Sirens

Little fat seashells, curling bare-bosomed mermaids and powder pink and blue everywhere. Is it wrong that the packaging of this all-female compilation – like the phrases ‘women novelists’, ‘Lilith’s Fair’ and ‘A Woman’s Heart’ – makes me want to smoke crack? Mind you, this writer is not crazy about the concept behind it, either. Surely what all those amazing minds and iron wills – from Mary Wollstonecraft forward – fought for, was the abolition of that weirdly digital 1-or-0 phallusocracy and all the outdated symbolism that went with it.

It must be said that any compilation with Patti Smith, Gemma Hayes, PJ Harvey and Stina Nordenstam on it, and that introduces new listeners to Lisa Germano, Maria Doyle-Kennedy, Maria McKee and Margaret Healy into the bargain, is pretty much worth having. It ‘s upsetting, however, that the specific track choices here frequently reduce truly great artists with vari-coloured work, and a number of obsessions and preoccupations, to their one track that most addresses what a lecturer at my university used to call The Ongoing Fight.

An alien creature completely unfamiliar with female artists, then, gathers that they tend to address feelings of righteous anger (PJ Harvey’s ‘Sheela-Na-Gig’, Neneh Cherry’s ‘Woman’, Ani Di Franco’s ‘Joyful Girl’), low self-esteem (Lucinda Williams’ ‘Lonely Girls’), depression (Lisa Germano’s ‘Happiness’), sexual rejection (Amy Rigby’s ‘You Get To Me’) and recovery (Sinead O’Connor’s ‘The Healing Room’), and that they have a preference for pianos, semiacoustic guitars and cellos. This is not the case throughout, but nevertheless the cumulative effect is as if ‘artists’ get to do whatever they want… whereas ‘female artists’ get to write about being female, and not the good bits, either, and in a stereotypically ‘female’ way. Fuck that!

I’m seriously conflicted over this record and am going to go listen to some Sonic Youth, Kills, Missy Elliott, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ms Dynamite, Peaches, Autamata, Low and Moloko now.