From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V4 #280 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Tuesday, August 18 1998 Volume 04 : Number 280 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: out gay artists with straight followings? [00jnweiser@bsuvc.bsu.edu] Lilith/womyn's music/gay artists [queen of carrot flowers ] Re: Lilith/womyn's music/gay artists [Birdie ] yet more updates [meredith ] Re: AG volumes ["Jeffrey C. Burka" ] Re: out gay artists with straight following? [FAMarcus@aol.com] Re: out gay artists with straight following? [Jeff Wasilko ] Kate/LF/Janis/Tipton [Mark Lowry ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 20:42:24 -0500 (EST) From: 00jnweiser@bsuvc.bsu.edu Subject: Re: out gay artists with straight followings? Jeff Buckley?? AI have/had a fairly large crush on that man... "Sketches..." is such a beautiful album. :( Ani has kind of a half-half following, I think. I dunno, the last concert I went to of hers was in 97 and it was a mixture of all kinds of people. Great show as well.:) jessica n. weiser / 00jnweiser@bsuvc.bsu.edu / http://adam.nettfriends.com/Jess "help me vanish, help me get myself outta here" - e. gryner ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 22:13:21 -0400 (EDT) From: queen of carrot flowers Subject: Lilith/womyn's music/gay artists Someone mentioned Jeff Buckley as being an artist who teased at coming out in one or two interviews, but never made an official statement re: his orientation. Wow, I never knew he was gay in the first place! Of course, that's the point...but the one time I saw/met him, he was with a slinky piece of whistle bait that wasn't from his record company. He also "dated" Joan Wasser from the Dambuilders for a while -- I put quotes around the word dated in light of this recent information, but I remember them gettng very cozy at some club in Boston, and that was pretty convincing of his being attracted to her. More info, please. Ob Lilith -- my biggest gripes with the fest have come up repeatedly, and yet somehow I feel the need to assert my opinion. Which is: I wish Sarah had been more up-front about what Lilith was from the start, which was a package tour of artists from her personal music collection, as opposed to "a celebration of women in music". IMO, it just reinforced the same tired stereotype of what women in music were, as opposed to what they could be -- that they could rock out and be outrageous as surely as they could trill and strum daintily. There just aren't enough "regular women" who are musicians on a major level. Everybody's gotta have a gimmick. That's what put me off about Lilith, but then, its purpose was to appeal to the greatest common denominator, and in that setting it's hard to find an individual voice within a monolyth. The thing that scares me even more than Lilith itself is the "girl" trend. Gender is not something that can go out of style as easily as Pucci prints and body piercing, though the media is certainly treating it that way. Scary. Nothing pisses me off more than people who use art to push their own agendas, and womyn's music certainly fits into that spectrum. I'm more interested in people who can carry you off the earth with a beautiful melody and a smart lyric than in someone bellowing protest anthems of any kind. (There's a good Jeanette Winterson quote I'm looking up about this. When I find it, I'll post it.) That's it. I'm tired. Off to bed. - ---- Chelsea, the mod pixie home: away: tugboat@channel1.com odyshape@hotmail.com "I started out as a missionary, but I couldn't find a religion which didn't promise things to some people at the exclsion of others. The personal voyage into that kind of light shouldn't be denied to anybody." -- Patti Smith ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 23:07:34 -0400 From: Valerie Kraemer Subject: MWABT and a baby born in seven months I had a very interesting week last week. On Monday, I went to my gynecologist and found out that I was pregnant with my first child. Yippee!! This was an unexpected development but very welcome. I had thought that my big event of last week was going to be the new Happy Rhodes CD. The new CD had to move to second place. I was able to pick up a copy at a local Connecticut store on Tuesday, and I was tickled at the coincidental significance of the CD title to my current life events. The CD is great. It wants to be played very, very loud. I live in an inner-city neighborhood where the locals are constantly blasting salsa and rap music out of their homes and cars. I can now add Happy Rhodes to the mix! - --Valerie ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 22:18:33 -0500 (EST) From: 00jnweiser@bsuvc.bsu.edu Subject: new Kinnie Starr?? Hey guys, I've gotten very into Kinnie Starr recently and saw on her site she's got a new album out this "fall". Does anyone know when exactly it's supposed to be released? Looking forward to it. Thanks for any info, jessica n. weiser / 00jnweiser@bsuvc.bsu.edu / http://adam.nettfriends.com/Jess "help me vanish, help me get myself outta here" - e. gryner ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 23:20:02 EDT From: Faerymouse@aol.com Subject: Re: Lilith/womyn's music/gay artists In a message dated 8/17/98 7:19:37 PM Pacific Daylight Time, tugboat@channel1.com writes: > Someone mentioned Jeff Buckley as being an artist who teased at coming out > in one or two interviews, but never made an official statement re: his > orientation. Wow, I never knew he was gay in the first place! Of course, > that's the point...but the one time I saw/met him, he was with a slinky > piece of whistle bait that wasn't from his record company. He also "dated" > Joan Wasser from the Dambuilders for a while -- I put quotes around the > word dated in light of this recent information, but I remember them gettng > very cozy at some club in Boston, and that was pretty convincing of his > being attracted to her. More info, please. Jeff was dating Rebecca Moore at the time of his death...he thanks her father in the liner notes of _Grace_. So he may have been bi, but he was with Rebecca Moore for quite awhile. Love Siobhan (lurker. woohoo!) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 08:46:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Jet Girl Subject: new happy and tori hey folx, long time no write just thought i would drop a line about the new Happy. Okay, think my all time favorite Happy song - which is hardly that - Oh the Drears, has been supplanted by Tragic. Oh how I love this song. I'm not too hip on Roy, but I can see how it might work as a single, it has that infectious lyric thing. The album on a whole is excellent, there are a couple gems, and I like the whole electronica feel, much tighter and more controlled than previous albums. May become one of my favi Happy albums. Just would like to add my vote for Rearmament as favy Happy album, always has been. Didn't get a chance to respond to that thread earlier. Saw Tori at the MCI Center here in DC. Uggh. If it wasn't free for me I wouldnt have gone. Something tragic about seeing Tori as a small spec on stage compared to the Park West where I saw her last and was practically sitting under her. I completely did not dig the band, and the sound was terrible from where I was sitting. But Tori still has that magic when she's doing her solo stuff. Awaiting the return of Bauhaus, kIrI jetgrrl@magenta.com Teacher: Let's all work together to make Daria's dream a reality. Daria: You mean the one where people walking down the street burst into flames? -la la la la la ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 20:48:27 -0700 From: Birdie Subject: Re: Lilith/womyn's music/gay artists queen of carrot flowers wrote: > Nothing pisses me off more than people who use art to push their own > agendas, Everybody's art pushes their own agenda - be it simply personal (I love you love you love you) or socially observant (Little ticky-tacky houses all in a row) or political (If I had a hammer). I love it when it is more than jack-off music for the masses. >and womyn's music certainly fits into that spectrum. I'm more > interested in people who can carry you off the earth with a beautiful > melody and a smart lyric than in someone bellowing protest anthems of any > kind. (There's a good Jeanette Winterson quote I'm looking up about this. > When I find it, I'll post it.) You know...whether it is field workers - cotton pickers (Tina Turner was one) - union workers - the 60's.....or "Sweet Honey In The Rock" who do sing AMAZING protest songs in AMAZING VOICES and perform at the Michigan Womens festival..... All those songs that "piss you off" - have traditionally helped people get through very very hard times - organize labor - get through a day in the fields - help put a war to end - and otherwise get past oppressive environments. Obviously, you have no respect for generations of people who struggled hard to overcome difficulties - and the songs that they sung which helped them. A lot of them were women and they made the world a better place for you. Birdie ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 23:59:11 -0400 From: meredith Subject: yet more updates Hi! I'm even more behind than I was yesterday, but at least I have something to show for it - I've updated the ecto news page yet again! Today I received from Samson a listing of the radio stations which have added Happy to their playlists. That's now on the news page - alas all the info I have is the call letters and locations. Phone numbers may or may not come later. If you don't see a station on the list that you feel should be there, please e-mail me with your suggestions. I'll be compiling the info and passing it along to Samson regularly. I already told them about WPKN. :) I didn't notice the station most notable in its absence until I was formatting the page, though: WXPN isn't on the list. (Things that make you go "hmmm"...) As usual, the ecto news page is at . Do sign up for the URL-minder to be notified when the page changes! +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 00:12:20 -0400 From: "Jeffrey C. Burka" Subject: Re: AG volumes Sharon was kind enough to write me, in response to one of my off-handed, parenthetical questions about the availability of Ambient I and II: > I just saw your question on Ecto. I believe the AG volumes are still > available and can be ordered through AG or stores. Thanks. Actually, I wrote the question the way I did figuring one of the two of you would eventually see it and comment on it...publicly. I have both AG ambient discs (seems like I actually pre-ordered them directly from AG around the time the radio promo single for BtC was sent out, but I could be making that up); I was more concerned about their status for the folks out there who are digging MWABT and curious about earlier work by Happy in that sort of heavily textured, ambient vein (and especially, of course, "Ra is a Busy God"!) Thanks, though... jeff (who remembers spotting both AG ambient discs at Tower once upon a time) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 00:28:40 EDT From: FAMarcus@aol.com Subject: Re: out gay artists with straight following? In a message dated 8/17/98 8:53:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time, birdies@ix.netcom.com writes: << Joni is definitely a member of the livingroom headphone set and Jewel is....public property. Bathrooms, TV's, Car Radios, the works. >> I know I'm going to catch it for this but for the life of me I don't understand what Jewel has done to warrant the respect she has on this forum. I've listened to her cd when it came out many times as I always do to any cd I purchase. Just to make sure I'm not missing something. There were a couple really good songs and that was it for me. And then she won the grammy??? I remember thinking that Happys worst cd was far better than than jewel's and the injustice of that. I think the first time I saw jewels video clip on mtv I thought she was a tori wannabe. Maybe she has a lot more to give but I'd have to see it before I put her on the same level as tori, joni, ani, happy and many others. covering up......fred ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 00:39:20 -0400 From: Jeff Wasilko Subject: Re: out gay artists with straight following? On Tue, Aug 18, 1998 at 12:28:40AM -0400, FAMarcus@aol.com wrote: > I know I'm going to catch it for this but for the life of me I don't > understand what Jewel has done to warrant the respect she has on this forum. > I've listened to her cd when it came out many times as I always do to any cd I > purchase. Just to make sure I'm not missing something. There were a couple > really good songs and that was it for me. And then she won the grammy??? I Well, at this point, Jewel's CD is over 3 years old. Frankly, I don't listen to the CD much anymore, either. Jewel's an artist that I feel is better appreciated live, espcially when you consider that she has literally hundreds of songs that have been written, performed live but never recorded. She had a new CD recorded 2 years ago, but was unable to release it due to record company politics. From what I heard at the concert she did in Bearsville while she was recording, the new songs would have been wonderful. The studio (and live) band featured T Bob Burnett and Jerry Marotta... Jeff ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:59:06 -0700 From: Birdie Subject: Re: lilith fair bullshit J. Wermont wrote: >If someone has such hatred for a genre, I'm not so sure > they're qualified to review a musician who plays in that genre. Oh I don't know - you can start off liking certain types of artists and then....they may have hits and then the labels start signing other acts like them - and sometimes imitations and knock-offs designed to cash in - and then it's a trend and then it gets crammed into your ears from every direction and then all rap starts to sound the same - all heavy metal starts to sound the same - all guitar strumming starts to sound the same.....and really, you can get completely fed up and sick of everybody in a genre because the industry has run it into the ground - in search of cash. Cashing in on trends.... What people are missing here is that the artists sometimes approve of the trend making and the running-into-the-ground of it OR they don't have any control over it. You don't even have to be a trend setter to be run into the ground. Look what happened to Hootie and The Blowfish. Your basic bar band f'christ sakes! You could have started off loving them and wound up hating them because the business rammed them down your throat. Gina Arnold and many others rebel against such Mass Marketing. It's a legitimate complaint. If the business knew how to pick or develop or nuture diverse talents and offered more choices - consistently - then you would'nt get anybody fed up with any genres or the trend of the year getting crammed down their throats. But they have to make trends and overdose everybody. Why? Because they are insecure and some wouldn't know what talent was if it was staring them in the face. They are there to go sign a band that sounds like.......(fill in the blank with someone in the top ten)__________. Because they sound like someone who is making money. >But to criticize the musical makeup > of the tour on the basis of "that music is boring" is pretty lame. Music gets boring when you have heard it 100 times on the radio already. If I hear the hits from the LF artists on the radio - I change the channel because.....I'm sick of it - which is what happens when you are beyond being bored. Remember in A Clockwork Orange when they tape open the guys eyes and play the same music over and over again while playing the same footage over and over? It was a form of behaviour modification and torture.... Anyway, saying you find 'Where have all the cowboys Gone" boring after having been subjected to it beyond a point anybody but a die-hard fan could tolerate - is being quite lame as plenty of people wouldn't be so kind to call it simply "boring"....."f*cking annoying as hell" might be true in regards to ***anything*** played too often and to a great many people...... Trendy genre music gets people pissed off as well it should. If you weren't rap or heavy metal - you could hardly get signed or heard a few years ago....it all becomes monolilithic......the trendy genre's can nearly cancel everything else out and then they wind up cancelling themselves out. We can only hope for more diverse business agendas.....instead of "Oh...we have one song (or genre) here that is a hit and we will run it into the ground".....to the exclusion of many other artists. This is where the Gina Arnold's come from...... Birdie ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 00:29:07 -0500 From: Mark Lowry Subject: Kate/LF/Janis/Tipton Hi. Got a promo copy of "I Wanna Be Kate" today. It's a must-have for Kate fans. I'll try not to spoil it since it's not officially released yet. BUT, I do applaud cover versions in which the artist gives a rendition that's completely different from the original, so long as the interpretation is still on target. Therefore my favorite track is the J. Davis Trio doing "There Goes a Tenner." The versions of "Coffee Homeground", "Suspended in Gaffa" and "The Saxophone Song" are also amazing. The whole thing's great. And isn't there a big Syd Straw fan out there somewhere ... beautiful version of "The Man With the Child In His Eyes." Regarding other issues recently raised: LF: I know it's hard to believe, but not all journalists are out for blood. Of course, I'm a little biased, being one and all. Our paper favorably promoted Lilith and our main music critic gave the Dallas show a terrific review. He also took a swipe at Gina Arnold's article in The Dallas Observer (one of several alternative newsweeklies in the New Times chain), calling it unfocused. His only LF regrets were that Liz Phair was only given 30 minutes and Lucinda Williams should have been on the main stage. Although I desperately wanted to see Liz, Lucinda, Erykah and Sarah (again), I didn't go because, well, it was 106 degrees that day and the show was at an outdoor amphitheater. Call me a wimp, but ... Out musicians: I know this doesn't count, but when did Janis Ian come out? I guess it was pretty late in her career. She had a straight following. Sort of related news/suggestion: Just finished a good book: "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton" by Diane Wood Middlebrook. It's a biography about Billy, a jazz musician who was born *Dorothy* in 1914 and lived as a man from young adult to her death in 1989. No one knew _ including her five ex-wives and the *adopted* children _ until the coroner's report. Fascinating story. It came out this summer. Mark Lowry "I watched the smoke rise slowly from your tired eyes. Two columns formed a marble gateway to a starlit room. And, painfully, you raised your stick + led me through with promises of paradise, where nothing ever dies _ it blossums." _ E. Ka-Spel, "Hotel X" ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V4 #280 **************************