LEADERSHIP
[ DEALING AND COPING WITH GENDER BIAS | Manuel Luz ]
It was my bass player friend, Matt, who first turned me on to bassist / guitarist Carol Kaye. Excited about a recently seen documentary, he explained to me that Carol Kaye was one of the unsung session musicians at the center of the assembly line that was the 1960’ s LA music industry. Her discography is simply staggering— The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, The Righteous Brothers, Sinatra, Streisand. As one of the famed“ Wrecking Crew,” she played on an estimated 10,000 recording sessions in a prolific career spanning 55 years.
Think about this. Kaye wrote and played the signature bass lines on Sonny & Cher’ s“ The Beat Goes On,” and The Beach Boys’“ Good Vibrations.” She recorded the themes to Hawaii Five-O, MASH, and Mission: Impossible. And she is also an influential teacher and author, having published the quintessential book series on how to play the electric bass.
A number of articles, videos, and blogs have come out in recent years giving her the credit rightly due her, as well as to the entire Wrecking Crew. And rightly so. Not only was she a fundamental shaper of the iconic sound of those decades, but she was a female commanding the respect of her peers in a male-dominated, highly-charged industry.
Which got me thinking. Thankfully, we no longer have to work through the cultural barriers of gender discrimination, at least in music. So why does a glaring gender bias still exist?
Think about someone who plays the trumpet. Chances are, you are picturing a male. Now think about a flutist. More than likely, it’ s a female. Trombones, male. Harpists, female. Bassoonists, male. Oboists, female. Electric guitarists, always male. Acoustic guitarists, sometimes female. There’ s an obvious and quite unspoken gender bias in music, and in this day and age, there is really no good reason why.
There has been some study on gender bias in music, and factors cited include both cultural associations of musical instruments to gender differences in learning and communications styles, and even to stereotyping instruments by gender. But this gender bias isn’ t limited to music. At a Christian writer’ s conference I spoke at, the vast number of aspiring authors in attendance were women. In contrast, the Christian worship conferences I speak at are predominantly attended by men. My young daughter’ s dance academy was populated entirely by young females. Likewise, my son’ s film school was almost entirely male. Why is that?
As the modern church continues to appropriate secular musical styles and instruments, the church also seems to conveniently and unthinkingly adopt these same gender biases. Why do male worship leaders almost always play guitar, while most female worship leaders lead with just a mic? Why are worship bands populated predominantly by men? For that matter, why are most worship leaders men? And it goes deeper as well— To be quite blunt( and unintentionally stir a hornet’ s nest), why do female worship leaders have to be pretty?
A half century ago, when Carol Kaye was quietly making history as an unknown female bassist, it would be natural to understand why females weren’ t playing electric guitar or bass or drums. But in this present enlightened day of political correctness, gender bias still seems to be the unstated cultural canon.
Now it is certainly not wrong for a young girl to want to play the flute, nor for a young boy to have dreams of playing an electric guitar. Actually, it’ s a great thing. But I believe it is certainly valid— and maybe even necessary— to challenge the social norms that make flute a feminine instrument and electric guitar a masculine one. As parents of young people and as influencers of culture, we need to open the possibilities of music and the arts to everyone. Frankly, the church needs more female worship leaders and worship instrumentalists. And we need to give them a place on the platform.
As Carol Kaye stated simply,“ The note doesn’ t say it’ s male or female, the note is either good or bad.”
Manuel Luz Manuel Luz is an author, songwriter, inventor, arts advocate, and worship pastor. manuelluz. com
32 April 2018 WorshipMusician. com