Last week, while I was getting my oil in my car changed, I decided to venture down a few blocks to GC (Guitar Center, not Golden Coral) and after playing a couple of Fender J-Basses that were in serious need of cleaning and adjustment (as are most of the instruments in stock at Guitar Centers across the country) I moseyed into the instruction book section to see if they carried any of the Sherr Music books. Instead, I found something that completely disgusted and infuriated me:
Apparently Daisy Rock has released a bass method book specifically aimed at the female student.
Before I get into the most obvious question this book poses, I will say that, personally, I have no great love for many of the method books released by the major publishers out there. Any book should be reinforced with real-life musical interaction, whether that interaction be from an instructor or a group of friends that get together and jam in the garage. Learning music is just like learning a language, if all you have to guide you is a book you won’t get very far, you need to listen to the language and have people there to help you along. That being said, my complaint with these beginning method books is just that they rely too heavily on nonsensical exercises that bore the student into oblivion or waste space with stupid pictures and charts and do not provide enough useful content. The Mel Bay Method is a particularly agonizing series as it hasn’t been updated since it was written in the 1950’s and features a somewhat confusing method of teaching the student how to play bass string by string as opposed to position by position (for you laymen: watch the Late Show With David Letterman” and the house bassist, Will Lee. Pay close attention to how often he moves his whole hand up the fretboard with few exceptions he stays in the range of the first four or five frets, or the first position. If a beginning student were to learn from the start that all 12 pitches can be played in that first position, many of them would not quit after the first three months.)
So, this Daisy Rock book is ridiculous because it is not only in the same category as many of these other lame instructional books but it pretends to be a tome of empowerment for aspiring young female musicians. This book, written by Daisy Rock founder, Tish Caravolo (a woman), offers nothing new or innovative other than pictures of female bassists (more on that later). As far as the content goes, this book is no better or worse than any of the other beginning method books on the market. The big question remains: What does being a girl (or boy) have to do with learning a musical instrument?
Should I be reading “The Husky White Fellows’ Guide to Tagalog”?
Empowerment is the smokescreen for Daisy Rock’s entire mission, which, apparently, is to make crappy short-scale instruments in the shape of purple dandy-lions or pink hearts and sell them to young girls. In my experiences as a teacher, very few of my female students have wanted anything to do with this. Even if they required a shorter-scale instrument they’d rather tough it out on a Squier P-Bass than get something that made them seem less able than or separate from the male musicians they knew and played with.
Because of the size of the instrument, compared to the guitar, beginning electric bass students are generally a little older (13 to 16) just simply because their hands are finally big enough to hold the darn thing. This is not always the case and I have had many students who were just small kids (male and female) and may have preferred a smaller short-scale instrument if they were made more available and of the same quality of construction as their full scale cousins (The Fender Mustang and Ibanez GAXB are the only shorter-scale basses I know of in the entry-level price range). Even so, many would choose a full-size instrument over the smaller ones because of the “tough-guy” factor, and, to be sure, the last thing they want is a short scale bass that looks like a butterfly or a heart or tampon or whatever.
What I am getting at is that if a girl is 11 or 12 then, yeah, she might be inclined to buy a Daisy Rock bass just because she thinks it looks cool. (This is, of course, after Barbie and Disney screw up her sense of gender-identity and she is believing that pink is for girls, blue is for boys, that girls should like horsies and rainbows while boys like working on cars and playing with guns.) As soon as she hits Middle School and starts listening to real bands (not Kidz Bop CDs) and jamming with other (mostly boy) musicians she’s going to drop that thing in a dumpster and beg mom and dad to buy her a Fender or an Ibanez. In my opinion, Daisy Rock is geared at a very specific age group where girls think heart and flower-shaped things are cool.
Inside “Girl’s Bass Method” are various pictures of famous female bassists such as (L.A. studio legend) Carol Kaye, Tina Weymouth (Talking Heads) and Meshell Ndegeocello. This feature has a double-edge effect on the student, in my opinion. In one respect, I feel that my female students should have strong role models and I encourage them to listen to musicians who have been successful amidst a largely male musical environment. It’s important to have people you can relate to when you are in the sometimes daunting process of learning and practicing music. Having someone like that to look up to can be an incredible source of inspiration. However, I really recommend Tina Weymouth and MeShell because they are killer musicians, not because they are female musicians. The fact that they are female is incidental in my eyes. I see them as musicians.
Many of the pictures in Girl’s Bass Method were of the affirmative action persuasion; meaning, mediocre bassists that got through the gate in bands where they were the scantily clad eye candy for the 17 year-old boys in the audience or they were members of mediocre all-girl gimmick bands. I’m not going to get into details of who is which, but the bottom line is, yeah if you saw Smashing Pumpkins back in 1995 and you thought D’Arcy was cool and it made you want to play bass, then great. I’ve met hundreds of great bassists over the years who have proudly professed that Gene Simmons spitting fire is what got them hooked on the bass when they were kids but at some point they realized there was more out there. The last thing I would want is for a girl to think she could stop working toward fulfilling her potential as a musican because she figured out she could wear a leather halter-top and fishnets and still get into bands so long as she looked cute for the boys.
I always thought empowerment was about equality. Making something separate for girls makes them feel like they need special attention because they can’t handle the standard thing, like doing “girl push-ups.” Most of the women in my life are genuinely insulted by society’s efforts to make them feel like they are separated from the other 50% of the world. The intrinsic logic behind Girl’s Bass Method should lead to an eventual Play Guitar Like A Man book (attn: The Nuge). Most of the great musicians I know, and I know many, could care less if their bandmates are black, white, male, female, blind, mute, midget, or three-headed crab people. That’s not what music is all about, and my gut tells me that Ms. Ciravolo knows this and is merely taking advantage of a perceived void in the industry (a lack of girl-focused products). My response is simply that Daisy Rock is using the same tactic that has been used to sell beauty products and encourage crash dieting: create a product that will reinforce a feeling of inadequacy by disguising that product as the key to empowerment.
