Men and women are important contributors towards the creation of modern alt-ish music. Now, more than ever, we are able to put aside stereotypes of women being incompetent, and men being the source of all that is good. We can appreciate bands for who they are, no matter if they consist of male members, female members, or any mix of both.
Mixed gendered bands are pretty interesting from a consumer perspective. Would it be fair to assume that ‘a band with both male and female members’ has the best chance of appealing to a broader audience of male and female fans? Is the Arcade Fire more approachable because they have women in their band? I’d say that a band is not truly a MIXED GENDER BAND when there is a female lead singer who pretends to play tamborine sometimes. It would be kind of like this live Scarlett Johansson performance of a cover from her latest album.
(Pretty awkward/worthless/I am not interested in finding out that she has a personality and is creative.)
I think when it comes to ‘popular music’, most people think of women as only singers. Sometimes female pop stars claim to be writers, but then they end up writing a song like Britney Spears’ “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” In the latest crop of alternative music, I think there’s probably one of the strongest economies of women-who-are-actually-talented-and-applying-their-musical-skills-to-create-good-music.
How do you feel about women in music? Remember when Paul McCartney’s wife was in Wings, but every one knew she didn’t really do that much? Are we breaking away from that stereotype?
Here’s a few blurbz about mixed gendered bands.
****CSS****
Sometimes I wonder how much I actively like the band CSS, or if I just like a few of their songs. I know “Let’s Make Love And Listen to Death From Above” is as catchy as it gets, and they also have the most viewed video in the history of youtube, “Music is My Hot Hot Sex.” I wonder if I would be creeped out if a dude was the one who wanted to ‘make love and listen to DFA.’
CSS were pioneers when it came to branding the ‘cute, exotic, yet kind of dirty looking’ female.
*****G C***
Maybe deep down inside of me, I enjoy Glass Candy because Johnny Jewel and Ida No remind me of a mom-and-dad type of relationship.
*****NYPC***
The New Young Pony Club has a female majority. I wonder if there is one dude who is the brains behind it. Does any one know what this band is up to? I feel like I deserve a New Young Pony Club remix per month, just since their music is so approachable and/or remixable.
***TGT*****
The Go Team has a handful of women. Do you think that there should be a limit on how many members can be in a ‘band’? Did you like any other songs other than “Huddle Formation”? I feel like mixed gendered bands are guaranteed one pretty catchy hit, but they can also be doomed to ‘be that band that only has one song that I listen to a lot.’
********
Teenagers in Tokyo is a majority-female group.
I feel like their song “Very Vampyr” might have perfected the genre of cute-dancey-thrash-chant rock.
When I see mixed-gendered indie bands, I wonder if there is one male who ‘basically writes most of the songs.’ I think an advantage of being a mixed gender bands is that if your female members are cute enough, you have a better chance of turning a mediocre, some-what annoying song into a cute dancey pop song.
I used to think Le Tigre was a mixed gender band. Is it fair to assume that bands that are 100% female have a smaller chance of appealing to men than bands that are 100% male appealing to women? More girls are probably willing to love Interpol or DMB than there are guys willing to love to Electrelane or Le Tigre.
Bands like Coldplay and U2 prove that all-male bands will always be the biggest bands in the world. However, bands like Fleetwood Mac and Sonic Youth prove that mixed gendered bands are great for getting fans to truly identify with and genuinely love your band’s catalog of work.
Overall, women are valuable members of modern alternative bloghouse indie post-dance rock music. It’s a good time to be a music fan. We even live in a world where people are allowed to convince themselves that Uffie has a unique, valuable rap style.
How do you feel about women? Is their place still in the kitchen?
Are mixed gendered bands better than all-female or all-male bands?
Are there any women producers who make bangers that I need to know about?
[MP3s]
Teenagers in Tokyo Very Vampyr
CSS Computer Heat
New Young Pony Club The Bomb (The Teenagers Crush Lou Remix)
It’s a great time to be a 15 year old girl who takes guitar lessons.
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IAmCarles.com
55 Comments
Is “teenagers in tokyo” the same as teenagersintokyo?
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so i come to this blog to visit links and i dont expect a new post at 1130pm (new zealand time) but there it is again. keeping me entertained in my small culture-less town. thank you.
girls in bands are half a ‘i’ll give them a listen’ motovational thing…as girls are girls.
most girls I know can’t stand girls in music. so maybe its for the males to get all googley eyed over?
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You’re such a patronising sexist douche.
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^^^^^^
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girls deffz need to get back into the kitchen. alternatively, they may go to the laundry room and/or bedroom.
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p.s. if there weren’t girls in electro bands, how would fags know which ones to listen to?
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Dear Ryan….
Please stop being an embarrassment to both hipsterrunoff and New Zealand!
Um yes I love woman in bands. Its time that men share the love by having more females!
It would be a nice thought to have a Female version of “Justice” rocking the ableton, or a fem version of DAFT PUNK!
The world is yours ladies!
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oh god uffie needs to go away and get her ugly self off your blog posts.
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Jesus I too can’t stand Uffie! She looks like an 8 year old
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funny.
im really upset about scarlett though… I want her to have my children that I don’t want at all, but it’s so ridiculous she gets a chance to create and promote a recording project when she sounds like that
she makes tha $$ so I guess she “deserves” it though
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i agree with anon 8:47
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Well, there is this one woman i Copenhagen.. Djuna Barnes – she is way cool and seems to be involved in pretty much everything on every club in Copenhagen. She is mostly a DJ, but she did help put together an amazing version of the sogn “Copenhagen” (with among others Trentemøller and Tomboy. It’s old, but amazing)
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nerdy frames: uffie 8 year old? more like friggin 80 these days. you missed out bonde do role in this post, they’re now a cush and cock 50/50 split.
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wooowwwwieee what happend to uffie? alright im a chick and I even think she used to be pretty bangable with the brwn hair, what is this blonde business?!?! soooooo hideous.. and the chubb? holy smokkkkess
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too much uff in daa M0uf
purdy ^high^ in calories didnt ya kno?
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I don’t listen to my girlfriend when she talks, why the hell would I listen to another one of them sing?
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none of the cmmntrs (including me) have said anything really that great since that stabbing post.
…besides that one person that said the cmmnts are becoming like youtube cmmnts.
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apart from le tigre and MAYBE electrelane, there are absolutely zero examples of all-female bands that are worth more than 5 seconds of my time
what else is there? the donnas and the fucking indigo girls?
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LADYTRON dude
two of the hottest bitches in music make up 1/2 of that group
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what about BLONDE REDHEAD or BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE?
or SaLT n PEPA.
staccato=female version of daft punk
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lisa lobsinger is hot
also reverie sound revue owns the fuck out of broken suck scene
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doesnt guns n bombs have a girl in it?
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those are fucking stupid thoughts… good bands do good music because they´re talented, not because they´re men/women only or mixed.
your place is in the kitchen.
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there are very few female vocalists that are worth my time, like kim gordon, siouxsie sioux. m.i.a. is annoying, santogold even more so, and uffie is a disgrace to women everywhere. the electro-banger genre will be dominated by french and australian men.
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youre always bragging about how alt you are, well stop hopping on the bandwaggon of uffie haters
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i used to really be turned off by all-female bands because i figured it would turn me ghey. now though, most BNGRS have women at the lead and dudes doin the mixing so i am now comfortable w/ my sexuality.
mixed gender brands do have a different personal brand, and yeh they may want to make musiq 2gether but dudes dont bring bitches into it w/o some good reasons.
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Uffie just gets worse everytime you post about her… PLZ, NO m0re Uffie!!!
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I would fuck the shit out Scarlett Johannsen/want to spend the rest of my life with her but she has a TERRIBLE voice.
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uffie looks like she accidentally got famous for no reason right before she became really ugly/addicted to drugs/food and now she wants out really really bad because all these people keep looking at her expecting her to make music that doesnt suck/be sorta hot and all she wants is to be some broad that bones someone on ed banger every once in a while.
feel bad for the girl
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You forgot The Corrs. They have that one dude who is supposedly the ‘brother’ but probably bangs the shit out of them hot bishes behind closed doors.
Hell, I’d take a chubby from him if it meant getting it on with The Corrs.
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a lot of y’all are too damn negative. I <3 women. i <3 carles for saying things that sound sexist but really aren’t.
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What about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Portishead, Giant Drag, and the Knife??
best bands ever!
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i’m a girl
i make music
i have fun
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the gossip, babes in toyland, uffie is garey busey and she SUCKS. guys, if it werent for pussy then boys would never have material. everybody puts something on the pizza
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Anonymous Anonymous said…
girls deffz need to get back into the kitchen. alternatively, they may go to the laundry room and/or bedroom.
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stupid post
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You’re an idiot. End of story.
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you’ve just illustrated why smart women do not do mixed-gender projects, musical or otherwise. no matter what the woman is doing, the assumption will always be that she’s just there to give blowjobs to the guys in the group. when the sad reality is that if there is a mixed gender project, 10 times out of 10 the women will be the brains/drive behind everything.
misogyny appears to be back in fashion though. go douchebags!!
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I fucking love The Go! Team. They’re seriously THE SHIT.a MSTRKRFT remix is well needed, btw.
TGT MSTRKRFT RMX FTW.
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Wait, should we consider CSS “mixed gender” just because they have that one guy who actually looks brazilian?
I mean, have you noticed, most of these mixed gender bands are also mixed race bands, but like, multiracial, not just biracial, it’s like latinas and white guys and black chicks and the occasional “I can’t really tell where he/she comes from” token character.
What guy bands besides Bloc Party are interracial? Do the Black Eyed Peas count, given that they’ve always had that token female singer?
Is the female factor the unity factor? Are the girls the ones that say “hey, let’s have a black chick in our band”? Or are the girls just the ones who actually are black? When CocoRosie added that black guy to do the beatbox with his mouth in their live show, did they specifically go for a black person? Did they not realyl care, and it just happened? Does it make them happy?
I feel like talking in a series of questions makes me look like I’m ripping off Carles. FU, Carles didn’t invent questions, did he.
I suppose I’m hoping Carles will answer all of my queztns in a future post.
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Also: Mixed race bands are composed mostly of interracial females + white boys. When you say “what if there’s a dude writing all the music so the chicks can sing it?”, are you ALSO being racist apart from sexist? I mea, if there’s two guys and they’re white, nd they’re the ones writing, what if one of the girls from THE GO TEAM hears this and goes “Is this because I’m blk/azn?” instead of “is this because I’m a wymn?”
I think both topics go hand in hand.
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FINALLY: is it wrong to like LeTigre if you’re a lesbian? Is it too typical? Is it wrong to like The Presets if you’re gay? Are you conforming to beaten-down stereotypes of “gay music” like Depeche Mode? Oh, whoops, in the 80’s Depeche Mode wasn’t gay? But I guess that if you still like them then you MUST be, so the present kind of defeats the past.
By bringing the gay, ghey, faggz etc. to the mix, am I taking the topic too srsly?
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pretty sure everyone took my comment the wrong way.
some of my favourite bands, tegan & sara, nouvelle vauge, fleetwood mac . . have females playing quit vital parts in the band.
my girls are girls comment wasn’t a personal opinion just a view on how maybe it gets others to listen to their band.
i.e and the tegan & sara show in Auckland a few years back where most jocks showed up as it was at a uni bar becuase they heard they were lesbians.
do i make any more sense now?
who are you dream shades person?
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You’re right – rock music is one of the most misogynist forms of popular culture ever invented. Girls are put at a big disadvantage because guitar straps hurts their tits. That and the fact that guitars looks like big penises when you let them hang around your waist.
I think for a woman to be taken really SRSLY as a rock artist you have to be a Chan Marshall/Cat Power type, someone who indisputably writes, sings, and performs their own material without anyone else’s help, and is good at it. But even then most people just want to stick it in her.
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teenagersintokyo yeah!
the go! team yeah!
yeah yeah yeahs yeah!
yeah!
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“staccato=female version of daft punk”
correction:
staccato=two uggo bitches who make bad mixes.
p.s. grlz r clueless.
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omg
carles you’re
racist
sexist
homofobic
child toucher
why do i keep coming back to read your doo doo every day?????
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hey fifteen year olds! get off the internet and actually do something CONSTRUCTIVE with your life because apparently you all don’t know shit about music or how gender operates in music. OKAY?!
I am so sick of reading comments by people who only started listening to this stuff like a year or two ago. Fucking TRENDYFUCKZ
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surely you know Ellen Allien?
female + electro(ish) right there.
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who cares you freaks
women are not a kind of music or a ‘valuable part’
for goddamn fuck’s sake
they are fucking people
who you all seem to have all sorts of why-should-i-give-a-shit-i-just-wasted-3-seconds-of-my-time-reading comments and posts
half of you are rude fuckheads and the other compromising pitiable fuckfaces
women in music is good, if keep up cutting down the riff raff making crap music and up that to the 50% best of the men and 50% best of the women we might have better music
having 90% men means 40$ more shit out there
ps people that don’t listen to a band cause it’s got a ‘girl’ a lady a fucking whatever you shitheads say, in it, is fucking retarded
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why do you keep asking if the band’s have a male lead inside them, what kind of inane question is that
do you care?
does it make women suck?
most likely there is some powermongering guy in there, but that doesn’t mean women don’t write great music
citing britney spears is as lame as you, carles, could possibly get
your research skills are flawed and unfortunate, as are you questions, thoughts, ideas, tastes, and words
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Im not sure if i missed it, because i decided to ignore about 50 posts, but nobody mentioned yeah yeah yeahs. Karen O does it for everybody でしょ!?!? やべかけーーーー！
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yo there MP3 downloads from The Ting Tings at: http://www.daytrotter.com/article/1274/the-ting-tings
dope ass mixed gender band rockin Ipod commercials
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yah fleetwood mac is a great example because of buckingham and nicks. i dont think there has been anyone as truly talented as them since.
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where’d this post go
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