The rules

The rules for my new daily task are as follows:

1. The first rule is that whoever is profiled may be anywhere on the scale of creative control from ruling the roost to meekly adding in a little sound. All female musicians have to put up with a ton of shit--so all will be honored here.
2. No posts where a female musician is just linked to her album or profile and left at that. I vow to add a couple sentences about why I think today's female musician fucking rules.
3. That being said, the major way to get a daily post is to be someone I like. I refuse to apologize for my bad taste.
4. However, I am way more than open to suggestions. If you have a female musician you adore, please let me know. I will post any and all suggestions on the condition that whoever is submitting explain who the woman is and why they think she rules. Submissions may be the post of the day or accompany the post of the day. But as long as you explain why you like said musician, she's on the blog.
5. I considered an out and out ban on discussing the husbands and/or lovers of these women in their profiles. But I realized that was dishonest--a lot of really cool women use their husbands/lovers to gain access to an audience. They should not be punished for this; why should they eliminate an important contact to getting a larger audience? Men are not generally examined for abusing friendships to get to the top, so Mouse Words will not punish women for it.
6. That being said, if a woman's husband/lover has no bearing on her career, he will not be mentioned. The basic rule is that we will mention no more of marriage or family life than profiles of male musicians do, and probably much less, since that crap is boring.
7. We reserve the right to occasionally link to female musicians we have ill will towards, but we think need recognition anyway for whatever reason. Courtney Love is the reason for this rule, but we will go into more detail if and when we tackle that frightening topic.
8. I repeat--I will be profiling women who are not front and center in their bands. I will deliberately profile women who are in the background and might otherwise be invisible. The reason for this is that women in music are treated like freaks--as often as not, an attractive, vivacious female member is the very reason that a band is catapulted to fame. (I would call it the Blondie effect, but I'd rather call it the No Doubt effect, since No Doubt has nothing to distinguish itself from other crappy ska bands expect an athletic lead singer. Blondie, however, fucking rules.) We are not here to put down those who gain fame that way. But we are here to remind everyone very firmly that women can be other things in bands besides lead singers/sex objects.
9. Singers are musicians. Singing may actually be the hardest thing to do in a band. Voices are certainly the most tempermental of instruments. Singing is traditionally the easiest way for women to get into music, because it's the only one where sex differences actually matter--women can hit higher notes that men.

Everything you need to know about how women are systematically disparaged, you can learn from observing the plight of female singers. Female singers are necessary--without them, you can't reach the high notes. People love female singers, always have. Maybe even more than male singers, for whatever reason.

One of the guiding principles of studying patriarchal history is that where women are necessary, you will find extreme attempts to try to reduce or even erase women's importance. The efforts to deny that women's soprano voices were necessary for opera went so far and became so cruel that they are legendary now--kidnapping and castrating thousands and thousands of young men in hopes that a few would grow to have beautiful soprano voices. (That this happened is a fact to keep in mind the next time a liberal-ish anti-feminist tells you that men surely wouldn't hurt themselves to keep women oppressed.)

In American music, female singers are accepted and actually sought after. This is where the other principle of female oppression comes into play--if you can't deny that you need women for something, deny that their work has importance. Female singers are here to stay, so singing became the shit work of music. While everyone respects someone with god-given pipes to die for, it's generally believed that singing is the easiest thing to do in a band. Male lead singers are feminized and made into sex objects. The notion that singers don't matter has created an avalanche of mediocrity as music producers try to outrun each other in a way to coax an Aretha-sized voice out of the smallest girl they can find.

But singing is hard--hard on the body, hard on the mind. It's harder to remember all the lyrics to a song than to remember how to play it. If your guitar wears out, you can buy another, but singers got only one set of pipes. Yes, there are singing lessons, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to learn by ear. And the singer is the conduit for the audience. I heard a very famous jazz musician (probably Charlie Parker, but I'm not sure) say that the goal for everyone who plays an instrument is to imitate the human voice as closely as possible. By that measure, Billie Holiday was probably the greatest jazz musician whoever lived.