This book is a very interesting read focusing on the sigificance of gender within music production, specifically how women “still haven’t left the blind spot of the public eye” and that males and females are always “quietly suspicious” of each other in musical settings.
The book focuses on a female solo artist named Where Did Nora Go (the name being a reference to a feminist play) during the chapter “Women In The Studio” to portray their greatest points about how unequal the playfield was for women in music production. The “pitfalls in gender relations” this chapter touches on surrounds how men’s self-proclaimed superiority in the past have deemed many technical and creative parts of music production as “a man’s job,” and how frustrating it can be for women to be seen as “lesser” by some in the studio. Where Did Nora Go was a great case study as it pryes deep into the systemic problems with how 21st century women were (and still are) treated within “patriarchal discourse.”
The writer themselves is a producer and recounts his experience with working alongside Where Did Nora Go and talks about how his long partnership had made him start to question some of his past working habits and see “how I could do my thing, so to speak, without reproducing too many of the male gendered stereotypes of the music business.” He goes onto talk about how, when working with Where Did Nora Go and another producer helping named Rasmussen, while it did create a good, creative energy in the studio, the writer points out that it also “created a sense of exclusion,” due to his and Rasmussen’s “homosocial oriented values” which can inherently exclude women from connections. This with years of history stacked up creates a feeling that studios are men’s spaces that women want to go to, but don’t feel invited into.
This book is not only rooting for a growth in accepting women into the studio, but the writer themselves understands that the industry can teach these misogynistic beliefs to male producers and even he has fallen victim to this. A critisism I have for this book is that it does homogynise sex and gender into one which erases producers who are outside of the gender binary, especially in 2018-2020 when many artists started poking their head out. However, for the more simple conversation regarding men and women, this book shows not only the systemic and historical issues with how women are treated in the studio, but also lived experience and reflection on how someone can grow and make the studio space more inviting for anyone.
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