“Girls Can’t Play Guitar”: On Musical Gatekeeping

I watched an excellent mini-documentary on the New York Times website about The Liverbirds. They were essentially the female version of the Beatles: a four-piece group that came up in Liverpool in the 1960s. The documentary featured interviews with the two surviving members of the band.

One of them shared an anecdote that really stuck with me. They were at a club and met the Beatles. John Lennon scoffed and said, “Girls can’t play guitars.”

Obviously this is musical gatekeeping. And it extends beyond the players themselves into the audience. My blog attempts to get to the heart of the music and why we react a certain way to it. So with that in mind, if we go beyond the sexism and flame wars, what is it about the music itself that reads as masculine?

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On College & Classic Rock

I’ve gone through many musical phases: years of my life where I’ve been singularly obsessed with one artist or artists, a single genre.

In college – specifically sophomore year – that phase was classic rock. Fall semester I was really into The Who. If you asked me how I was feeling, I was often tempted to answer, “a little like a dyin’ clown with a streak of Rin Tin Tin.”

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