The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I love what you do, but you should be sexier!’
In 1995, Amy Raphael blew the whistle on sexism in rock music. Almost 25 years later, has anything changed?
In August 1994, I interviewed the American singer Courtney Love in a hotel room in west London. Her band, Hole, had played an emotional set at Reading Festival the previous evening – the first since her husband, Kurt Cobain, had killed himself, four months earlier – and I wasn’t sure in what kind of mood I’d find her. She hadn’t given an interview since Cobain’s death, but was making an exception because she hoped that the stories she had to tell me would help young women in the music industry.
I was interviewing Love for my first book, Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock,a collection of 13 first-person interviews with female musicians including Björk, Tanya Donelly and Liz Phair. Love was quick to point out that when she was growing up there weren’t many female role models for an aspiring rock star to look up to; perhaps just Patti Smith and Debbie Harry. And she certainly had stories to tell about her route to success: of people assuming Cobain wrote her fierce, poetic lyrics; of guys in the crowd yelling “Show us your tits!” at her during Hole gigs; and of being sexually assaulted by audience members when she made her customary dives from the stage during the band’s live shows
Her response? “I wore a dress that was so restricting, and shoes that were five inches high, so I could barely stage dive. Then I got the best write-ups – for being feminine, I guess. I couldn’t move well and I was restrained, which equals great review[s]. That’s pretty horrid.”
All these years later, I remember Love’s tone as she told me this. She was
unshakable in her belief that, on stage, she could be whoever she wanted. But there was a note of resignation in her voice, too; this is the way the music industry worked. As Debbie Harry would write in her foreword to the book: “All the image stuff becomes marketing once you sign a deal.”
Which is not to say that any of the women in Never Mind the Bollocks acquiesced to the everyday sexism that seemed to run throughout the music industry. Kim Gordon, of New
York rockers Sonic Youth, pointed out that women who perform into middle age are portrayed as “losing it” while their male counterparts are generally perceived as “just getting better”. Björk, meanwhile, explained how she had learned to turn a blind eye to the ingrained sexism she encountered: “I guess I’ve taken being a woman for granted and decided early on that the only thing for me to do was just ignore it. People used to say, ‘Wow, she can do all this and she’s a woman.’ That upset me – f--- you!” In the years following the publication of the book in 1995, I felt cautiously optimistic about the way in which the treatment of women in the music industry, by both insiders and by fans, appeared to be evolving. There were more female bands than ever and the opportunities offered by the internet had given women a better chance of being heard on their own terms. When, around 2010, Virago, my publisher, asked if I’d consider updating my book, I procrastinated. Back in 1995, giving women a “safe space” in which to talk felt necessary; a decade into the 21st century, I wasn’t sure if it still was. I started to change my mind in 2015, after reading a newspaper article by Lauren Mayberry, singer for Glaswegian three-piece Chvrches, in which she hit back at online trolls who had called her a “slut” for having the audacity to pose in the band’s latest video wearing – wait for it – a minidress and wet-look hair.
Shortly afterwards, American rapper Cardi B was vilified on social media for daring to be a straighttalking woman of colour. It’s true that she doesn’t hold back in her online posts (when, earlier this year, a Conservative commentator suggested on Twitter that the rapper’s latest video was out of sync with the #MeToo era, she responded by asking: “If I twerk and be half naked does that mean I deserve to get raped and molested?”). But then neither does Kanye West, and he is given a much easier ride.
Finally, also in 2015, Björk told the online music magazine Pitchfork that she was no longer willing to ignore misogyny in the music business, and admitted that she was sick of the men who had co-produced her records being given all the credit. She wanted to let it be known that things are harder for women in the music industry – and that everything a man says, a woman has to say five times just in order to be heard.
Lauren Mayberry was one of the first women I interviewed for A Seat at the Table: Women on the Frontline of Music, the follow-up to Bollocks, published next week. She explained how she had posted a screengrab of a “particularly inappropriate message” on Facebook. “Within a week, over half a million people responded. The messages the band received were shockingly abusive. This is just one of the many examples of explicit abuse: ‘This isn’t rape culture. You’ll know
when I’m raping you, b----’.”
For Mayberry, accepting this kind of abuse in silence wasn’t an option. She says she wouldn’t still be in Chvrches if she “put up and shut up”. She is not, of course, the only musician to be attacked by online bullies using aggressive sexual imagery as a verbal weapon.
When I interviewed Jessica Curry, the Bafta-winning composer, she recalled the abuse she had received when it was announced she would be creating the soundtrack for the video game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs in
2013. (Composing music for the very male world of video games is huge business these days.)
“I got a tweet that read, ‘I know your son’s name and I’m going to come and slit his throat,’” she told me. “Gamer websites instructed other fans to, ‘Go for this woman’. It was a sustained and organised campaign of hatred.”
The internet has completely transformed the music industry since I wrote Bollocks and, of course, some of these changes have been positive for women. Instead of relying on the narrowminded attitudes of A&R men, female artists now have the freedom to post their music directly on websites such as Bandcamp without having to first secure a deal with a record label. The internet has also helped female musicians to connect with one another to share support and guidance, and played a central role
‘I got a tweet saying, “I know your son’s name and I’m going to come and slit his throat”’