Sunday, November 23, 1997
POP EYE
FEMALE TROUBLE
By STEVE HOCHMAN
It's been a great year for women in rock--from the emergence
of rebel Ani DiFranco and the building stardom of Jewel to the
Sarah McLachlan-led Lilith Fair's triumph over the summer
festival tour competition.But you'd hardly know it from the first
round of Grammy voting that's underway.
The ballot being considered by the
recording academy's nearly 9,000 members to determine the final
five nominees in each category lists just 11 eligible candidates
for female rock vocal performance: DiFranco, Fiona Apple, Patti
Smith and Meredith Brooks, all of whom have received a lot of
media and public attention, along with lesser-known Leah
Andreone, Thornetta Davis, Lauren Hoffman, Lauren Christy, Amanda
Marshall, Abra Moore and Garrison Starr.
That's much better than in 1988 and
1992, when they couldn't even round up enough female rock artists
to present the category, which is only open to artists billed as
solo acts. But it's fewer than a third of the 36 counterparts in
the male category. National Academy
of Recording Arts & Sciences President Michael Greene is
concerned about the discrepancy, which he says recurs in an
"under-representation" of women in the alternative-rock
and group categories as well. But he attributes much of the
situation to timing (such female rock regulars as Melissa
Etheridge didn't release new material in the past year), genre
definition (Jewel and Shawn Colvin, among others, were deemed by
an eligibility screening panel not to be "rock"
artists) and rules twists (Sheryl Crow's 1997 singles are
eligible in several categories, but they came from a 1996
Grammy-winning album and are not eligible for performance
awards).
Carla Desantis, publisher and
editor in chief of the women-oriented music magazine Rockrgrl, is
dismayed by the lack of a female presence in the rock category,
but she doesn't see it as a blow to women in rock.
"It's not the record-buying
public or the press sending in these entries," she says,
noting that the original submissions for nomination come from the
record companies and the academy membership. "This might be
all the women who fit the category. It would only be an insult if
there were deserving women that the record companies didn't
nominate."
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