Music Is My Lover

I wish I could remember her exact words. A fellow music fan on a messageboard, talking about why she disliked the way I posted. It was something to the effect of "I hate it when you talk about sex, because that makes you sound like a groupie. And I've been fighting to be taken seriously as a music fan, when people always want to dismiss you, if you're a female music fan - oh, you just fancy the musicians. And obviously you are not a groupie, you know a 100x more about music than most of the men here, and I love it when you talk about music, but I hate it when you talk about boys."

She went on to say that she, herself, had never been given shit on the messageboard for being a woman - and then a couple of men expressed surprise that she was, indeed, a woman at all. They'd never had any clue.

Now there, indeed, is the whole crux of the problem.

There it is, isn't it? It may be dressed up in feminist language, but this "proper music fan / groupie" dichotomy - it's just the old Madonna/Whore complex dressed up in new terms, isn't it?

It's the easiest stick for male music fans to beat females with. The groupie stick.

Yes, you will be allowed on male ground, but only if you disguise all aspects of your femalehood. You can discuss music, but only clinically. If you bring your body, sexuality, emotions, romance, love into it - oh no, you're a groupie. In short, if you bring any aspect of your femaleness into the discussion, that's it, you lose any power and your authority and your right to have a critical opinion.

Fuck. That.

It's loading the dice against you from the very start. What is rock music and pop music about, but sex and love and romance and emotions? You're excluded from the discussion before it even starts.

But, of course, these rules don't apply to men. Read even the most sensitive of indie boys, talking about a female artist - even one they admire - Bat For Lashes or Little Boots or whoever the current indie pinup is. What's the discussion about? Her attractiveness, her sexuality, how the listener as a man responds to her as an object of attraction, as a woman.

Where did I learn the attitudes that I take in my writing about music? I was discussed *in* the music press for years before I ever joined it. I've been in a band since I was 17, I grew up reading male voices discussing my music - except wait, no. They didn't discuss the music first. They'd discuss my appearance, my attractiveness, my sexual appeal (or lack of it) and after several paragraphs of trying to decide whether they'd fuck me or not, then they might, maybe, get around to mentioning the music that I made.

Fair's fair, right? This is the way that artists are discussed, right? Is it really any wonder that I started writing about music the way that I did?

Well, here's a secret. I'd have been a groupie, if only I hadn't been so ugly. I love music, I love it more than life itself. It's my emotion, it's my heartbreak, it's my joy, it's my "I want to get up and dance" it's my "I want to lie down and die." I eat, sleep, breathe, drink music - I would fuck it, tongue kiss it, suck its cock, finger its pussy if I could, I love music so much. My experience of music is above all emotional, intensely sensual, yes, even sexual.

Music is emotion made flesh - or sound, as the case may be. Is it any wonder that women want to fuck the people who produce it, who write it, who make it? To me, it's a wonder that men don't. Oh wait, actually they do - oh, but they bury their sensual love under layers of weird repressive fandom rituals, dress it up and call it "music criticism." Does this extend to DJs in a music culture where the gatekeeper of music is raised above the creator? Sure it does. The desire to fuck a DJ, a "glorified jukebox" to borrow a term, is like desiring to fuck music itself. "You're not in love with Erol Alkan," my dear friend D tells me over dinner, listening to me listing obscure gems of a BTWS set like extolling a lover's charms. "You're in love with his record collection."

"What's wrong with that?" I shrug back. "It's a fantastic record collection."

But no, you're forced to choose. You can be a Serious Music Fan, or you can be a Groupie Slut Piece Of Meat. Because sex and music have no place together for a Nice Woman. (Despite the fact that the adulation of women is sold to men as one of the reasons to become a musician in the first place. This only reflects glory on the male, not on the women who respond to it.)

Want to be a woman in a male dominated field? You can either dress it up and play the sex card (so long as it's not in too threatening a way) or else you have to strip yourself of your sexuality, your sensuality, your gender.

It was Miss AMP who pointed it out to me, standing backstage at the Truck Festival 2006, watching the other bands play. We watched The Schla La Las, bouncing around in their matching cute dresses, then we watched The Organ, playing serious music in their serious jeans and their shapeless T-shirts. "Is that what you have to do, to be taken seriously?" Ampy wondered. Neuter yourself. Take out all the sex and the girly bits - even if it's sex and romance and pure girly glee that drive you to love - or even *make* music to start with?

No. I can't do it. I won't do it. I'm not a female eunuch. I will not neuter myself to make my fandom acceptable to anyone.

Goodbye, Plan B

So I was going to write a song today. I woke up (after dreaming of Holloway Road) with a bassline I didn't recognise stuck in my head. But then a car passed by outside, blasting Dizzee Rascal's Bonkers - and suddenly it was gone, replaced by that bassline. So instead, I thought - wow, I think I'm going to blog, instead. Because I've been trying to digest my feelings about the demise of my long-term employer, Plan B.

Right. Plan B. Where do I start? Careless Talk Costs Lives, obviously. It's weird how, although I never made any great splash as a writer, people never namecheck me as one of their faves (possibly because I wrote under so many pseudonyms), and I never really had much of an influence on the direction of either magazine (except negative, via endless crotchety email exchanges with various editors) - that magazine had such a profound influence on *my* life.

My life would have been very, very different without that magazine. Friends, bandmates, sexual partners, the bulk of my DJing experience, the most successful band I was ever in... Nothing, except perhaps ILX (from which a great deal of the writers were drawn) had such a great influence on the daily fabric of my life. Even though my actual involvement had slipped to minimal - 500 to 1000 words every other month - its passing still leaves a hole in my life. Not least because I now lack that final SHUT UP phrase that's so good for dealing with idiot teenage boys on the internet - "Yes, I am entitled to my opinion - why? Because I'm a professional music journalist and you're not."

I missed the beginning of Plan B, because I'd left CTCL in a cloud after the backlash over THAT article. (The only piece of writing I've ever done that people still talk about - for al the wrong reasons.) I went through a long period of being nothing but a Bloomsbury Wife, when everything I did - writing, music, art - just went by the roadside, in subservience to my partner's needs as an artist. It's no accident that when that marriage ended, the first people I called were the Plan B girls - Frances and Miss AMP and Anna. (Though it's funny to think that Anna didn't become a Plan B girl until I introduced them - one of those weird cases when your friends end up liking each other even more than they like you.)

I was casting about wildly, for something to do, someone to BE, now that the whole Being Married thing that I thought would be the be-all and end-all of my life had failed to dramatically, trying to remember who I actually was. Went through a bit of a wild phase again, clubbing, drinking, taking drugs - but it no longer fit. Instead, we started a band - as you do. Shimura Curves were supposed to be the female Gay Dad in a way, failed miserably at that, but become something else entirely. Band and magazine are inseparable in my mind. (Which ironically hurt us, in terms of getting coverage - we could never find a music journo to review us who liked the music who *hadn't* been in the band at one point - Alex Macpherson, Sophie Heawood - they'd all done guest spots with us.)

It's funny to compare the two magazines, and my experiences of them. For me, CTCL was much more about The Music, while Plan B was much more of a social thing. (Though reading the actual magazines gives the completely opposite impression.) Because of Everett True's editorial style, reading CTCL felt like a mad night out with a gang of mentalists who all knew and hung out with each other at sweaty clubs. I suppose it was quite off-putting if you weren't *part* of that mad gang, though it was, I admit, a mad fun gang to be in. Under Frances, Plan B felt and read much more like A Proper Magazine. We wrote about the music, not the nights out, which had paradoxically become much more incestuous.

But that was what did it in, for me. Not the writing - it was good discipline for me to actually write to deadlines and wordcounts, and put together cogent criticism, instead of the mad theorising I used to do for CTCL. But the incestuousness did it for me. Shimura Curves, let's face it, imploded in a bizarre love triangle - not even a triangle, a quadrilateral or pentangle, due to all the threads and connections. But my involvement with the Plan B social scene ended due to another bizarre quadrangle. I'll be honest, though she may hate me for it. My friendship with Frances was going through a bad patch - both our lives hit weird bumps at the same time, that threw us in conflicting directions. I made the mistake of blogging about it - with the fake anonymity at which the interweb so excels. Another person involved in the quadrangle decided that that specific blog entry was about *them* - and absolutely freaked out over it. I excused myself from the whole social scene as self protection.

It's not like I stopped writing for them. I just stopped going to the parties, the gigs, stopped dropping by the office after work with a bag full of beer. But that's it, isn't it? Magazines, bands, clubs - all these things are about so much *more* than the music, they're about the threads and filaments that tie the people involved together.

Let's talk about the writing. I never really took writing that seriously, because I never thought of myself as a music journalist. I did it out of peer pressure; I never thought I was any good at it. ET used to email me every month begging "please write more for us, you're one of my favourite writers!" and I was flattered into complying. We had a game, to see what, exactly I could get away with. (I'd put in stuff deliberately, knowing it would get taken out - to distract the subeditors from what I *actually* didn't want them to cut.) The piece I started writing for Plan B with was almost a dare - I wrote about a bubblegum band - Busted - in an emotional style that I knew ET would find irresistible, even though he found the music intolerable. My last piece will be an interview with Beyond The Wizards Sleeve - kind of a final HA HA FUCK YOU, I WIN!!! to Miss AMP*. I really wish I'd had the guts to do the interview, AMP-stylee, and asked him about his cock and stuff - but really, Amp is inimitable.

* (Sorry, that requires some explanation - if you missed the Miss AMP vs. Fiona Fletcher electro vs. prog wars of the early Noughties. Despite being best of mates IRL, we used our columns to slag off each other's musical tastes in a very playful way, that mirrored our arguments in her flat in Stoke Newington - Ampy declaring that she was going to neck pills and go to Bodyrockers and me saying "NO! I'm going to listen to PROPER MUSIC, I'm going to a CAVE in Dalston to listen to Turkish prog..." and we'd FITE! about who had the most fun. So when I saw Amp, for the first in ages, the other week - the first thing she said to me was "Ha ha, you love Erol Alkan, do you admit you like Electro now?" and I replied "Ha ha! He plays, like, psych and TURKISH PROG now, ha ha I WIN I WIN I WIN!~!!!!! PWND!!!!11")

Reading this blog back, I realise it's not about the music at all. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? It's the music that brings us all together in a community, but in the end, it's all the other stuff that you remember about that community.