Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon

“What’s it like to be a girl in a band? / I don’t quite understand / That’s so quaint to hear / I feel so faint, my dear.” So sings Kim Gordon in Sacred Trickster, the opening track of Sonic Youth’s latest album, The Eternal. It’s supposed to be a lightly mocking joke, of course, something that says, “Hey, isn’t it great that this sexism in rock shit doesn’t exist anymore?”

Unfortunately, if the results of Triple J’s Hottest 100 Of All Time are indicative, sexism in alternative music is alive and well. The list is, to put it bluntly, a sausage-fest.

After Sunday’s countdown, I did a quick bit of internet research and came up with the following statistics about gender representation in the list. Of the 100 songs, a mere nine were created by groups who had women in them at the time. (I excluded bands that had short-lived but non-integral female members, such as the Beastie Boys, whose female drummer who had departed long before the recording of Sabotage, and the Prodigy, who briefly had a female vocalist named Sharky.) Tellingly, in all of these acts, the women were not “out front” – in the Smashing Pumpkins, who contributed three songs of the nine, D’Arcy Wretsky played bass and did backing vocals, while the band’s image was crafted around Billy Corgan’s persona. Pulp and New Order fared no better, placing their women behind keyboards and utilising male lead vocals.

More frightening is the fact that of the 100 songs, a mere two have female lead vocals. These were both songs by Massive Attack – a group that doesn’t feature any full-time female members. When women’s voices appear on the list, they are backup singers, as in the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, or TV On The Radio’s Wolf Like Me. Depressingly, there are no songs on the list by solo female performers.

Let’s be clear: the sexism apparent in this list doesn’t reflect poorly upon Triple J, who have historically supported female artists such as Björk, Tori Amos, and Cat Power (to name the obvious ones). Instead it reflects poorly on the masculine bias clearly present in both “alternative” bands and their listeners. Hopefully Triple J has recorded the gender split of voters, and will make that information public at some stage to help us figure out why men are so over-represented on the list.

Send your own thoughts on the Triple J Hottest 100 Of All Time and anything else in the music world that takes your interest to . All letters/messages/comments may be considered for publication in a future Letters To The Editor column.

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