"If you spent any part of the last twenty years in indie clubs in British tweecore strongholds such as Norwich, Leeds or Sheffield, you may well be familiar with this pseudo-feminism. Remember all those guys who really loved Le Tigre or Electrelane or Bis or CSS, but ultimately might as well have been in the triples-for-singles meat market up the road when it came to putting their money where their emancipatory mouths were? I certainly knew a few. The sense that the sexual democracy of that scene is a sham, amounting ultimately to the perpetuation of the same old male privileges in a more passive-aggressive way, is one of the (many) things to have consistently undermined twee’s claims to political credibility"

What is particularly painful here, is not revelations of Norwich as a pseudo-feminist stronghold, although I’d suggest postfeminist might be a better, or at the very least alternative, way of thinking about it (it’s not just men that are engaging in these forms of feminism); but rather the very direct castigation of my beloved Tullycraft. An aesthetic difference of opinion would have been fine, the first half of the criticism offers a purely subjective response of which I simply disagree, but to actually deconstruct ‘Pop Songs’ using feminist criticism, painful reading. Painful probably because it places them on the wrong side of a seemingly important debate I wasn’t engaged in the first place.

However, on the topic of the Norwich music scene and its gender politics, I’ll be exhibiting a poster exploring the issue at the International Day of the Girl celebrations I’m hosting at The Forum. Come and look at it and make up your own mind about what it means to be a woman in the local music scene.

(Source: thequietus.com)