Sexing the Groove

Popular Music and Gender

Sheila Whiteley, Sheila Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135105198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Sexing the Groove discusses these issues and many more, bringing together leading music and cultural theorists to explore the relationships between popular music, gender and sexuality. The contributors, who include Mavis Beayton, Stella Bruzzi, Sara Cohen, Sean Cubitt, Keith Negus and Will Straw, debate how popular music performers, subcultures, fans and texts construct and deconstruct `masculine' and `feminine' identities. Using a wide range of case studies, from Mick Jagger to Riot Grrrls, they demonstrate that there is nothing `natural', permanent or immovable about the regime of sexual difference which governs society and culture.
Sexing the Groove also includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography for further reading and research into gender and popular music.

Part I

ROCK MUSIC CULTURE

1

SIZING UP RECORD COLLECTIONS

Gender and connoisseurship in rock music culture

Will Straw

For example, suppose we required a dense texture of classical allusion in all works that we called excellent. Then, the restriction of a formal classical education to men would have the effect of restricting authorship of excellent literature to men. Women would not have written excellent literature because social conditions hindered them. The reason, though gender-connected, would not be gender per se.

(Baym, 1985: 64–5)

I wish Riot Grrrl had inspired girls to be more curious about the great female musicians of yesteryear. Boys bond around discussing used records and obscure bands. With girls it’s like every generation has to exhaust itself reinventing the wheel. So we end up with bands that are good but less original than they think they are.

(Vincentelli, 1994: 24)

You don’t have to be a German genius to figure out that any pop combo is only as good as their record collection …

(Moore, 1993)

INTRODUCTION

When I had almost finished writing this article, I was interviewed by the director of Vinyl, a documentary film-in-progress whose subject is record collecting. By the time shooting of the film is completed, its director told me, he will have interviewed almost 100 record collectors. Only five of these, he admitted, were women. He had tried (he claimed, convincingly) to find more female collectors, following up on every lead and making certain that his search was well publicised, but had met with no success. (In response to my own concern that my collection might not be spectacular enough, the director reassured me that some interview subjects had collections of only a few hundred records.) With the director of this film, as with everyone who has discussed the subject with me, there was easy and intuitive acceptance of the idea that record collecting, within Anglo-American cultures at least, is among the more predictably male-dominated of music-related practices.

The challenge, however, is to determine what might be said next. When people are pressed to account for the gendered, masculinist character of record collecting, the certainty that it is so gives way to hesitant and often contradictory explanations as to why. As I shall argue, this uncertainty is rooted in competing images of the collection as cultural monument and private haven. Record collections are seen as both public displays of power/knowledge and private refuges from the sexual or social world; as either structures of control or the by-products of irrational and fetishistic obsession; as material evidence of the homosocial information-mongering which is one underpinning of male power and compensatory undertakings by those unable to wield that power. Indeed, the confusion underlying these characterisations is such that, were one presented with statistical evidence that the typical record collector was female, one could easily invoke a set of stereotypically feminine attributes to explain why this was the case. One might note, for example, that collecting is about the elaboration of a domestic context for consumer goods; that, within collecting, the values of consumption come to assume priority over those of production; and that, in the collection, an immediate, affective relationship to the object takes precedence over collective, spectacular forms of cultural involvement (for a discussion which explores some of these claims, see Belk and Wallendorf, 1994).

TAXONOMIES OF MALE IDENTITY

At the very least, we may say of record collecting, as of most practices of connoisseurship and systematic consumption, that it stands in an uncertain relationship to masculinity. As part of the material culture of music, records themselves participate in the gendering of cultural habits at a number of levels. From one perspective, records are merely the physical residues of processes of commodity turnover and stylistic change, and, as such, are part of the ongoing, unofficial relocation of objects from the public, commercial realm into the domestic environment. In this, they contribute to the differentiation of domestic spaces, and it is as an effect of the male collector’s salvaging of popular cultural artefacts from the world outside that many of the distinctive or stereotypically resonant aspects of men’s domestic space take shape. (The slovenly bachelor, his apartment collapsing into disorder amidst the chaos of clutter, is one such stereotype; the apartment which is little more than a compulsively ordered archive is another.) It is often in his relationship to his collections that a male’s ideas about domestic stability or the organisation of a domestic environment find their fullest or most easily decipherable elaboration. (Writing of the 1950s, Keir Keighdey (1966) has discussed the role of hi-fi equipment in nourishing a masculine ideal of the listening room as refuge from the noise and interruptions which come with married or family life.)

Were record collections merely graveyards for exhausted commodities, however, their connection to what Medovoi has called the ‘masculinist politics’ which surround so much popular music might not be apparent (Medovoi, 1984). As accumulations of material artefacts, record collections are carriers of the information whose arrangement and interpretation is part of the broader discourse about popular music. In a circular process, record collections, like sports statistics, provide the raw materials around which the rituals of homosocial interaction take shape. Just as ongoing conversation between men shapes the composition and extension of each man’s collection, so each man finds, in the similarity of his points of reference to those of his peers, confirmation of a shared universe of critical judgement.

In the psychological literature on collecting, it is sometimes noted that males and females tend to accumulate objects with equal intensity. If men’s accumulations of objects tend, more frequently, to be considered ‘collections’, one explanation is that this simply signals the higher prestige which has accrued, historically, to the sorts of objects amassed by men. Baekeland has suggested that this argument is not sufficient, and that, in fact, male practices of accumulation take shape in an ongoing relationship between the personal space of the collection and public, discursive systems of ordering or value. These public systems are no less arbitrary, of course, in their choice of objects or criteria of value, but they tie each male’s collection to an ongoing, collective enterprise of cultural archaeology. Baekeland cautions that:

we should not forget that many women privately amass personal possessions far in excess of any practical need, without any thought of public exhibition other than adornment: we rarely think of accumulations of dress, shoes, perfumes, china and the like as collections. They consist of relatively intimate and transient objects intended directly to enhance their owners’ self-images, to be used until they are worn out or broken, and then to be discarded. Men’s collections, however, be they of stamps, cars, guns or art, tend to have clear-cut thematic emphases and standard, external reference points in public or private collections. Thus, women’s collections tend to be personal and ahistorical, men’s impersonal and historical, just as, traditionally, women have tended to have a relatively greater emotional investment in people than in ideas and men to some extent the reverse.

(Baekeland, 1994: 207)

This opposition of ‘people’ to ‘ideas’, however, misses the extent to which it is an ideal of systematicity itself which typically grounds the mas-culinist inclination to collect. Images of the stamp collector as armchair traveller or the phonecard collector as folklorist miss, in their emphasis on the object itself, the degree to which any corpus which may be differentiated in consensual ways will become the focus of collective collecting. Indeed, the most satisfying (albeit under-theorised) explanation of the masculine collector’s urge is that it lays a template of symbolic differentiation over a potentially infinite range of object domains. (In this, railroad systems offer the most perfect image of the collector’s object, both in the flat, geometric structure of such systems themselves, and in the fact that all there is to be collected, ultimately, are the numbers through which trains are differentiated.)

This vision of collecting leaves unanswered the reasons as to why it might be so. One explanation is that collecting works to displace the affective or corporeal aspects of particular practices (sports, music-listening) onto series and historical genealogies, in what might be seen as a fetishistic act of disavowal. Another might tie the compulsion to contextualise to a broader male preoccupation with the subject’s place within symbolic configurations of identity, a preoccupation whose links to Oedipal anxiety should be apparent. ‘What motivates the purchase’, Baudrillard writes of the collector, ‘is the pure imperative of association’ (1994: 23). These are both, it must be acknowledged, pop-psychoanalytic accounts of collecting and the compulsion to contextualise, and each is convincing only to the extent that it sheds light on the social dimensions of collecting – its role in structuring and excusing relations between men.

WEARING KNOWLEDGES

Several years ago, film studies scholars noted that skills and knowledge have a problematic place within dominant representations of an ideal masculinity, and that there is ongoing anxiety over whether the most valorised forms of masculine mastery are social or asocial. (See, for a summary and development, Neale, 1983.) Forms of expertise acquired through deliberate labour of a bookish or achival variety are typically so dependent upon bureaucratised institutions of knowledge that they are poor supports for ideals of masculinity as transcendent strength. In Neale’s words, this subservience to the terms of a symbolic order will ‘threaten any image of the self as totally enclosed, self-sufficient, omnipotent’ (Neale, 1983: 7). A disavowal of the social, discursive origin of such knowledges is necessary if skill is to be seen to be instinctual, the sign of ‘power, omnipotence, mastery and control’ (1983: 5).

The variable relations between knowledge and mastery help to generate the range of masculine identity formations which circulate within popular culture and nourish our everyday classifications. In any discussion of this range, we would do well to recall Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s insight that positions in what she calls the ‘male homosocial spectrum’ have long been marked by the variable susceptibility of each to accusations of homosexuality (Sedgwick, 1990: 185). Within the peer cultures of adolescent males – groups which typically show a high involvement in popular music – the contours of public postures will be shaped to significant degrees by the possibility of such accusations. Positions in this spectrum are individuated through the ways in which the possession of knowledges is signalled in self-presentation, in ‘the most automatic gesture or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body – ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 466). Males police themselves, not only in terms of the looseness or control which mark bodily gesture, but in the ways they ‘wear’ and release the knowledges they have cultivated. While the dandy, for example, manifests a mastery of the most social of codes, the sense that his persona is frivolous or depthless, reducible to the surface on which this mastery is displayed, is the frequent basis of his denigration. Inversely, the nerd is noted for a mastery of knowledges whose common trait is that they are of little use in nagivating the terrains of social intercourse. (Indeed, nerdish dispositions are marked by their ability to turn virtually any domain of expertise into a series of numbers on a checklist.) Both the dandy and the nerd are characterised by a relationship to knowledge which is semiotically rich and easy material for parody. For the dandy, this is the result of a labour which transforms cultivated knowledges into the basis of an ongoing public performance. For the nerd, knowledge (or, more precisely, the distraction which is its by-product) stands as the easily diagnosed cause of performative social failure, blatantly indexed in the nerd’s chaotic and unmonitored self-presentation.

We might add to this taxonomy (if only as the marker of an extreme position) the figure of the brute, the male persona characterised by a pure and uncultivated instinctuality. The brute shares with the nerd an obliviousness to the rules of social comportment, and, as with the dandy, there is a sense of explicitness, of little depth beyond the immediately visible. What the brute most famously suggests, however, is a strength and mastery independent of knowledges which originate and find value within the social and the symbolic. In Western popular culture of the postwar period, for the most part, the brute has not been a principal source of heroic or appealing imageries of the male. (As Sharon Willis (1993/4) has noted, with respect to the films of Quentin Tarantino, even the racist positing of certain African-American cultural figures as purely instinctual has seemed to require the interpretive gaze of a cultivated white man who is able to recontextualise such figures within popular cultural traditions.)

In popular music, ostensibly dependent upon the expression of raw, erotic energy, we might expect the figure of the brute to be prominent, but this has been the case only in isolated instances. Throughout most of the recent history of that music, the privileged masculine stances have been those which move between the immediacy of unfettered expression and the acknowledgement that a tradition or genealogy is being reworked or updated. (The postures of recent Britpop stars, marked by both libidinous laddishness and knowing references to Burt Bacharach or Ray Davies, are almost perfect examples of this ambiguity.) Indeed, an image of instinctual strength which is not informed by an awareness of progenitors or not anchored in the solidity of a canon and tradition risks appearing naive (as has often been the case with Heavy Metal performers). It is from the raw material of instinctuality, nevertheless, that the most appealing images of a cool, hip masculinity within popular musical culture have been formed (e.g. Chris Isaac or Damon Albarn). Hipness almost always requires a knowledge which is more or less cultivated, but must repress any evidence that this knowledge is easily acquired in the mastery of lists or bookish sources. In this respect, as Andrew Ross suggests, hipness is one point in an economy which threatens to flounder on the opposed alternatives of being over-or under-informed (Ross, 1990: 83). What counts, however, is not simply the degree of knowledge but the amount of restraint with which it is deployed or guarded. The jazz musician quizzed at length about his influences by the eager fan will almost always insist that music is a question of an elusive ‘feel,’ even when, like Kirk Douglas in the film Young Man With a Horn, he carries his record collection with him from town to town. Similarly, it has long been common in the hipper circles of science fiction fandom to belittle as nerdish those who see that fandom as a cultural space in which to discuss science fiction. To actually introduce science fiction into conversation – to take the pretext for fannish intercourse as its ongoing focus) is to risk being denounced as ‘sercon’ (serious and conservative), someone unable to sustain effortless and generalised sociality. A familiarity with the symbolic universe of science fiction is a long-term necessity for a subcultural career within fandom, but this familiarity must be signalled in ways which do not show the marks of contrived effort.

Hipness and nerdishness both begin with the mastery of a symbolic field; what the latter lacks is a controlled economy of revelation, a sense of when and how things are to be spoken of. Hipness maintains boundaries to entry by requiring that the possession of knowledge be made to seem less significant than the tactical sense of how and when it is made public. Cultivation of a corpus (of works, of facts) assumes the air of instinctuality only when it is transformed into a set of gestures enacted across time. The stances of hip require that knowledge and judgement be incorporated into bodily self-presentation, where they settle into the postures of an elusive a...