The Female Singer/Songwriter Vs. The World

I love my acoustic guitar. I love the immediacy of its sound. I love that I don’t have to plug it in just to get an idea for what will work. I love that I can plug it in and distort it and make it sound all crazy if I want.

LOVE my acoustic!

What I don’t love is the stigma attached to it.

When you’re a girl with an acoustic guitar and you take to the stage, an idea of you automatically forms in everyone’s mind. You’re going to be sad. You’re going to sing sappy love songs or angry love songs about how some man hurt your feelings. And if you aren’t those things, well, then you’re either a folk singer who is going to sing protest songs about abortion or you’re going to pretend to be Ani Difranco for your 40 minute time slot.

You can never just be a musician playing songs.

You’ll never be a person in a band. Even if you have an electric guitar, people treat you like a novelty. You better tart it up in fishnets, hot pants, and knee-high boots. If you don’t have the body for that, well, then you better be punk rock enough to pull off the angry, stomping, screaming, smeared make-up, tattooed, swearing bitch from hell persona – and you better make sure you acknowledge often how fat and/or ugly you are so that people can laugh and talk openly about it and not feel bad about themselves for doing so.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. There have been countless articles and blog posts written about women and their struggles in the male-dominated music business.

I guess I’m just finally seeing it first hand and it grosses me out and makes me get all stabby.

Why can’t music just be music?

I’ve been struggling to come up with a tag line for my music, something I can put on my one-sheet or bio that will give people at venues an idea of my sound without solely sticking me in that singer/songwriter box that means you can only ever play a show with other people who have acoustic guitars as their main instrument. Oddly enough, I see plenty of males with acoustic guitars opening for Rock Bands. Somehow that’s different…

And then I get upset that being considered “just a singer/songwriter” or a “folk singer” makes me angry. Those are great genres to be a part of. I just find it so frustrating that I’m being told by people that they are going to put me on a secondary frequency because I’m not officially a Rock Band. Or they assume I’m not a Rock Band because they see an acoustic guitar.

The acoustic guitar has come a long way. Don’t put it in a box.

And don’t put me in one just because I play one.