Whose Voice Is It Anyway? Technological Gatekeeping in the

Pop Music Industry

UEL Research Conference 2014

Helen Reddington

Membership has a ratio of 13 percent female to 87 percent male, a figure that remains pretty constant among both new joiners and existing members. Sarah Rodgers, Chairman of the British Academy of Songwriters Composers and Authors (BASCA), says that her society’s membership is 20 percent female to 80 percent male. Meanwhile, the Music Producers’ Guild (MPG) is even more divided, with women making up less than four percent of its members

M, PRS For Music Online Magazine, Issue M48 http://www.m-magazine.co.uk/features/women-in-music accessed 14/07/2013

Adrienne Aitken Producer, MPG Board Member

‘If you even mention gender then you're defining that there should be a difference, and it needs to be quantified that you're a woman but you're actually as good as a bloke; but if you're as good as a bloke, a bloke doesn't have to quantify that he's a bloke, he's just an engineer, so you shouldn't have to quantify that you're a woman: you're just an engineer.’

It is… possible to appropriate the phallic energy of rock and to demonstrate… that boys don't have any corner on that market. But that beat can always threaten to overwhelm: witness Janet Jackson's containment by producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in (ironically) her song 'Control'

McClary, Susan (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and SexualityMinneapolis an Oxford: University of Minnesota Press p 154

' … as unskilled rock workers women are a source of cheap labour, a pool of talent from which the successes are chosen more for their appropriate appearance than for their musical talents'

Mc Robbie, Angela, (1991/2000) Feminism and Youth Culture, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan

'The degree of individual star labour undertaken within pop is frequently considered to be lesser than that of, say, rock, especially if musicians do not write their own material, cannot cut it live, have to have their pitch digitally corrected, and so on.’

Dickinson, Kay (2001) 'Believe'? Digitalised Female Identity and Camp, in Popular Music Volume 20/3 pp. 33-347 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

‘... the classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled or semi-skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with sexual bias. The work of women is often deemed inferior because it is women who do it’

Phillips, Anne and Taylor, Barbara (1980) Sex and skill: notes towards a feminist economics. Feminist review, 6 pp. 79-88, p79

‘It is precisely because social, historical delineations have the capacity to appear as if they were inherent in musical processes themselves that delineations present themselves to us in musical experience, as if they were autonomous, immediate truths .’Green, Lucy (1997) Music, Gender, Education Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p131

Adrienne Aitken, Producer/Engineer, on dividing out roles in the studio:

‘The guy I was working with was a complete technophobe and I took to it like a duck to water'.

PA: Do you think there is a ‘male culture’ behind the scenes’ of record production?

HM: This is a clearly male-dominated area of the music business. It always has been. Musicians tend to be predominantly male, and so there tends to be a ‘locker room’ mentality in the recording studio – a lot of dirty jokes, and things like that… Basically, I think that many male musicians don’t feel comfortable having a female in the studio, in any capacity –whether as the producer in charge of things or the assistant engineer who’s making the tea. Sometimes they feel a bit constrained when there’s a woman in the control room with them.

Interview date 22/03/2005 http://blog.lownoiserecords.com/howardmassey.html accessed 7/04/14

Mandy Parnell,mastering engineer

Q. Are there any times that you feel that your gender has gone against you?

MP. ‘I’ve had people refuse to work with me on the grounds that I was female…. but I

was lucky because my boss was supportive and gave me free reign to tell anyone to fuck

off if I wanted to, and to show them the door if they were any way underhand.

He totally supported me on that level. But you know, I’d get the normal banter: you’d

get these breakbeat guys or drum’n’bass guys, these little geezers seeing me sitting

there, any they’d go ‘D’you know how to cut a loud record?’, and I’d just laugh at them

and go, ‘Well where am I working? I work at The Exchange, you know: we’re known for

loud records. Do you think they’d have me here if I couldn’t cut a loud record?’.

Q. After you’d worked with them did they change their attitude?

MP. Oh God, yeah, they’d come back.

'…took exception to the words, started to make remarks about them, and seemed to be quite threatened, I think. And she [Gina Birch, guitarist/vocalist] felt it rather off-putting Especially when you're recording a vocal, you feel exposed to the engineer: he can hear every word. She would have felt more comfortable with a woman. It was quite funny, actually, to watch his reactions; but we were aware of him as a stage between us and the music.’

In Steward, Sue and Garratt, Sheryl, (1984) Signed, Sealed and Delivered: true life stories of women in pop London: Pluto, p77

... feminist musicians are concerned about the lack of women technicians, especially as a feminist all-women band with a male producer cannot claim that all the creativity that went into the record was female.’

Bayton, Mavis (1998) Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p 7

‘The production skills that [the] women have developed... is [sic] a direct result of having taken full responsibility for their sound rather than from being a ‘passenger’. This, in turn, allows for a confident articulation of the work that needs to be done in order to meet the needs of the song.’

Paula Woolfe Journal on the Art of Record Production Issn: 1754-9892 A Studio Of One’s Own: Music Production, Technology And Gender

‘The producer can be the fulcrum of record company pressure

and influence over artistic output because he or she has more

power than any band member, able to achieve commercial

success, or, alternatively, wreck the sound... self production can

be problematic as individual band members may disagree, and

often bands find it easier when an outsider produces them,

especially as, the more democratic the atmosphere, the more

disagreements there are likely to be.’

Op. cit. Bayton pp 162-3

PA: Why do you think there are so few female record producers, especially in the genre of rock?

HM: The interesting thing is that the studio manager of almost every major recording facility is a woman. She’s the person in charge– the person who is actually running things and very often the person doing the hiring and firing, so you would think that studios are perfectly willing to hire female staff. But since there are so few women music engineers and producers out there, my guess is that there are simply not that many women who are interested in doing this for a living'.

"The bottom line is, women aren't interested," she says."Right now, I currently teach engineering and production; and I also teach psychoacoustics and music cognition. In the psychology topics, the students are half women and half men. But in production and engineering, maybe one out of every 10 students is a young woman.”

Professor Susan Rodgers, Berklee

From ‘Why are female record producers so rare? By Mark Savage, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19284058 29th August 2012 accessed 6/4/2014

‘As the arguments that women lack the necessary intrinsic talent to succeed in male-dominated occupations become less and less convincing, the argument that women are just less interested has grown and flourished.’

Fine, Cordelia (2010) Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences London: Icon Books p 52

Mandy Parnell, Mastering Engineer:

‘I was obsessed; I didn't play with dolls, in fact [I] hated dolls… I was

obsessed by playing records… I loved to listen to music, never really

wanted to play music, just wanted to listen to it.

I studied at SAE from the age of 16 [after a 'moment' of realisation

after visiting Virgin’s The Manor Studio in Oxford by chance]

Out of my year at SAE, three of us out of a hundred went on to be

sound engineers.

It took me three years to get a proper apprenticeship as a trainee

sound engineer’.

Sam Bennett, Producer, Lecturer:

I knew about circuits from age six; I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of [dad’s] record collection which didn't span an enormous breadth of popular music, but certainly more than most. So therefore, I knew a lot about blues, I knew a lot about guitars, electric guitars, the way they worked, I knew a lot about pick ups and the electronics behind them.

'I've encountered a lot more competition and sexism from women… I was once offered a job to work with a female artist, but she didn't want another woman around. She wanted to be the star of the show. You'd think that women would be more supportive [of one another] but it doesn't always work that way'

Odintz, Andrea (1997) Technophilia in O'Dair, Barbara (ed) (1997) The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, New York: Random House p214

'Femininity' demands the appearance of lack of skill and emphasises nurturance and appreciation of the skills of men…success for women often means gaining the precarious position of token achiever in a male-dominated profession. This position is circumscribed in such a way that as more women achieve in a given area they are forced to compete with each other for the same space rather than the space itself expanding.’

Potter, Sally, (1997) On Shows, in Parker, Roszika, and Pollock, Griselda (eds) (1997) Framing Feminism: Art and the Womens' Movement 1970-1985 London: Pandora, p30

Interviews with pop/rock/R&b producers, recording engineers, remixers, a sound artist, live sound engineers, a

mastering engineer, a vocal producer, 2010-2014:

Adrienne Aitken

Colleen Murphy

Dot Allen

Samantha Bennett

Terri Harris

Felix Mackintosh

Tina Weymouth (part)

Jacqueline Pelham-Leigh

Anonymous (North-East)

Isobel Campbell (part)

Yvonne Shelton

Janet Beat

Eleonora Romano

Laura B

Isabel Seeliger-Morley

Laura Leitch

Masol Artistry

Mandy Parnell

Sally SmithHave not interviewed group of engineers in Manchester; Liverpool engineer; Norfolk engineer; additional London engineers and producers. Some that I contacted did not want to be interviewed.

From Future Music, October 2010

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