by Lindy West
Ninety percent of the time, if I am talking about something important such as world hunger or myself, he is not listening because he’s on Microphone Grindr thinking about getting matching towels that say HIS and HERTZ to share with a six-foot XLR cable, his real wife. (A case study: When I texted Ahamefule to get permission to make fun of his microphone addiction in this book so that we can send our children to college, he wrote back, “Of course. If you showed me a photo of you in a recording booth but your nose was replaced by a nutsack, I would definitely notice the type of microphone first.” A pause. Then another text: “But you have to understand the significance of vibrations that occurred in the air at one point in time being preserved for all time. It is a miraculous human achievement.” Pause. “It really is.” Pause. “A microphone is one of the most beautiful things in the world.”)
Ahamefule’s favorite website is a Facebook page called Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale, where long-haired rock-men sell one another recording equipment and tell stories about their favorite audio cables. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? I have a jazzy bass; you need a jazzy bass. I need an MXLR 700-Falcon Jabroni Pro 2C-4500XL-10 Analog Pre-Amp Monitor Phase Box: Platinum Limited IguanaDog6614 Black Ice Edition; you have an MXLR 700-Falcon Jabroni Pro 2C-4500XL-10 Analog Pre-Amp Monitor Phase Box: Platinum Limited IguanaDog6614 Black Ice Edition. Consider that gear swapped!
But in the past couple of years, a wicked (and not in the cool way that gear swappers usually use it!!!) rot has been devouring Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale from the inside out, turning Daves against Mikes, Phils against Stans. That rot is called identity politics, cursed be its name.
First, though, a little background on the music business. A 2018 study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative analyzed six hundred songs that had appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 list from 2012 through 2017. Researchers found that not only did male recording artists outnumber female artists by a margin of 3.5 to 1, men make up 87.7 percent of songwriters and a staggering 98 percent of music producers. Out of 651 producers examined by the study, only two were women of color. Not 2 percent—two people.
Racial and gender disparities are just as pronounced among the technician class. According to census numbers analyzed by Data USA (an MIT-affiliated website that processes public government data into easily digested visuals), men make up 91.9 percent of broadcast and sound engineers, radio operators, and media and communication equipment workers. A full 78.6 percent of that workforce is white.
In the early 1990s, my now husband was living in Section 8 housing with his single mother, begging for a trumpet. He’d been drawn hungrily, inexorably, to music since he was a toddler, but a musical instrument—let alone private lessons—was a laughable expense for a family that didn’t always have food. Miraculously, in the spring of his sixth-grade year, two important things happened on the very same day: a hard-up neighbor posted a flyer advertising a trumpet for sale, and my mother-in-law received her tax refund.
As soon as he was able to make music, Ahamefule was just as desperate to record it. His dream was to have some kind of multitrack recorder, but that wouldn’t come until his midtwenties. Instead, he would tie a boom box with a built-in microphone to a string and hang it from the ceiling so he could record transcribed bebop solos and the originals he wrote for his grunge band, Cogito Glo (those recordings are lost to time, which is how I know we live in Hell). He read everything he could find about acoustics and frequencies and pieces of audio gear that cost more than his mom made in a year. To this day, he says, he remembers the placement of every microphone he’s ever set up.
After middle school, Ahamefule enrolled at the rich, mostly white neighborhood high school and discovered that it offered audio engineering as an elective. Kismet, right!? There was clearly no one more deserving of taking audio engineering AT HIS PUBLIC SCHOOL than little audio savant freak Ahamefule J. Oluo, finally catching a break after a childhood of grinding poverty and disappointment, right? Sometimes the world is good!
One would assume at this point that little Ahamefule enrolled in the class and learned the basics of audio engineering and made connections with professionals in the field and got internships and mentorships and tips and tricks and references and maybe even hand-me-down equipment, setting him on the path to a steady, reliable career as a studio engineer and eventually perhaps even a record producer. Right?
NOPE. BECAUSE THAT SHIT COST $200. OR $40. HE DOESN’T REMEMBER. BUT $5 MIGHT AS WELL BE $50,000 IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT.
You might want to set this book down real quick and schedule a therapy appointment for five minutes from now, because the image of a little boy tearfully begging his mother for a relatively small amount of money so he can fulfill a lifelong dream of learning a skill at which he is preternaturally gifted and her having to say no, because she has nothing, while that same opportunity—again, an elective at a public school—is instead just handed out to any indifferent, rich shit looking for an easy A, IS A LOT FOR ONE HUMAN HEART TO PROCESS. Ahamefule did not come up with the money, and he did not get to take the class, and he did not become an audio engineer, and that’s just the outhouse of a country that we live in.
That, again, was in the 1990s, when it was still somewhat feasible to live in Seattle on a working-class salary. Things have changed. The Seattle Times reported in 2018 that the median net worth of white Seattleites is $456,000. The median net worth of black Seattleites—and here you should probably beep-boop-boop that therapist again—is $23,000.
White net worth in my city is twenty times that of black net worth. If you are one of those people who believes that racism is a thing of the past, never existed at all, or is defined simply as one person being mean to another person, you are claiming that white people genuinely earn—through ability alone, because anything else would be a systemic advantage—twenty times as much as black people. White people are twenty times as good at their jobs, twenty times as skilled, twenty times as deserving. If you believe that, you are racist. That is racism. (Congratulations! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2019 is a great time for you guys.)
Nationally, the median net worth of white families is a little more reasonable, only ten times that of black families. Ten fucking times! The Washington Post reported in 2017, “Nearly 1 in 5 black families have zero or negative net worth—twice the rate of white families.” Being able to spend a few hundred bucks for a trumpet and more for an audio engineering class is the kind of investment that gives kids an early advantage, a foothold on a path beyond mere survival, but it’s an investment that’s wildly out of reach for many American families—and that disparity is absolutely racialized. These numbers reflect a pathologically racist society.
In the Annenberg study, despite obvious systemic inequalities of opportunity, 42 percent of artists were people of color. Despite everything (or perhaps because of it), American music is black music. The fact that a people who have a socioeconomic deficit of 1,000 percent still manage to dominate the American musical landscape (influentially, if not compensatorily) is a testament to what we are losing.
It was against that backdrop that Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale saw the first stirrings of unrest.
I don’t know where it started, but a few white male Gear Swap members—perhaps newly enwokened by Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, perhaps finally exorcising long-simmering guilt, perhaps just human men with basic mental processing skills and normal amounts of empathy—began offering minor discounts based on gender and race.
It was a simple, thoughtful, victimless gesture—intended to take the smallest chip, a grain of sand, out of the monumental walls of privilege and social conditioning and systemic disadvantage that funnel people down the same well-worn paths that determine which people are “the right fit” for which careers, who has the right experience, who’s just a hobbyist versus who gets a good union job. Tackling something so basic as helping one person afford the tools it takes to do something (and charging for them! It’s not even a handout!
) is the gentlest of reparations, literally the least the privileged can do.
Naturally, upon seeing this, some of the white men of Gear Swap (#NotAllTheWhiteMenOfGearSwap) parkoured directly out of their fucking gourds. Individual sellers choosing to apply minor discounts to the sales of their own personal belongings as a small palliative for the glaring inequality and power imbalance endemic to their industry is tantamount to communism! AND fascism! AND MURDER. As every white reggae drummer knows, it is extremely sexist and racist to try and heal the ravages of sexism and racism. What if someone posted that his clarinet was for sale to WHITES ONLY or that her SM57 was $50 for real Americans and $7,000 for Muslims!? The libs would go wild!
I mean, for that matter, what if only 2 percent of producers on the Billboard Top 100 list were women, and what if black musicians were historically grifted out of their own profits and music rights by white executives!?!? Oh, wait.
Keith Richards likes to tell a story about the Rolling Stones’ first trip to the United States in 1964: they visited Chicago’s Chess Records and supposedly found blues legend Muddy Waters (whose 1950 hit “Rollin’ Stone” had inspired the band’s name and whose music they shamelessly plundered to stratospheric fame and profit) working as a handyman, painting the ceiling. That’s a wild story, right? But the actual wildest part of that story is that it doesn’t end with “And then we gave Muddy Waters a million fucking dollars!!!!!”
Now, a lot of people say that this story isn’t even true. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, because it’s Keith Richards telling it, and even in his imagination he doesn’t give Muddy Waters a million dollars! GIVE FAKE MUDDY WATERS A PRETEND MILLION DOLLARS FOR STEALING THE BLUES FROM HIM, IMAGINARY PAST KEITH RICHARDS YOU RAGGEDY CORPSE.
Forgive me if I have minimal sympathy for a bunch of white dudes complaining about being charged a reasonable market price for equipment that they are going to use to make bad copies of music stolen from black people. (Notably, not one of them was complaining about the price of bagpipes.)
So this is the part where, in 99 percent of other nonsocial-justice-related internet forums moderated by middle-aged white guys, someone in charge would roll his eyes and take the path of least resistance, assuaging the legion of angry Geoffs by banning race- and gender-based discounts—case closed, political correctness foiled again.
Instead, a marvelous and singular thing happened at Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale.
The two white moderators looked at the bloody scene before them, and they said (I’m paraphrasing) …
“People can sell their own shit for whatever they want. Stop bothering us with this.”
!!!
!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And then here’s the really important part—they just kept saying “Shut up, stop bothering us with this” to anyone complaining about the policy. Forever!
Yes, of course, the anti–identity politics people didn’t go down without a fight, and yes, they got annoying, and they complained on every single post. And on every single post, every time, the moderators went in there and they didn’t say, “Okay, fine,” they said, “Oh, my God, you guys have to stop wasting our time with this stuff, we do not care what people want to sell their own belongings for, this page is for swapping and selling gear, so SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO SELLING AND SWAPPING GEAR OR LEAVE AND START YOUR OWN FUCKING GEAR SWAP.” And every single time it was a miracle! And ban them they did! They banned people! And they kept banning people! And they kept defending the policy, and more and more people started offering the discounts, and on every discount post more aggrieved whites would complain, and then the moderators—with a delectable, escalating, red-hot exasperation—would tell them to shut up and then ban them.
As I said, I don’t particularly care about gear. If anything, I view it as romantic competition. I am not a member of Gear Swap. I could not tell you what a preamp does, and I have logged probably seven hundred hours of conversation about them.
I tell you the Gear Swap story because I think it’s instructive. You don’t have to “hear both sides” perpetually—you can hear them once or twice, make a decision, and move on into the future. The Gear Swap mods made a decision and stuck to it and it worked. Their platform became stronger and more successful. It is a pleasant, civil, productive community.
Twitter could do this. Facebook could do this. In a more abstract way, our news media could do this. Our government could do this. All of them are desperate to keep you away from the truth: that they could make their platforms safe, constructive, and non-Nazi-infested for all users, but they choose not to.
The reasons for that choice are almost certainly dense and snarled: Social media platforms were largely built by men, who clearly did not anticipate the ways they could and would be weaponized against vulnerable users. It is devilishly difficult to retroactively fix a system that trolls have already figured out how to exploit. It is expensive to moderate all that content. On Twitter, the president of the United States generates towering traffic and publicity by using the platform as his brain toilet. On Facebook, bad actors spend money, too. Our national sociopolitical discourse is so hopelessly broken and partisan and foul that no one is starting from common ground. Right-wing propaganda has convinced even relatively intelligent people that we must “hear both sides” on moral no-brainers such as NAZIS = BAD. Left-wing gullibility, always seeking to do the right thing, falls for it every time.
And there is one other reason, perhaps. Men think that misogyny is a women’s issue; women’s to endure and women’s to fix. White people think that racism is a pet issue for people of color; not like the pure, economic grievances of the white working class. Rape is a rape victim’s problem: What was she wearing? Where was she walking? Had she had sex before?
That’s like if your doctor botched your bunion surgery and amputated both your feet and you went back to complain and the doctor said, “Don’t look at me! I have both my feet!”
In 2013, in the stylish atrium of a Seattle ad agency, I moderated a panel for the 3 Percent Movement, an organization founded to address the dismal statistic that at the time of its beginnings, only 3 percent of advertising creative directors were women (according to the organization’s website, that number has since climbed to 11 percent). There were three women and one man on the panel. The audience was almost exclusively women.
Our conversation was wide-ranging and sometimes contentious: we talked about the implications of men sculpting women’s insecurities to maximize corporate profits and how even a gender-blind application process isn’t a perfect fix in a society that punishes feminine boldness and confidence.
Whenever talk turned toward solutions, the panel came back to mentorship: women lifting up other women. Assertiveness and leaning in and ironclad portfolios and marching into that interview and taking the space you deserve and changing the ratio and not letting Steve from accounting talk over you in the meeting.
During the closing question-and-answer period, a young woman stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice electric with anger, “but all I’ve heard tonight are a bunch of things women can do to fight sexism. Why is that our job? We didn’t build this system. This audience should be full of men.”
I thought about that question when I sat on an all-female panel in front of a mostly female audience talking about how to fix gender bias in comedy. I think about it every time a reporter asks me how victims of internet trolling can make ourselves safer online. I think about it when abortion rights are framed as men’s to take away but only women’s to fight for. Naturally, I thought about it constantly as #MeToo ripped through entertainment and politics and our own families, illuminating the ubiquity and scale of male sexual entitlement.
#MeToo felt like an appropriately cinematic turn: It’s the third act, and our heroine is angry. She’s finally stepping into her power. The witches are coming. It was beautiful to watch.
But I keep
returning to that old question. Men: What exactly is it that you do here?
One pervasive feature of the post-#MeToo landscape has been distraught men apologizing for their gender, fretting about old drunken hookups, and begging for guidance on what they can do to help. (Of course, it took only moments to transform a mass catharsis into an emotional labor factory.) Hey, you know what you could do to help? Everything.
How about Matt Damon refuses to show up to work until his female costars are paid as much as he is? How about Jimmy Fallon refuses to interview anyone who has been credibly accused of sexual assault or domestic violence? How about Robert Downey, Jr., relentlessly points out microaggressions against female contemporaries until he develops a reputation for being “difficult” and every day on Twitter four thousand eighth graders call him an “SJW cuck”? How about Harvey Weinstein anonymously donates $100 million to the Time’s Up legal defense fund and then melts into the fog as though he never existed?
How about men boycott Twitter? How about men strike for International Women’s Day? How about men take on the economic and social burdens of calling out toxic patterns of gendered socialization? How about anyone but the oppressed lifts a finger to change anything at all?
Sexism is a male invention. White supremacy is a white invention. Transphobia is a cisgender invention. So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well intentioned but floundering, as though they are not the experts.
You are the experts.
Only 2.6 percent of construction workers are female. We did not install that glass ceiling, and it is not our responsibility to demolish it.
In the summer of 2017, some old friends invited me to appear on their podcast. They are two stand-up comedians in their midthirties—I know, the podcast comes as a shock—and their show was a kind of micro–focus group, investigating how to be better straight white dudes by picking the brains of guests who don’t fit that description.