Gender is not genre

"What's it like to be a girl in a band? / I don't quite understand", sang Kim Gordon on 'Sacred Trickster', the opening track of Sonic Youth's last album The Eternal. Well, it seems to involve being unfairly and crudely pigeon-holed, if this Pitchfork article is to be believed. And I think it probably is. The article's message being: gender is not genre.

It's an easy trap to fall into, though. Music writers (myself included) are fond of casting around for comparisons and touchstones, and the paucity of women in indie/rock (compared to pop or R&B, for instance) means there are fewer reference points. How often are the names of PJ Harvey, Kate Bush, Bjork and Sleater-Kinney invoked with genuine justification? Not very, is the answer. And have I been guilty of making such spurious comparisons myself? In all probability, yes...

On a tangential note, Kate Bush granted Radio 4's Front Row a rare interview in which she echoed my own view of the album as an art form and the pernicious influence on it of download/iPod culture. We might both be dinosaurs, but that's just the way it is.