Recently, I took my girlfriend to see Sparks at a venue in north London. The
night began well, our mood bolstered by the party atmosphere of the
occasion, which had been staged to mark the release of the group’s 21st
album. As we entered, I noticed that the audience was composed mostly of
middle-aged men, but at the time I thought little of this. Just another
rainy summer’s night. The surprise was how much my girlfriend hated it. I
watched with alarm her jaw set and countenance darken as bewilderment turned
to discomfort/ anger/despair. On the way home we argued about the worth of
the visuals, the tunes, the arrangements and a particular set of lyrics my
companion took to be misogynistic, and which I defended as if they were the
honour of all men everywhere.
Of course, the next morning we laughed (while agreeing never to speak of the
evening again) and recalled that our first ever argument had been about
music. Over the coming days, however, word began to reach me that we were
not the only couple to be rent by a Sparks show this year. Could it be that
Sparks are, at heart, a blokes’ band? Who would have guessed?
We all know they exist, but we seldom speak of them: artists whose fanbase
skews violently towards one sex, frequently leaving the other irritated or
just perplexed. On the men’s side, the Smiths spring to mind as a band whose
devotees tend to be male, others being Led Zeppelin, the Fall and geezer’s
geezer Neil Young. On the feminine side, scarcely a man on earth professes
to understand the appeal of Barry Manilow or his inheritor James Blunt,
while mere mention of the name Alanis Morissette has been known to induce
hives.
Male friends have noted that you seldom see many women buying albums or
attending gigs by instrumental “postrock” acts such as Tortoise or Godspeed
You! Black Emperor. A number of women nominated Pink Floyd and Steely Dan,
one describing a show by the latter at the Hammersmith Apollo, during the
interval of which she knew the joy of using a women’s loo sans queue for the
first time in her life, while men waited their turn in the corridors.
Against that, I still recall watching what appeared to be some mysterious
female rite when Take That played Wembley Arena in the mid1990s, then doing
the same again a decade later, feeling no nearer enlightenment. Tori Amos,
Joan Armatrading, Justin Timberlake, Simply Red: all appeal to notably more
women than men.
Assuming we accept such patterns exist, the question is why - and do
theysimply reflect social and cultural influences? Or could the teenage
male’s attachment to heavy metal contain a biological dimension, sure as bad
skin and bum fluff?
A vox pop of music fans threw up many theories. One male respondent, a music
manager, suggested the defining factor to be men’s need to confer
“importance” on the stuff they like. “Women don’t have that,” he says.
“Women like pop, which men tend to consider throwaway - the irony being that
little of the music that has ever been considered ‘important’ has stood the
test of time. I mean, nobody makes musicals about Wishbone Ash, do they?
They make them about Abba.”
So perhaps women, expecting their musical preferences to be taken no more
seriously than other concerns traditionally associated with their sex, see
no point in freighting their tastes with significance, thus avoiding the
scourge of pretension? It’s possible. A female photographers’ agent and
former music-biz press officer, asked to offer single-phrase comments on a
range of artists including Neil Young (“whiny”), the Fall (“miserable
northern gits”) and Led Zeppelin (“hahaha”), confessed to anxiety that she
was being tested on her musical credibility, sighing: “I was nervous because
they all sounded like ones you’re ‘supposed’ to like and I feel slightly
guilty about not liking. It’s also, I think, that most women respond to
music from a different place to a lot of men. Women mostly think, ‘Oh, I
love this song!’ There’s no corresponding urge to collect all others like it
and arrange them into alphabetical order.” Recent research suggests that an
infant’s ability to recognise musical sounds and notes precedes language,
but employs the same mechanisms. When we talk to a small child, we vary the
tone and pitch of our voice more than normal, until these exchanges become,
in essence, musical. Some have tried to argue that this explains our love of
music, although it’s just as likely that we’re preprogrammed to develop and
learn in such a way. This thought does raise the question, though: if we
talk differently to our baby boys than to our girls, as we very well might
without even realising, could we be predisposing them to different types of
music later in life?
Take heavy metal, which in my own youth marked a distinct border between most
male and female tastes. I’d assumed this to be somehow eternal, but it’s
not: a straw poll of teenagers reveals that modern girls are as likely to
adore metal as their boyfriends. Nicola Dibben, who directs an MA course in
the psychology of music at the University of Sheffield, provides an
explanation for this. Throughout our lives, but particularly in adolescence,
we use pop music as an important marker of who we are and who we would like
to be. Thus, two things are happening psychologically when we listen to a
piece of music by a particular artist: “First, we’re hearing it in terms of
what’s acceptable within the conventions we live by - of what the artist
represents. Then, we’re making a decision as to whether we want to identify
with that. So, for instance, heavy metal sounds loud, strident, powerful ...
qualities we associate with masculinity. But, as a woman, I might say,
‘Well, I’m feeling powerful and strong today, so this is what I want,’ and
I’ll buy into it.”
Asked whether gender differences still exist among teens, my 14-year-old
daughter, Lotte, mutters darkly that boys can usually be relied upon to shun
bands containing or fronted by women, such as Paramore, and
singer/songwriters like Kate Nash. Interestingly, she herself thinks it
would be “weird” if a boy liked Kate Nash too much.
In fact, “masculine” and “feminine” appear to be more useful constructs in
this context than “male” and “female” - a notion that Raymond MacDonald,
professor of music psychology and improvisation at Glasgow Caledonian
University, elaborates by introducing the concept of “masculine” and
“feminine” brains. This has the side benefit of explaining why my postbag is
likely to be full of missives from men who love Michael Bublé and female
Smiths fans tomorrow morning. It also takes the issue of gay preference
right out of the equation.
Not long ago, he says, the head of BBC 6 Music came to him, wanting to know
how the station might increase its share of female listeners. MacDonald then
got into trouble by publicly stating the playlist changes that needed to be
made in order to achieve this - at which point he was accused of pandering
to stereotypes. “People get very heated on this topic,” he says, “as music
in this country is such an important marker of who we are, and there is so
much variation within gender. But increasingly it looks to us as though it’s
not gender, but what we call ‘cognitive style’ - brain type, if you like -
which is a better predictor of music preference.”
This presupposes two distinct types of brain, one with an in-built talent for
systematising, the other for empathising, and it seems to make sense when
applied to the world. “It just so happens that more males have a
systematising brain, and more women an empathising cognitive style,”
MacDonald says. “Which is why you get a lot of ambiguous results when you
look at gender alone, as our brains vary within gender, meaning that a
particular woman might respond to music in a typically ‘male’ way.”
MacDonald, a musician and fan himself, hopes that research being conducted
with his colleague Dr Laura Mitchell will establish musical preference as an
accurate predictor of cognitive style. As to whether this characteristic is
innate or learnt, we don’t yet know, but anyone who has read Norman Doidge’s
brilliant The Brain That Changes Itself (Penguin), in which the author makes
a convincing case for our brains being far more “plastic” and malleable than
previously supposed, will suspect that our predispositions can be changed
through experience, either way. So the good news for Kate Nash is that my
daughter’s boy friends may yet learn to love her.
ARTISTS THAT WOMEN LOVE BUT MEN HATE
JAMES BLUNT The new Barry Manilow
TAKE THAT Safe sex on a stick
CAT STEVENS The thinking woman’s James Blunt
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE It’s all in the hips, apparently, even if he does
sound like Michael Jackson
JOAN ARMATRADING An original: the mama of confessional balladry
TORI AMOS The female brain in extreme
ALANIS MORISSETTE They say Sir Alex Ferguson learnt the hairdryer
treatment from her: sends men fleeing for the hills
SIMPLY RED ‘At least holds out the promise of good sex,’ says one
respondent
JANIS JOPLIN Sixties soul icon or overwrought shouter?
EARLY GENESIS Before they got all serious and jumped to the boys’ side
ARTISTS THAT MEN LOVE BUT WOMEN HATE
NEIL YOUNG Maverick übergeezer to men; whining Worzel to many a woman
THE SMITHS Arch chroniclers of the 1980s crisis in masculinity
AUTECHRE Representing ‘intelligent dance music’: a redundant concept to
all but the straight white male
TORTOISE Instrumental postrock: so much better with a beard to stroke
THE HOUSE OF LOVE And other shoegazers of the 1980s. Most women have
got enough post-post-adolescent angst at home already
THE FALL The male brain in extreme
STEELY DAN The male brain in extreme noodle-vision
JOY DIVISION The male brain in meltdown
GANG OF FOUR The male brain after reading Gloria Steinem
LED ZEPPELIN The male brain removed from the equation altogether
