Gender Inequality in Metal Music Production

Pauwke Berkers, Julian Schaap

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787146754
• eBook ISBN: 9781787439290
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

For over four decades, scholars have been investigating male dominance - both symbolically and numerically -within popular music. The heavier genres of popular music, metal music in particular, have been male dominated spaces, which are difficult to navigate for women participating as fans, musicians, or both. Studies on gender inequality in metal music have convincingly demonstrated how gender dynamics shape the reception of metal music and metal scenes all over the globe. Yet, they shed relatively little light on the extent of and reasons for metal music's male domination from a production perspective. This book fills this gap, offering is a systematic and large-scale overview of gender inequality in metal music production. In other words: how many women - compared to men - are participating in metal bands and what are the causes for the differences in participation?

1

WINDS OF CHANGE? LONGITUDINAL TRENDS AND CROSS-NATIONAL DIFFERENCES

with Frank Weij

The thing is, when we had our big success back in the 80s we were expecting loads of other females to come up behind us, but they never did. It seems to be only recently in the past few years that they’ve started to emerge, which we couldn’t really understand. It’s taken all this time, but I think, finally, now it’s more accepting.

Kim McAuliffe of Girlschool (Bryan, 2015)

In this quote, Girlschool’s rhythm guitarist and vocalist Kim McAuliffe observes a lack of women in metal music production in the 1980s. She regrets that back then her band did not (yet) function as a role model for women wanting to enter metal music as musicians. However, according to her, the number of women has increased recently. In an interview in The Wall Street Journal, metal music scholar Deena Weinstein echoed this observation, stating that ‘Metal today is definitely not a boys’ club’ (Shah, 2016). In this chapter, we will discuss the longitudinal trends and cross-national differences in participation of women in metal music production. We will first address women’s participation in metal music, as recorded in the ‘history books’. Yet, this rather subjective history of women in metal music only addresses women who have managed to receive some form of recognition, and those from the global centre of the world of metal – Western Europe and North America. To provide a more representative overview, our analyses on gender inequality in metal also include more amateur, grassroots production as well as music produced in other parts of the world.

A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN METAL MUSIC PRODUCTION

To explain why metal music is both numerically and symbolically dominated by men, we need to trace back the history of women in metal music. Due to the absence of comprehensive academic history books, we will draw on Herron-Wheeler’s (2014) self-published booklet, Wicked Women: Women in Metal from the 1960s to Now, as well as on various additional sources. While it is not our intention to provide an exhaustive history on the entire subject, we do aim to provide some historical context to our study of women in metal production, sketch some of the boundaries they have run into and introduce potential role models.

Arguably, the first woman in metal was Esther, ‘Jinx’, Dawson (Indianapolis, 1950), the founder and singer of Coven. She was trained in classical music and ‘born into the occult’ (Tweedle, n.d.). Preceding their 1969 debut Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls (Mercury), Coven opened up for Alice Cooper, the Yardbirds and Vanilla Fudge. Their sound can best be described as heavy rock, with a strong emphasis on diabolical subject matter. The influence of Coven can be seen in the music of bands that followed – for example, famous rock critic Lester Bangs (1970) referred to Black Sabbath as ‘something like England’s answer to Coven’. However, women such as Jinx Dawson – despite predating Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut – rarely make it into the canon of rock music (Dawes, 2015; Strong, 2011). Indeed, neither Louder than Hell (Wiederhorn & Turman, 2013) nor Aardschok’s Hard Rock en Heavy Metal Encyclopedie (Van den Heuvel, 1989) – a leading Dutch metal magazine – even mention Coven. Moreover, Dawson was an exception to the masculine rule of metal. Almost all heavy metal bands copied Black Sabbath’s all male model (Herron-Wheeler, 2014). According to Jinx Dawson, these bands probably could not picture a woman leading a heavy metal band (Herron-Wheeler, 2014) as it opposes dominant notions of femininity in society in general and metal in particular.

As heavy metal evolved into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, developing into a distinct genre, most bands remained all-male and genre conventions became hypermasculine (Walser, 1993). Despite all of this, one of the first all-women metal bands was formed in 1975: Girlschool (at that point still called Painted Lady). After being invited by Lemmy Kilmister to join Motörhead’s 1979 tour, they recorded their debut album, Demolition (Bronze), and landed several Top 10 hits. Guitarist and vocalist Kelly Johnson also appeared on the cover of Guitar Player magazine in 1983, something few women had achieved until then (Herron-Wheeler, 2014). While most lyrics on Demolition addressed traditional occult-inspired metal tropes, some songs discussed issues of gender. For example, Not for Sale was ‘about women being used to sell cars’ (Bryan, 2015). In the early days of metal, being an all-women band came with a whole set of stereotypes (Stewart-Panko, 2016), with which such bands often still have to deal with.

According to Girlschool bassist Enid Williams:

(…) a few years back, we wanted to play a festival in Scandinavia that, in the past, we had gone down very well at. The manager we had at the time was also managing another all-female band who were booked to play the same festival. The organisers turned around and said to him, about us, ‘Oh, no, we’ve already got our female band.’ And that’s in Scandinavia where half the government are women and it’s generally pretty good for gender equality!

As thrash metal grew popular in the 1980s, several women took to the stage, such as Ann Boleyn (Hellion), Katherine Thomas (The Great Kat) and Sabina Classen (Holy Moses). Classen is considered to be ‘the very first growling and extreme music woman in metal’ (Canella, 2012), the Mama aller Brülltanten (Zwingelberg, 2014). Classen, and women singing in a similar style, are often described as women who can growl like men (Chaker & Heesch, 2016). On the one hand, this evaluation confirms strong masculinist codes in metal; these women ‘do’ masculinity, positioning this type of singing as non-feminine behaviour. On the other hand, it conveys respect for doing masculinity successfully (Hecker, 2016, p. 155).

In the early and mid-2000s, bands like Within Temptation, Nightwish and Evanescence scored international chart hits. These bands are fronted by women who sing in an operatic style, and whose voices are in the soprano or ­mezzo-soprano range (Herron-Wheeler, 2014). As such, they have been genre-classified as ‘female-fronted metal’. While some bands – like La-Ventura – have argued that ‘female-fronted seems to be hot at the moment, so why not use it to our advantage?’ (Carpenter, 2015); many others have widely criticised this approach to this gender classification. First, gender marking – explicitly labelling a genre ‘female’ – has been critiqued as sexism, by either reversing such marking or by marking every­thing (Brekhus, 1998). As an example of reverse marking, one metal critic writes in reference to female-fronted metal: ‘we’ve started referring to bands as “male-backed” just to confuse everyone’ (Arthur, 2017). As an example of marking everything, Thrashhits (2013), in their article ‘Top 6: Ways Metal Treats Women Really Badly’, discusses female-fronted metal as a separate genre by including other markings: ‘And because it would be totally acceptable to call Disturbed “Jewish-fronted metal” and Suffocation “black guitaristed death metal”, Wait, what?’ Second, the genre ‘female-fronted’ metal is critiqued as an accentuation effect (Berkers, Janssen, & Verboord, 2014). In other words, bands with female singers are placed into this genre based on gender similarities, ignoring differences in musical style (Chapstick, 2018). Floor Jansen (Nightwish) argued for the ending of gender-based categorising for this exact reason:

Arch Enemy is a female-fronted metal band, but so is Delain. They don’t sound alike at all. The only thing they both are, are metal bands, but the style within metal is so massively different that it doesn’t really say much whether there’s a girl singing or not. So it’s really not so important. Plus, to emphasize the difference in sex between men and women, I think we’ve had that time by now. (Blabbermouth, 2015)

This admittedly subjective history of women in metal music only addresses the tip of the iceberg, excluding (1) women who have not received substantial commercial, critical and/or peer recognition and (2) women outside the global centre of the world of metal – Western Europe and North America. Our analyses on gender inequality in metal, however, also include more amateur, grassroots production as well as music produced in other parts of the world.

GETTING INTO METAL MUSIC

Metal music production tends to be a form of grassroots cultural production by non-professionals (Miller, 2016b; Wallach & Levine, 2011). Most of it occurs at a local level in the context of physical (and sometimes virtual) scenes. The often-heard adagio calling out to ‘support your local metal scene’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Gender Inequality in Metal Music Production
• 1. Winds of Change? Longitudinal Trends and Cross-National Differences
• 2. ‘Female-Fronted Metal’: Gender Differences and (Sub)Genres
• 3. All Vocals, Few Chords: Gender Differences in Instrumentation
• 4. Wielding The Double-Edged Sword: Gender Differences in Artistic Careers
• Conclusion: Women Are Nowhere, Gender Is Everywhere
• Appendix 1: Quantitative Data – The Metal Archives
• Appendix 2: Qualitative Data – Interviews with Metal Musicians
• References
• Index