Female artists in popular music - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

I've been trying to figure out a clever angle to get this going but nothing has grabbed me so just jumping straight in.

After a few conversations including with Kokkinos & Kitchensink I'm starting a tread to highlight the impact of female artists on the music that we all love.

Female artists seem really underrepresented so want to highlight their impact.

I don't have anything in particular to post right now so thought that I'd just post this and anyone can jump in and start the ball rolling

JOSweetHeart

Gender: Female

Age: 43

Location: East Tennessee

Alison Krauss, LeAnn Rimes, and Tanya Tucker are my top three lady musketeers.

God bless you and them always!!!

Holly (a fan of Miss Tanya for 35 years now)
_________________
Me & my favorite singer James Otto

Check him out here when you can!

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Is 35 too many? I'd put them in a custom chart, but that seems unfair to the ones who haven't made any solo albums.

My problem is that as I've gotten older, I've gradually come to prefer female singers to male ones, so now I'm discovering all these female singers I didn't know about before and it's getting hard to keep track of them all. And most of them have been making records only during the last 20 years or so, during the digital era, so I'm not reminded of them every time I walk past my record collection like I am with the older stuff. So that also seems unfair.

This list is roughly in order of my degree of respect for their musical and performing talent, so it might seem a teensy-weensy bit jarring and idiosyncratic.

Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins)
Charlotte Hatherley (Ash)
Emma Pollock (The Delgados)
Diana Ross (The Supremes)
Rachel Goswell (Slowdive)

Kate Bush
Marissa Nadler
Miki Berenyi (Lush)
Emma Anderson (also Lush)
Charlotte "Sea Oleena" Loseth

Kim Field (The Stargazer Lilies)
Victoria LeGrand (Beach House)
Stina Marie Claire Tweeddale (Honeyblood)
Sarah "Noveller" Lipstate
Susan "Siouxsie Sioux" Ballion (Siouxsie And The Banshees)

Harriet Wheeler (The Sundays)
Rachel Browne (Field Mouse)
Carole King
Billie Holiday
Esperanza Spalding

Marnie Stern
Barbara Gogan (The Passions)
Tracey Thorn (Everything But The Girl)
Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders, Valve Bone Woe Ensemble)
Kaitlyn Ni Donovan (The High Violets)

Kim Deal (Pixies, The Breeders, The Amps)
Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth)
Kristeen Young
Shirley Manson (Garbage, Angelfish)
Dominique Durand (Ivy)

Tanya Donnelly (Throwing Muses, Belly)
Juliana Hatfield (The Lemonheads, The Juliana Hatfield Three)
k.d. lang
Shana Falana
Courtney Barnett

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

JOSweetHeart wrote:

Alison Krauss, LeAnn Rimes, and Tanya Tucker are my top three lady musketeers.

God bless you and them always!!!

Holly (a fan of Miss Tanya for 35 years now)

I do love a bit of Alison Krauss. The Albums that she has done with Robert Plant are all right up there

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

MadhattanJack wrote:

Is 35 too many? I'd put them in a custom chart, but that seems unfair to the ones who haven't made any solo albums.

My problem is that as I've gotten older, I've gradually come to prefer female singers to male ones, so now I'm discovering all these female singers I didn't know about before and it's getting hard to keep track of them all. And most of them have been making records only during the last 20 years or so, during the digital era, so I'm not reminded of them every time I walk past my record collection like I am with the older stuff. So that also seems unfair.

This list is roughly in order of my degree of respect for their musical and performing talent, so it might seem a teensy-weensy bit jarring and idiosyncratic.

Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins)
Charlotte Hatherley (Ash)
Emma Pollock (The Delgados)
Diana Ross (The Supremes)
Rachel Goswell (Slowdive)

Kate Bush
Marissa Nadler
Miki Berenyi (Lush)
Emma Anderson (also Lush)
Charlotte "Sea Oleena" Loseth

Kim Field (The Stargazer Lilies)
Victoria LeGrand (Beach House)
Stina Marie Claire Tweeddale (Honeyblood)
Sarah "Noveller" Lipstate
Susan "Siouxsie Sioux" Ballion (Siouxsie And The Banshees)

Harriet Wheeler (The Sundays)
Rachel Browne (Field Mouse)
Carole King
Billie Holiday
Esperanza Spalding

Marnie Stern
Barbara Gogan (The Passions)
Tracey Thorn (Everything But The Girl)
Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders, Valve Bone Woe Ensemble)
Kaitlyn Ni Donovan (The High Violets)

Kim Deal (Pixies, The Breeders, The Amps)
Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth)
Kristeen Young
Shirley Manson (Garbage, Angelfish)
Dominique Durand (Ivy)

Tanya Donnelly (Throwing Muses, Belly)
Juliana Hatfield (The Lemonheads, The Juliana Hatfield Three)
k.d. lang
Shana Falana
Courtney Barnett

Not too many at all. I'm totally with you on preferring female singers as I've got older. I've really started getting into jazz in quite a big away over the last few years and people like Nina Simone

& Billie Holiday

move me to tears on a regular basis

I think that we can use a lot of your list as a starting point for some further discussion.

kokkinos

MadhattanJack wrote:

I'd put them in a custom chart, but that seems unfair to the ones who haven't made any solo albums.

The benefit of a custom chart would be that it would highlight the best effort(s) of each artist, acting as a guide for someone who is unfamiliar with one or more of them and wants to get into their music. I guess you could include non-solo albums in that chart and simply add to the notes below said entries that female artist X contributes in this or that way.
Either way, that's a great list, thanks for sharing.
_________________
Bob Dylan
Charles Mingus

Romanelli

Bone Swah

Gender: Male

Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

The only way in which female artists are underrepresented is that we don't talk about them enough.

That's easy enough to change. Just do it.

I'd make a list, but it would be too long. And we all know who so many of them are. 35 is an extremely small number. Don't hold back. Make a massively long thread that will never hold them all. Make a chart with multiple editions, because you'll never get them all. Remember that without female artists, popular music would be dull and one dimensional. Solo artists or not. I can't imagine loving music the way I do without them.

Let it all out! Do it!
_________________
I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Romanelli wrote:

I'd make a list, but it would be too long. And we all know who so many of them are. 35 is an extremely small number. Don't hold back. Make a massively long thread that will never hold them all. Make a chart with multiple editions, because you'll never get them all.

Yeah, but it's the internet, so you have to worry about things like cognitive-capacity limits, reader-engagement off-switching, and listicle fatigue.

The ideal number for something like this is either 7 or 17, according to internet psychiatrists. That's because people like the number 7, but if you go to 27 or 37 then they get suspicious that you're trying to manipulate them with "high sevens." (And it's true, that's exactly what I would've been doing.) Besides, I didn't want it to look like I was trying to "take over" the thread either, because it's always a disaster when I even just appear in a thread, much less take it over. Still, I could maybe see adding Blondshell and Weyes Blood just to get to 37... I don't think I'd want to go any higher than that, though.

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

Romanelli wrote:

The only way in which female artists are underrepresented is that we don't talk about them enough.

That's easy enough to change. Just do it.

Not sure that I'd agree with that. We (the BEA collective) have only three albums in the top 100 by female artists with the highest placed being

Hounds Of Love (1985) by Kate Bush

@ 53.

So, we are saying that there are no more than three albums by female artists worthy of inclusion in the top 100? I'm not sure that's correct but I'm almost as guilty myself. Female artists are seriously underrepresented in my charts as well.

Pastel Blues (1965) by Nina Simone

for example is at 555 in the overall chart!

& it's not unique to BEA. Most lists don't include female artists in any great numbers

I think that this will change over time as so many of the best artists around right now are female but it will take quite a while to redress the balance so I was hoping to celebrate the impact of female artists and it might be working a little as there's a fair amount of traffic here which is great

Keep talking and highlight your female greats

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Johnnyo wrote:

So, we are saying that there are no more than three albums by female artists worthy of inclusion in the top 100? I'm not sure that's correct but I'm almost as guilty myself. Female artists are seriously underrepresented in my charts as well.

I counted 13 artists in the Overall Top 100 that are either female solo artists or bands that have, or had, at least one female member (for example, the Velvet Underground had Mo Tucker and Nico, Arcade Fire have Régine Chassagne, Talking Heads had Tina Weymouth, etc.). That's still pretty bad though, and yes, I'm just as bad myself — In my case, I think you'd have to go all the way to 2013 or so in my year charts to find one that has majority-women (going by this looser definition) in that year's Top 10. Whereas in the last 5 years or so, I think all of them are.

With the all-time lists though, the male bias is probably unavoidable because pop music was so male-dominated up until the 2010s. Older albums have had far more time to gain fan support, the bias reflects that, and the only way around it would be to weight more-recent releases... which nobody is going to be in favor of.