Where have all the flowers gone?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I was curious to see just how many homegrown female musicians are currently in the UK charts. Below are some figures taken from Everyhit for new entries in June 2007:

- 48 new entries

- 28 from UK artists (58%)

- 9 from acts featuring at least one female (18%)

- 2 from acts featuring at least one UK female (4%)

These two acts were:

The Zimmers - My Generation
Reverend & The Makers - Heavyweight Champion Of The World

Well, quite. The new entries for April-May 2007 give a somewhat less bleak picture:

- 49 new entries

- 30 from UK artists (61%)

- 15 from acts featuring at least one female (31%)

- 6 from acts featuring at least one UK female (12%)

Those 7 acts were:

Melanie C - I Want Candy
Faithless ft Cass Fox - Music Matters
Natasha Bedingfield - I Wanna Have Your Babies
Groove Armada ft Stush - Get Down
Shirley Bassey - The Living Tree
Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
(also, Ash would have been included here if Charlotte hadn't already left)

Winehouse, TashBed and Stush make things look promising; Melanie and Shirley make things look desperate.

The percentage of British acts in the charts is very encouraging for our music scene as a whole, but my inner Elastica-fan is sobbing at the fact that that 53% of the UK entries from the last three months are guitar bands and only ONE of those features a lass. Singing*. And it's a rubbish song. Perhaps the girls are better off out of it.

*I'm not dissing singers by any means, but where are all the girls who bought guitars by the fretful a few years back?

Comments

I JUDGE THAT...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

... they are all hanging headless in alexmacpherson's loneloony-bluebeard's chamber

Re: I JUDGE THAT...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Probably. This sort of thing winds me up SO MUCH, esp when the end-of-year roundup bang on about "sisters doing it for 'emselves" and how well the little girls are doing these days dontchewknow.

The songwriting side of things is barely mentioned! How is the next generation of lasses going to be inspired to make brilliant pop music if they've never even heard of eg Miranda Cooper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_Cooper)? I know that role models don't necessarily have to be of the same gender BUT....

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I hadn't really thought about it before (or maybe I just didn't notice it cos it's always the case), but the current return-of-indie movement is very boyrock, isn't it?

From the "Year So Far" list of poptimists' 40 favourite hits so far:

40 hits
14 from the UK (35%)
28 featuring at least one female (70%)
9 featuring at least one UK female (23%)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

It is EXTREMELY boyrock compared to Britpop or punk or even grunge (if you count riot-grrl as 'grunge', which no-one apart from me does but whatevs). Girls are now confined to stroppy chanteuses (Allen, Winelodge, Nash), rent-a-vocalists for male dance producers (Stush, Luciana, Cass Fox) or delicate [read WET] acoustical flowers (KT Tunstall, Sandi Thom). Bah and pah. And I will totally go out there and do something about it myself. I'm just a bit busy at the moment.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

a lady! in Reverend & The Makers? coo

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

She is called Laura.

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I've warned you before about bracketing KT with s**t like Sandi Thom. Consider this a final warning.

It's interesting though that the UK female solo artists are much more successful across the pond than male solo artists or groups. KT, Amy Wino, Lily all having a lot of success Stateside, whilst I doubt if you'll find more than a handful of Americans who have a clue who The View or The Fratellis are.

Also, how did Kate Nash not appear in your chart rundown? She's just gone straight in at #2 this week.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This week is offishaly* JULY!

*& actually

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

plus also, only six people like Nash

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I am grouping them together in the style of their music, not making any point about whether they are good or bad. I'm just trying to make a point, dude.

The US success aspect is an interesting one...

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

Magic Numbers (who scraped into the top 40) have UK girls. Can't really think of many more of the recent crop of UK guitar bands with any success who have though.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The Zutons have their saxophonist.

I'm sure there are more we could think of, but the fact that we're having to struggle to come up with more than a handful says it all.

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

It does indeed. Guillemots have a woman too, but I've just checked and she's Canadian. Rubbish.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Before riot grrl broke, grunge had a female component in (ironic NY hipster chortle) 'foxcore', which, as my memory has it, consisted of Hole (the pre-Fleetwood Mac-idolising version), Babes In Toyland and L7. As a scene it had all the sisterly solidarity of the mostly female house I was living in at the time: they (the bands) spent much of their time furiously claiming that the other bands had nicked their fashion ideas (I think L7 were not guilty on that front). I believe somewhere I still have not one but two Babes In Toyland albums, one on vomit green vinyl: horrible heavy metal with nothing going for them.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

'Kinderwhore' (ugh) was another name applied this lot.

I own:
1x Babes in Toyland LP
1x Babes in Toyland Peel Sessions mini-LP
1x L7 7" EP
0x Hole (of any version)

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I count riot grrl as being very strongly grunge, not least cos there was a huge interchange of people and ideas!

Couldn't agree more about lack of girls in current 'indie', esp wiv guitars, esp the pointy ones - remember ladies, Courtney told us they're the best cos you can rub yourself up against them!

Is it just me or have Ash been being extremely off about Charlotte as well?

[sbp.livejournal.com]

So then there's Girls Aloud, Lily Allen, the reformation of the Spice Girls, Charlotte Hatherly, just off the top of my head. Some acts only release singles around album time, for a patch of time focussing on maybe once every two years.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I think Lily A and Amy W are probably the only lasses to emerge in the last few years that would actually inspire anyone to go out and become a musician or a songwriter.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the industry (& public!) demand for "more Lilys" is clear, or else we wouldn't have Kate Nash at #2.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Yep. The demand outweighs the supply, which causes the quality to go down...

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

There is Laura Marling and Rosie Oddie, the former being much better than the latter, but rather lacking in stage presence so far (she is only little). Candie Payne is an interesting new one as well.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I think the answer should be sought not in the "more Lilys" angle, because really those artists have male counterparts more or less. (Is there a subgenre staked out by girls at the moment where there are no boys? I don't think so.) The question is what are the boys doing that the girls are not.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Well, until Lily & Amy there weren't really any mainstream pop female Streets-type soloists ('telling it like it is over questionable beats', hehehe) to speak of. Hopefully now the girls have 'conquered' this sector they can move on to bigger and better goals...

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was thinking on this sort of subject the other day, partly because I was wondering for the eight million nine thousand and twenty fifth time if I could afford an electric violin (still no and getting noer but I'm sure that won't stop me sooner or later) and partly because I was trying to think of other young ladies I knew who played instruments and realising there weren't any. Not that I'm a virtuoso but I do play violin in the sense of playing it for actual songwriting purposes (I have tiny, tiny hands and have finally, joyously thrown off the shackles of My Damn Guitar in favour of things with no greater number of strings than I have fingers on one hand) and it occurred to me the only other girls I could think of (in my real life) that make music in any deliberate sense (not that I am especially deliberate but I have even been known to actually generate songage occasionally, albeit entirely confined to and instantly forgotten upon leaving my bedroom) are singers in boy-instrumented bands or only do it as a sort of classical hobby.

Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with having a classical hobby sort of instrument but I do often still get the feeling that there's a strange, unacknowledged perception among young wimmins my age that the songwriting process of pop (ie: not classical) music is often seen as something for the boys and not very dignified for a young lady, who ought to be nice and play her clarinet or at most strike a slutty pose and sing about cheatin menz, etc.

[redcommieapples.livejournal.com]

is mutya buena not british or female?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Gosh, you're totally right. Dunno how I missed her off! Apologies Mutya.

The Sugababes are an excellent example of schoolgirls getting off their bums and writing songs (hehehe and Cleopatra, oh dear). They are excellent role models and I'm amazed there aren't more Suga-clones around.

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

There have been plenty of attempts - the 411 and Clea both wanted to be like the Sugababes in different ways, but few of their songs were up to Sugababes standard.

Off topic

[celentari.livejournal.com]

Maybe they are all off being journalists? In the 4Talent crew the girls outnumber the boys 2:1. Which I quite like.