I’ve long believed that there are two types of people in this world: people who care about lyrics and people who don’t. I fall into the latter category. I know that’s weird coming from someone whose career is supposedly based on words, but that’s just how I’ve always been.
This is partially due to the fact that the type of music I predominantly listen to—heavy rock—tends to be plagued by mediocre-to-horrific lyrics. It’s also because I’m not a singer. I love guitars and drums and the rhythms they create and how it all meshes together to rearrange your molecules. Voices move me, too, but not necessarily because of the words they’re forming. This is not to say that there aren’t great rock lyricists or that I never listen to lyrics, because of course there are and I do. But generally speaking, I find that I like a band more the less I listen to what they’re saying. I’ve never read a review of a band that focused on lyrics and felt compelled to investigate that band.
Recently, a friend and I were talking about this fact—that I tend to ignore lyrics—and he pointed out that recent reviews of the rock band Speedy Ortiz, which is fronted by Sadie Dupuis, by both Pitchfork and Wired have focused almost exclusively on her lyrics. Granted, Dupuis was an MFA candidate in poetry, and it certainly seems like lyrics are an important part of her music. It’s also possible that she’s marketing her band this way. But my friend noted that he couldn’t imagine a similar guitar-oriented rock band with a male frontman being treated the same way.
“Justifiably, Dupuis has been looped in with other fiercely charismatic songwriters like Courtney Barnett and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. … Dupuis is still part of a refreshing trend in powerful female voices in rock music,” writes Kevin McFarland in Wired.
Once again, gender is being used to classify a musician, but as Jillian Mapes over at Flavorwire points out—and it’s crazy that pointing this out is still necessary—“woman” is not a genre of music.
When you’re a woman working in man’s world, your gender is acknowledged constantly. At times it can feel empowering, this sense of taking up richly deserved space in a man’s world. But at a certain point, gender-defined underdog status and tokenization grows old, even if it’s positioned as a necessary breath of fresh air in the press or among fans.
What’s worse is when — not if — you become categorized as part of a gender-defined genre alongside women whose work shares few qualities with your own.
Even a guitarist as phenomenally talented as Annie Clark of St. Vincent gets the lyrics treatment, as evidenced by this 2013 Pitchfork review by Lindsay Zoladz. The first two grafs don’t mention anything about her guitar playing—instead it’s all about her lyrics, and even her wardrobe. It’s not until the third paragraph that we get this: “St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists.”
Compare that to this review of Metz’s latest on NPR, which includes exactly zero mentions of lyrics. Interestingly, Ann Powers’ review on the same site of the new Torres album (which, granted, falls into the singer/songwriter/more-focused-on-lyrics category) notes how Mackenzie Scott considers “confessional” a four-letter word and how the word is “overapplied to women in particular.” Noting the discrepancy in why women’s voices are considered more personal than men’s, Powers writes:
If Joni Mitchell was confessional when she wrote, "I met a woman, she had a mouth like yours," in a song about an ex-lover, isn't Bob Dylan, too, when he wails, "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, should I leave them by your gate," about his ex-wife? Yet one is broadly considered a prophet, speaking for experience well beyond his own. The other, the woman, is categorized as more intimate; her equally poetic language has been dubbed something to identify with first, and only after doing so to call art.
It’s not surprising that this attitude bleeds over to women artists in all genres, seeing as how women get pigeonholed into the “woman” genre to begin with. (That was the joke in The Stranger's "Men Who Rock" special issue.) That said, Powers ends her review lumping Scott together with other women musicians, calling her “part of a cohort of young women singer-songwriters as bold about emotions as they are eager to experiment” and saying, “she is an evangelist of the personal.” While it’s also true that there are intentional communities of female artists and confessional songwriting is a thing that exists, it also stands that women’s voices seem to be evaluated more on these terms than male artists.
There is another facet to this discussion, and that is the quality of contemporary music writing. More than any other sphere of arts writing, music criticism tends to be populated by a fair amount of people who do not know a lot about the basics of the craft (theory, but also instrumentation, effects, recording techniques, etc.). I’m not saying all music writers need to be classically trained musicians, and certainly one does not need to have any kind of music training or experience to appreciate music, but it should be incumbent upon the writer to at least have a baseline understanding of how music gets made, if only to accurately describe what he or she is hearing. Lyrics are the low-hanging fruit of music criticism. They’re easiest to talk about and analyze, and after all, most bands (and fans) focus on the singer—the person, usually assumed, who is the so-called heart and soul of the band. People make personal connections with bands, and so it’s only natural that they do so through lyrics.
I do not mean to imply that we should not listen to the voices of women artists. Of course we should. But I appreciate Wye Oak and Land of Talk predominantly for their music, not for their lyrics. As a drummer myself and a possessor of a vagina, I also know first-hand the experience of being perpetually underestimated in terms of one’s playing ability and the quality of the music created. Women musicians should be evaluated on terms that also acknowledge their non-lyrical craft.
That's the only way I'll know whether or not to buy their albums.
