| There could be a lot of conjecture, articles written, performative stances, and checks and statements made, but I think the key word here is stagnancy. |
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| Molly Tuttle at Old Forester's Paristown Hall, Louisville, Ky., Oct. 27, 2021. "Ccrooked Tree" is out today on Nonesuch. |
| (Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
Producer of the Year, Non-Female
A statistic for your GRAMMY weekend: In the past decade, a grand total of one person who is female has been nominated for the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. Her name is LINDA PERRY and she was nominated in 2019. She lost to PHARRELL WILLIAMS, one of four men nominated that year. That's the fewest number of men who've been nominated in at least a decade. This Sunday your nominees will be RICKY REED, HIT-BOY, MIKE ELIZONDO, ROGÉT CHAHAYED and JACK ANTONOFF, all skilled music makers in addition to being men. But it's a little hard to see past the "being men" thing, considering the historical record. By contrast, two women are up for the Producer of the Year, Classical trophy on Sunday—perennial nominees JUDITH SHERMAN, who's won 11 times, and ELAINE MARTONE, a four-time winner. That's twice as many classical producer nominees this weekend as there have been non-classical producer nominees in, well, a very long time.
Someone should study this.
Actually, someone has.
But before we get to that: A year ago, Okayplayer interviewed several people who are both a) female and b) producers, of which the site was able to find six. Maybe it found more but only interviewed six. One of them, Seattle producer SASSYBLACK, was asked should be done about this. Here's her answer, in full:
"I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell you what to do. Like, what the hell! I have to work to make these beats. I gotta do the regular struggle of just trying to be good at making the music in my head come out right. I gotta be good at that. But I also got to be good at telling you how to be nice, [and] be civil? That’s crazy. That’s too much work. Y’all don’t pay me for that."
Got that, everybody else? Do you know what you need to do now?
The stats in the first paragraph come from the newest edition of the USC ANNENBERG INCLUSION INITIATIVE's annual report on the gender and race/ethnicity of the artists, songwriters and producers behind the most successful pop songs and the most prominent Grammy nominees. This is the fifth year they've been doing this but their numbers go back to 2012, and the long and short of it is almost nothing is changing.
"The last decade has been one of insignificant change in the recording studio," USC Annenberg said in its official announcement of the report, released Thursday morning. "I think the key word here is stagnancy,” Inclusion Initiative founder DR. STACY L. SMITH told Rolling Stone.
In 2012, 11 percent of the songwriters and 2.4 percent of the producers credited on the songs on Billboard's year-end Hot 100 were women. In 2021, it was 14.4 percent and 3.9 percent. Technically an improvement, but not really. The lack of change is remarkably consistent across the various crafts. The one area where there's been a noticeable improvement has been in the percentage of women in color in various roles, which is good news, but the raw numbers remain small for everybody.
The RECORDING ACADEMY's Women in the Mix pledge, which since 2019 has asked artists, labels and managers to commit to considering at least two women for every open production role, seems to have been a failure. Lots of people pledging, hardly anyone following through with hires. It's possible, it should be noted, that the study's focus on the Hot 100 is skewing the results. Maybe women are getting hired by major artists to produce and engineer all sorts of tracks that aren't hitting the top of the charts. But also, maybe not. The numbers the researchers did collect are remarkably consistent and remarkably bleak. Men are drowning out women, especially behind the scenes, on the pop charts and on Grammy nomination lists. The one major Grammy category where women do reasonably well overall is Best New Artist, which is nice to hear and also strange. Where do those women go after they're nominated for (or win) Best New Artist? Who's employing them a year later? Who are *they* employing?
It's possible that for the second time in three years, a woman could sweep the big four Grammy categories Sunday night. Which would be great. And which would, ironically, put a slew of Grammys on the shelves of an overwhelmingly male crew of producers, engineers, mixers and songwriters.
Maybe women aren't being hired in the first place. Maybe they're being hired but the songs they're working on aren't cutting through. Maybe their songs are cutting through but they're not registering in the ears of Grammy voters. Maybe maybe maybe. The answers to those questions and the assigning of blame are beside the point. The real question facing the industry, again, is a simple one: What are you going to do about it? Like, what the hell?
It's Friday
And that means new music from acoustic guitar virtuoso MOLLY TUTTLE, whose CROOKED TREE, recorded with her band GOLDEN HIGHWAY, takes the 29-year-old Californian back to her bluegrass roots, with a feminist twist. Like her murder ballad: "I have a natural love of horror movies, and gore, and creepy stories," she tells Tony Scherman in the NY Times, "but some of the old ballads are really misogynist. There’s a lot of violence towards women. So I flipped the perspective to a woman's." Translation, per Scherman: "it’s the guy who gets hacked to death, for a change." Also, Tuttle has lived with alopecia since she was a child, and it inspired the album's inspirational title song. Which seems relevant this week... PACMAN DA GUNMAN's BULLETPROOF SOUL was released Thursday, the third anniversary of his mentor Nipsey Hussle's death; it ends with "Till We Meet Again," which remembers that tragic day. The full album, produced by Hit-Boy, is "built for a cruise through the city, centered around a relaxed, West Coast-centric rhythm," the LA Times' Kenan Draughorne writes... MR MIXONDO is the debut from DJ TRAVELLA, a teenage star of Tanzania's singeli scene. "His rhythms pummel listeners at more than 200 beats per minute," reports Joshua Minsoo Kin in the Chicago Reader, and "its layers of synthesized noise culminate in the aural equivalent of an abstract expressionist painting"... THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, by Toronto punk vets PUP, as its title suggests, "a grand concept album about their own implosion," as Chris DeVille puts it for Stereogum, with the bandmembers envisioning themselves as a corporate board of directors overseeing their own music The board appears to have voted for the band's "most flowery and experimental album to date"... The RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS reunite with guitarist John Frusciante and producer Rick Rubin on UNLIMITED LOVE. "I love them and felt that we had unfinished business on a soul level," Frusciante, who's had an on-again-off-again relationship with his bandmates for 30-plus years, tells the LA Times... OMG this song by Mancunian jazz(ish) saxophonist/guitarist ALABASTER DEPLUME, whose GOLD is more or less an album of improvised bands improvising his songs. There's a childlike wonder to the album, but also a deep, lived-in, scarred beauty. This Pitchfork review by Marty Sartini Garner does a good of explaining how and why it works.
Plus new music from THOMAS RHETT, PAUL CAUTHEN, the late PASTOR CHAMPION, MILEY CYRUS (live album), T-SHYNE, RIZZO RIZZO, THOUXANBANFAUNI, MESHUGGAH, DUSTER, WOLF, GERALD CLAYTON, DAVE DOUGLAS, SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE, HANNAH PEEL & PANORCHESTRA, PLASTIKMAN & CHILLY GONZALES, CINTHIE (DJ Kicks mix), CALIBRE (out Saturday), MORE EAZE (aka Mari Maurice), CHRISTIAN LEE HUTSON, PILLOW QUEENS, LIGHTS, DESAPARECIDOS (live album), the HELLACOPTERS (first album in 14 years), JON SPENCER & THE HITMAKERS, CHRISTIAN ALEXANDER, µ-ZIQ, HRISHIKESH HIRWAY (released earlier this week), PAPERCUTS, CONFIDENCE MAN, SONDRE LERCHE, CASSIDY MANN, ALDO NOVA, WARMDUSCHER and D-DAY: A GANGSTA GRILLZ MIXTAPE from J. COLE's Dreamville Records and DJ DRAMA, which arrives ahead of the Dreamville Festival this weekend in Raleigh, N.C.
Oh, and it's BANDCAMP FRIDAY. You know what that means and what to do.
Etc Etc Etc
TERENCE BLANCHARD's opera "FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES," which last year became the first work by a Black composer ever performed at the METROPOLITAN OPERA, will be shown on PBS TV stations this weekend as part of the network's Great Performances series. The opera is based on NY Times columnist CHARLES M. BLOW's memoir of the same title... A wonderful thread about BRUCE WILLIS hovering over a Philadelphia DJ booth back in the day... Country music in Kenya... How to stream a DJ set.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative |
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| Inclusion in the Recording Studio? [PDF] |
| By Karla Hernandez, Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Dr. Katherine Pieper |
| Gender and race/ethnicity of artists, songwriters & producers across 1,000 popular songs from 2012-2021.. |
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Bloomberg |
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| The Real Reason Spotify Frustrates Musicians |
| By Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal and Damon Krukowski |
| Earlier this year some musicians, led by Neil Young, removed their music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. It has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. |
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The New York Times |
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| The Grammys, Always Unpredictable, Face New Surprises |
| By Ben Sisario |
| The lead-up to the awards has involved controversy over a last-minute ballot change, Covid-19 cases, a nominee’s death and, of course, The Slap. But producers say the show will be ready. |
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The Ringer |
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| If This Record Doesn’t Kill PUP, Nothing Will |
| By Ian Cohen |
| The Toronto rockers are back this week with ‘The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND,’ an album that can only be described as the most PUP experience possible. For fans of the quartet, that’s a great thing. |
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Kerrang! |
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| Taylor Hawkins: A wild light blinding bright |
| By James Hickie |
| He was obsessed with rock’n’roll and one of the greatest drummers on the planet, but more importantly Taylor Hawkins was a man brimming with love and kindness. |
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The New York Times |
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| A Filmmaker’s Journey to the Center of Celine Dion |
| By Elisabeth Vincentelli |
| In her kooky, rambunctious biopic “Aline,” the French comedian Valérie Lemercier drew from her own life to play the Quebecois pop star at every stage of hers. |
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Resident Advisor |
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| Life After Closing Time |
| By Anu Shukla |
| Forced evictions or fresh starts—people leave the music industry for various reasons. We talked to club workers who changed course and navigated away from nightlife. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “April Fools” |
| Aretha Franklin |
| From "Young, Gifted and Black" (1972). |
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| Video of the day |
| “The April Fools” |
| Stuart Rosenberg |
| Catherine Deneuve/Jack Lemmon romcom from 1969, with Dionne Warwick singing the Bacharach/David title song (same one Aretha sings above). Full movie here: https://sistercelluloid.com/2019/04/01/streaming-saturdays-jack-lemmon-and-catherine-deneuve-save-each-other-in-the-april-fools |
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| “REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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