Smithology

Discussion of the absence of female artists in the recent Triple J Hottest 100 poll seems to just keep going and going. Maybe it is being kept alive on twitter by all the people who keep tweeting how dumb it is that people keep tweeting about it. Every few hours I see a tweet come through on the #hottest100 twitter tag along the lines of “judging by that #hottest100 of all time, straight white males. Not sure how I feel about govt $ indulging such an audience.” ref and converse replies “I picked MY best 10 in @triplej #hottest100, so what if none by women? What a lot of patronising, pseudointellectual rubbish some ppl write.” ref. Then there’s the proliferation of “all-vagina” rock lists: “my sister’s attempt at a #Hottest100 of vaginas… RT @bettydee ALL-FEMALE #Hottest100 of all time: http://bit.ly/xwL1F” ref and “My response to the ‘JJJ cockfest’ = ladies only play list #hottest100 http://bit.ly/2lxvWy” ref (These tweets are just from the most recent page-full of tweets that loaded in my client)

The first observation here is what an echo chamber Twitter can be. If not for twitter I wonder whether this issue would be so talked about, sure the usual blogs would have picked up on it and the usual readers of those blogs would have commented but those who follow the #hottest100 twitter tag are more diverse that readers of those blogs so a greater response has been provoked, even a special on Triple J Hack (mp3) to discuss the issue.

Some of you who have a greater emotional distance from this discussion may be asking what’s it all about? Who cares?. In answer to that, keep in mind that Triple J is Australia’s only national youth radio station that explicitly aims to engage young Australian culture. A poll like this gives an indication of what young Australians are into so a lot of different groups pay attention apart from the youth themselves: me I’m just an old fogey clinging to fond memories of my early twenties and the dream I had of being a rock star. A lot of us stale old onlookers have an interest in perpetuating a certain culture that once had an ideal of equality between the sexes. Other groups include various stakeholders in the music industry: artists themselves, producers, record label decision makers (whatever they’re called) who will be deciding where they’re going to spend money (or not) in the next few years. Then there’s Triple J itself getting valuable feedback on what their audience or potential audience want to hear.

But there are a few big problems with the data from this poll. The first is that we don’t know who voted. We can guess that the bulk of the 500,000 ish votes came from under fourties. We can guess that it was mostly middle class people with access to the internet. From the result we might surmise that more men voted than women. Others have speculated that a large contingent of “Bogans” ie working class males flooded the poll to produce the result. But the truth is that we don’t know and we never will.

Having said that, there is a little bit of evidence that a different demographic voted and that is the results of the yearly hottest 100s from earlier in the year and previous years which have plenty of female artists.

Another problem is that we don’t know why people voted the way they did. Again there has been speculation that a lot of the voting was along the lines of what people thought they should be voting for based on results of polls in other settings. This might account for a greater number of baby-boomer staples such as The Beatles, The Beachboys and Bob Dylan in the result. As for the gender exclusion in the result, we could speculate that it was a conscious choice of the voters on one extreme or that it was mere coincidence on the other. The truth is likely to be somewhere in between but again we can only speculate.

There’s a saying I’ve picked up somewhere along the way that goes “never attribute to malice what can be explained by misunderstanding”. There has been a fair few defensive comments both on Twitter and on the radio defending any misogynist agenda. I tend to agree that voters were not consciously excluding women when they voted. Even the fact that Triple J’s original history of rock was all male is atypical of Triple J who in my mind have promoted many female artists and have lots of intelligent women DJs. So I think the accusations of misogyny or neglect of feminist ideals are unfounded.

To me the most convincing speculation as to the result is that the demographic who voted was different to the one that usually comprises the Triple J audience and that this demographic doesn’t consider female artists to be worthy of “hottest of all time” status even through they may on average enjoy female rock. Why is anyone’s guess but mine is that there is a growing culture in Australia of associating rock with male aggression and a growing privileging of male aggression over the last ten years. This stands to reason as we look at a revival of aggressive male nationalism on Australia day coupled with awakened xenophobia in the wake of 9/11.

See also Where Were all the Sisters on The Memes of Production for commentary from real cultural studies people.

UPDATE; On further reflection, another explanation is that the trend towards excluding female artists from the hottest 100 over the last twenty years is due to the changing place of the Internet. Maybe all this proves is that the educated middle and upper classes (who used to be the only ones on the internet) were more into women rockers than society as a whole who now have greater internet use – at least amongst rock fans. And mixed in with this is John’s idea from Memes Of Production that it is also due to the mainstreaming of what used to be alternative rock.

feminism, music