Women In Pop editor Paul Mitchell: “Women drive this industry”

Cover image: Dami Im

Women In Pop is a new magazine dedicated to, well, just what it sounds like: in-depth coverage of artists who make pop music and happen to be women.

The quarterly launches at Sydney venue Ivy tonight and will be available in newsagents and magazine specialists across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and several other markets in Asia. The first issue features Dami Im, KLP, Pr0files, Greta Salóme, Jackie Tech and Alice D, as well as a number of other artists to be announced at the launch.

It joins publications such as She Shreds, Tomtom, and Australian-based annual Gusher in the small but devoted sector of magazines focused on music made by women.

Editor and founder Paul Mitchell, a veteran of the advertising and TV industries in Australia and the UK, spoke to TMN about starting a magazine in 2017, trying to avert the male gaze, and how he sees the boundaries of genre and gender.

TMN: What was the genesis of this idea?

Paul Mitchell: I’ve always been a big fan of female-fronted music ever since I’ve been interested in music, and my idea for a magazine kind of grew over a number of years and I always found it quite frustrating in a way that the media and society as a whole tend to treat both pop music and more so female pop artists. They’re never given the attention, the respect that I believe they deserve. We all know how sexist and misogynistic the media world and the music industry can be. And I just felt that I knew that I had all these women that I like to listen to and I knew made incredibly powerful and beautiful music, and no one was talking about them, no one was exploring them, no one was talking to them and no one was promoting them, and I know that happens, there’s millions of musicians out there and they’re all gonna be on the front page of the newspaper, but it used to frustrate me that I could never find information about these people I was listening to.

And it also frustrated me, the way that the media portrayed women. When they are covered at all, which is rare, it often doesn’t focus on their artistry or their craft or their talent, it tends to focus on something else. At the worst end of the scale, it focuses on how pretty they are, how wonderful they look in a bikini, and I suppose at the better end, it tends to not explore their music. It tends to acknowledge that they’re very very successful, but not that they’re artists, not that they’re writers, not that they’re producers or musicians, they’re just women that generally had a man behind them promoting them, is the cliché. And I just wanted to do away with that stereotype and reverse the imbalance as I saw it by to building a magazine purely to [cover] female artists.

Pop tends to be very coded as– while women and men both make it, it’s more something that women are considered to be fans of, and anything that teenage girls are into, it gets taken less seriously like anything where the audience is primarily women.

Exactly. I agree, and in the first issue, we got a really fantastic article by Dr Rebecca Sheehan who is a lecturer at Macquarie University and she specialises in gender inequality, gender equality, whatever the correct term is, and she’s done a really interesting piece on how, throughout the history of pop and music as a whole, if you go right back to the 20’s, it is actually women who have both driven pop music and been the driving force behind pop music.

She presents a case where people like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Frank Sinatra, they were all inspired by women. There was a group of black women artists in the 20s and 30s, Billie Holiday was one of them, that really really pushed the envelope on what we knew music to be at that stage.

Like how Sister Rosetta Tharpe was supposed to be the biggest influence on Elvis?

Yeah, exactly. And Rosetta is mentioned in the [story] in quite a lot of detail. And it’s quite interesting that – and Rebecca brings this up as well – that we have this narrative that we’re being given about how men create pop music or music as a whole, when it is actually women that started it, and getting back to your earlier point about how pop is generally perceived to be something that women are interested in and women follow. That is true to an extent, and one of the arguments that Rebecca makes is that, well yes, it’s actually women that drive this industry so why are you ignoring women? It’s women that put The Beatles to where they were, it’s women in general that put One Direction to where they are, it’s even women that put people like Madonna where she is or Beyoncé. Women drive this industry both as creators of music and as followers of music and it is, I think, a huge disconnection that we just don’t acknowledge that and we don’t respect that.

Do you feel like you need to draw a line under where you think pop ends and something else begins, or is it just more a sense of pop is what’s popular and the boundaries are more porous then ever?

Yeah I think the boundaries are porous. Initially when the idea for the magazine came up and myself and a few other people were discussing it, we did talk about where does pop end and initially it was going to be a quite defined line where we may do an article on X but we wouldn’t do one on Y. But the more we got into it, the more we’ve explored it, it is a very porous border and I don’t think we would [for example] feature heavy metal if there were women in that arena, it’s probably not the way we would go, but it certainly is a more fluid situation than we originally planned and that probably many people would think.

What about how you define a woman? Would you include non-binary and gender diverse musicians as well? Is that something that you felt you needed to have a position on?

We definitely do and I think again, what we mentioned before about the fluidity between what is pop and what isn’t, is I think, and we are taking a view that a women is not necessarily an artist that’s been born a woman. Rebecca’s quite keen on and a fan of Anohni who was previously Antony, and she mentions her briefly in one of the articles and she’s going to be doing a second article where she’ll feature a bit more prominently, and we do believe that those women have as much of a voice and have even more interesting stories behind them that we do want to acknowledge.

Anohni

You can even go down to the level of, there’s a big history of drag queens making music as well and they tap very heavily into the same persona, so would we reject those because they’re technically a man? We probably wouldn’t because it’s an interesting topic and socially, it’s quite an interesting area to explore.

There have been some discussions recently about gender in music and representation and diversity on festival and venue lineups, for example. As a quarterly publication, will the magazine aim to cover current issues as well?

Yeah we are. The aim for the magazine and where we’re going is to have a balance between traditional music reporting with the difference [being] we’ll only focus on females, as well as what I would call sociopolitical issues. So for example in issue 1, we’ve got a fantastic piece by Dr Sheehan exploring some gender politics behind the origins of music. But then we have some very traditional music pieces, and what the content has always been and the goal and the aim behind it all is to have good quality music journalism, without any of the baggage that normally accompanies female musicians, and, you know, how they’re portrayed.

We don’t talk about their love life, we don’t talk about who they’re feuding with, Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry, whatever may be. We don’t talk about which beautiful dress they wore to that award function – we talk about their art, we talk about their craft, we talk about their music, how they create, who inspires them to create, what they do when they create and their background, where they’re going with their career, what they hope to want to achieve, as well as their opinions and their views on the current gender balance within music and how it affects them, how it’s going to affect others and what they want to change for the future.

Do you think there are things that you’re gonna have to be extra aware of as a man who’s editing a magazine about women?

I do. I do have to be very careful of that and it’s something I’m very much aware of that as a man there are things I don’t know about the female experience, obviously because I’m a man, but how I’m getting around that is I’m surrounding myself with as many women as possible. I’m promoting female writers wherever possible, there are men in the first issue and the team behind me are all female, my PR is Tina, as you know, the sales manager is a woman and the editorial assistants that we have are female, and it’s all about getting the balance right in that, surrounding myself with women and asking them, not can I do this or can I do that, but making sure that they’re involved in every single step of the process, so I’m not overstepping a boundary or I’m not perceiving something to be a problem that isn’t a problem or I’m perceiving something that’s not a problem that is a problem.

Sounds like part of why you wanted to do this in the first place is because you felt like there was a bit too much of a male gaze in terms of how female musicians are covered. I still find it bizarre that Rolling Stone does that “Women in Rock” one issue a year thing.

Exactly. That’s one of the – without wanting to call out Rolling Stone or anyone else – but that’s how the process of the magazine, we went through all of the main music magazines and it was quite, even to me, I was shocked and appalled that in 2016, Rolling Stone in America didn’t have a single female [on the] cover, and the previous year they only had something like, I can’t remember the exact figure now, but it was 12% or something of all female covers, and that was repeated across a whole lot of magazines, and it wasn’t just Rolling Stone, it was across the industry, which was disturbing, and that’s part of the reason behind the magazine.

KLP

I suppose the other question is, why start a print magazine in 2017? I mean, do you think a new title has some advantages over an existing one, that might have some legacy issues, or is there a lesson in the vinyl revival in that people just like holding it in their hand?

Yeah and I think that’s what it is. I mean yeah, it’s a valid question I know I’m going to be asked quite a lot. Part of the reason is personally I love print, I love the feeling of holding a magazine and the feel and the touch and the look of a magazine I think is different to what you get on a screen, and it’s also about making a statement as well – a magazine can almost be a work of art if you do it right, they can be beautiful things to hold and to read and I just prefer the format.

And I do think we probably have an advantage over older titles because we’re new, we don’t have legacy issues, such as Rolling Stone may have as being seen to be out of touch. and I know everyone screams about the death of print, but I think, in many regards, it’s considered to be overrated.

I think there is still a very healthy market for niche titles, which is what you could argue ours is. You walk into any newsagent where they still exist and the shelves are – there are still a lot of niche magazines out there that are selling and that are selling well. We’re not going in with a humongous print run, we know we’re not going to sell 100,000 copies, but I think it’s an area of the media that is still viable and is still alive and we think that the magazine format, the physical format is the best way to go at this point in time.

We do have an online, we will be having a launch online as well at the same time as the magazine, but it will be more of a stock gap between issues, we will have little news items and mini interviews and videos and bits and pieces like that, and we will expand that over time, the focus at the moment is on the physical addition – but we certainly are going online, and that will be coming alongside this magazine.

And will there be an emphasis on longform writing for the features?

Yeah they are, and that’s again why physical, we believe, is the best for us, they’re long form articles, the bulk was in the 3000 words or above. Because we really want to explore and really get into the artist, we don’t want sound bites. We want an extensive overview of the artist. We have a couple that are smaller – we have a new talent section for new artists, which is 1000 words – but the bulk of the articles are 3000.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Women In Pop will be available from Monday. See womeninpop.com for stockists.