For the Sake of Science

Comrade Major Meltdown* – the male poster who yearns like crazy to be accepted by women – is still chirping away all across the Internet, garnering me a modest number of hits (yippee). It’s almost like the silliness of Andreas Moritz sans the desire to swindle people. So thanks for that mild bump, you incoherent wannabe.

What’s more interesting, though, is the original post from that site (which has nothing to do with me).

Dude Rock—it’s hard to define by a sound, but you know it when you see it. It crosses genres. But if you define it from the center, you have a good idea of what’s going on—their shows will mostly be male, and female intelligence will not be taken seriously in that space. What few women there will mostly be girlfriends. The space will be a safe one for overt sexism.

That’s likely true. I can probably only define “dude rock” as something vaguely heavy metal, but the primary example given by the poster, Amanda Marcotte, is Ween, and I have no idea who that is – and that’s the major issue overlooked in the post.

Yes, there’s a lot of testosterone-driven music out there. It probably isn’t fair to say every fan likes it for what partly fuels it (the world is never so black and white, now is it?), but like-minded people do tend to find like-minded music, so it works as a general rule. But that isn’t what’s important. What’s important is that most music just isn’t worth it. Ween? Who knows. Most music sucks. It’s that simple.

I brought the albums, and Sleater-Kinney, who I also discovered through my same friend, to my dude friends. They were unimpressed. They couldn’t say why. They weren’t stupid enough at that point, or even self-aware enough, to say that they didn’t like it because it was made by women. They just happened to not like it, even though they liked ALL THIS OTHER MUSIC THAT WAS LIKE IT. I don’t know, it just doesn’t do it for me. It’s boring. It’s whiny. It’s screechy. Oh, it’s repetitive. Or is it derivative?

Whatever it is, it sucks.

(That is a quote from within the main post.)

See, the thing is, it does suck. But it doesn’t suck because it’s by women. It sucks because odds are it’s going to suck, no matter who made it. For instance, I like Hole and The Cranberries to a fair degree, but there aren’t a ton more female musicians I enjoy (as singers). And sure, I can probably name 5-1 the male-led bands I like over the female ones, but that’s because I can probably name 10 bands or musicians I like. In total. This is more an issue of music sucking than of sexism sometimes.

That said, I do tend to favor males over females anyway in my musical tastes. The reason has to do with the clearness of female voices. I prefer that bit of gravel, that gruff. That’s why I like Kurt Cobain. In fact, I view him as my personal standard for what a musician should be. That doesn’t mean I can’t like clearness in a voice (Freddy Mercury, anyone?), but I tend towards the other end of the spectrum.

But the music of Cobain deserves attention here (and really, everywhere). He constantly railed against that macho-image. He hated the bigots from his small, logging home town. He even wished he could be gay for the sake of pissing them off. It would be difficult to make a case that he has any connection to “dude rock”.

Of course, this post has some nuance, is pro-(non-caricature)-feminist, and is only derisive of the state of music in general (and, I suppose, a type of vocal style), so it’s likely to draw the ire of someone who refuses to understand a word of it.

*Please add “fuck” and its derivatives at seemingly random intervals to view this post in Comrade Major Meltdown mode.

Post-script: Here are two Cobain videos. The first is him smacking some body guard in the head with his guitar for being a dink. I guarantee he wouldn’t have done that to someone who was 5’7″, 125 lbs, and not wearing a muscle shirt. The second is him kissing Krist Novoselic at the end of an SNL episode.

Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: Amanda Marcotte, Comrade Major Meltdown, Nirvana, Pandagon |