Sophie Heawood: If Björk can’t stop a man stealing the limelight, what hope is there for the rest of us?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/31/sophie-heawood-bjork-men-stealing-spotlight

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The best person in the world, Björk, is back, raw with heartbreak and an album full of the stuff that I have played and played this week. I never thought she’d make a record like this – so painful you can step inside her bruise. But I was stunned when, in an interview with the music website Pitchfork, she explained that throughout her career she has had to pretend her ideas came from men to get other men to pay attention. “With the last album Kanye did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet,” she said, while making it clear she was not knocking him for this. “A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second… I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album – it was like doing a huge embroidery piece.” The electronic musicians Matmos came in for the final two weeks, added percussion, and 14 years on are still credited everywhere for having produced that whole album. Matmos always correct this, she said, but nobody listens: “It really is strange.”

Not you! I thought. I mean, this is a woman classically trained since childhood, who has been recording music for three decades, her CDs on sale as official tourist goods in Reykjavik airport. A woman so inherently musical that when I found an audio recording of the 11-year-old Björk reading a nativity story at school, I had to play it about 20 times, and even take it with me to brush my teeth, because the rhythm of her speech was so compelling – even though it was in Icelandic and the only word I could understand was Bethlehem.

There was another headline this week, about a new TV show from Jessica Hynes, who apparently “rose to fame in Simon Pegg’s sitcom Spaced”, when in fact Spaced was a show that she and Pegg invented and wrote together. I imagine she’s had to correct that a few times, too.

On the other hand, it was reported last week that 68% of working fathers under 35 now regularly take their kids to school, as opposed to 61% of working mothers under 35. Which is rather lovely, what progress, etc – except that the school run is a quantifiable task with a beginning and an end, and it’s visible, and you can say you’ve done it – whereas a hundred other parenting tasks that are not so easily defined are still mainly being done by women, and we will never hear about it.

Kazuo Ishiguro recently said he only spent four weeks writing The Remains Of The Day, at which news many other authors said they felt like giving up: they couldn’t dream up greatness like that in four years, let alone four weeks. What he actually meant was four weeks on a rough first draft, but people wanted to believe in his innate genius.

On the contrary, when Björk says she spent three years deep in the intricacies of composition, everybody reckons she must have got a man in. You might think the more avant-garde side of the arts would be wiser to this, but they’re not – how often have I heard that Hole’s best songs must have been written by Kurt Cobain, or that Tracey Emin nicked her ideas off Billy Childish? I imagine being an artist who is also guilty of being a woman can sometimes feel like starring in a long-running murder mystery, with people constantly excited to work out who actually dunnit. Cos it ain’t you, babe – it can’t be you.

The corporate side isn’t any better – the Sunday Times just published a list of the most powerful people in the British music industry, with not a single woman in it, no pop stars, not even the chief operating officer of Sony Music UK, Nicola Tuer, one of the smartest execs in the whole business. Invisible, apparently. Perhaps they’re just bored with hearing about women. Perhaps power, when held by women, is still a spurious thing, not quite to be believed in or trusted.

Still, imagine how exciting it’s going to be when people finally find out who has actually been doing what all this time. When society develops some kind of cultural x-ray vision, to see all those ducks’ feet furiously paddling beneath the water; whole secret networks of women’s work that history wrote nothing about. It’ll be like landing in a new country in darkness and then waking up to a view you’ve never seen before. Spoiler alert: what you won’t see is that a lot of women wanted to create things, and didn’t. What you will see is that they were creating them all along.

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