Time to drop the "female fronted" label?

Raised by Floor Jansen

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/ni...stopped-referring-to-bands-as-female-fronted/

If you think about it, "female fronted" doesn't remotely describe what kind of music a band plays. Take "female fronted metal", it has become synonymous with symphonic metal but that ignores the plethora of band in other metal sub genres who have a female lead singer. Just off the top of my head there is doom, folk, black and power metal where female vocalists have become commonplace. Outside of metal, there are plenty of stoner, blues, psychedelic and alternative rock bands who have female lead singers. The term is not remotely helpful in distinguishing between those styles.

The term also tells you nothing about the vocal style that a singer has. Are they an operatic soprano like Tarja Turunen or a mezzo soprano like Sharon den Adel? Two distinct vocal styles that the term female fronted does not distinguish between.

 

Absolutely.

The term is nonsensical or redundant at best.

 

Is "Female-Fronted Metal" really used as a stand-alone genre term? If so, never heard it until just now.

 

Aren't all females fronted?

 

I hear it (or rather see it as I am talking about social media) a lot.

 

That's just silly. Of course "female fronted" doesn't remotely describe what kind of music a band plays. It does describe the sex of the lead singer(s) which is a bit of information I like to know. Describing The Flaming Lips as an Oklahoma band also doesn't remotely describe what kind of music they play, but I still like to know where they're from.

 

I agree that it's good information to know.

 

I like a lot of female vocalist, but I have known people that won't listen to hard rock/ metal / punk / thrash / or garage fronted by female vocals, so they skip any reviews or links to "female fronted" music.

I guess it could be a female led instrumental band, but mostly I think it means there are female vocals,and that description is helpful to people either seeking to find/avoid female vocals.

That's not me, understand,but may be useful still.

 

Information is good and useful. Females are good, too.

 

Females are awesome, but whether a band is fronted by a woman or not means nothing to me, and tells me nothing about the music. It's also pretty sexist to act like it makes an act "special", as though females haven't been fronting bands since the beginning of the recording industry.

 

Based on my experience with this current generation of teenage musicians, we are going to achieve sexual parity in bands sometime over the next twenty years. There are as many talented female singers, musicians and songwriters as male ones and "female" is not a genre.

 

This is so p.c. Doesn't Blubberbutt, Oh, I mean Blabbermouth have better things to write about.

 

I made part of my journey home last night on a female-driven bus, and here I am still alive and posting. Just goes to show how we've progressed with the times.

 

New term for me. So it's in one ear, and right out the other. Bye-bye.

 

This. So now we're bad people if we want to knowthe sex of the singer le?

Please.

 

I'm not talking about political correctness in any way. I'm saying, in my experience with a large group of teen age musicians, fully half of the best players and singers are female. This is true across all sub-genres of rock. Any belief that only men can play metal is just a leftover from an age when most metal players were men. The next generation of bands will have more and more women, simply because there will be excellent players who just happen to have ovaries rather than testes.

 

It is not a genre, it's a descriptor like heavy metal or free jazz, lots of musicians hated the term free being used as well, but it's not up to them how people review or discuss music.

 

It's not a valid descriptor. Let's say you're listening to an instrumental recording. If nobody told you that a particular part was being played by a woman, you would have no way to tell. (Whereas you presumably can tell the difference between heavy metal and free jazz.)

 

It's in common use in the states,and used in professional review magazines, valid or not.

Pitchfork is one of the most politically correct music review sites, and they use the term all the time, it's not just in metal

 

I agree with you and have no issue with your comment. 25 plus years ago not many females listened to metal music except for some of the stoners I went to school with. The hair bands were pretty much the limit back then for most females. Once the 90s came around, the amount of females that listen to metal increased and by the late 90s into the next decade, many females listen to metal music that is heavier than what I ever listened to in junior high and high school. Death metal, speed metal etc. There's YouTube videos of girls shredding better than anyone I knew when I was their age if they could even shred. So it is no coincidence that with this new population of female listeners that a few of them want to get into the music themselves and do their thing which is fine with me.

I guess my problem is that when changes like this happen, some people can't let it take it's natural course and just refer to the artist as who they are whether they're male or female. Some people care, but most don't if a leader of a band is female. Metal music will always be a sausage fest and nothing in the near future will change that. Basically what I am trying to say is that people should just look at the musician for their talent rather than their gender and not bring unnecessary attention to try and make it look p.c. for society unless there is a problem with discrimination going on in the metal community than it should be addressed. Talent is not exclusive to any particular gender in metal or any other area of life.

 

I've never heard anybody refer to Heart like that. They're just a great band.

 

That's right. They are looked at as a band that happens to have two female members. People didn't over analyze things as much back in those days (the 80s and prior) like today.

 

some more than others

 

I think it makes a big difference in the style of music.
It is something I hope doesn't change in the best interest of consumer advocacy.

 

I consider the song "Alice" by Sunn O))) to be crossover metal free jazz. The song is a dedication to Alice Coltrane. The song has Julian Priester and some other jazz musicians collaborating with Sunn O))).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoliths_&_Dimensions



Sunn O))) could have a female as the lead person in the band and nobody should or would notice or care. Dress in a loose black robe, fill the stage with smoke, have a big stack of amps behind you, and fill the room with sound waves bouncing around and over each other. Male or female, who cares. Just play heavy and slow. Women can do that just as well as men.