 This artist chart -- which gets regularly updated like my personal one below shall -- presents Last.fm's group choices of people like me. We enjoy the place's gathering on the Ectophile's Guide to Good Music, which has become one of my favourite sites.
I find the skeletal background (a contribution by Last.fm user Mbiscan) most appropriate to my work on the roots of music, which is well under way. One research book I'm reading, along with those about women that have mostly arrived now, goes right back to 'The Singing Neanderthals' by Steven Mithen. Humanoid bones can't get much drier than that, can they?
Mithen himself can't help but sometimes be heavy going, but he's taken on a tricky task in going back as far as he does and draws on the mind sciences as well as ethnomusicology to do it. People in the past have described my own passion for music as an "obsession" if I browbeat them. This can be because I am unable to listen to it while concentrating on other things. It has to be one or the other, except when mood music really is on low at dinner parties and the like. Even then I find myself straining to hear it at the expense of others focused on the chit-chat. I have never understood why my brain needs to shut out either the music or the company if the former grabs my attention.
Mithen is among those explaining my sometimes antisocial quandary to me. He also puts it into an evolutionary context at a time I believe we need one, after a century of quantum physics you can't confine to the labs any more. There are people who have simply stopped doing this. While many of them are quacks and charlatans, I have been trying to find books by a few that aren't because "minds are changing", and I'm now aware of an evolutionary process that I'm often arguing elsewhere has affected very many people for at least the past four decades. An ailing world needs paradigms now that successfully reconcile science with the sacred, but without nonsense in a "spiritual" guise.
I know that I need one myself, after a culmination of events this year that make no sense in a purely four-dimensional and conventional approach to the world and some of our art forms. In music, I read Mithen as a convert to his cause in advance, since I have since my teens in the late 1960s been open to notions that music is central to all our cultures. It's the most comprehensible to me of the unspoken arts, when it comes without words, though I find it hard even now to articulate exactly why that is. So I've turned to the scientists and shall later try to wrap my head round Daniel J. Levitin's 'This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession' -- those are my italics, evidently.
Chicks between the covers by my bed
What I can do is follow several books at once. The ones about women to land up on the part of table that passes for a shelf or by my bunk right now are almost all by women. What with one or two comments from the stubborn sceptics among my colleagues who want to see what's in the parcels I unwrap, this leaves me feeling like a minority man within the minority female field of women in music!
There are still men I work with who can't reconcile rock and a girl with a guitar. I don't think ill of those who make rude comments at names like Tori Amos and would voice many more were I to reel off scores of other names from the letter A all the way down to Zazie and Zita Swoon, a Belgian indie rock band that can sometimes grab my ear. But I feel they're missing out when it boils down to the kind of misogynist prejudice interestingly explored and turned upside down by the one man whose book is in the pile. He is Simon Reynolds, for 'The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'N' Roll'.
I say often that there's no arguing with personal taste, but don't like it if people judge others purely by their sex or on the strength of only a tiny part of their work when countless musicians like Amos and Kate Bush have evolved if you listen to the whole body of their opus; it's a part of their changing lives, abilities and outlook. It's fairly recent news to me just how instrumental women were in the early days of the blues and other music that gives us what we've got today. Some of the misogyny might have set in both sides of the Atlantic when the record companies that are now huge majors even once paid a small handful of those no-nonsense pioneers better than the men way back when.
Of the books I've begun by women, one claims to be "the definitive history of women in rock, pop and roll". It's Lucy O'Brien's 'She Bop II' and this hefty but not academically weighty tome is indeed so highly readable that I find its often anecdotal approach a good bedtime tale. O'Brien is full of fascinating biographical tidbits about her vast subject matter, weaving these into her historical narrative, and I've forsworn the science fiction usually required before I fall asleep.
At about 500 pages, it may seem long, but a claim to be definitive can only be publisher's blurb, when O'Brien has to fit more than a hundred years of creative endeavour and innovation between the covers. After all, she has an eye to music worldwide and that's commendable, rather than the all too prevalent narrow approach to the popular music of the United States, Britain and, occasionally, a European periphery.
No work can say it all, but 'She Bop II' is a darned good bid to sum up a complex tale with as many threads as possible, while including the record industry's side of the saga. If this raises the interest of any man, then O'Brien is a woman to dispel prejudice since she appears to have so few herself. Like me, though there's a relatively brief discography, I feel she'd be very hard put to come up with any of those absurd "best of" lists that make me mad.
I find it helps to read historical surveys like this in conjunction with ... well, listening, of course, but also at the same time as I delve into the kind of work written by women like a different O'Brien -- Karen -- and Amy Raphael, whose collections of interviews with musicians dating from the mid-1990s you can now pick up from Amazon Marketplace sellers for a pittance. I mean a pittance, having found an only slightly bashed copy of Raphael's 'Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock' for a single penny! The pounds went into the postage and the bloody Frog value added tax...
One of the items I'm still waiting for is widely held to be a classic in the historical genre, which was more costly, since I wanted Gillian Gaar's 'She's A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll' new, though I could have ordered it for less than eight quid. Also new and now here is a mixture of feature articles with many superb pictures and interviews by Andrea Juno: 'Angry Women in Rock: Vol 1'.
This list is far from comprehensive and since I must also consider the bulk of my CD spree done for 2007, I'm amused, rather than put off, by the Jarboe fan on that Amazon page who loves that particular singer so much, but wrote "to be honest, I have not read [Juno's] entire book since lots of the artists are beyond what you might call 'obscure.'" Well, that's as may be. I know virtually nothing of Jarboe, but do know work by half a dozen of the "obscure' singers.
So my mainly 'Voices of Women' wish list at Amazon France has grown to more than 130 CDs, will probably go on getting bigger and is highly likely now I've read the part on Jarboe, to include her, even if she -- like some of the early blues women -- prefers to dress outrageously expensively. In the book she sometimes looks fond of wearing no more than tattoos and snakes.
2:16:37 PM link 
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