“Women’s Music as a valid category?  Yeah, right, sure …”

Go to the record store and look at the categories.  You’ll find rock, blues, jazz, and pretty much the same file list you just came from, but you won’t find “women’s” as a record store category unless you’re shopping at someplace like CDauvinist Records & Tapes over in Leland.  I don’t believe in that “plays like a girl” crap.  The reason I put that tag in the table was to have an excuse to lure you here and say, “I told you so” about that goddam Ladies of the Cape Fear anthology I got in so much hot water over a couple of years ago.

What I said about the record was that the performances were by and large very, very good, but that stylistic inconsistency made the record very, very difficult to listen to, because nobody wants to go from a jazz piece that happens to be by a woman to a country piece that happens to be by a woman to a light classical piece that happens to be by a woman to a blues piece that happens to be by a woman, etc.  I also suggested that this anthology scheme implied sexism on the part of the record producer.

A few nattering bitches who didn’t understand exactly what the hell I’d said were joined by the record producer trying to smoke screen himself and by Lan Nichols, who strayed from his usual anonymous letter-writing modus to write a letter to the magazine that printed my review in the name of his mother-in-law.^*  The main jist of the complaints against me was that Ladies of the Cape Fear was done for charity, and how awful it was of me to say anything negative about a warm fuzzy project like that.

In the first place, one dollar from every fifteen dollar CD sold was allocated to Habitat for Humanity, so it was never more than 1/15 a charitable project.  In the second place, Habitat got some unexpected bills for printing and other expenses associated with the Ladies release and ended up sending a registered letter to the record’s producer telling him to immediately cease and desist all usage of the slogan, “The House That Music Built” and otherwise washing their hands entirely of a project that was a liability rather than an asset to their charitable cause.  Finally, several of the artists on Ladies, including one who was so enraged with me that she fired me from the Master of Ceremonies role I had agreed to take at the album’s release event, ended up pursuing legal remedies against the record’s producer, who left town without leaving a forwarding address…

…and based on this dumbass smalltown fiasco, there are still idiots out there who think I was either the bad guy or the bad guy’s puppet in the whole mess.  Well you stupid bastards can kiss my ass.

* … and he lives with his mother-in-law, too, which ranks right up there with his writing me anonymous hate mail when I was on crutches as a reason why he’s such a hero of mine.