Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  RECORD COLLECTING FOR GIRLS

  TOP FIVE LISTS

  WHERE HAVE ALL THE GIRL BANDS GONE?

  INTERLUDE

  MAKING OUT WITH ROMEO AND JULIET

  GUILTY PLEASURES

  THE SMITHS SYNDROME

  INTERLUDE

  ARE WE BREAKING UP?

  THE NEXT MADONNA

  INTERLUDE

  OUR SONG, YOUR SONG, MY SONG

  THE DEATH OF THE RECORD COLLECTOR

  INTERLUDE

  ROCK 'N' ROLL CONSORTS

  BEATLES VS. STONES

  FINAL NOTE

  Acknowledgments

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2011 by Courtney E. Smith

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Courtney E.

  Record collecting for girls : unleashing your inner music nerd,

  one album at a time / Courtney E. Smith.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-50223-6

  1. Rock music—Anecdotes. 2. Women rock music fans—

  Anecdotes. 3. Sound recordings—Collectors and

  collecting—Anecdotes. 4. Smith, Courtney E. I. Title.

  ML3534.S577 2011

  781.64'0266075—dc23

  2011025158

  Book design by Alex Camlin

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Excerpt from "Car Wash Hair" © 1991 Jonathan Donahue (BMI).

  Used with permission. All rights reserved.

  RECORD COLLECTING FOR GIRLS

  THERE ARE THOUSANDS of people who work behind the scenes in the music industry and bring artists, big and small, into the public consciousness (and a precious few executives who take credit for everything). For the first decade of the new millennium, I was one of the people who helped determine what music you listened to: I worked in the music-programming department at MTV. My career there started unassumingly enough. In college in the late 1990s, I developed an addiction to online chat rooms. This was back in the early days of social networking, when you had to pay per hour to use AOL. I soon realized that I could get a free account, with as much chat time as I wanted, if I took a job as a chat host for MTV. I turned that gig into a series of internships in their New York offices, which led to a job as a production assistant and then a move into the music-programming department. Within a few years, I was spearheading MTV's first promotional campaign for Death Cab for Cutie, from videos on TV to interviews for the web to live performance bookings, because I was able to persuade everyone that the band was going to be huge. I had a hand in the launching of acts such as Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Shins, M.I.A., Vampire Weekend, and Lykke Li. I also managed to convince MTV to do some odd, rather interesting things (that I hope they don't regret), like putting the Klaxons in proper rotation and debuting a No Age video on their blockbuster summer music show. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I kind of accidentally made Fall Out Boy happen too. I prefer to think of it as an act of God that I simply hastened along by putting them in front of some very influential people, but on my bad days, I feel the shameful weight of my role in kick-starting emo 2.0. In a small way, I've been shaping the music you've listened to for a decade.

  The very nature of my job required me to think about music in analytical ways, particularly across gender lines. What I would suggest programming for teenage girls to watch on MTV was different than what I would expect twenty-something men to watch on MTV2. When I was programming MTV2's Subterranean, I began to think about how many female artists and bands I was programming. I felt it was important to make each week's show a 50/50 split of male and female artists, and I was amazed by how difficult it was to achieve gender balance. This realization (and having the differences between the genders in our audience hammered home in PowerPoint format on a regular basis by MTV's research department) inspired me to reevaluate my history with music. Curious about the influence of female voices vs. male voices, I started analyzing my own and my friends' record collections with that question in mind. From my childhood dabbling in my parents' records (the Beatles and Stevie Nicks) to the music that soundtracked my teenage romantic disasters (the Cure, specifically Wish) to the mix tapes guys made for me in college (still trying to figure out the one with Otis Redding and Carla Thomas's "Tramp" on it) to the music of my breakups (Fiona Apple embodies my inner sense of injustice), the majority of my music collection has in some way been shaped by guys.

  According to the Recording Industry Association of America, women buy nearly 50 percent of the music sold every year. Sometimes it's a little more, sometimes it's a little less, but on average it's an even split. While a pay gap may still exist between women and men, female economic leverage cannot be ignored: women fans make the careers of as just as many musicians as guys do. But when it comes to music writing, the shelves are lined with men. Most of the books I've read and enjoyed about music have been from a male perspective. I wondered, what would a female music nerd have to say? Because girls get their hearts broken and make mix tapes about it, too.

  I knew there was much still unsaid in all the music writing out there by dudes after a conversation with my friend Gina about music. We spent an afternoon scrutinizing the likelihood that the guys we were seeing would break our hearts based on their favorite bands. Sometimes this line of analysis works and sometimes it doesn't. Gina's boy of choice at the time loved the National and Leonard Cohen (two very messed-up lyricists), so it seemed obvious that he had to be a bastard. The boy I was obsessing on loved Yo La Tengo; we were both surprised that he turned out to be a jackass but were not at all surprised he was romantically hapless. As I talked to more women, it became obvious that many of us are talking about music in the same way, and while relationships are part of the conversation, there's so much more. It is time for a discussion that encompasses more than the stories of guys and the girls who dumped them.

  This is where you and your record collection come into the picture. Most women don't collect records just to own them, we invest in the way music makes us feel. Music is wrapped up in our personal experiences. You might like different songs than I do or have different deal-breaker bands—and you might think I'm a total sellout to like the Pussycat Dolls—but I bet we also have a lot in common. I bet you've looked at people's record collections to determine what they are like. I bet you've wished Madonna would grow up and stop thrusting her crotch at you or wondered how a couple chose their wedding song. You may even have (on occasion) needed someone to explain to you why dating a rock star is always a bad idea, even when it seems like a really good one. I know I have...

  TOP FIVE LISTS

  IF YOU'VE READ the book High Fidelity or seen the movie, even just for the sake of John Cusack, then you've been witness to the art of the Top Five list. Music nerds everywhere delight in making Top Five lists of obvious, obtuse, and obscure records tailored to every categorization of music you could possibly imagine. I am one of those nerds. When my mind begins to wander, I think about what albums I could listen to if I were stuck on a desert island. (Usually this train of
thought ends with the realization that I'd hate any album by the sixth straight year of listening to it.) Instead of counting sheep to lull myself to sleep, I make a list of all the songs I can think of about masturbation. (There are a lot.) I keep a running tab of what I think are my favorite songs right this minute vs. my most-played songs in iTunes vs. what's accrued at the top of my last.fm most-played list. I can't seem to stop myself from obsessively thinking about music.

  I've always loved music, but I wasn't always a music obsessive. That started when I was a college student and worked at a radio station in Dallas. I fell in with a group of music snob guys who regularly debated topics like Blur vs. Oasis and whether Cat Power was the cutest indie rock girl or just the craziest. The guys carried on conversations as if they were characters straight out of High Fidelity, constantly judging and ranking music. It was obvious they believed Nick Hornby's adage that what you like is what you're like, and they were judging people based on their musical taste. Girls were generally dismissed from their reindeer games. I can't even tell you the number of times I'd heard them say obnoxious things like, "Yeah, she's hot, but she likes Alanis Morissette, so you know she's kind of an idiot." I didn't want to be one of those girls who was so easily disregarded, so I faked being knowledgeable enough to pass muster. After listening to them make and revise their Top Five lists, probably hundreds of times, I developed a list of shortcuts for making a Top Five artists list. As time went on I added requirements of my own, and before long I had a cheater guide that helped me narrow in on my Top Five. When I don't have the whole history of released music at my fingertips, it makes my list-making more manageable, and the guidelines force me to take an analytical look at my music collection.

  These are strictly my rules, so if you feel like adding new criteria or ignoring one of my standards to better reflect your own taste, knock yourself out.

  Except #3. Do not ignore rule #3. You'll see why.

  The most important thing is that your Top Five list reflects your favorites and not what you think someone wants to hear. Dare to be uncool.

  Here's my Top Five artists list right now:

  ELVIS COSTELLO—British post-punk artist who developed into a multi-genre music maven

  R.E.M.—Athens, Georgia, college rock band that paved the way for indie-to-mainstream success

  SLEATER-KINNEY—Portland, Oregon, riot grrrl rock band with a feminist agenda

  STEVIE NICKS—'70s and '80s songwriter with the world's most amazing stage costumes

  FIONA APPLE—the songwriting port in a world full of breakup storms

  Here's how I got there ...

  RULE #1: YOU MUST OWN ALL THE FULL-LENGTH ALBUMS RELEASED BY ANY ARTIST IN YOUR TOP FIVE.

  The exceptions to this rule: greatest hits albums and anything you've deemed to be a low point in an artist's career. I see no reason to clog up your record collection with either. Completists everywhere just hissed through their teeth at me, but why would you own a record you don't enjoy, or multiple copies of songs you already have? For decoration? When music collecting becomes obsessive-compulsive disorder, it's time for a new hobby.

  I was late in discovering Elvis Costello, both late in my life and late in his career. I think the first time I heard of him was when I saw his video for "Veronica." It was inexplicable to me in 1989, the halcyon days of Debbie Gibson and Poison, why the video for "Veronica" was on MTV so often. Costello seemed old even then, and his video was set in a nursing home, so in my eyes it didn't hold a candle to Madonna's video for "Express Yourself." The video got less airplay than Madonna's, or even Paula Abdul's, but he walked away with the 1989 Best Male Video award for "Veronica," because respect for the man was due. (Paul McCartney cowrote the song, so double the respect.) The melody was catchy, but the lyrics were a mystery, and I memorized them all wrong. I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, because the idea of a pop song about an old lady with Alzheimer's was unfathomable and unrelatable to me at age twelve.

  After "Veronica" in my discovery of Elvis Costello came "Alison," which had actually been released twelve years earlier—the same year I was born. I grew to love this one while listening to my parents' Elvis Costello greatest hits album, and if you don't know it, I recommend you buy it immediately. His unforgettable delivery of the line "My aim is true" is a knee-buckler—the sort of bittersweet sentiment that I dream of a guy writing for me in some tragic soap-opera scenario where we can't be together.

  My family and I were big perpetrators of the Columbia House scam. It was a great way to build a collection, considering that my allowance was a mere $5 a week. We would all constantly join, leave, and rejoin various mail-order companies that offered eight albums for a penny if you bought three at full price. In college I ordered The Very Best of Elvis Costello & the Attractions from one of those clubs and found myself really getting into his clever lyrics. His songs are so easy to fall in love with.

  I went to the next level of Costello fandom when I bought the Rhino reissue of This Year's Model. It was in the dead of winter at the beginning of 2002. I had recently moved into an apartment in Brooklyn and was consumed by a long-distance flirtation with a boy in a band who lived in Dallas. He mailed me a loaf of honey wheat bread (which was impossible to find in New York City) and a packet of forget-me-not flower seeds, and he called me on the phone nearly every day. I was totally crushed out. A few months later, when his band toured through town, he explained to me that it all meant nothing, that he was just a flirtatious person, and suggested we should just be friends. It was infuriating, and I hated him for stringing me along. Listening to the first track of This Year's Model, "No Action," while stomping the cold, mile-long walk from the subway through the housing project near my apartment was the only time I felt like a rational, thinking person rather than a girl who had been turned into a chump and who secretly still had a little crush. It's frustrating when someone treats you horribly, but being a jerk back to them just doesn't seem worth it. Instead I pretended to be sternly nice and above it, but that farce left me with a lot of anger to work out. Power-walking to a collection of songs full of venom, vigor, and a dash of bitter longing got me through that romantic humiliation and the feeling of annoyance with myself for not telling him off. I didn't get the guy, but I did get Elvis Costello.

  I quickly became a devotee. I still get chills listening to certain turns of phrase in his songs. His album When I Was Cruel came out the next year, and I tumbled headfirst into obsessively listening to it, dissecting it. I saw him live three times. I worked my way through most of his catalog over the next five years, first focusing on his pop albums with the hits. I still discover new songs to love when I re-explore those albums. Next I delved into his collaboration with songwriter Burt Bacharach, his classical compositions, and even his British TV program scores. The man has a giant back catalog of material, and I'll admit I cheated and put him on my Top Five list before I owned everything. I'm still growing into some of his work. I expect when I get older and tired of pop music, Elvis Costello will still have something to offer me. I'm not sure I can say the same for anyone else on my Top Five list.

  Elvis Costello is my number one with a bullet because I want to own all of his work and can't get enough of listening to him. That is how you should feel about the number one on your Top Five. Number one becomes your family, your boyfriend, and your comfort food. It's indispensable.

  RULE #2: ARTISTS CANNOT BE IN YOUR TOP FIVE OF ALL TIME IF THEY'VE ONLY RELEASED ONE ALBUM.

  Perhaps you feel you have intensely bonded with an artist who only has one album. You may think you love them. You may put them on your list of the top ten albums. However, it's still too early to give them a spot on your Top Five artists of all time. To me a favorite artist is someone I have history with, a band that has earned their place in my heart. I don't take it lightly or include someone on a whim. Besides, there's a very high probability a new artist's second album could hit the sophomore slump hard and totally suck. That's what happened to thos
e poor bastards the Strokes, who made a hell of a great and timely first album and became the leading band on the New York City (aka media capital of the world) scene circa 9/11. How could they possibly have followed up on that? They were damned from the moment they started making a second album.

  I distinctly remember the first time I really heard an R.E.M. song. Eponymous, their first greatest hits album, had recently come out, and my stepdad was blasting it on the stereo. He had this amazing sound system that you could hear all over our small house. I was in the TV room and remember being annoyed by the music, but then "The One I Love" came on and I started listening to it. Really listening. I'd heard the song before and seen their lo-fi videos on MTV, but this time Michael Stipe's voice and the dark, swirling music of the song really hit me. I found myself adding it to the mix tapes I made off my parents' CD collection.

  Aside from a passing fascination with "Orange Crush," I missed most of the excitement around their breakout album Green. I thought "Pop Song '89" was annoying and that they'd made a stupid video. I was eleven at the time, and the artistic merit was lost on me. I became a bona fide fan with the release of 1991's Out of Time, thanks not only to the giant hit "Losing My Religion," but also to Jane Pratt's constant mentions of R.E.M. in Sassy magazine. When Automatic for the People was released in 1992 I was truly obsessed.

  Somewhere along the way, Courtney Love stumbled into the picture and started screaming at anyone who'd listen that Murmur was one of the greatest albums ever, and so I found myself buying up R.E.M.'s back catalog. As I started collecting R.E.M.'s early albums, bootlegs, and singles, I gained an appreciation of how different the R.E.M. albums of the '90s were from those of the '80s and how they were changing as a band. Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and Up are not in most rock critics' canons of key R.E.M. albums, but I enjoy each one because I like hearing the band evolve and try new things. If R.E.M. had just made the same '80s jangle pop albums over and over (which they did for most of the '80s, actually) then what would have been the point of continuing to listen to them?