You’ve been at that dinner party. Maybe it was a family gathering,
maybe a business schmooze. The conversation turned to music, and
suddenly all the guys in the room started talking about their favorite
records with the sort of picayune intensity with which they’d been
discussing baseball stats minutes before. “That’s the Wooly Wombats
track on which Dude Ranchero from the Squats played foot organ with his
elbow,” some dude in an ironic Starsky and Hutch T-shirt enthuses. You
get excited too: “I have that on the Que Smells Seventies Smiles compilation as well as the original Boner Records 45!”

I
admit: I love this kind of talk. I’m a sucker for rock trivia and, ever
the tomboy, I like to hold forth with the guys (that’s kind of why I
became a rock critic). If the women convene to the kitchen, I’ll stay
in the living room and dig through the host’s CD collection. I’m geeked
that way.

Still, many years ago, the way that some men use
arcane knowledge to claim authority/ownership over music fandom began
to irritate me. Ever since I traded 45s with my best girlfriends in 4th
grade, it’s been apparent to me that female consumerism is a driving
engine of pop history (even if I didn’t use those big words back then).
Where would Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Led
Zeppelin, Madonna, and Britney Spears have been without the little
girls understanding?

Yet at dinner parties and in the trade
magazines, distaff voices tend to get shut out of the dialogue about
music. That’s why I co-edited Rock She Wrote.
It’s also why, in the early ‘90s, I started the All Girls Listening
Party, inventing (I believe) what we now call a music club.

The
music club is similar to a book club. We meet once a month to drink,
nosh, gossip, and discuss. But rather than all converging on one
central cultural document (i.e., reading the same book), we each bring
our own song to share. The only rule about this song is that it not be
too long, so it doesn’t hog up the evening. It can be an old favorite,
a new discovery, something you recorded or have something to do with,
or a track you know nothing about, except that you like it. Each member
gives a little explanatory intro of why she brought this song, then
plays it. At the end of the night, we make a CD compiling the evening’s
selections – now we have a group mixtape we can listen to whenever.

The
idea of the music club is to share our musical interests and create a
critical conversation in a non-competitive, non-judgmental environment.
My Miami group – which I now call Ladies Who Listen, because we’re no
longer girls (and we don’t lunch) – is nicely eclectic, so we get to
expose each other to diverse musical backgrounds. Last month, Geane
brought Brazilian singer Mart’nalia, Laura brought Mexico’s Ximena Sarinana, Lolo (whose indie record store Sweat is often our meeting spot) played disco queens Hercules & Love Affair, and I rocked out to MGMT. (Thanks for the turn-on, Wendy.)

You can start your own music club. Check out the MOLI profile I set up for ours to get an idea of how it works: www.moli.com/ladieswholisten.
It doesn’t have to just be for women. We debate constantly about
opening ours to men – and then never do it. So instead, one of our
husbands has started his own music club. His is international, and
works as an e-mailed playlist. Variations on the theme are encouraged.

Books
are great; the women in my book club are my favorite in Miami (and some
are also in the music club). But if music is the universal language,
then we need to find ways to talk about it that are inclusive, not
exclusive. Welcome to the club.

Evelyn
McDonnell is MOLI's editor at large. Her Populism blog runs Tuesdays and Thursdays.