they're all too busy fighting for a good place under the lighting (good for you!)

From the study lounge at the top of my building I can see into Fenway. Definitely have to creep up here on a game night sometime (not tonight, the boys are in Oakland tonight). I can see most of Kenmore Square from up here, actually - this is essentially the spot I envisioned when I used to think about going to school in the city. It's pretty great.

So, one of my main aspirations in life is still to be Rob Sheffield. For a long time he was the only reason I read Rolling Stone, because The Pop Life was literally always funny even when the rest of the magazine was about bands I didn't care about. Love Is a Mixtape, I take that book everywhere I go. I've read it I don't know how many times, and I have it here at school for when I next want to read it again. I quote it in conversation. Rob and I, we think a lot alike. And his new book, Talking to Girls about Duran Duran, is all around pretty rad - music geekery as usual, and a ton of it is set in Boston and New England, so I'm constantly like "Dorchester! Jamaica Plain! Quincy! I know where that shit is on the T!"

But there's this one part, very early on where he's discussing the overall premise of the book, with which I take issue. He's talking about the difference in girl-music fandom and boy-music fandom. This paragraph follows:

"The way girls raved about DD [Duran Duran] was so different from the way we boys talked about music we liked. I remember hours of debate in the high school lunchroom about the Clash: which was better, London Calling or Sandinista!? Is 'Lover's Rock' really about oral sex? Which member of the band truly understood the geopolitical context of Nicaraguan history? Who had a cooler name, Joe Strummer or Tory Crimes? My female rocker friends call this 'boy list language,' and they won't tolerate it. When I talk about Duran Duran with other guys, which admittedly doesn't happen all that often, we end up debating whether the Power Station was a better side project than Arcadia. No Duran Duran chick, not even the hard-core obsessives, would sit through a conversation like this."

The first thing that outraged me in that paragraph, actually, was the suggestion that Sandinista! vs. London Calling is actually a debate at all, because if you have a functioning brainstem and a working knowledge of the Clash discography, the only thing you could maybe rank ahead of London Calling is their self-titled debut, either the US or UK version depending on your degree of purism (unless you're really into the trippy Combat Rock shit, which is respectable, but I would argue against you). But he addresses that in the next paragraph - they were just arguing for the sake of argument, which is totally understandable.

That's the real issue here - I am pretty definitively a girl, and although I don't have that many friends who talk music the way I do, I've had discussions very to these with the ones who do. In junior high I would re-decide which Green Day album was my favorite just about every month, debating back and forth with my brother about the merits of Kerplunk vs. Dookie vs. Insomniac and trying to dispel the myth that Insomniac is a remake of Dookie in anyway - it's the classic first-album-after-a-big hit, really, same as its 90s counterparts In Utero and Pinkerton, the deliberately harsh backlash against being perceived as pop stars. If anything, I'd call Dookie an update of Kerplunk (the re-done version of "Welcome to Paradise" being a pretty obvious metaphor for that) but that's still not really fair to either album (still my two favorites overall, I think).

I digress, which I guess kind of proves my point. I'm not sure where the idea came from that male music obsessives are always making lists, ranking their favorites, wanting to know everything about the bands, while girls are doing...what, exactly? What's left for the female music fan to do in this stereotype, besides go "ooh, he's so cute, I'll buy the new single"? I know that's not the suggestion, but Rob, you're getting dangerously close there. And I don't get it.

He never really elucidates what female music fandom is like, in his experience; I can tell you that in my experience, I made a list of the best guitar and bass lines in every Simple Plan song on No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls when I was in seventh grade. My dubious taste aside (and the lack of musical proficiency to be ranked on that album at all aside, although I will never apologize for loving Simple Plan), that sounds suspiciously like Boy List Language. I once set a goal in eighth grade to listen to every Green Day song on every album in the course of one day and actually got there (although this was pre-21CB, of course). I can still recite their entire discography in order of year of release, tracklisting, etc. This, again, sounds suspiciously like Boy List Language, and I gotta say, I am most certainly a girl.

Chuck Klosterman, my other culture-nerd-boy hero, puts forth a similar view in Fargo Rock City, talking about the loyalty of male rock audiences vs. female ones and how fickle girls can be with music. I really don't get it: there's a difference between the loyalty of music fans, sure, but I don't think it's defined by gender. I'm nineteen and I have been a Beatles obsessive since age nine, Green Day obsessive since thirteen, Clash since fourteen, etc. and etc. I know girls who memorize albums line by line and boys who buy singles online and disregard them after a week; I know both types of fans in both genders. There's definitely an interesting cultural study to be done here, but reducing it to generalizations about gender - basically as a way for boys to feel superior about themselves - isn't getting anybody anywhere.

The best thing I can offer in the guys' defense is that maybe it's a generational thing, that maybe girl audiences in the 80s were different than now, but that also seems extremely dubious. There have always been the girls screaming and crying at the Ed Sullivan Show, and I'd say there have also always been those of us who are quieter, sitting in the back, organizing our music collections by release date, figuring out our favorite Track 7 on every album, making playlists of the best British and Irish and Australian and Californian songs. I guess it's just the general cultural phenomenon that I've begun to notice in more and more places: nerdy girls get overlooked in culture, unless it's some ugly-duckling story where they get made over into the prom queen by the end. And it's bullshit, frankly. "Nerdy" boys show up everywhere, improbably winning over the hot girls with their wit, fronting Weezer (not that I even want to get into the current state of Rivers Cuomo right now, that's an entirely different post), etc. Right now I guess we've got Ellen Page, which is rad, but she can't hold down the fort alone. If I'm missing any prominent examples of nerdy girls kicking ass in the world, someone please let me know, because it's getting to be a real pain in the ass when even the smart, clever, thoughtful guys lump us in with the rest of the supposed crowd.

Oh yeah, and "Lover's Rock" is definitely about some kind of sex and possibly birth control; Joe Strummer is definitely the one who knew and cared about Nicaraguan history (Mick pretty much knew about glam rock and getting high and actin' like a rock star, Paul knew about reggae and the real mean streets of London, and Topper...well, Topper wrote "Rock the Casbah"); and Tory Crimes is a pretty ballin' name (adapted from the original Terry Chimes), but I don't think I could ever make a list involving the Clash that didn't have Mr. Strummer at the top.