November 16, 2006
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time after time
time magazine recently announced the one hundred greatest albums of all time. nice. we love to look at lists. rankings. score boards. americans love it. i’m an american. i love it too. i looked. read. thought. they said, “We hope you’ll treat the All-TIME 100 as a great musical parlor game. Read and listen to the arguments for the selections, then tell us what we missed or got wrong. Or even possibly what we got right.” how nice of them. they want us to judge them, after they judged the musicians. well, the male musicians.
i’m gonna state the obvious; something to which i’ve grown quite accustomed. out of one hundred records, mostly good stuff, only ten are from women. ten. yeah, that’s right. the list goes back to the fifties. there are one hundred albums categorized by decade. ten of them are from women. ten. additionally, one disc is from a woman band. one from a band fronted and supported by women. so twelve of the one hundred somehow involve women. out of one hundred. yeah, that’s right. never mind what you think about which albums need to be there, on their list of lists. never mind all that “parlor game” crap. never mind that the honest critical analysis is spent on the men and their work. that just cuts the top. continuing to read this kind of crap with an ounce of reverence underscores the ignorance in which americans (guys and dolls) are apparently quite comfortable wallowing in. plain and simple.
so, you might ask, who comes up with this? well, men. even more obvious is that not only are women reprehensibly represented in six decades, but the blurbs justifying the importance of the galbums contain a lot of misogynistic minutia: “seductive;” “sexual tumult;” “whittles her journal entries and melodies down with poetic economy;” “pop star and mass media manipulator.” you can imagine what these gals must think of this tripe. also, most of the other women who weren’t reduced to parenthetically paradoxical poets or seductive sex pots are said to have made it only because of some man. headache.
i suppose time magazine isn’t concerned with this issue. that would take way too much of their, uh, time. they, i’m assuming, can only publish what they believe americans want. all three hundred million americans want to know, yet again, how men have creamed the very essence of human life’s artistic yearnings? where would we be otherwise? not tonight.
no further proof is needed that they are not what they say they are.
dickcarter, feminist mormon housewife
postum scrotum: frequently, women write songs and sing them. often those songs are exceptional. often they are not. why are so many musically minded men so unable to recognize this simple fact?
