A pirate’s life for me
Caught the Mountain Goats show at the Doug Fir in Portland last night. I expected the show to be great — and to be floored by John Darnielle’s literary rock — but frankly, I didn’t really expect the Mountain Goats to literally rock. And yet they did. I don’t even remember if they played with a drummer the last time we caught the Mountain Goats, a couple years back at the Tractor, but this time they rocked out with Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster. (Which brought me back to the two months in 1997 when I thought Superchunk was the best band ever.) I don’t know that it was necessarily the drummer that pulled everything together to make last night’s show stand out — maybe it was the venue, the crowd, or the lunar eclipse — all I know is it was a fantastic show and John Darinelle writes freakin’ brilliant songs. (He has a blog, too.)
Opening act Pony Up started things off with some entertaining Canadian girl rock. The idea of “girl rock” as a genre actually bothers me, but I couldn’t think of another accurate descriptor for the band. More Cub than Sleater Kinney. Entertaining, but lacking brilliance and prone to meticulous but downright boring guitar playing. They were fun; they were sexy; but they weren’t really as good as I wish they were musically. Or does third-wave feminism mean its all right for girls to be mediocre?
Maybe it was the after-effect of watching Lou Barlow perform with Sebadoh on Friday night, but I started wondering why female guitar players don’t assert themselves in rock with the same level of virtuosity as their male counterparts. While women in indie rock aren’t exactly an anomoly, they’re usually bassists (Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth – who does sometimes play guitar it is true), or vocalists (Karen O; Patti Smith; Cat Power; etc.), and sometimes drummers (Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo). But at least last night, J and I could not come up with a truly rocking female lead guitarist without going back to, oh, maybe Blondie. Somebody prove us wrong or explain the phenomena please! Why aren’t more women stepping front and center in the indie rock world and rocking out with talented guitar-driven (and not lyrics driven) music? At the risk of appearing dated with my musical references, why don’t guitar-driven “post-rock” (a term I picked up from the Wikipedia entry on Kinski embarrassingly) bands meditate on a melody for ten minutes with a woman on lead guitar rather than bass or drums?
March 11th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Looks like NYTimes covered this today, “Guitar Heroes, Make That Heroines, in Indie Rock”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/arts/music/11herm.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=slogin
March 12th, 2007 at 7:08 am
I debated changing my post to give Sleater-Kinney a little more credit for the guitar parts in the Woods. But I thought it wasn’t really exemplary of the band. Although a nice demonstration of what post-post-punk can be.
I hate to nit-pick the Times (who am I kidding here? I love to nit-pick the Times), BUT although the article gives me hope, it arguably continued the patronizing habit rock critics have of discussing female guitar players in the context of mostly other female guitar players — and vocalists! Nekko Case is a fantastic singer, but what does including her in a discussion of female guitarist virtuosity really add to the discussion except maybe hint of the dearth of high-profile women taking charge with the wanking solo to the right of the band leader? I guess I’d have been more satisfied with a piece of rock criticism that compared the two artists featured in the piece to other guitar players, male and female, playing with bands that are still around. The article still kind of comes off saying they sound good for a girl, but … Maybe that’s just because rock criticism, like guitar soloing, seems to remain dominated by men.