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Looks Aren't Everything Are They?

© David Reid

This weekend as I searched for my Suite 101 topic my girlfriend suggested. Sexism in the music industry. I like to touch on this topic from time to time because it's so wide spread that it seems to be the norm or worse acceptable. Attached to sexism is this notion that women in the industry must be quite attractive otherwise forget pushing their music. Now it might not always seem quite obvious but if you consider successful women performers many if not all are quite attractive. Not to take away from anyone but it is strange that you don't see unattractive women performers. Is there a link between looks and vocal ability? Clearly there is no true correlation. So it is just by chance? Or Accidental? Unfortunately not, in the music industry there is a clear correlation between looks and success.

Now you might argue that you can't tell how attractive an artist is when you hear her song on the radio, but in the last decade MTV has shown it has more influence on what's popular then any radio station. Recently I read a Time Magazine article about video producers and how this one was producing a video for a less then perfect looking female artist. His solution was to hide her in a freakish costume essentially hiding her. This oddly this direction worked because this video is now in heavy rotation on MTV. Apparently in addition to beauty an occasional side show freak will have success(you might note Marilyn Manson). But for the most part looks matter because we all been condition to believe that beauty equals talent. Or that we really don't care about talent but would rather buy albums made by attractive women. So before you buy that Spice Girls album or Jewel's album stop and think for a moment. "Why am I buying this?"

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