Have been helping Annie Hysterical check details of NME archives to make sure her installation for Ladyfest earlier this month wasn't too skewed by the fact of there being a few missing copies.
We were pretty sure Annie wasn't misrepresenting anything, given that the sample used represents easily the vast majority of copies in the period shown (1989-2008). But people have been starting to ask questions for academic purposes, so we wanted to make sure it was watertight - that a large number of covers featuring females hadn't randomly been left out of those Annie had acquired for some reason, for example.
Not only are any concerns we might have had proving unfounded - take the main bands featured on the cover in 2008, one of the years most underrepresented in the sample, and you find the split is as follows:
Female: l
Male: llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
Both: llllll
- the one female in question being Scarlett Johansson, since I'm sure you're curious. I do happen to think Scarlett is a wonderful singer; but I'll leave it to you to decide if you think that's the main reason she was the only woman to get a solo cover from them that year.
so it seems we had nothing to worry about, and in fact if that year had been better represented the 'male' pile in Annie's installation would be even more dominant. But beyond that, and rather sadly, the magazine seems to have given up any pretence this year of focusing on new music.
As far as cover star slots for the last 10 issues goes - 3 were taken by the Stone Roses, 1 The Ramones, 1 David Bowie, and 1 The Rolling Stones.
This week's cover features Muse, announcing, "We're opening a door into the future!"
Sounds like someone needs to.
No comments:
Post a Comment