WELCOME, my darlings!!!!
Nov. 22nd, 2010 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_future_modernes posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
rocknroll_n_blues_queensLet me introduce myself! I am your host, the_future_modernes, and I created this comm. because I wanna highlight the women-identifying performers of rock and roll (ETA: and punk and goth and metal and shoe gaze and progressive and singer-songwriter) and blues and funk (and whatever other genre of rock music that you can come up with) music! I've loved rock music since I was 15 years old, but it was only during last year's "three weeks for dreamwidth" that I began to be disturbed at just how ridiculously male-centric my playlist was. I wanted to have role-models that I could look up to when I was playing air-guitars or rocking out to an awesome cd, and they were not to be found easily on rock radio stations or on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine! (Instead we had a naked Christina Aguilera posing with a guitar:/) And so I started to google. And I found that they were out there, alright, they were just mostly ignored by the mainstream establishment. To make matters worse, when they were paid attention to, their level of sexiness seemed to be the only thing that the idiot-journalists could think about! And to top it all off, diversity was completely ignored. And so I have been bombarding my access list with women rockers ever since! Some of my favourites include Tamar Kali, Sophie Ramos, Asobi Seku, Girl in a Coma, Dengue Fever, Lumaya, Brody's new band Spinerette (GOD her voice!) and so many others!
So kick off your shoes and sit a while! Tell me about you!Who are your favourite female in rock and roll and blues bands? Any band with at least one woman-identifying person is eligible, all you have to do is focus on that woman identifying person. All-women bands would be even more awesome! And bands that feature women with differing levels of ability, sexual orientation and other diversity intersections would be for the win!Give us some interviews, highlight a song on which the performance, instrumental or vocal; was awesome! Rec us websites! If you id as a woman and you feel like it, tell us what's your experience been being a fan? Write fic, make icons, make us a layout! Link us videos, give us some history, and make your recs diverse!!! Lets have some fun!
the_future_modernes, and I created this comm. because I wanna highlight the women-identifying performers of rock and roll (ETA: and punk and goth and metal and shoe gaze and progressive and singer-songwriter) and blues and funk (and whatever other genre of rock music that you can come up with) music! I've loved rock music since I was 15 years old, but it was only during last year's "three weeks for dreamwidth" that I began to be disturbed at just how ridiculously male-centric my playlist was. I wanted to have role-models that I could look up to when I was playing air-guitars or rocking out to an awesome cd, and they were not to be found easily on rock radio stations or on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine! (Instead we had a naked Christina Aguilera posing with a guitar:/) And so I started to google. And I found that they were out there, alright, they were just mostly ignored by the mainstream establishment. To make matters worse, when they were paid attention to, their level of sexiness seemed to be the only thing that the idiot-journalists could think about! And to top it all off, diversity was completely ignored. And so I have been bombarding my access list with women rockers ever since! Some of my favourites include Tamar Kali, Sophie Ramos, Asobi Seku, Girl in a Coma, Dengue Fever, Lumaya, Brody's new band Spinerette (GOD her voice!) and so many others! So kick off your shoes and sit a while! Tell me about you!Who are your favourite female in rock and roll and blues bands? Any band with at least one woman-identifying person is eligible, all you have to do is focus on that woman identifying person. All-women bands would be even more awesome! And bands that feature women with differing levels of ability, sexual orientation and other diversity intersections would be for the win!Give us some interviews, highlight a song on which the performance, instrumental or vocal; was awesome! Rec us websites! If you id as a woman and you feel like it, tell us what's your experience been being a fan? Write fic, make icons, make us a layout! Link us videos, give us some history, and make your recs diverse!!! Lets have some fun!
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 02:15 am (UTC)What I'd love to find is a jam band with a woman up front so I can sing along with the songs. :D Or a woman doing what Jeff Coffin & Troy Andrews do: play loud & crazy jazz on her instrument better than anyone else out there. It would make my DAY.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 04:47 am (UTC)My top three awesome women blues/rockers:
The Empress of the Blues - Bessie Smith
The First Lady of Song - Ella Fitzgerald
The Clouds - frontwomen Jodi Phillis (guitar and vocals) and Patricia "Trish" Young (bass and vocals).
Bessie Smith is amaaaazing, and she sings some seriously challenging material about bisexuality (in the 1920s and 30s!) along with all kinds of other awesome stuff. Died early in a car crash, sadly, a massive tragic loss.
Ella Fitzgerald I probably don't need to explain, except to say that I really really love the arc of her voice through her career, starting with the soft-but-skilled girl-voice, ranging through the full bodied woman voice and all the way to gentle blues mama late in life. And she uses quarter-tone trills better than anyone before or since. :-)
The Clouds are probably my favourite band of all time, ever. Phillis and Young are absolutely classic Sydney Rock Chicks, and the band was forged in the heyday of the Sydney Pub Band circuit of the 1990s. Their rock is fierce, their use of harmony amazing, and their recordings do actually come close to doing justice to their live performances. They were seriously impressive live - none of this talent-hack click-track-autotune recording band business - their live sound was just as tight and powerful as their recordings. Sadly never made it big, despite doing very very well locally.
SeahorseMairi on youtube appears to have a bunch of Clouds videos up... they give some idea of how good they were live.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 09:06 am (UTC)♥ !
I decided to follow because my music shelf is so very dude-centric. I just went through my list and the female musicians or female-fronted bands (not counting bands where the output is shared equally between men and women) make up some 15% in the albums section, the most prominent examples being Anne Clark, Ladytron, Malaria!, Qntal, Siouxsie & The Banshees, and X-Mal Deutschland. Although there's often the argument being made that "it's just my personal taste" that just happens to have mostly dudes (and yeah sometimes I have that knee-jerk reaction myself), it doesn't happen in a vacuum and I think that the tendency to ignore female-fronted rock/alternative bands in the media, skip over their contributions when talking about musical history, or focus on them only in sexist and diminishing ways plays a part in it. That's why I think this comm is awesome.
P.S.: a question: are bands from the punk/goth rock spectrum eligible?
Welcome aboard!!!!
Date: 2010-11-23 09:25 am (UTC)YEP!
YOU LIKE QNTAL TOO!! HEEEEE!!!!!
woman-identifying
♥ !
Glad I got the language ok!
it doesn't happen in a vacuum and I think that the tendency to ignore female-fronted rock/alternative bands in the media, skip over their contributions when talking about musical history, or focus on them only in sexist and diminishing ways plays a part in it. True dat true dat.
I look forward to your posts!!!:)