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Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 23:59
by Weirdelves
http://10listens.com/2010/04/02/masculi ... ne-on-her/

Haven't seen this before, interesting article on how Joanna is treated in the public sphere, raising some intriguing points.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 27 Aug 2011, 16:36
by ursulabear
it is very interesting to see how the image of her is so static. She has grown so much as an artist.
I am not sure I agree with all the points, but it is really quite thought provoking.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 01:55
by Spelunker
i really don't understand why people get their knickers in a knot over music reviews. so what if newsom is labelled a precious pixie woman-child for the rest of her career? however many years from now, i won't be handing her music over to my grand kids and saying 'have a listen to this... the woman who wrote it was real smart, and she looked and sounded like a wood nymph!'
i envision most of these men (and women) to be sitting around in their ivory towers, gnawing on their pens and twiddling their thumbs. if they want to brand her with this static caricature, then that's perfectly okay. myself and thousands of others will still be listening to her music decades from now, suspended in wonder and drawing from it whatever we may find.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 04:37
by Jessie
Spelunker wrote:'have a listen to this... the woman who wrote it was real smart, and she looked and sounded like a wood nymph!'


HAHAHA! I just pictured myself doing that. God knows I will be a music evangelist to my kids/grankids.

Anywho, great read. I do agree with most of that. It is annoying, but I don't really read reviews for anything. If it's music, I listen to the clips myself if I can find them.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 21:35
by Jordan~
Reviewers of her work are singlehandedly keeping the word 'elfin' alive where otherwise it might be replaced by 'elven' and 'elvish', which have the weight of Tolkien's influence behind them, because only 'elfin' is sufficiently archaic to be used to paint the picture of Joanna Newsom as fairy princess.

I don't think it comes from nowhere. You'd have to be blind, I think to miss the deliberate image-crafting in each album. Just a glance at the cover art is sufficient. On the front of MEM we see a childlike Joanna in the middle of a collage featuring a unicorn. On the front of Ys, we see something that could very well have been painted as an illustration to a fantasy novel, where she looks for all the world like an elven queen despite the fact that she's apparently wearing the clothes she showed up wearing to be painted. On the front of HOOM, she could pass for Lola Montez.

She's said before in interviews that each of the albums belongs to a different aspect of herself. I think a lot of the problem is that the reviewers have been slow to catch up. With Ys being more otherworldly and grand and, well, elven - mythological and legendary - after it had had time to sink in, they eventually incorporated the 'Ys vibe' into the Joanna Newsom narrative, which until then had been all elfin, no elven. Some time after Ys was released there was an acknowledgement of something other than the wild child wunderkind of MEM in reviews, a little of the austere majesty of Ys was incorporated, as well as a vein of motherliness that became more prominent around then (particularly after the release of Colleen). I imagine eventually the sensuality and sexuality of HOOM will be incorporated as well, probably with a more pronounced emphasis on motherliness, too. There seems to be a very conscious attempt to rail against each previous presentation - the Joanna Newsom of previous albums - with each new album, too: Have One On Me is, in a way, more down to earth than Ys; despite being a more ambitious project, in many ways, it's ambitious in a different way, and some of the lyrics are very dark - there's people encased in burning ash, the skinning alive of a rabbit, the narrator being stabbed to death, God spitting like a cornered rat, a room gilded with a man's lovers' gold teeth, etc.

There's a lot of sexism, certainly, in the narrative surrounding the creation of the albums, and especially her 'discovery' as an artist. My impression of the whole saga of Will Oldham asking her to tour and her association with all these big names in music is the opposite of that apparently received by most reviewers: I imagine her charisma and talent drawing people in, with her genius having a kind of gravitational pull that makes people like Will Oldham and Van Dyke Parks flock to her rather than them discovering it and nurturing or cultivating or taming it to make it bear fruit. In my mind, she's more like an inadvertant Pied Piper leading them along in a merry dance than a feral child being trained.

(I put this in parentheses because it's an odd thought that depends on a reference that it's quite possible no one else will understand, but reading Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, the concept of a ta'veren, someone who twists fate and makes people behave differently just by their presence, makes me think Joanna. Not literally, I mean - that would probably just as unfair as thinking of her as a wild thing needing to be cultivated, since it would imply that her work is a product of some kind of good luck and it'd make her out to be some sort of supernatural phenomenon, rather than her music being the result of a great deal of talent and a lot of hard work - but more just in the way that people react to her.)

But I think the reviewers are doing exactly what they're meant to, albeit a bit more slowly, with regards to her image. They're picking up on what I'm sure must be deliberate signals: "This is the Joanna Newsom of Ys," she said, and a few months later some of them heard. I'm certain that she's self-conscious enough that she isn't accidentally dealing with femininity, especially her own, as a theme: one of the three songs that became Only Skin was entitled Being A Woman, after all. The best reviewers have been conscious of the intentionality of it and analysed what the album says about being a woman, what's expressed about femininity, while the less aware reviewers have taken each album as unintended, as if it were a thing of nature - as if they had heard her singing in private and stopped to listen, rather than purchased an album deliberately engineered to convey a certain impression and express certain things about certain themes - which may, as the author of the article suggests, stem from the sexism surrounding her status as an artist, being an extension of the notion that she requires to be cultivated.

I think the writer of the article is correct in that I imagine that it's that sexism that's made the childlike Joanna Newsom of MEM into something of an albatross for her: rather than being taken as a meticulously constructed impression, it was approached with a prejudice, interpreted as something that it wasn't, and subsequent efforts to present a different impression have been slightly tainted, at least, by the notion that that's the real her - because for that to be the real her fits comfortably into a chauvanist narrative - and anything else she presents is the constructed Newsom-child playing dress-up.

That said, gender politics is something to which I feel like an outsider; an observer rather than a participant. Being gay seems to exclude you from it, as if people can't really decide how you fit in. It being the case that most of my friends are and always have been straight, particularly straight males, I'm aware of it and I know what it looks like, but understanding it is something quite different. I'm aware enough of it to know that it appears to be bad for everyone, but that's not really a subject for this thread.

As a final point about weirdness, set down here apart from the rest because it's more personal and vague, I can see the writer's point about how the 'weirdness' of her music is perceived. This always struck me as odd, because I don't listen to a lot of music. I coudn't tell you a single song in the top 10 at the moment. If I had to guess what artists would be in the top 10, I would guess that one was Lady GaGa and I'd struggle to think of any other names that might feature, and if I did think of one I imagine it'd sound more antiquated than if I'd said Benny Goodman. And I don't just not listen to a lot of mainstream music, I don't listen to 'indie' music, either. I listen to two artists religiously, a few less so, and then a bunch of songs that I just quite like, most of them for their camp value, like the odd cheesy symphonic metal ballad and a little Michael Bublé and Macy Gray and Bonnie Tyler and stuff like that. Before I listened to Joanna, I barely listened to anything at all: a few soundtracks, odds and ends from a couple of bands, a little jazz. Just things that I heard and thought, "I'd like to hear that again." Music didn't really become a part of my daily routine until I got into Ys, which I got into because the first time I heard it I was massively excited, thinking, "This is like nothing I've ever heard before; this exists in a realm of its own, separate from all music I've heard until today." I think the writer of the article hits the nail on the head when he calls her "audience-be-damned": that's probably what attracted me to it. It's the same thing that attracts me to the comedy of Stewart Lee, who always jokes that he wishes he didn't need an audience and eventually he'll refine them out of existence, or to Tomas Kalnoky, who, with his numerous projects that he seems reluctant to let anyone watch over his shoulder and his hatred of his audience-oriented record label, seems to wish the same thing. I like artists who are just trying to be artists, for whom the audience is sort of getting in the way, for whom it's something they feel like they have to manoeuvre their way around. I had never heard anything "audience-be-damned" before Ys; I'd never heard anything that didn't seem to have been written with anyone but the artist in mind, and that's probably what grants it its emotional intensity and soul-baring sincerity, the things that so drew me in to it and made it so powerfully moving to me. And the writer of the article is right in that people don't seem to celebrate the immense courage required to be such an artist nearly enough: the boldness and bravery of the vision behind the ambition shown by Ys and HOOM is seldom even mentioned, which is a grave injustice.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 22:08
by polliwog
What's wrong with fairy princesses? XD

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 22:10
by Jordan~
There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a fairy princess, and there's nothing wrong with dressing up as a fairy princess, but there is something wrong with implying that someone must be a fairy princess because the alternative is inconceivable to the masculine ego, especially when they insist that a fairy princess is something they're not. (If I had a bra I'd be burning it right now, I guess.) (Don't worry, I know you're joking.)

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 28 Aug 2011, 22:39
by ursulabear
Seriously. Joanna is not a nymph. she is not an elf or a fairie. she is a woman. i can understand how she was seen an an elf during the mem years 9with the bangs and the dresses and the ears poking out). But in 2005,. she transformed into a woman with a voice and a great deal of talent. errrrbody needa feget bout dat elf shit.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 02:59
by polliwog
How do you know that she isn't a nymph, elf, or fairie? Because she said she isn't? Those supernatural beings lie all the time! Don't you watch TV or the movies?

Your turn. :hyper:

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 03:44
by dwaink
ok she really is an elf damit, quit letting the cat outa the bag polli!

dwain :)

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 04:01
by dwaink
gender bias is such a subtle and pervasive thing, i'm not at all sure "men" are capable of defusing it in themselves enough to have a clear perspective in a "review" i work really hard at not letting it effect my actions, i tell myself deeply that i do not quibble with women being equal or superior to me in any way and yet i know i still harbor the fruits of my upbringing, i growl under my breath at doing "women's work" and other residual "taint". all jest aside i am very much in awe of Joanna's genius and her artistic ability and i can't imagine being any more in awe if she were a man doing the same art. perhaps i might connect deeper with a man's perspective in artistic expression because of similar upbringing, not fully being able to empathize with Joanna's experience as a female simply because i don't have that experience at hand in this life time. She seems to spend a good deal of time in HOOM trying to get across the idea that men and women want the same things, a valid point, but i am not sure it makes us the same...or at least in my mind i can't make that leap of faith yet.....
dwain

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 05:32
by polliwog
We are NOT the same! My corpus callosum is smaller than a woman's, and I resent the Hell out of it! How am I supposed to win an argument with a woman when the two sides of my brain can't communicate as effectively as hers? :D

Your turn.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 17:14
by Jessie
I agree it's offensive to keep on calling her all of these adjectives but there really is something magical about her. I like to think of her as a little bit of a mystical creature. I feel the same about my early Tori Amos obsession. There's something other worldly there. Joanna's 100% real woman who practices her ass off to get as good as she is but there's a little something else too.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 17:43
by polliwog
I wouldn't call her a fairie princess to her face, because she isn't (to the best of my knowledge), and she clearly finds it offensive. That doesn't change the fact that I was 'enchanted' the very first time I saw and heard her. Although I'm no longer obsessed with her--thank you very much to a few jerks encountered here, and in the old forum--the enchantment still holds me. Sorry Joanna, for the use of the 'e' word. I just don't think any other word quite fits. So there! :P

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 21:48
by dwaink
polli u can't win an argument with a woman because u are wrong! plain an simple :) get over it :)

dwain they can't take my prostate away from me ...sniff

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 29 Aug 2011, 22:00
by dwaink
...Sorry Joanna, for the use of the 'e' word. I just don't think any other word quite fits. So there! :P...

hmmm e word huh? hows about ethereal:

"".... Hindu philosophy relates Aether with the concept of Akasha (आकाश), a Sanskrit word. The Nyaya and Vaisheshika traditions of Hindu philosophy set Akasha or ether as the fifth physical substance, which is the "substratum of the quality of sound". "It is the One, Eternal, and All Pervading physical substance, which is imperceptible"....""

dwain

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 30 Aug 2011, 01:31
by Jordan~
Jessie wrote:I agree it's offensive to keep on calling her all of these adjectives but there really is something magical about her. I like to think of her as a little bit of a mystical creature. I feel the same about my early Tori Amos obsession. There's something other worldly there. Joanna's 100% real woman who practices her ass off to get as good as she is but there's a little something else too.


In a man I think it would be called charisma. She inspires something in people.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 30 Aug 2011, 09:58
by sophie
one of the three songs that became Only Skin was entitled Being A Woman

Off-topic sorry, but I know about Be A Woman and the Only Skin played at Queen Elizabeth Hall, but what's the third song?

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 30 Aug 2011, 10:25
by Weirdelves
After all the press coverage on Joanna, the first few times I saw her I was surprised how confident and funny she was. She's got great present and just generally seems like quite a cool person when I was expecting a shy and retiring little figure. I guess that's a product of the media first around her.

Re: Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her

PostPosted: 30 Aug 2011, 10:50
by Jordan~
sophie wrote:
one of the three songs that became Only Skin was entitled Being A Woman

Off-topic sorry, but I know about Be A Woman and the Only Skin played at Queen Elizabeth Hall, but what's the third song?


I remember her saying that it started as three songs. Those are two of them, but I don't know if the third was ever performed before they all became Only Skin.