They say that men and women approach music in different ways. At least, that’s how it was presented to me when I started in music journalism. Boys were geeks – filing their records in alphabetical order, showing off how much they knew – while for girls the relationship was much more emotional; they cared less about who played what on a song and when, and more about how it made them feel. This always irked me, because somewhere in there was the suggestion that boys take music more seriously than girls; as though collecting an album in multiple formats implies deeper engagement than listening to one copy till the tape wears thin. I’ve always thought that men and women feel exactly the same way about music. It’s just that they talk about it in different ways.
That’s partly why I wanted to make a programme in which women tell stories about being in bands. A few months back I reviewed Kim Gordon’s memoir, Girl in a Band, in these pages and I couldn’t forget the way she began the section on Sonic Youth. “A lot has been written about Sonic Youth,” she said. “Here is what stands out for me.” As the bassist and a founder-member of a cult group that always attracted evangelical followers, Gordon knew she was writing against 30 years of testimony by music journalists, most of them male, and that the story of her band had already been told loudly, definitively, countless times by other people. Many of us have encountered the funny sense of ownership that men feel about the bands they like. “I love my music,” he says, and he doesn’t mean it as his mother might say he loves his food. The whole reason Gordon got into a band, she said, was to break into the male band dynamic and experience it from the inside – not as a muse or a fan, but as another boy.
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