I chose this assignment as gender within society has always been a huge area of interest for me. I find it thrilling to discuss how gender differences affect our daily lives without us even realising it. The world of popular music is no exception as we are hounded from the moment we wake until we return to sleep with music, all of which is underpinned with a myriad of social comments voiced by the whole production team, not all of which are even given consciously. Gender is a huge subject area to cover with many stereotypes and pre-conceptions, alongside a massive amount of diversity within the way that people enact and interpret gender and sexuality.
For the grounding of my essay I have decided to focus mainly on ‘Atomic Kitten’ and ‘Slipknot’. I feel that these two groups make a great point of contrast as they are both current acts, prominent in our music charts. Both acts have a well known name and recognised commercial success, yet they are hugely removed from one another in musical style, performance and attitude. I am interpreting the title literally, in respect to it proposing that role play, image, and the gendered performance… are all crucial to success. Therefore, to disprove one aspect would invalidate the whole

Slipknot approach the music industry in a very different manner. Rather than being a group ‘foundered’1 by the industry, Slipknot formed themselves in Iowa USA in late 1995. The band consists of nine musicians, heavily influenced by ‘Korn’, ‘Marilyn Manson’, and the “nu-metal explosion of the late 90’s”2. Since the summer of 2000, Slipknot have achieved three top forty singles and a platinum, self titled album. I would view the band as having wider aims than Atomic Kitten as, along side the pursuit of financial gain, Slipknot have a strong allegiance to the ‘role’ of a hard-rock band. While Slipknot aimed for wealth and fame, they were unwilling to compromise their music to achieve this. The result being that the members faced feelings of disbelief and ridicule from their audiences in the early stages, inspiring the mostly anonymous stage show. Slipknot, when performing live, adopt stage aliases (numbers zero through to eight) rather than names. In addition, the members wear individual masks and identical boiler suits. This masked image is the main reason that I have chosen to reference Slipknot with Atomic Kitten. My motive being that, unless you knew anything about the band’s line-up, you would have no visible clue to the gender of the band’s members as their body shapes and faces are always obscured. Most people, if asked to guess the gender of the performers would (in this case correctly) guess at Male. I believe that this is due to the nature of the music and stage play given by the group. Live, Slipknot present a very lively show, often including violence and coarse language. In addition, their genre of music is one with very few recognised female artists. However, this is not to say that there are no female performers who act violently and use coarse language, playing hard-rock, ‘punky’, and raw material. Fine examples of these performers would be the groups ‘Tampasm’, ‘My Ruin’ and of course the more renowned ‘Skin’ from the band ‘Skunk Anansie’. All of these girls have made an impact on the music industry and are respected within circles that appreciate their style. I find it interesting to note that because of the aggressive and harsh vocal style employed, it is sometimes difficult to decide on the gender of a vocalist within this genre. To validate this point, I played the Tampasm song ‘Hard Core Romantic’ to a small group of friends from varied musical backgrounds (I have included this song as track three of the accompanying CD). After hearing the song, all of my specimen group were surprised to learn that the band they had just heard was entirely comprised of females. It is on this basis that I then return to my use of Slipknot’s anonymity. Slipknot could easily include female band members and many people would never know. Indeed, with the aid of a little signal processing, even the vocalist could be a woman! Therefore, I feel it is fair to say that Slipknot do not use clear gendered performance within their act. With the benefits of now knowing that the members are all male we can argue against this, saying that the members portray many male stereotypes. Unfortunately, the important point remains that for the most part of their careers so far, the identity of the members of Slipknot was hidden, leaving gendered performance out of the selling criteria for the band.

I would like to begin by briefly discussing some definitions. Image and gendered performance are fairly simple, with image referring to the style, attitude and commercial packaging and aesthetics of the act. Gendered performance simply translates as the way in which the performers and producers display, both consciously and subconsciously, their stance on masculinity/femininity. For instance, do they wear pink and move delicately in an effort to appear ‘girly’, or do they use cars in their packaging and act boldly and confident as a patriarchal model. Role play is trickier to define.