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

[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.