s looks as a marketing tool, giving the Adverts’ debut single a cover bearing a close-up of her face – all eyes and lips, the band’s name an afterthought. This was a stunt pulled without the band’s prior knowledge, which Gaye avenged by refusing to appear in other band photographs for the single.

As the Adverts gained more media attention, Gaye’s image began to dominate the band’s press. Again, the novelty of her status as sole female in a role other than singer seemed to confer as much fascination as her looks. She complained of fending off photographers’ requests for her “to pose with my jacket undone” and sudden “leching” from men she’d considered her friends. After ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ hit the Top 20 and the band appeared on Top of the Pops, the national response to Gaye was extraordinary. The Sun described her, bafflingly, as ‘one of the saucy girl singers who have taken over pop’, and the Daily Express swooned that she possessed:

…[the same] fragile beauty that made the world and Mick Jagger fall in love with Marianne Faithful. Gaye is beautiful, she is as dark as Marianne was fair, with black hair and Castillian white skin…

This presentation of Gaye, and its explicit comparison to pliant and angelic pre-punk darling Faithfull, attempted to explain her as a continuation of the past, rather than a messy break with it. As revolutionary a moment as punk was, it operated within a reactionary framework in which its icons were objectified and misunderstood.

The Adverts disbanded in 1979, their split hastened by Gaye’s discomfort with, and other band members’ resentment of, the puddles of critical drool collecting at her feet. Gaye’s enduring reputation as prototypical punkette pin-up tends to overshadow what she actually did – which was, in her own words, “[try] to get a good sound and play right. I’m not one of Pan’s People.” She had the misfortune to attempt this within a context in which women on stage, regardless of their reasons for and intentions in being there, were automatically sexualised, examined and evaluated in a manner wholly absent from attitudes towards their male counterparts. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

*
[Thanks to tvsmith.com and Punk77 for several of the above quotes.]

If you’re interested in guest posting on BadRep, drop us a line and tell us what you’re thinking at [email protected]

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Without warning, some Midweek Links appeared /2010/11/03/without-warning-some-midweek-links-appeared/ /2010/11/03/without-warning-some-midweek-links-appeared/#respond Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:00:46 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=805
  • It’s the Twelfth Annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance on 20th November. There’s an event in Brighton on Sunday 21st November.  Read more about events around the world, and what the day itself is all about, here. In brief, it’s an event to remember everyone who has died this year as a result of widespread prejudice against genderqueer and transpeople.  The list is deeply saddening. Some of the BR team will be going to the Brighton event, and hopefully there will be lots of people there.
  • Gabby Schulz: comic on sexism and online etiquette. (Invoked debate to the tune of 666 comments!)
  • It would be churlish at this point not to link to Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, which if you haven’t checked out before, you should.  You may well be aware of it already, but it bears repeating, because when I first discovered it, I cheered at my monitor screen with the kind of excitement I’d not exhibited since about 1994 when Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories were my favourite buys at the school Book Fair. Contains Susan B Anthony, Wonder Woman, Tesla, mermaids, and the Brides of Dracula supporting universal suffrage.
  • Don’t Interrupt – Lizzie B blogs “work, politics, the media and being a woman.  So just about everything, except, of course, the kitchen sink”. Nice.
  • This blog was featured recently in Marie Claire magazine, no less, and frankly, you can’t knock their taste on this one bit: Rhian Jones on Velvet Coalmine blogs music and politics.
  • Here’re some blogs aiming to engage male readers with gender issues and/or feminism: What Men Dare Do, Feminist Allies, and The Good Men Project.
  • Hyperbole And A Half joins the pressing debate for the alpha dude on How To Make Showering Awesome Again. Well, have YOU ever seen a coconut burst into flames from sheer excellence?
  • Send your links to [email protected]

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