Book Review: Rock She Wrote
Writer’s Note - This essay was originally written as part of an MFA workshop assignment.
If you want to make the eyes roll out of a female music critic’s head, reference the “surprising number of women” at a rock show. The myth that women always eschew “harder, more raw” genres like metal or rap for “superficial” pop music is as dangerous as the assumption that pop music is somehow less authentic because it is “girly” music. The truth is that women have been consuming, playing, and writing about every conceivable style of music since before the Beatles were dodging panties onstage and videos first depicted the pervasive paradigm of a crazed fan-girl.
When Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap was originally released in 1995, editors Evelyn McDonnell (author and music journalist) and Ann Powers (music critic for NPR and a contributor at the Los Angeles Times) were in search of the voices of women. They combed through archives and liner notes to find accounts of women who were in the band or on the scene and piece together what would be the first anthologized history of women music writers. The book was reprinted in 2014, after nearly two decades of industry upheaval as record labels were slow to adapt to digital formats. While many of the publications in the anthology have since dissolved, the accounts themselves have barely aged.
The book includes essays from 61 different women, including former rock critic for The New Yorker Ellen Willis; editor and publisher of Bitch magazine, Lori Twerksy; author and activist bell hooks; musician Patti Smith; Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon; and Runaways lead vocalist Cherie Currie. The essays span the mid 1970s to 1994: from Jaan Uhelszki writing about performing onstage with KISS for Creem in 1975 to an except of Marianne Faithfull’s 1994 memoir, Faithfull, which recounts her collaborations with the Rolling Stones and the conception of the song “Sister Morphine.” The contributors chronicle pivotal points in music history across genres: the role of women in jazz, the commercial rise of hip-hop, a defense of lovers rock, a defense of Yoko Ono, and a euphoric firsthand account of feminism and lesbian freedom at Michfest.
Who are these women though? What motivated them to try to break into the boys club? McDonnell writes in an essay adapted from a 1992 article in The Village Voice that for women who really loved music, the options were limited. “You could be a musician: get dicked around by business people, be treated like a sex object, then succumb to the drug culture that keeps artists under control. Or you could try your luck in the biz-become a secretary, get harassed by your bosses, and maybe, maybe someday, become a publicist. Or you could be a well-loved groupie, maybe marry one of your hereos and get dumped down the line for a model with seamless features where your skin wrinkles.” McDonnell paints the female rock critic as someone who saw journalism as the only way to be in music while maintaining her independence and speaking her mind.
Some of the essays offer praise. Lisa Robinson wrote “The New Velvet Underground” from Creem in 1975 to capture not just what was happening with the band, but what she felt was a major cultural turning point in the rock scene away from glitz and glam. She describes the electricity of the minimal aesthetic that was attracting crowds to the Lower East Side. “Television, the Ramones, Patti Smith - they all share a very black-and-white look,” she says, “And this combined with their crazed, charismatic energy, is dramatically effective. Not only do they sound interesting, they look interesting. Without props, smoke, fire, sets, costumes, makeup, hairstyles, or special shoes.” When R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe met Robinson in 1995, he told her that it was reading this piece as a teenager in rural Georgia that inspired him to be a musician and changed his life.
Other essays offer biting criticism. One of the most disturbing accounts in the book comes from Deborah Frost covering the popular new wave of hair metal for The Village Voice in 1985. Frost, an accomplished musician and metal fan, confronts the hair-sprayed debauchery of Sunset Strip culture to examine the artistic motivations of Motley Crue. She finds a group of men obsessed with partying and pyrotechnics who show up to practice too hungover to play, deciding to receive blow-jobs in the closet from 15-year-old strangers instead. With a shocking lack of self-awareness, drummer Tommy Lee tallies up the money made and the number of girls he’s slept with. The band’s hookups are aided by an organized and objectifying system requiring girls to sleep with one of the roadies first in order to get a sticker on her backstage pass that may or may not get her a shot with the band. Lee says, “They’re troupers, man. You’ve never seen some girls take so much. These girls’ll do anything, man. Ask ‘em to bark, they’ll bark. Where do you find them? You can find them just about anywhere. Arf!”
Frost is sharply wry and restrained while writing about her time with Motley Crue in a way that starkly exposes the superficiality of the cars and the glitter for a vacuous world of sex and drinking exploited for millions of dollars to horny pre-teen fans. She ends the essay with a short report on a 1986 drunk driving accident caused by lead singer Vince Neil that severely injured two people and killed his passenger. Neil was fined $2,500.
The former High Fidelity editor Georgia Christgau argues that it is this type of contextualization that makes the writing of women music critics unique, “The way men are men and men are critics is that they’re really into the stats...I never liked reviewing music that way. I consciously try not to compare artists to other artists. I just try to describe what it is that I see and feel and think that the artist is trying to say to me as a member of the audience.” Ellen Willis, a pioneer of blending New Journalism, feminism, and music criticism famously prepared for every album review by listening to the record while dancing in front of her mirror. While male critics could get caught up in enumerating different types of equipment in each recording studio, women remembered that music was first and foremost about the experience. Their essays looked at the culture of the fans, the politics, the fashion, and how the music made the listener feel.
When Rock She Wrote was first released in 1995, it didn’t send shockwaves through the industry or make any bestseller lists. Although it is the most canonical collection of important contributions of female critics in rock music, it still does not even have a Wikipedia page, nor is it consistently listed as one of the books authored by either Powers or McDonnell. The book has quietly inspired a subsequent generation of female critics who found camaraderie in its pages as they faced the same types of sexism, insecurity, and frustration. When the new edition was printed in 2014, Rolling Stone magazine had only two women on their masthead. Reading these essays is reminder of just how vital the perspective of female critics can be, how their voices shaped music journalism, the singularity of their observations, and what we would lose without them.
