Ask the indie professor: Are gender stereotypes still present in indie music? | guardian.co.uk
I’ve been meaning to say something about Wendy Fonarow’s “Ask the Indie Professor” columns in the Guardian for a while now. Of course, now all I can do is kind of sputter and throw my hands up in defeat. Blegh.
(That being said, the use of a photo of the one and only Carlos D. to illustrate the “Why do bassists want more sex?” column (which wasn’t actually answered?) was a RIOT.)
This line has nothing to do w/the wider scope of the piece but it kind of sprang out at me:
Blur didn’t write “Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls, who do boys like they’re girls, who do girls like they’re boys” for nothing.
I am really not sure that in context those lines are a celebration of androgyny - the song is a voyeuristic/horrified tableau of package holidays, with deliberately cheap/harsh music at disco-tempo, and the chorus seems meant to suggest an undifferentiated on-heat mass of rutting flesh as much as anything else, hence the sarcastic kicker “always should be someone you really LOVE”. Class is the issue here more than gender (as it pretty much always is w/Blur).
