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Comment Gender on the Newcastle upon Tyne pop music scene - January 2011 - By Mark Self "The bar was fairly quiet, beforehand the men in the audience immediately took an interest in myself more than the male performers, and kept complaining that they wanted to hear me first, as if I was some kind of novelty. And one of the men actually made some comment about me having breasts. Good job he pointed that out, I had no idea..." We know this; the male musician cannot be seen as under represented on the popular live music scene locally. I employ the term popular as a distinction from Folk music or Classical music only. Taking a look across the varied Newcastle scene we see the gender disparity blazing away mainly unattended. An incongruity affording a discord building to an inharmonious situation pervades. "The music scene in Newcastle is definitely male-dominated but I don‘t think this is specific to Newcastle." "Music has been dominated by males for centuries; like many things, women have been disallowed to perform music in the past, and been forced to release compositions under a male pseudonym." This is not to say there are not a lot of women musically active in Newcastle. Over the previous four years I have witnessed women out weighing men; singing in a choir I engineered, playing and singing in folk and art music outfits and randomly in great numbers the audience at a 1930‘s jazz revival gig in North Shields I filmed. Open mic nights seem to have the balance about equal with, for example, plenty of women suffused at the Open Mic night at The Trent on Tuesday evenings. The perception lives in the female mind too, "I‘m really not sure why there are not as many women doing it." I am going to avoid the use of stats relying instead upon my own minimal experience and a questionnaire sent to varied women performers and one female promoter all of which have experience in Newcastle and other cities. All quotes in this essay are taken from the women that responded to my questionnaire. One focus of the questionnaire was to enquire why are women under represented on the popular music scene in Newcastle? I cannot know the complexities but know arriving at one conclusion would be folly. This is not a spotlight I can adequately cover in an article of this size either. Instead I have opted to generate debate via questions and responses this article may generate via the blog this magazine is attached to. Do women under represent themselves? Is it harder for a female band/or solo to get started? Are some possible female band members busy with families or have friends who are mothers building female support networks elsewhere? The previous two questions increase in significance when women soar past their teens into their all-important twenties where most male musicians hone their craft. A female promoter suggests one reason could be women in Newcastle are already catered for "it really isn’t that important. I mean, you‘ve got the town and the nightlife." Do women not consider music "important?" Do women not appreciate the environments music is made and performed? Hours of lonesome programming causing havoc across the friend network? Or the cost of gear detracts from the fashion/make up/automobile/holiday/apartment budget? Women are objectified so much by men and resultantly by themselves and other women too," Could this mean women want to avoid ‘objectification’ by not performing on popular music scenes? Can the male objectifying the female musician ever be prised away from the reification process? "I’ve learned that people from companies, like PRS or LiveNation, when I contact them, are very willing to meet for coffee and chat about prospective career options while I know boys who have been trying for ages but don’t even get a response via email. I met this girl who played an acoustic night once, and she seemed to know everyone and everyone was keen on listening to her music, which I thought was great since she got a full room, but later, afterwards when everyone was mingling I heard loads of the boys talking that they wanted to score with her, and they were taking the piss out of her songs. Not so cool, it was quite sad." "There needs to be a healthy balance, and I find being a little like the boys only helps. It’s strange, but once you show them that you can down a pint and know as dirty jokes as they do it opens doors. Which is hilarious if you ask me." "Newcastle was great, people were open, helpful, there were occasional problems but it always worked out fine in the end. In London it’s really horrible. People work against one another, try to rip you off, cheat, it’s evil. They are arrogant and unhelpful. In Germany it’s different. People working in music are old and judgemental; the first reaction I got when I pitched an idea to a promoter was just laughter. And then a finger pointed at me as in "You must be lost". But then, after I finished talking, he liked it a lot but said he couldn’t do it. But I’ve recently heard that he took my idea and is using it as his own... Oh well." "I think the music scene in Newcastle is a pretty strange thing. I guess there isn’t a massive interest in new or experimental music or open mindedness among people to explore it, or openness of that scene to encourage people to explore it that much. There were definitely more female musicians in Montreal being more experimental and it wasn’t a big deal or a gimmick at all." What possible conclusion can we draw from the above impressions? The Mercury Music Prize in 2009 "like 2008 saw female acts heavily featured." Bubble gum pop like the Gaga’s, the Britney’s and The Sugarbabes rarely seem to stray far from the semi naked promo videos organised by the record labels. Record label decisions are taken by women and men but most of these men and women are not front of camera. A musical system jam packed with women making themselves and being made into sexual objects in order to sell audio recordings and related merchandise is what we have advertised upon us. It is these adverts a lot of young musical women base some of their identity. Why is it local female musicians opt out of performing more naked if that’s a way to sell music? Does this mean local women retain some power over the culture that seeks to control their purse and their image because they perform clothed? Is there a local female demographic missing altogether from the pop music scene? I sense a cavern between the female scene and the international music business. I know how big this gap is because it is the same size space as the men contend with. Only the gap between music and the music business has fewer females performing in it locally. Music fans found to be complicit in adding to the general cultural blur - January 2011 - By Mark Self Listening to music is a creative process in its own making. Humans have a tendency to stain what they experience leaving residues; having a relationship with the music you love blurs cultural mechanisms as a listener. A cultural mechanism is the way we understand each other or a music distribution format or a way of speaking about music or the guitar having a dominant musical position in the 20th century. Many people listen to music and make claims about how strongly they identify with the music. Claiming when listening to music "I love that...that’s great...wow...yum yum," gets the mind steadfast in the consumer regions rendering the meaning of listening mostly topological. In this way music appears frivolous. Music is a large part of the social fabric. It is listened to while we make music and culture made from within an ear -mind feedback situation, between the mind’s conscious and unconscious. The social fabric is an ignored influence on all musics. While the body and an external phenomenon is all we’ve got. We would be hard of hearing without a body, yet all music listeners are presented with images to fuck or defile, smile and cringe desirous at the imagery we are presented with in music promotion. The focus by the music industry on the image of the body rather than the more exiting social nature of music making and distributing permits the culture industry sharks to funnel music listeners into simple strategies like, "oh, I would like to make love to that pop star, so I’ll clamber onto iTunes" and 99cent purchase mechanisms ensue in under five seconds, or drive the same car, do the same holidays, hang with the same celebrities, mimicking essentially what is presented to the listener in an image driven musical promotional form grafted onto the imagination of the listener in repeated bangs delivered by the internet, TV, radio and less powerful reaching mechanisms. It is the needs generated by the body (the senses) that the culture industry harness in order to get the dolla flowing from any group of bodies (people) paying attention or not to the culture industry’s marketing strategies. It is hard to see working a lot of what Zizek says about the culture industry and the way it works reverberating across the musical realms; all the same he maintains, "dominant ideologies wholly structure the subject’s senses of reality." When I consider dominant ideologies structuring music a list appears: how people interpret the mainstream and the musical sub genres emotionally, the genres, elements of genres (kicks, guitars, vocal tricks), capitalism and education, look together like they are occupying a lot of the areas held within the collective imaginations of groups of people. Groups of people are music’s audiences. It is around groups of people that the collective imagination generates. The current trends in statistics brought about by the forces monetizing the internet is a powerful developing tool that the culture industry employs in order to market their form of cultural product. In all this melee of induced buying habits I reckon I like Lady Gaga’s treatment of music and art/fashion as much as I like Bong’s treatments of music and art/fashion. The cultural blur takes control of the mind at places where we may not understand some things or even parts of things. I know I understand a miniscule amount of things my brain is not large enough to accommodate complete data. Music is a thing many music fans claim to "not understand a bit..."; It sits in countless cultural cracks and open community spaces we may not identify with or appreciate. Music exists very well next to people who do not understand it and those fine people who do "not want to understand it." The term music means different things to divergent people. This does not have to be a stumbling block to talking about music and what talking about music may be used for. What I am trying to grasp here is the way my voice presents itself garbled on the matter of writing about cultural blurs. Is listening to music too close to the identity of most people to wish to know about music and the way they listen to their favourite music? Yes. This is not to say garbility can be interesting and troublesome but the latter has no value inside my perception, so I’ll adopt an extra direction. "All the music in the world is on someone’s computer somewhere." (Hypebot) "...music is designed to enter the human body via the butthole" (Huge Spacker) Listening to music not only assists us to form our identities but also permits us to imagine ourselves in relationships with the outside world, people and situations, as well as the fantastical in its myriads of adoptable listening positions. This is partly due to the world of digits and electricity and plastic crunching into the emotional and all out buzzing evolutionary tactics, but creations and projections still arrive at our perception if we listen to music whilst experiencing all those other things. No one, not even we ourselves, can place a stop on the creative process generated by listening to music. We are informed in the popular music spheres aimed at young adults, "like me...friend me...link me...this way to the merch..." It is a common understanding that music is thought to communicate some things. There are more things to say to our fans than, "Keep on giving our band regular tenners and twenties." Yet musicians persist in linking the weight of their creativity to the weight of the bank balance. What is worth something is that we understand that we are communicating something with music, rather than bury the fact we are communicators and music is just one variable communication tool of many, and a one where language does not play a foremost role in the reception of music at the countless listening positions audiences adopt. This communication tool, used as a cultural weapon to hammer cash out of an unsuspecting listening fan, or vast arrays of young fans entering the corrupted world of adulthood, or the older lady at big band revivals, is a shareholder AGM cherry in various guises. Communicating with oneself or outside society while listening to music has been the abuse hole plundered by record labels, TV companies, shareholders, hedge fund managers, A&R people, newspaper/magazine distributors and event promoters across the 20th century into the 21st, or since recording equipment was invented and developed from 1887 onwards 2010 the future from then but the present now, nope, it’s the past. Describing the movement of time and understanding in words alone can be tricky but a musical form all the same. Oh, yeah, if one scratches the surface one can locate many instances where musicians can be repeatedly found to be fucking themselves fiscally and artistically. This is not to take credit away from the thousands of successful musicians and distributors who like to fuck themselves anyway. In history ideas of music dig themselves into the collective identity. We have little choice as to which parts of the collective identity we carry around unless we can conceptualise some reasons as to why we like the music we do. If music is absent from time, can we then consider things as they are in time, to consider things musical in some way? A person’s birth scratches their subjectivity into the 7 inches of identity most music’s and people get given to exist upon. The binary digit terrorform we are currently engulfed in dealing brings history to the present as much as the technology we rely upon to make historical music in the present does. When we want to know why we listen to music and think, and know we are wanting to think as well as listen to music, a bam bam, we could give ourselves a lift and consider technology and history are going to weight the contemplation. "One of the biggest challenges a music marketer faces is selecting a channel (or multiple channels) to focus their efforts on. More than anything, this means researching and understanding the ways existing and potential fans discover and consume music." [1] It is possible to consider that music fans buying habits should be left to blow in the wind. Drifting across their likes and dislikes at their own pace. The conglomerates and their minions should get off marketing that shapes what people like and dislike because what they have found is people can be easily shaped into liking god awful vacuous aurality where not even the vacuum chamber is polishable. Should the drifting music fan be awoken via contact honesty from the musicians they idolise? Music fans have their fantasies transformed into malleable entities that large corporations can then go about farming for cash. This is Big yuck Brother, inside the musical, inside the double fantasies, inside your children and roaming free and wild in the shape of countless Gaga and Robbie loolilikies? The shapers of commercial music in general are guilty of destroying the mainstream highways of musical perception by selling loud music projecting a sexual character to advertisers who then use the music to suck cash from the pockets of the wider consumer purchasing what they would possibly consider non-musical items. Should we be asking music fans questions about their socio/cultural/artistic listening stance, or should they be left alone to waft collecting themselves freely in shopping malls and pubs, offices and factories, bus stops and Sunday jaguars roaming lakes, sports events and marriage guidance counsellors, holiday resorts and the backpack adventure’s of a sneaky sandal wearer? We are close to the musak nightmare but I wont talk about that here. There is a big vortex pulsing unlike a black hole around the questions, what is music? Why do music fans have to like music? Could music still be music if the word music was not pretendy? Music sits well behind capitalisms ideas of what profit will be. The recording executive stands closer to capitalisms mechanisms that most musicians and audiences. This sets up a no mans land where the music fan deletes capitalism from their idea of what music is and this collective action renders a heavy shadow in the collective conscious. It is a double no mans land if the music fan also happens to be a recording executive or an AnR worker. Many musicians have a relationship with the cultural politic taking place in tandem with making the music. Most music fans ignore the cultural politic taking place around their favourite music in order to purchase the music or freely download it. Nothing must get in the way of the purchase or the free download. Music exists and is in great shape all the same. The music fan is so adept at social invisibility they permit themselves to be treat like cattle by bouncers at gigs. The bouncer has little love for the younger music fan. The shareholder rarely invites a group of music fans to join them for a weekend at their home. The non die hard fan will rarely feel inclined to discuss music or its capitalist agenda for fear of demolishing the fantasy that music must be loved in order to compel a purchase from the fan. What I find intriguing is nearly all music would be deleted in the collective consciousness without the marketing, media companies have invested, the technology, engineers invented or the collective conscious, reacting to real events. This lets us know that the music fan is allowing someone else to take part in choosing what most music fans listening habits may be. Do I really like Led Zep, Sepultura, RATM, or Limp Biscuits ‘Chocolate Starfish’ album because a record company let me in on the composers secrets or claims, or is it the volume, the harmonies, the drumbeats and time sigs, or do I like the way these boys dress up, gesture at me in videos, stare at me from posters in bus stops, shout at me from advertisements, transform my emotional reactions from within film and TV, and tease me with snippets across radio saturation, or is there more weight for me in the listening experience if I were to ask myself, what do I mean specifically when I ask myself why I love a certain band or piece of music? No conclusion will stay fixed for long but the process will facilitate a small hierarchal breach, setting into motion the polarisation mechanisms around the binary like/dislike. The breach displaces the marketing data bought and collected by record companies and social networking sites. I read a music fan on Facebook exclaim recently, that they "will die if they don’t receive an ipod soon." The profit machines grip upon the technology used to listen to music? A place where fans with cash or ingenuity believe they can know the people (the band) they do not know, all the while self-herding across the vast social networking platforms or cultural farms, fooled by technologies and their ease of access into doing things other youth generations and music listeners have done before, bought records. The music industry claims they cannot control their fans these days. So they supplicate and offer music for free in the hope it will grow like a seed in a set of social network allocations. Stepping structurally we can feel force in the collective imagination affecting the music fan as they consume while imagining extra musical consumption on offer via the shuffle function, a feedback within a feedback. The Shareholder: The people who fund commercial music, its gigs and record releases, photo shoots and binges, they want their return and it is always asked for in large. We are smack bang in the middle of a cultural blur with this example. So, the shareholder may know a lot about a certain period of rock music, while their children may know nothing of rock and never wish to know it. Yet the child rock hater will still exert influence over the shareholder who employs their funds to liquidate certain sections of rock music. This is an instance where various subjects are performing as various actors in the same bodies, depending on which actor or which other machine they may be interacting with. It is hard to locate precision in the occurring blur. The history of the making and distributing of music applies a massive cutting tool to the identity of the music fan in ways varied according to the perspective and the historical moment the music fan enters over time into their listening identity, varied according to the interpreters perspective and varied in terms of which present tense the events may be read within. History, in partnership with technology, delivers ideas to the music fans imagination. When we listen to our favourite band or what not, we are not listening to our favourite band. In this not listening sense, we are in an expression negotiation with outside forces that can be recognised by our sensory data. Music and Art and Yes - January 2011 - By Mark Self If I had in either hand a tin of paint and a 7" single could I claim I was well into music and art? If I somehow managed to persuade my friend with their car to transport a whole load of rubbish to my house and I freely improvised the detritus in my back yard spatially, finishing up with a violin resting open top, could I say I was a mash up artist working on the overlays occurring between music and art? If I waltzed into the open door of a recording studio, while filming and recording were going down on a pop song, with a litre bottle of ink tipped and topless in my haversack bag pollocking the studio carpet, could I claim I was involved in art and music in an experimental way? If this human expression goes down in earshot of music then I think in many ways I am an artist who works with music as well. Gently breaching social and artistic norms is a way of making art because it exposes and generates expression regarding how we understand the occurrences we experience. If I write songs, but decide what I wear for that day, occurs around how my dress and social understanding are going to synthesize, in order I can somehow understand what I may want to say with my songs, would many people consider that a too pedantic creative stance to adopt? Should making art and music together be impromptu, accidental, improvised, not discussed in public, sold or forgotten about? While stepping over a line, the rules and the unwritten rules maintaining the structures in my imagination are manifestations generated inside social networking protocols or how I read them at least. Would my audience consider me an artist who works with music or a musician who just takes the piss? I remember a crucial aspect of audiences; they drift, and choice is directed within the mainstream music’s by the distributive cartels. Audiences collect around genres but that’s mainly a healthy curiosity. If I walked past a workman in the street operating on full throttle a pneumatic drill and I got a small piece of chalk out my pocket and ventured to draw spiky flowers on the tarmac near the workman’s vibrating legs, would it be fair for me to claim, I am an artist trying to bust through the norms prescribed me, while shouting at the workman, "you’re the musician for the duration of this fully improvised art music performance?" If I put paint on my head and head butt a wall for my next showcase of expression, in a rhythmic style not unlike the kick snare patterns used in 2 step Garage, will that be enough to get me a place at university studying music and art in 2011 or will the fees wrestle me to the floor? Why would some audiences hear and see this kind of work as art and expression, yet some others would only witness a dude hurting himself? It is because there is only so much art to make and head butting walls are a viable expressive frontier in a world where greed, death and joy roam and stain our imaginations like vulturous vulgar dinosaurs caring little for the embodied sensations contemporary humans feel and insert into the music musicians make? The reverse applies regarding audiences who decide on what to consume? There is possibly only so much expression millions of artistic and music human beings can go through before we recognise were going to repeat ourselves. Art and music mix well as expressive phenomena because their adherents, or the people involved at the stages in the process of making and receiving focus upon the reprising nature of human expression, spending through choice most of their music art time embedded within the fantasy that originality could be real, can be sought by everyone, as well as exploited within the marketplace. Executing some of the myriad of ideas we have is a key to finding yourself with complete pieces.

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