Article Review 2

Ashley Compton

Blog Topic: Women and Country Music

Article Review #2

Andsager, Julie, and Kimberly Roe. "Country Music Video In Country's Year Of The Woman." Journal of Communication 49.1 (2006): 69-82. Print.

            In Julie Andsager and Kimberly Roe’s article “Country Music Video In Country’s Year Of The Women”, they examine the portrayal of women artists and characters in country music videos. In the article, they do some research to determine if the portrayal of women in country music videos are symbolically annihilating to women and discuss their results. In the process they look at how women and men artists are portrayed in terms of appearance and roles, and they look at how women characters in the music videos are portrayed in the country genre (72). Their research shows that women artists usually portray women progressively, while men artists usually portray women stereotypically.

            Since 1997 was declared by the country music industry as its Year of the Women, Andsager and Roe’s method involved taking a random sample of CMT’s (Country Music Television) music videos that aired in the last two weeks of January 1997 (73). They sampled a total of 285 videos. The artists name and gender, as well as the director’s name and gender were recorded for each of the videos. Other details recorded for each video included the type of song, consciousness of both women artists and main characters, their role, body type, clothing, age, and even the number of characters of color. After the data was collected, the authors analyzed their results.

            In regards to the gender of the artists and characters in the music videos, Andsager and Roe discovered that of 71.2% of the videos featured men artists and only 28.1% featured women artists. The remaining .7% were duos of both men and women artists. Of the main characters in the videos, women appeared more frequently than men and it was more likely for female main characters to appear in men’s music videos. Of the directors, they learned that men directed almost all of the videos. With this information, Andsager and Roe acknowledged that “Despite the country music industry’s proclamation of 1997 as the Year of the Woman, the number of female artists featured on its premier video channel, as well as the ratio of male to female videos played, suggest that women have not reached an equal footing with male artists.” (78)

            Concerning some of the other factors that were recorded while watching the videos, Ansager and Roe found that women artists were more likely to portray women as fully equal than men artists were. In male artist videos, women were much more likely to be considered as “keeping her place” or in a very stereotypical way. Also, 21.9% of the main characters that were men were “working”, while only 6.2% of the women main characters were. Dealing with physical appearance, they discovered that men in 94.1% of the videos wore neutral clothing and only 5.4% of the men in the videos wore somewhat alluring to alluring clothing, while only 57.5% of women in the videos wore neutral clothing and 41.2% of them wore somewhat alluring to alluring clothing. With these results, Andsager and Roe concluded that just as research suggests that women in other genres of music video are symbolically annihilated, women in country music videos are also symbolically annihilated in that they are objectified and stereotyped.

            Andsager and Roe’s article is very closely related to my blog topic of “women and country music”. Their article deals with the portrayal of women and gender roles in country music videos, which are just a couple examples of the problems involved with women and country music in general. This article and Janelle Wilson’s article “Women in Country Music Videos” discuss many of the same topics dealing with women and the country music industry, making them very similar. Both articles examine the portrayal of women in music videos in the country genre. They also both focus on the idea of country music videos being a way to encourage the transition from traditional gender roles to not-so-traditional gender roles however, Wilson’s article deals a bit more with the portrayal of women in the lyrics of the songs while Andsager and Roe’s article focuses more on the portrayal of the characters in the video. I appreciated the tables that were included in Andsager and Roe’s article. They were a good visual, and they discussed and explained the tables in the writing, which was a very helpful. I feel that this article does a great job of exposing issues involving women and country music and should be read by anyone interested in the topic.