Friday, January 6, 2012

12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music

This might make me pretty un-hip but I am just going to go ahead and say it: I don't care that Celine Dion's album “Falling Into You” sold more copies than any Queen, Nirvana, or Bruce Springsteen record.


You all know how much I love Nirvana and I am certainly no h
uge Celine Dion fan. However, I think that what we consider to be "good" music is subjective and unstable. It changes from person to person, from decade to decade. It is very difficult to compile any sort of comprehensive list of definitively "good" artists.

In my thesis I talked a lot about what it means to be authentic in popular music. When we look at what is considered to be good music, we often see the word authentic thrown around to describe artists that are "cool" as opposed to artists that are tragically uncool and in-authentic.

What I noticed about this particular list (and rock/grunge/punk music in general) is that women are the inherently uncool, inauthentic, un-hip. On this Buzzfeed list there is not one single female artist on the positive side. AND quite a few artists on the negative side are either women or they are artists that are predominantly enjoyed by women, especially young women.

As always, I maintain, the arbiters of music taste are sexist.