Seven years of SLACing (and new Barbies!)

Seven* years ago, having accepted a tenure-track job offer and realizing that my ability to give graduate students advice would be greatly diminished by working at a small liberal arts college, I started this blog by bragging about my job market success. Over the years, some things have changed (I finished my dissertation, started my first job, then started my second; I started a corresponding Facebook page) and some things have not (I still use the same now-ancient theme for the site, I still occasionally think I’m clever, I still like giving people advice).

As I said on the site’s fifth birthday, I originally thought that five regular readers would make writing this worthwhile. Now, I’m closing in on 100,000 total views. (Don’t scoff. Not everybody can be like Conditionally Accepted with their hundreds of thousands of views and getting called up to the big leagues!) Even though I’m not writing about grad school and the academic job market nearly as much these days, I hope that people are still finding my career musings worthwhile. Since WordPress now distinguishes between “visits” and “views,” once in a while I will notice that somebody new has discovered the site because the daily “visits” will remain constant while the “views” climb, which is always nice.

When the blog was three years old I posted lists of the most popular posts and my favorites. (Those lists of favorites still make up the “good places to start” section of the blog – maybe I should update that…) It is harder to remember which posts were my favorites now that I’ve written over 700 of them, but the post that brings people here in the most ironic fashion is probably the one in which I talked about Kanye West and Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs, quoting one of the twitter responses in the title. Over the years I have seen quite a few people arriving at the blog by searching for the title of that post, but I don’t think that an analysis of racism is what they’re typically expecting to find. Take that, racists!

In other news, today Mattel announced that Barbie now comes in three body types: petite, tall, and curvy. I have no doubt that Mattel purposefully shared this news on my blog anniversary in an attempt to bury it (like when companies release bad news on Fridays). Clearly, the two posts I’ve written comparing Barbie to Lammily and their nearly 400 combined views are the reason for this change. Take that, Mattel!

Given the huge effect my blog is having on racists and toy manufacturers, it is clear that similar influence on sexists, classists, and college administrators is not far behind. Yes, I think it is safe to say that my work here is nearly complete. Maybe this will be my last post!

*If Prince didn’t work so hard to keep his songs off of the internet, I would put a link to the song “Seven” here.

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Only men can whine

A week or so ago, Alanis Morissette showed up at a Taylor Swift concert to sing her breakout hit, “You Oughta Know.” This prompted Taylor Swift fans to ask, “who the hell was that?”, which prompted Amanda Marcotte at Slate to answer, “Alanis sucked, you’re better off for not knowing.” Marcotte explains:

Alanis Morissette was a singer who, in the mid-1990s, capitalized on a small but growing trend of “angry woman” rock acts, such as L7 and Hole, and made an absolute killing, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill worldwide. But while her predecessors wrote songs protesting sexual harassment and rape, Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you.

Although Marcotte compares Morissette to other “angry women” in the mid-1990s, I think that a better comparison is mid-’90s rock music in general. (I’ll also set aside the direct line from “You Oughta Know” to Taylor Swift’s catalog of songs aimed at people who have wronged her, which suggests that Swift’s fans are familiar with this form of protest with or without knowledge of Morissette.) The ’90s were, for better or worse, a particularly whiny time. From Pearl Jam’s “Black” to less-remembered songs like Stabbing Westward’s “What Do I Have to Do?” lots of men were singing about unrequited love. Hell, Weezer’s Pinkerton, with songs like “Pink Triangle” and “Across the Sea” helped launch an entire genre of music made by whiny men.

In this context, it seems unfair to deny Morissette the ability to whine about a failed relationship just because some of her less popular female peers sang about more serious topics. “Jagged Little Pill” is no “Little Earthquakes” or “Not a Pretty Girl,” but it wasn’t intended to be. That it sold many more copies than all of these other other albums by “angry women” put together speaks to its broader relatability, regardless of its misuse of the word “Ironic.” Marcotte seems to think that the world would have been better off if Morissette had simply said, “boys will be boys” and moved on with her life, though I bet that Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood disagree.

Whatever you think of “Jagged Little Pill” or Alanis Morissette’s music in general, Marcotte’s criticism seems to be rooted in the relative dearth of female-fronted rock bands, whether in the ’90s or today. As Shonda Rhimes has noted, when there is a lack of diversity in a particular medium, the depictions of those in underrepresented groups are expected to meet a higher standard. A lot of white men in the ’90s could whine because white men made nearly all rock music and, between them, covered the entire range of emotions and topics. If anything, the presence of L7, Hole, Tori Amos, and Ani DiFranco in the ’90s, with their music about serious issues, made more room for Alanis Morissette to talk about things that were less serious, or serious in different ways. To expect every female musician to be all things to all people indicates that there aren’t nearly enough female musicians.

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“Kanye West is a nigger.”

The title of this post is one of the more gentle quotes compiled from Twitter on this site following Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards Sunday night.  For those unfamiliar with the situation (though I recently saw this story on CNN, so if you’re reading this you’re probably familiar), Taylor Swift won the award for Best Female Video and Kanye West took the stage to say that Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies” was one of the best of all time.  Apologies followed, but the story continues to be told.

Entertainment Weekly, of all places, does a good job of examining the racial implications of this situation:

Then there’s the other context underlying this story: namely, race. I want to make it 100 percent clear that I am absolutely not accusing everyone who’s criticized Kanye’s VMAs conduct of having racist motivations. That would be ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical. But racism is a undeniable part of this controversy. Not just from the Twitterers and blog commenters whose first instinct has been to spew truly vile racial slurs in Kanye’s direction. (Blogger Harry Allen has compiled some of the most disgusting examples; warning, lots of NSFW language.) I’m talking, too, about all the characterizations of Taylor Swift as a victim of some awful crime. When a black man speaks rudely in the presence of a younger white woman — and that’s all Kanye really did — and it gets described as an “attack” or a “violation” or an “assault,” you bet that’s playing into centuries of racist tropes. When a black man does something impolite, making no reference whatsoever to race, and he immediately gets crucified for “hating white people” or “reverse racism,” that itself is a form of racism. Here’s a question for those who use this line: VMAs host Russell Brand made some pretty gross jokes about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga during the broadcast. Does he hate white people, too?

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