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Ornette Coleman is a dude.

Yeah, I’m supposedly in charge of the jazz section at work, and I just found out today that Ornette Coleman is a dude. Think about it– Ornette. It totally looks and sounds like a girl’s name! It’s got that -e on the end, not like Arnett Cobb, whose -ett ending looks more masculine.

Besides: this album cover is purple and yellow, and just looks like the kind of cover a chick would have:

(music geek side note: check out Clinic’s first album cover… note, the colors of the two albums are actually the same, though they don’t look it on the innernets)

Anyway… I thought he was a she, and I was really impressed, because people were always namedropping him in conversations and in music reviews of other artists who they were comparing to him. Music snobs always cite “The Shape of Jazz to Come” as being one of the most important or influential or awesome or whatever albums of the 20th century.

I was always impressed, since usually people don’t give this kind of praise to women. Usually, if a woman does something spectacular in the world of music, it’s always “best female…. whatever” or “the first woman to…” They never just say, “OK, the top 10 slide guitarists in the world are: Ellmore James, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Hooker…” Chicks always get their own category in music, no matter what they do. Because of stereotyping, I assumed Ornette Coleman was a singer, too… since most chicks who play jazz music are singers. I think there are a couple of piano players maybe… but to the uninformed person such as myself who rarely listens to jazz, all I hear mention of are chick singers.

So, there goes that dream of a chick who was ranked among men as being good at something! I don’t think it will ever happen, not in my lifetime. Feminism kind of backfired. Now dudes are whiny, and expect women to pay their own way and have jobs and stuff… yet women still get paid less, still are viewed as objects, and still aren’t given the kind of respect men get. We’re still 2nd class citizens, but now we have to carry our own luggage and open our own doors! We are expected to lift heavy objects, if we can’t reach things high up we have to get ladders, we have to do everything for ourselves… and still do all the housework.

Then there’s Martha Stewart. In order to achieve anything in business, you have to play the game by men’s rules. However, once you do that, you’re considered a BITCH. Ask any dude what celebrity they’d most like to punch out. Most will pick Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, or Roseanne Barr (OK, maybe not now, but 15 years ago, she was a target of much masculine ire). Why? Because they are BITCHES. You’ve probably heard stories about how mean Martha Stewart is to her employees, right? You’ve probably also heard about how Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion are obnoxious haughty divas and are mean to people. It really bothers me when people dis Oprah and Rosie O’Donnell. I mean, they have the double badness of being rich & famous and… NOT HOT. Guys seem to hate it when a not-hot chick gets famous. I’m not exactly sure why… I’d like to study this phenomenon further.

Do you ever hear “he’s so mean to his employees” stories about Donald Trump? Whenever anyone mentions him, do people automatically say, “god, what an ASSHOLE! He’s such a DICK to his employees!” No, not even after he got his own reality show in which he gets paid to act like a big jerk to people on national tv every week.

Where am I going with all this? Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president last week– and that’s pretty cool. However, I think the campaign, if she does make it to the final two, will disgust me beyond belief. I can stomach an awful lot, but when people start throwing stones at Hillary and other women and trying to justify it with one of the many statemtents like, “she’s just in it for the power” and “she’s just a bitch,” I get really mad. People basically see Hillary as a power-hungry, evil, conniving fiend who pulled the strings of her puppet husband from behind the curtains. So far, all the articles I’ve read about Hillary’s announcing her bid for candidacy have mentioned her failed attempt at nationalizing health care.

Do you remember the 90s? Do you remember when she was First Lady? There is no way that health care thing ever would have happened. At least she tried. She didn’t just stand in the shadows smiling like most first ladies, maybe taking up some benign charitable cause to sometimes mention. She took a stand for something that everybody ridiculed her for in the press… and now they’re all dissing her because she didn’t accomplish her original goal. Damn I hate the media. Seriously, the media sucks. Liberal Jew-Run media my ass.

Wow, this whole rant started off about how I’m dumb when it comes to jazz. How did I manage to connect that with Hillary Clinton? I have no idea how my brain works sometimes.