Once again, patriarchy quells artistry

The doorbell rang this afternoon, the postman presenting my fabulous purchases from Amazon. One of the more anticipated CD's was the David McCallum album Music--A Bit More of Me. I will elaborate more on this in a later post. But in downloading the CD onto my ipod I was looking at the songwriters for the songs. A cover of Stevie Wonder's "Uptight" was credited as written by Moy/Wonder/Cosby. Seeing what was an ostensibly Chinese name, Moy, I was intrigued. After all, my brother's preschool teacher Sharon Moy was Chinese American.

Well it turns out I was wrong. As wrong as the time my parents tricked me into thinking that Nat King Cole was part Chinese.

Sylvia Moy was an African American songwriter and producer who spent a large part of her career at Motown. In fact, she was the first female at the label to have the title of record producer. She wrote so many incredible songs with both Wonder and Henry Cosby, including 'My Cherie Amor". She also wrote the Marvin Gaye/Kim Weston classic "It Takes Two".

And for those of you who grew up in the 90's I am sure you will remember this theme which was also written by Moy.

Which got me thinking about female producers. Especially in a time when so many manufactured pop starlets make it big not on their own merits but on the ingenuity of their super-producers (who often become stars themselves, e.g. Pharell) it is interesting to note the paucity of women in this position. So for all the young women shaking their booties on MTV very few will have women behind the scenes with the power in determing a would-be pop diva's musical persona. This easily explains the subject nature of so many of the songs these young booty shakers sing. They lament loosing their man, they want to be dirty, they just wanna be your girl . All perfectly crafted to the heterosexual male ideal.

NPR's All Things Considered did a two part story on this. Take a listen. It's a sad ending to the story though. Make sure you listen the second part to hear it. As usual, it is the women who are always caught in the dilemma of choosing loneliness and vocational success or a relationship and lessened career aspriations. Here's to hoping there are more people who can really handle an accomplished and driven woman as a partner. Because if they don't exist, so much amazing music will go uncreated.