Auto-Ethnographical Podcast Preview

Photo Credit: Jason Devaun (Flickr.com)

The group I will be introspecting on in a podcast that will be listenable here on creatively decisive next week will be one I’m very familiar with. I’m person who loves creating and being exposed to music. More specifically I’m a male guitarist. The “male” part of that sentence becomes relevant when you’re talking about the sexism that exists in the guitar world and, more importantly, in music as a whole. I originally wasn’t going to cover this topic at all until I asked a friend what adjectives came to mind when talking about guitarists and she replied with “sexist” among other things. The entertainment industry is the subject of much controversy over sexism and, in some cases it’s justified. I feel as if its almost my duty as a musician to clarify that even though sexism in the music industry is a real issue that needs to be addressed, saying that all male musicians or music professionals are inherently sexists is unfair. Most of my research is comprised of music professionals talking about their experiences witnessing or even acting in a sexist manner towards female music professionals. I represent the vast majority of the music subculture who does everything in their power to treat all fellow musicians with respect regardless of race, religion, sex, gender, or anything at all. An example of someone who shares this mentality is Nick Jaffe, a session musician out of Minneapolis, who maintains a blog about all things music. In a recent post, he discussed the exact issue I mentioned above. His, mine, and most music fans’ argument was that the way to combat the problem of sexism in music was that all musicians should go out of there way to make sure women and all people are included in the same conversations, given the same voice, and treated the same way. Many academic studies have discussed this same issue in the context of business in general. In short, any discrimination that women could experience in any traditional business setting could happen just as easily in music. These parallels will be further explained in the auto-ethnographical podcast coming next week.