Feminist Fridays

I read a book called "Cunt" a few months ago. (I hope to write more about that later)  and I have thought a lot about a chapter in which the author Inga Musicio talks about how she made an effort to listen to more women musicians because she said that unless women were pop stars they are not often taken as seriously as men in their craft.

( I am not a feminist to down on men, women treat each other equally as disrespectful , but you can't deny that there has been a long history of not taking women seriously so the problem is most likely not enough people think about it, so the habit continues. )

Madonna was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Totally deserving, considering her influence, and not exactly a shock to anyone, unless you consider that out of the 200 plus artists in the Hall, only twenty of them are women. Another seven women who were nominated as part of a band: (Tina Weymouth from the Talking Heads, Debbie Harry of Blondie, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac..)

Twenty. That's not many.

Growing up, I wanted to be a rock star, I took guitar lessons, I took voice lessons and I took piano lessons but I never did anything with it.  Not because I am shy or have stage fright, because I can assure you that is not the case, but because I didn't take myself seriously.  I didn't see other women like me represented in the music that I listened to as often and never questioned why.  Not to mention the fact that I was a music leader in my church and people verbaly got upset about it because that was "not a job for a young woman." All of my guy friends were in bands, and none of them were genius song writers or even that far along with their instruments, but I intrinsically thought  that I couldn't do what they did. so I resorted to dating boys in bands instead of starting my own.

Anyway back to "Cunt", Inga said she went a whole year only listening to music that was made by women artists and that she started to see a shift in how she saw herself as women.

I thought about that this week when I looked at my top 25 playlist..

the thing that is the common bond between all 25 is that every one of them has a woman musician in the band.

I started playing guitar for our church  a few weeks ago, I am by no means "good" at it. I can barely play and I only started out of necessity, because I was sick of relying on boy rockstars who wouldn't show up.

Now Shaundria, Phill and I do the music and I can barely play the guitar but I feel like I can at least give it a shot, because if Allison Mosshart, Ani Difranco, Courtney Love, and Florence Welch can do it, so can I.

so I encourage you to look at how many women are on your playlist and if it's not many, go to the library, they give music out for free there, and check out as many women musicians as you can and put them on your ipod, and listen to them.

you just might awaken your inner rock star.