This ain't sports, it's music

Sure, bands have logos and so do sports teams. Some bands have mascots and uniforms just like sports teams. Don't be fooled, though, there's a difference. A big difference...

Sorry all you fans of American Idol, but in music just because one performer wins doesn't mean all the other performers have to lose. We've gotten so used to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the various World Cups and the Tour de France. The winners of each of those events are, at that moment, the best in the world and everyone else has fallen short. You see it in the eyes of a football team that plays in a national championship game and loses. Even though they are that close to the ultimate goal, they're seen as losers and they see themselves that way.

In music, there is absolutely no requirement that we define a "best" band. It drives me nuts how much energy goes into statements like, "Clearly, the Beatles are the best rock band ever." or even the typical "Top 100 Songs of All Time" list. I can't tell you which band I like "best". I can name 100 bands that I like to listen to but I'd be hard-pressed to pin down the "best" band out of those 100, even the best 5 bands. If there's really a best band, why should any of us listen to anything else? Because we don't all agree on the best band and we don't even agree on the best genre, sub-genre or just about any other criteria you can use to subdivide the vast sea of great music on this planet. And, our tastes vary from day to day and over the course of our lifetimes (at least some of us archive the old and welcome the new).

Since this isn't sports, why put so much energy into putting down the bands and styles you don't like? With the internet, there's literally no excuse for complaining that you don't have access to the music you like. Given that, why spend any time listening to music you don't like for long enough to develop even the slightest negative opinion? Sure, it's worth being open minded and trying out different styles and artists, always experimenting with new things, but once you know you don't like it, just let it be. Leave it alone and focus on the positives, the music you love. Enough of the "Emo sucks!", "Metal sucks!", "Country sucks!" comments. None of them suck, you just like some of them and dislike others. We don't need to crown a winner.

I understand, as a fan, there's something that drives us to be "balanced" in the sense that every word of praise must be balanced by a word of criticism. To bolster the standing of our favorite bands we need to make the others look completely inferior... I'm suggesting it's better to give that a rest. Be a rabid supporter but be an indifferent detractor.

For those of you musicians out there, in bands, trying to succeed in your local music scene, here's a thought. If every band in your local area sounded the same, why would anyone prefer to see you? Variety in a local scene is a good thing. It gives people the opportunity to focus on the bands they like and skip the ones they don't like. If you're in a band, you want other bands in the local scene to be different, to provide variety, even those sharing the bill with you. The greater the variety of bands, the greater the opportunity that more than one will succeed. As a local band it's in your best interest to support the success of the bands around you; that will grow the scene overall and that in turn will give you a better chance of success.

Regardless of whether you are a fan or a performer, stop putting down others to bolster your own preferences. Can you change your ways? If you do, you'll be rewarded by greater opportunity and better music across the board.

Where Are All The Women In Metal?

Women have been liberating themselves for the last 50 years or so. My doctor, my veterinarian, my CPA...all women. As a software engineer I've spent years in the industry working side by side with incredibly bright, creative and self-assured software engineers that just happen to be women. I've played softball alongside women, I've skied with women and I fully believe that women are every bit as capable as men.

But, there just aren't that many women in heavy music. To be fair, there are certainly some women in heavy music: Otep Shamaya, Tarja Turunen, Anette Olzon, Tanja Lainio, ... OK, so I didn't have that much trouble generating those names and that's the tip of the iceberg. But still, it's odd. Each of those women fronts an otherwise all-male band. Even Joan Jett and Lita Ford, integral members of the all-female band, The Runaways, have spent the bulk of their successful years in music with male bands backing them. Sure, in addition to the Runaways, there's Girlschool, The Donnas and Kittie but for every example like that, there are 100s of all-male bands.

Why is it that my son is already showing an interest in electric guitar, while my daughter is focused on singing? They both like heavy music but, somehow, the innate desire to be an instrumentalist in a rock band (a desire I've felt for most of my life) shows up in my son and not my daughter? Perhaps it's simply a vicious cycle. There are very few female role models playing instruments in heavy bands. And, the more I think about it, the more I think that's true across much of contemporary music. It's not hard to find female lead singers, or backup singers in many mainstream styles but the list of female, well-known, accomplished instrumentalists is awfully short. Yeah, I can think of a few off the top of my head: Lita Ford, Nancy Wilson, and Lzzy Hale. But it's not a lot. You don't often see women on the cover of Guitar Player or Modern Drummer and that's strange.

Go to see a symphony and often there are more women in the string section than men. In medical fields (human and animal) women are shooing up more often than men. But go to a massive summer metal festival and you won't see many women on stage.

Maybe we're still fighting the perception that women are there as decoration, for visual stimulation. Certainly that would explain why women do show up as front people for bands in much greater proportion than as instrumentalists. That bugs me, because there are so many other traditionally male jobs where women are competing (or even out-competing) with men. Many of those are highly unglamorous and yet women are still drawn to those jobs. When I was apprenticing at KGLT, I scheduled myself with Cara, a DJ for decades who plays heavier music than I do. She can out-swear and out-tough me any day. But she doesn't play an instrument; she isn't in a band.

My wife, Nancy, theorized that perhaps boys are encouraged more to be instrumentalists than women. Except, how many of us heavy guitarists were actually encouraged to follow careers in music? I wasn't. Most of my musician friends weren't. Yeah, my parents weren't negative about my music interests; they let my bands rehearse at our house, they came to gigs, they supported me but I was never given the impression that becoming a professional musician was a good life choice... So, it's hard to imagine that there's a big disparity in parental support between boys and girls when it comes to playing in rock bands.

Honestly, I'm not completely sure why so few women choose to play guitar, bass or drums. We know from classical music that they are just as capable of virtuosity as men are. From many other fields, like medicine, law, business, politics, etc. we know that women can go toe-to-toe with men. Maybe it's only a matter of time. Nearly every contemporary musical style was pioneered by men. Perhaps what it'll take is a new genre, led primarily by women, where they define the rules, the style, the personas. One way or another, though, I hope that when my daughter hits her teens that she can find comfort in music, the same way I did. I can't imagine how I could have gotten through junior high without music as a refuge and I hope that option is equally available to the unconventional, non-conformist, dreamers out there, like me, that just happen to have two XX chromosomes. For me, life would suck without guitar and I wouldn't subject anyone, regardless of gender, to a life without the escape and the reward of musical immersion.

What are your thoughts?

Music, like religion, is a personal thing

A lot of people lose sight of the personal element to religion. There are quite a few folks wandering this planet thinking that we need uniformity, that things will be better if whole countries, or even the entire globe is Christian or Muslim or whatever. I beg to differ. Religion is a personal thing, sometimes a family thing, sometimes a cultural thing, but absolute uniformity is not an ideal end point. That's what our founding fathers believed and that's why there's a separation of church and state.

And... that's why it's OK to have your own personal taste in music. The world would not be a better place if everyone listened to and played exactly the same music. That's the beauty of creative endeavors, there's variety in what's created and there's variety in how it's consumed. Yeah, major corporations love to funnel us all towards uniform targets but we don't consistently follow that leadership. Many of my friends who love "metal" listen to entirely different subsets of the genre than I do. I lean toward power metal, goth metal, nu metal some metalcore and I have soft spot for hair metal. Some of my cohorts swear by death metal, black metal and grindcore. That's OK...really. We can be different and it can all be "metal". We don't need to argue about what is "real metal" and what is not. It's all metal. It can be commercial; it can be isolationist. It doesn't matter, it's all metal and it's all good, even if I don't like all of it.

Y'see, musical taste is personal. It's subjective and it varies. I don't need to demonize other genres or sub-genres to like the music I like. There are amazing players in country, blues, jazz, classical, pop, you name it. I can like some performers or composers outside of metal without in any way being disloyal to metal. You can dislike everything except thrash metal and that's OK too. That doesn't make the stuff you dislike bad. This isn't sports fandom.

Musical taste is a lot like taste in food. Just imagine a world where every single restaurant serves bratwurst and nothing else the next time you wish that record labels would start selling nothing but swamp metal. How many days could you go eating bratwurst before you at least started craving kielbasa? And then imagine how long you could go on those two sausage types before you could not eat another bite and had to open your own pizza joint.

So, tell me, what's unique about your taste in music? What sets you apart, even from your close friends?