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Arts
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 — 3

“You’re not like other girls,” he says. 
You are supposed to take this as a compliment. 

But what he really means when he says this is that he 
looks down on women and girls as a whole and you 
do not fit the degrading image of women he has in his 
mind.

And of course you don’t! Because (like all other 

women), you’re unique and a powerhouse; these are 
two things that couldn’t be further from that image of 
women he has in his mind. This is something you’ve 
only learned with time, or are maybe just realizing 
now. If that’s you, welcome. I’m so honored to be a 
part of this moment with you, and we are so glad 
you’re here. 

First, the crucial question: Where does the “not 

like other girls” phenomenon come from? Obviously, 
in the general sense, it’s the product of a patriarchal 
society that devalues women. But the phenomenon is 
reinforced in a plethora of ways in pop culture as well 
as through interpersonal interaction (like the one 
with our Average Joe above).

For example: despite my respect for Taylor Swift as 

a woman, a musician and a strategist (Swifties, please 
don’t come for me), the iconic and pervasive lines “She 
wears short skirts / I wear t-shirts / She’s cheer cap-
tain, and I’m on the bleachers” are the poster child 
for this trope. “You Belong With Me” shot to stardom 
and still has a special home in the cultural zeitgeist 
because it resonated with all of us, reminding us of 
that pang of sorrow and jealousy we felt watching our 
crush date someone else.

Over some delightful chords, Swift says what we 

only wish we could have: You should be with me 
instead. Unfortunately, the song doesn’t just say that 
your crush should be with you because you’re great — 
it crosses a line by arguing that your crush would be 
better off with you because the girl he’s with now is 
“like other girls” and you’re not.

In the equally popular cult-classic film “Pitch 

Perfect,” Becca (Anna Kendrick, “Love Life”) is an 
excellent archetype of this. She’s moody, she likes to 
produce music instead of singing it, she wears dark 
eyeliner, she refuses to partake in activities that many 
other women find fulfilling, she rejects the advances 
of the Dream Guy™ — you get the gist. While she 
ultimately does find love and belonging in her rela-

tionships with other girls, the film elevates her as the 
desired woman because she’s “not like them.” 

A significant period of my life was defined by my 

efforts to not be like other girls. I wore the same 
Under Armour sweatshirts as the boys in my class, 
I read the Warriors series when they did (you know, 
the completely plausible one about the warring gangs 
of cats), I wore the same DC skate shoes and I spent 
my recesses playing knockout on the basketball court 
instead of sitting on the bleachers talking to my girl 
friends. Not that there was anything inherently 
wrong with that. In hindsight, though, I did every-
thing the boys did, not just out of enjoyment, but also 
because I thought that being “like other girls” was 
a bad thing (wrong) and figured the best way to be 
the least like other girls was to be like the boys (also 
wrong). 

As my roommate pointed out over one of our 

mac and cheese dinners, it has “become cringe” to 
say that you’re “not like other girls.” How interest-
ing that, as the concept has been interrogated, its 
insidious nature exposed to the world, it is women 
who take the fall. Even now, the message is clear: 
It is the women who once fell prey to the ideology, 
rather than the men who cultivated it, who should 
feel embarrassed. From its conception, the “not 
like other girls” phenomenon was destined for a 
significantly long run before its current reckoning 
because it obscures the role of the oppressor in pit-
ting women against each other, allowing for him to 
abscond, even now.

In possibly my favorite tweet of all time, @mcapri-

glioneart wrote: “No, no, no. You misheard me. I 
didn’t say ‘I’m not like other girls.’ I said ‘I LIKE 
OTHER GIRLS. IM GAY.’” In another (now deleted) 
tweet, @MissElla wrote, “im not like other girls in 
their mid-twenties. Im childish like a 13 year old and 
moody like a 90 year old on their death bed.” These 
women illustrate (in the most amusing way pos-
sible) what we know to be true, now and forever: It’s 
not embarrassing to be like other girls. In fact, it’s an 
honor. I couldn’t be more proud of the ways I am like 
other girls. I cherish the relationships I have with the 
women who enrich my life, each one of them bring-
ing something special to the table I’d be worse off 
without. They empower and inspire me to be the best 
version of myself, and lift me up and accept me on the 
days when I can’t manage that. 

Loneliness, at one time or anoth-

er, has played a central role in many 
people’s lives. Whether it is actual 
isolation or a fear of it, it plays into 
how people look at their social inter-
actions, and at the value of their lives. 
How lucky we are that music exists! 
“Outsidership,” especially when con-
sidered through music, is strangely a 
very connecting experience at times, 
realizing you and others see the world 
in the same way. And there have been 
so many fantastic musicians (Nirva-
na, Radiohead, Velvet Underground) 
who express deeply their own per-
sonal experiences of outsidership. 
Much of rock, indie rock and grunge 
were founded around this feeling. 
The more specific you get, the more a 
general audience can relate.

My anger rises when these bands (so 

often white, straight and cis masculine) 
or their fans pervert the label of “out-
sider” and take it only for themselves. It 
most certainly has to do with the feeling 
of being wholly individual — but every-
one is a whole individual. Pop music lis-
teners are whole individuals too. Taking 
the label of “outsider” and keeping it for 
oneself is not what most of these bands 
were about. Ironically, being an out-
sider is a shared experience. It is widely 
shared by women, people of color and 
members of the LGBTQIA+ commu-
nity. I have certainly stepped into many 
rooms in my life full of men and instant-
ly felt an uncomfortable twinge as I had 
to reconsider how to relate to them in 
conversation, or if I should instead stay 
silent. And there are many fans of these 
bands, and some bands themselves, that 
don’t fall into any of these categories and 
refuse to acknowledge outsider identi-
ties besides their own. Although we 
might all at some point feel desperately 
alone, there are some who are born into 
that and can never escape from it. This 
creates certain bands and listeners that 
thrive off making people uncomfort-
able. In communicating their own emo-
tional experiences, they use too much 
anger, not enough empathy.

In writing this, I am not trying to 

attack anyone’s social experiences. 
Some prefer to exist mostly or entirely 
alone. Some thrive that way and don’t 
need people in their everyday life 
to enjoy their existence. Some have 
become alone due to others not talking 
to them because they think they are dif-
ferent or odd, which in turn causes them 
to talk to fewer people, and then fewer 
and then barely any at all. These are not 
the people I am talking about, and nor 
would I ever want to criticize them. The 
ones I refer to are those who use their 
“outsider” mindset to suck the joy out of 
art for others.

I have met countless people, often 

men, with a superiority complex about 
the music they listen to. They look down 
on pop music, dismissing it as pap. At 
one point, I bought into this. Entrenched 
in the world of male-dominated punk 
before realizing how deeply problem-
atic it is, I bought into a bitter outsider 
mindset that looked down on pop 
music, which I pronounced with spe-
cial derision. Then, amid discovering 
the usage of swastikas and iron crosses 
by bands [COPY: need a link here] like 
the Ramones and the Dead Boys in the 
CBGBs punk scene in New York (docu-
mented by Legs McNeil and Gillian 

McCain in “Please Kill Me”), [COPY: 
need a link for the book] or Sid Vicious of 
the Sex Pistols, I realized how messed up 
they had made this culture. The swasti-
ka, as they tried to explain it, served as 
a symbol to shock people. [COPY: link] 
Obviously, that is absolutely no excuse. 
In their anger, they alienated those who 
had already undergone trauma and trial, 
who had literally been cast out of society 
and tortured and persecuted.

They claimed the outsider label as 

their own, making the punk scene a 
worse place to be for people with actual 
marginalized identities. As discussed in 
Todd Haynes’s new documentary “The 
Velvet Underground,” The Factory, run 
by Andy Warhol and producing acts such 
as The Velvet Underground, was a toxic 
place for women, a place where they were 
valued only for their looks. When you see 
a whole music scene full of white people, 
or full of men, it’s not because there were 
no marginalized identities that would 
have wanted to become part of the scene. 
It’s because there was a lot of racism or 
sexism or any other -ism involved. When 
listeners consist of a majority of men, it is 
worth asking oneself why.

Sometimes, the culture is formed by 

the band. But other times, it is misinter-
preted by the fans. Especially with sen-
sitive subjects, it matters less the intent 
that the artist created with, and more 
the way the general audience will most 
likely interpret the lyrics. For example, 
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was an avid 

feminist, and wrote “Polly” and “Rape 
Me” (both stories concerning sexual 
violence) as middle fingers to sexism. He 
believed that men should be educated 
not to rape, rather than women being 
asked to protect themselves. How-
ever, the lyrics to both of these songs 
are incredibly incendiary. While he 
meant them to be empowering stories 
of women defending themselves, that 
is certainly not their only or even their 
most obvious interpretation.

Bands in such positions of promi-

nence have a lot of influence, and when 
they release something, it will surely be 
interpreted in a million different ways. 

The source also matters; on discussing 
with a friend, he remarked that these 
probably would have come off quite 
differently as Courtney Love songs, 
rather than Nirvana songs. Even though 
Cobain’s intentions were good, these 
songs can likely serve to fuel something 
terrible inside some listeners and do not 
take into account his responsibilities as 
an influential male artist. 

Even if the mostly male, white bands 

that filled these genres aren’t at all bad 
people, not many of them considered 
their domination of these musical 
genres. It is due to this that a whole coun-
ter-movement formed (that of riot grrrl) 
and is still ongoing. When searching for 
indie rock bands in the ’90s, you have 
to pick through legions of white men at 
the forefront, before reaching people of 
identities that society has automatically 
deemed outsider. For example, Long Fin 
Killie, an indie rock band from the ’90s 
headed by Luke Sutherland, a gay Black 
man, has just 1,470 monthly listeners on 
Spotify. Although they made important 
strides toward inclusion in one of the 
whitest, most male-dominated genres 
of them all, his and the band’s names 
are virtually unknown. It is this form of 
sexism, racism, homophobia, transpho-
bia, etc. that is the most prevalent: that of 
simply not considering how much space 
you take up, and whose voices are not 
being heard.

It’s an honor to be like other girls
The real “outsiders”

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EMMY SNYDER

Daily Arts Writer

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

Finding hidden gems has always 

been an obsession of music fanatics: 
stuffing eager faces into dusty crates, 
with two fingers grazing the record 
sleeves alternating to and fro, leafing 
through hundreds of records to grab 
some tantalizing faded cover art and 
bring that forgotten music to the light. 
When the needle hits the wax, the 
question arises for the music collector: 
To share or not to share?

Do we rush to have the song in 

another’s ears, hide it away for the 
perfect moment to surface or keep 
it tucked away forever? What if it’s 
shared to the wrong person? What if it 
finds its way to the internet? What if, 
God forbid, it gets to a place like Tik-
Tok or Youtube recommendations? 
Before long, everyone’s playlists and 
“Now Playing” are marked with that 
special sound you worked so hard to 
find, that secret gem you kept all to 
yourself. These are the anxieties of a 
gatekeeper.

It’s a perfectly normal consider-

ation, rest assured. We might all have 
thought proudly to ourselves, I lis-

tened to them before they were cool, 
in response to a shared appreciation 
for an artist, slyly signaling that we are 
definitely not jumping on any band-
wagon. We all desire to be just a tad 
bit original; we all have a little hipster 
inside of us that secretly delights at the 
discovery of an untouched piece of art 
that brings us the same level of enjoy-
ment as any other. Because as much as 
we might like to think we are comfort-
able with the exposure and discourse 
of our favorite hidden gems, there will 
always be a time an album goes omit-
ted in a discussion, a song so obscure 
yet so deliciously good it can’t even get 
extended playlist treatment, an artist 
we purposefully neglect to mention. 

Gatekeeping is less an active cam-

paign to silence the spread of music 
and more of an internal plea we all 
have in our minds — in one way or 
another, no matter how loud that plea 
is actually voiced, the desire to keep 
things dear to us safe will always ring 
true. As much as we cheer for the 
success of the artists that bring us so 
much joy, the transition from obscu-
rity to popularity is one without its 
pitfalls for devoted fans. The Japanese 
funk band that hasn’t found its way 
through the Youtube waves yet, the 
bedroom pop artist you’re pretend-
ing wasn’t just reviewed by Pitchfork, 
the 15,000 monthly listener indie-folk 
artists you could have sworn was only 
1,500 a month ago, as much as we’d 
like to champion around their success, 
there’s a small part of us unwilling to 
let that go. So where does this desire to 
gatekeep come from?

Discovery is inevitable, and it’s safe 

to say that gatekeepers understand 
that. If they have confidence in the 
quality of what they are attempting 
to gatekeep, whether that be a psy-
chedelic pop artist from the ’70s that 
verges a little too hard on the abstract 
or an album only available on the deep 
reaches of Youtube, they also have 
the slight doubt in their mind that 

quality will inevitably translate into 
pedestrian attention marked by Spo-
tify curated playlists and mainstream 
publication reviews. Gatekeeping is 
impossible, yet it prevails despite futile 
efforts. It’s not so much a tangible abil-
ity to control the spread of informa-
tion — especially in our time where 
it spreads at such a rapid pace — but 
rather an empty attempt at control for 
comfort.

The question “to share or not to 

share” is not as hard for those who 
dig purely for their own enjoyment 
and pay no attention to any rise in 
popularity, or for those who truly 
don’t care for those who dig to truly 
expose, such as the label “Numero 
Group” with a model to revitalize 
and renew the music. Their project 
with Duster allowed new distribu-
tion of their music along with their 
newfound popularity, amongst other 
forgotten artists. They give them a 
second chance at success for their art, 
a second chance at exposure for their 
music to reach a wider audience.

As for communities like Rateyour-

music.com, the music side of TikTok, 
Discord servers devoted to the dis-
cussion of music, subreddits and pri-
vate Facebook groups, the question 
remains a delicate one. Gatekeeping is 
still a very prevalent practice in Inter-
net communities, but it’s hard to say if 
their influence of popularity reaches 
outside their own communities, or 
is contained to the bickering inside a 
comment box. 

Despite the fact these are micro-

climates and niches amongst music 
communities, they speak to a very 
real approach to the division of artists 
amongst listeners. Surely, we can’t all 
be as perfect as an archive label, and 
surely, we aren’t as bad as Internet 
hoarders masquerading as collec-
tors. But still, that inner hipster rests 
inside of us, and where does it come 
from? What is the obsession with 
“obscurify,” the engine that ranks 

how “obscure” your Spotify data is, 
and what is the delight of having our 
number hit 70%, 80%, 90%? 91%? 

We gatekeep to prevent the music 

from being subject to analysis from 
others. In effect, when others listen 
to a piece of music, it changes as it 
gets passed around from ear to ear. 
No matter how hard we try, how hard 

we stay to our convictions, the seeds 
of doubt from Pitchfork reviews and 
YouTube replies and empty com-
ments from friends will always be in 
the back of our minds. Gatekeeping 
is simply a prevention tactic until the 
very last moment before the pristine, 
delicate, perfect, untouched percep-
tion of the music we hold in our minds 
gets muddied by the subjection of 
others’ thoughts and feelings. It’s a 
method to stave off that second before 
the image of the music we hold so dear 
in our head, the absolute image of that 
music, is altered. 

Even guilty pleasures are a part of 

this treatment. On one hand, we con-
ceal our guilty pleasure songs and art-
ists to save ourselves the shame and 
embarrassment of sharing such enjoy-
ment, but on the other, is it not to also 
preserve our own image of that music 
in our head? Do we hide our pleasure 
at these songs to save them from the 

judgment of others? To conceal is to 
contain it in its most pure form to be 
enjoyed forever, on repeat: a rapture of 
sound at each click of that play trian-
gle, free from outside scorn and meant 
just for you.

When we value the esoteric qual-

ity of the work more than the work 
itself, what we lose is that confi-

dence in it. This, in turn, is possibly 
another reason why it’s gatekept so 
hard: because that perfect image 
of the work cannot be touched by a 
scathing critique or the idea that the 
work’s quality is dependent on The 
virginal piece of music brought to 
light sacrifices the delight and plea-
sure of its obscurity. That’s why we 
gatekeep, but we also show: to feel 
the intimacy of introducing a friend 
to music never touched by their ears. 
Sharing music is a way of connec-
tion and communication. To share 
a hidden gem or an obscure piece 
of music special to us contains the 
same level of intimacy as sharing 
our favorite ’80s hits or our most lis-
tened to artists. The reason people 
gatekeep is because of this intimacy, 
or the fear of that intimacy. 

Why do we gatekeep?

CONOR DURKIN

Daily Arts Writer

A public lecture and reception; you may attend in person or 
virtually. For more information, including the Zoom link, visit 
events.umich.edu/event/84264 or call 734.615.6667.

Rhys Isaac Collegiate 
Professor of History
Susan 
Juster 

 Mumbling 

Masses and 
Jumbling 
Beads”

Wednesday, November 10 2021 | 4:00 p.m. | Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

LSA COLLEGIATE LECTURE

Finding Catholics 
in Early America

“

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