Watch yes, empirically observe or record without bias, no.

don’t know about you but my mom was kinda busy raising me (i debate this fact though).

as men we’re given all the freedom in the world to pursue every hair-brained idea that pops into our minds. women don’t have this luxury, they actually need to get shit done. it doesn’t bother me that men dominate certain jobs/industries, we’re both part of the same species, at least it’s a human being doing it !

It’s not like the Beatles, for example, could have noticed that The White Album was ‘male’…

If we can put aside issues as to whether gender discussions in music are appropriate or reflect prejudices, I think it’s interesting to observe the trajectories of different scenes.

e.g. UK garage became gradually more ‘feminine’ up until its commercial peak (’flowers’ etc), then got gradually more ‘masculine’ until we ended up with dubstep and grime…

Is this the normal trajectory? Or does it vary?

probably same reason there is a low ration of female rockstars or female chefs or whatever, but impossible to answer succinctly.

- why is it that all female djs have their looks commented on in a way that never happens for most male djs?

Yep I think you see Magda or somebody discussed with “not bad looking either” constantly, it’s pathetic. I guess because way more straight guys like the music so forums for discussion tend to be a bit locker room.

- how long before people will stop using the retarded phrase ‘djane’?

too long, however long!

- more basically, why is this music so male dominated in pretty much all facets?

again…seems just part of a wider pattern isn’t it? I think it’s a shame dance music, having broken a lot of the patterns of the music industry in terms of how it’s consumed, produced, and discussed, hasn’t really broken this one.

Interesting stuff from that interview, thanks for that. I always found the hard techno thing (especially very early 00s like Billy Nasty/Dave Clarke etc) to be really awful when I was growing up. I guess Clarke could be okay and you’d discover some good records but generally it was shit. I much preferred seeing someone like Garnier back then who always played house and would get you interested in good music. Though the clubs were just all guys and it felt like everyone was ready to criticise the music the very second someone allowed some art (or melody or anything at all) into it. I mean even metal has personality. Conversely that sound gets a relatively free ride from historical revisionism cos it’s not even interesting enough to truly make a mockery of.

At the same time I tend to find arguments that say house was a victim of American homophobia a little too facile.

I agree with you Chris that those are the huge questions that need answering here (though do people really say “DJane” still? DJesus Christ!) I guess I was keen to see if starting with a subtle example of someone casually suggesting serious techno is a male thing would lead to these other ideas coming up.

Though of course the answers to your questions aren’t so easy to come up with.

I just uploaded a Q&A Terre Thaemlitz and I did together. There’s a point in the interview which is relevant to this…

I asked him: “I wonder about gender in electronic music… Although largely a genre without lyrics, techno and electro (especially 80s-influenced electro) seems to tend toward an idea of toughness, masculine hardness, one that seems to contain an incipient homophobia that expresses itself through a distain toward (or rejection of) disco and house. I would even argue that this overwhelmed and killed the drum’n’bass scene, which became so ‘dark’ and ‘hard’ that the girls stopped dancing… House DJs often play techno, but in my experience many purist techno DJs distain house, and it appears to be a rejection of the music on the basis that it’s ‘poofy’, ‘sissy’, ‘faggy’ etc. I wonder what you make of that.”

TT: “Actually, I was just having an email exchange along these lines with Dont Rhine of Ultra Red, who is currently doing some teaching at a university in Chicago. He was talking about how there are absolutely no traces of the Chicago house scene. No DJs, clubs, record stores, radio stations or anything. Compared to the homophobic ‘Disco Sucks’ campaigns of his youth, house music died a more passive death of neglect and silence that he links to AIDS, racism and Right Wing reactionary shifts. He was talking about how the death of house is such a metaphor for the genocide of queers in the ’80s and ’90s, and no one wants to hear.

Although I was a hardcore Techno-Pop fan in my youth, it was precisely the ‘straight, white’ tendencies of New York techno culture you pointed out that made it completely unappealing to me. I just fucking hated techno. It ruined so much electronic music for me, which is really depressing.”

And you can read the rest at http://mnmlssg.blogspot.com/

and so on…

”THIS IS THE RIGHT TIME”

btw…….hey ronan maybe you should have been at panorama on sunday! it was ”SEHR KUHL”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!