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10:11 · 1,957 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Fender's 2015 survey of North American players found half of new guitar buyers were women, and a 2018 revision confirmed it was still half and happening worldwide.
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- The Taylor Swift explanation does not hold up, since by her fifth album she rarely picked up a guitar on stage and the trend kept going anyway.
▶ 00:00:21
- Most of those purchases were made online, because music shop culture felt intimidating and buyers expected to be judged by the staff.
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- The representation gap shows in the numbers: Spotify's five most streamed artists and five most streamed tracks of 2018 were all men, as in 2015 and 2016.
▶ 00:01:24
- Laura Marling's framing is the argument in one line, that preventing women from seeing examples of achievement prevents them from believing it is possible.
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- Brittany Howard lost her sister to cancer and the family home to a fire before she was ten, found music through drums then bass then guitar, and was driving trucks for FedEx before restarting the band.
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- PJ Harvey was the first solo woman to win the Mercury Prize and remains the only artist to have won it twice, after twice nearly leaving music for sculpture.
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- Annie Clark does not treat the guitar as a six-string instrument but as a sound generator, running it through enough effects that it stops sounding like one.
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- She left Berklee in her third year because it was teaching her to be employable rather than creative, and because she did not accept that music should be graded and measured.
▶ 00:05:38
- The history is older than the discussion admits: Sister Rosetta Tharpe shaped Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis, Goldie and the Gingerbreads formed the first all-female rock band, Patti Smith released the first punk album, and Joan Jett founded her own label after 23 rejections.
▶ 00:07:10