Last week, an open letter “to the Australian music industry” (dubbed #meNOmore) was published, detailing the widespread experiences of sexual harassment, assault and violence experienced by women in the industry. It contains appalling stories, from everyday acts of denigration and boundary-crossing, to sexual assaults kept quiet with threats to the victims’ careers. It is far from the only industry to experience these issues, but is there something unique to the music scene that allows this behaviour to flourish?
“With all of the recent developments and scandals, we often go straight to the consequences for the individual perpetrator, which is obviously important,” Elspeth Scrine, a musician and co-ordinator of Listen — a feminist organisation that organises events to showcase and support marginalised artists — told Crikey. “But we don’t often enough look to the structural elements.”
“Part of it is the same problems that afflict a lot industries: the music industry is structured with men at the top, in areas like management,” Dr Catherine Strong, a senior lecturer in media and communication at RMIT told Crikey. “But also men are given a lot more power as taste-makers, they are inherently taken more seriously than women.”
Strong said there was a culture in the music industry that venerated behaviour in men that would be abhorrent in any other context.
“A particular myth is allowed to flourish — sex, drugs and rock and roll — that posits women as prizes and music as guaranteed sexual access to women,” she said. “As well as this, people often accept abusive behaviour as part of the ‘troubled genius rock star’ myth. We’re stuck in a ’60s/’70s mindset in some ways, and we have to dramatically re-frame how we view this behaviour.”
Scrine said it wasn’t just glamourised and venerated artists who exercised this power over young women, but every level of the music industry.
“It may be an agent or manager who is holding your career, it may be a sound engineer who controls how you sound every night,” she said.
Notably, the #meNOmore letter felt the need to point out that it’s signatories were neither “whingers” nor “vibe-killers”. Scrine said the culture of complicity spread to contemporaries, not just people who hold power.
“It’s really hard to call things out. Because of the culture of touring, there’s an intimacy that builds with your fellow musicians, you develop these close relationships, and there’s a tendency to close ranks,” she said. “So when behaviour or comments start to push that line, it gets very hard to say ‘whoa, I’m not comfortable with this’. It’s exhausting to always feel like you have to be the killjoy.”
Scrine said it was important that campaigns like #meNOmore didn’t just focus on the most high-profile victims.
“It’s an incredible campaign, but it’s really important that voices of marginalised groups, like women of colour or trans women don’t get silenced in that process,” she said.
The #meNOmore letter describes itself as an “all-inclusive movement — particularly encouraging participation of Indigenous, POC and LGBTQIA+ musical communities who have experienced intersections of sexual discrimination, harassment and violence”.
One hopes we advance, but be wary of comparing eras. I have been involved in a small way with very grass roots music for a fair while (ie forty odd years). There is something a little uncertain, a little dangerous, a little exotic in the figure of the minstrel. Historically, they lost their heads now and then: literally. I have never been a hunter of unattached women, being happily monogamous, but I have often been intrigued at approaches made by women towards musicians and advances accepted from them as well. There has been a milieu which has blurred limits and easily gets out of hand. No respect and no time for the predators, but it isn’t always as simple as it has been painted. Especially not in times gone by when attitudes were different. Today we can and should expect better.
OBO – “Gone with the Gypsy laddie-Oh”.
I’ve been going to gigs for close on fifty years and, where I’ve been close enough to the stage to observe what’s going on, I don’t remember a single one where there weren’t women in the audience making f— me eyes or gestures at the singer (assuming he happened to be male). Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’n roll go together. It’s too simplistic, as you say, OGO, to look at ‘predatory’ sexual behaviour in the music industry in isolation of this sometimes inconvenient truth.
The answer is mate, that blatant industrial-scale exploitation is in the music industrys nature.
Remember when the Mob controlled the industry (don’t answer that – it was first half of the 20th or thereabouts)? The general way of doing things hasn’t moved on from those days (eg. that payola’s illegal as balls, doesn’t matter if you have battalions of barristers ready to argue that it ain’t no thing); ditto the more general exploitation and sliminess woven into its fabric as a result (eg. Milli Vanilli weren’t told that they’d be lipsynching until the manager made sure they’d spent their advance – he didn’t want them walking away).
Courtney Love wrote about the more customary exploitation some while ago
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
if you can get past her defence of Lars Ulrich (it was before we learned the extent of his malpractices*)
*(listen to Excels “Tapping Into the Emotional Void”, 1989 – sound familiar?)
Not an easy one, working in an industry inherently aligned with the (legal and illegal) drug industry. And also being financially inherently unstable means it tends to attract risk takers in all genders. Not that that should ever excuse anyone’s misbehaviour, but it does complicate matters on the ground. But the more it’s discussed openly the better, for everyone.
The music and entertainment industry are open to many forms of exploitation…