[FuzzyPlum]

The Guardian
Why are the gender rules of rock and pop still so reactionary?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...-fleetwood-mac


...Next Sunday, by contrast, a group will headline the last night of the Isle of Wight festival after nine months spent touring American and European arenas, and provide a glimpse of something different. After 17 years as an on-off quartet, Fleetwood Mac have assembled all five members of their most successful line-up and come back to remind us that they are by far the most successful mixed-gender rock band in history, though surprisingly few people have ever thought to follow their example.

The fact that their internal romantic entanglements made their most successful period such an emotional hell might serve as a cautionary tale. Then again, the incredible, fantastically honest music that came out of it all speaks for itself. Rock and pop tend to scrape perfection when they deal with love and relationships; in Fleetwood Mac’s greatest work, you hear those subjects explored with such power precisely because both male and female views are on show.

Lindsey Buckingham (a man, just to make that clear) is a kinetic stage presence and gifted guitar player, but performing alongside two women is part of what makes him very different from the standard macho guitar hero. Equally, for all that Stevie Nicks is all flowing tresses and robes and hippie ethereality, the fact that she commands the stage alongside three men confirms her sense of unimpeachable strength. Stage right is the newly returned singer and keyboard player Christine McVie, a brilliant and very understated songwriter, whose career history goes back to the time she spent as an anomalous member of the English blues-rock band Chicken Shack. (“There weren’t many women in bands then – I was always the only girl,” she recently told Mojo magazine, perhaps mistakenly using the past tense.) The two other men in the group – drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bassist, McVie’s former husband John – are at the back: give or take the former’s slightly painful nightly drum solo, a case study in the musical restraint that has always left space for the band’s front rank to work their magic.

I could listen to Rumours (1977) and the jaw-dropping Tusk (1979) all day: in fact, post-election, that’s exactly what I have been doing. The band’s average age is 67.8; there are rumblings that this tour may mark the start of the end.

“I think every band should have a girl in it, because it’s always going to make for cooler stuff going on than if it’s just a bunch of guys,” says Nicks. So, two questions: why have so few people ever seized on their example? And in the midst of a musical landscape so dominated by boring big gorillas, isn’t it time a few more modern musicians belatedly did?