“In the beginning, there was rhythm.” So shrieked teenaged Ari Up with full-throated joy over the herky-jerk of Viv Albertine’s guitar, the dub lope of Tessa Pollitt’s bass, and helter-skelter drums by Budgie (Soiuxsie Sioux’s beau) in a 1980 song by English punk tarts the Slits. Rhythm—the repeated ordering of breaks and beats, of stops and starts, of motion and stillness, of life and death—gives popular music its pulse, its purpose. Rhythm is the pattern that propels us, onto the dance floor or maybe, with Martha Reeves and her Vandellas, into the street to dance. Grace Jones warned us about being slaves to the rhythm, or was she inviting us? Janet Jackson founded a Rhythm Nation. We can move to the rhythm, but also, crucially, we can move the rhythm. We are a rhythm movement.
Ari was a rhythm mover. With her bandmates, she created not just a new way of making music but of being in the world. A German waif plunked down into the cruel streets of Thatcher’s London calling, the woman born Arianna Forster generated vocalizations with the wild abandon of an alien autodidact. She didn’t just absorb the punk disruptions of such peers as Johnny Rotten; she propelled them, pulling notes like taffy—up and down, in and out—testing the bounds and elasticity of pitch, tone, volume. Ari cut her own path stylistically, too, with her ragged layers and spandex leggings. Sure, she sported that most dubious of dos: blond dreadlocks. But she wasn’t so much from northern Europe as from another planet, and eventually she decided to leave the colonizer for the colonies, reinventing herself as late-night dancehall groover Medusa in Jamaica. When I met her in New York in the nineties, she was a widow, a single mother, a legend, a character—and also someone just trying to figure out how to get by, to make her art and raise her children.
All the people in this book are rhythm movers: the musicians, the writers, the illustrators. They have not merely tried to fit into the grooves of popular music (or scholarship, or art) but have jumped the beat. They are musicians who inspire and compel us, the editors, writers, and illustrators of Women Who Rock. They also inspire other musicians—in fact, many of the contributors to these pages are musicians—by carving out sonic possibilities, by kicking down the doors through which their followers charge. They are pioneers more than settlers, explorers but not necessarily popularizers—mothers of invention. They are Sister Rosetta Tharpe, pulling the gospel out of a guitar. Selena, embodying the multiple cadences of border culture. Björk, dancing beside you in a virtual reality video then stepping inside you—or are you stepping inside her? Beyoncé, commanding, “World stop!” in a video alongside her bestie Nicki Minaj… then chuckling, “Carry on.” Women who bend, break, and create code tend to be dismissed as weirdos, freaks, divas, or bitches. This book honors them as heroes, leaders, geniuses, and, in Miami rapper Trina’s phrase, da baddest bitches—as women who rock.
Early in the process of creating this book, my collaborators and I agreed that rather than attempt to be encyclopedic and all inclusive, summarizing the thousands of women who have made incredible, indelible music in the last century, we wanted to tell a narrative story by focusing on key select figures who were true game changers. From the beginning, we had the concept of “women who rock,” which we knew was not a new phrase, and which we were fully aware was problematic even at the most basic semantic level—but which we also felt had a simple, direct power. Women. Who. Rock.
Women. We love women. That doesn’t mean we hate men or overlook folks who fall somewhere in between the two poles of gender (from Big Mama Thornton to Joan Jett to Laura Jane Grace). But we also recognize the centuries of oppressive systems that have conscripted humans born with child-bearing hips (as PJ Harvey says) into hard domestic labor and barred their self-expression and public lives. Much of my work as a journalist, critic, and historian has been spent trying to describe and remedy the obstacles women musicians and writers face, and to celebrate the work they do despite—or perhaps because of—those obstacles. Carole King wrote some of the greatest pop songs of all time while she was a young mother in a bad relationship with her songwriting partner. A teenager named Alicia Armendariz found refuge from her violent father in LA’s punk rock community and reinvented herself as Alice Bag. Janet Jackson broke away from binding family ties to assert control of her own career, music, image, and life.
We chose to make a book about women because there is strength in unity—divided, we fall. We’re not arguing that these music makers are all formally or stylistically linked. This isn’t a book about the genre “women’s music” (though Alice Bag does salute June Millington and Olivia Records in the essay she penned) or even, necessarily, an embodiment of Hélène Cixous’s call for écriture feminine, though I embrace her mandate in the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “Woman must write her self.” Women Who Rock champions mold smashing and pattern disruption. It offers portraits of diversity, from Patsy Cline’s country melancholy to Joni Mitchell’s folk jazz to Missy Elliott’s avant rap.
Who. Are you? This book honors identity. It unapologetically embraces exceptionalism. It’s dedicated to the notion that while all people are created equal, some manage to excel. Yes, there were more than one hundred girl groups who collectively defined an era of pop, civil rights, and feminist history. But as storytellers, we understand the power of the individual human narrative that embodies the bigger cultural change, so we homed in on members of the Supremes, the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Bluebelles. Call it great women history, if you want. We believe in the greatness of women.
Rock. Gender is not a genre in this book, and neither is rock. As I told the writers who helped choose whom to profile, we use rock as a verb, not a noun. We perceive it not as a static entity, defined by loud guitars and a 4/4 beat, but as an action that defies the containing force of a label—and that evokes a rich lineage of musical motions, from the lullaby swing of a cradle, to gospel’s transformation of the soul, to the sexual call-and-response of rock and roll, full circle back to soul rocking your baby.
There were rough parameters that guided our choices. The subjects all created music after the advent of the commercial recording business—in other words, when popular music really came into its own as a performed, reproducible, sellable good. You could say that the book focuses on the rock era, the period beginning in the mid-1950s when hitherto segregated styles of music became entwined as rock and roll, and you would not be wrong. But I argue that we move the narrative arc forward and outward, into the pop era. (Or is it the mom-and-pop era?) After all, feminist and other scholars have for years critiqued “rockism”: the hierarchizing of individualized styles of music, particularly those performed by white men, as more authentic than those styles that are created for broader commercial appeal, often via a collective process with women as its public face. Despite its title (and let’s face it, Women Who Pop just doesn’t work), this book fully embraces rockism’s counter philosophy, poptimism, in that I believe the Supremes are just as important to musical history—let alone to history history—as Bob Dylan.
It has been twenty-one years since our clearest predecessor, Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, was published. That’s a generation or three in popular culture. In that esteemed volume, there’s no TLC, no Dixie Chicks, no Lady Gaga, no Missy Elliott, no Taylor Swift, no Destiny’s Child—let alone no Beyoncé! Women have ruled the popular music stage more than ever in the past five, even ten, years. It’s well past time to canonize these game changers and to connect them to the noble lineage that made their advancements possible. Sometimes, I asked the musicians themselves to invoke their inspirations. Wendy Case of the great Detroit bands the Paybacks and Royal Sweets pays homage to Chrissie Hynde. Stephanie Phillips plays guitar and sings in the London punk band Big Joanie; she penned eight entries in this book, including tributes to Poly Styrene, Aaliyah, and Amy Winehouse. Post-punk pioneer and pop survivor Adele Bertei enshrines volcanic diva Tori Amos.
Narrowing the list of subjects was a bitch. It was the absolute hardest part of this book (which overall was a joy and a thrill to put together). The selection process was both painstaking and arbitrary. I had a wish list. Then I consulted a dozen or so writers whose work I admired, experts in a variety of genres who represented different demographics: race, age, gender orientation, geography, and so on. I asked them to submit lists of ten musicians they would like to write about for this book. Their suggestions put the combined list of subjects well over two hundred, which forced me to make dozens of excruciating choices. Sometimes, that meant picking subjects who best represented an era, rather than, say, every worthy Riot Grrrl band, or OG rapper, or seventies singer-songwriter. The final 103 acts here are by no means my favorites—that would be a very different book—but they encompass a range that I think is both broad and deep.
There are excellent books about women and popular music written by single authors, including Ann Powers’s Good Booty (Ann wrote about Joan Baez and Donna Summer for this book), Gillian G. Gaar’s She’s a Rebel (Gillian wrote several essays for us), and Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop. We always envisioned Women Who Rock as presenting not just a plenitude of subjects but also of voices and visions—of literary and visual art as well as musical. Our original editorial team of about ten writers mushroomed for a variety of reasons, but mostly because there were so many women I wanted to work with, some of whom had space in their busy schedules for only one or two essays. I loved editing these talents. Peaches praising Sinéad O’Connor! Original Riot Grrrl Allison Wolfe talking to Girly Sound maker Liz Phair! Poet jessica Care moore’s ode to Betty Davis! I believe some of these pieces—Jewly Hight on Dixie Chicks, Kandia Crazy Horse on Marianne Faithfull, Vivien Goldman on Angélique Kidjo—are the definitive takes on their subjects. Others make important arguments about pop’s gender trouble, such as Daphne Brooks demanding to know why Nina Simone didn’t earn a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decades ago, or Rebecca Haithcoat’s testament to Janet Jackson as a model of self-determination.
Over and over in Women Who Rock, there are stories of women persisting—against all odds. Rape, bad contracts, sexual exploitation, addiction, anorexia, corrupt managers, suicide, domestic violence, prison, murder: These aren’t extreme cases; they are recurring motifs. Women have put up with a lot of shit in order to sing their songs and make their records, to walk in this world and live the lives they choose. Too many of these tales end tragically. But perseverance, hope, family, love, change, stardom, talent, work, and revolution are also themes. One performance of one hymn may have sent two members of Pussy Riot to Russian gulags, but the spectacle of their trial shone a light on the repressive injustice of Vladimir Putin’s regime and made them a global cause célèbre. Now they travel the world speaking out against prison systems and make videos that continue to engage and enrage.
The writers created portraits in words, each distinctive in its point of view but also illuminating. We wanted the artwork that accompanied these essays to be equally original. So rather than seek existing photographs, we commissioned artists to draw portraits in paint, ink, pencil, and digital color. These imaginative illustrations—Björk’s head beside a planet, Mavis Staples’s afro curved into a Black Power fist, Fiona Apple shimmering in a pool of water—define Women Who Rock as much as the texts and their subjects do. If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how you can simultaneously read this book and spread its pictures all over your wall.
“I wanna be your Joey Ramone, pictures of me on your bedroom door,” the all-grrrl band Sleater-Kinney sing. If I had to give one single reason why this book exists, it’s to pay it forward. I’ve been blessed in my career to have had access to many of the artists whose music has kept the blood pumping through my veins, some of whom are in this book as subjects, or writers, or artists (check out Grace Slick’s self-portrait!). I feel personally heartsick that we didn’t manage to include an entry on the Slits. Ari was by far one of the most interesting people I ever had the honor to know, but beneath her head of hair and kinetic energy beat a heart of gold. I’ll never forget the time she called me from a thousand miles away on Valentine’s Day; she was phoning all her girl friends, to let us know we were loved. It was one of the last times we talked; Ari Up died of cancer in 2010.
As human beings, we all search for models of how to be in the world, even if, like Oedipus, we also may want to replace those who made our existence possible. Just as Bessie Smith inspired Janis Joplin, who inspired Patti Smith, who inspired Tegan and Sara, I hope the rhythm movers in Women Who Rock inspire the next generation of wayward daughters to pick up a bass, or a microphone, or a sampler. Or a pen, or a laptop, or a paintbrush. Or maybe, even just to push the Pause button. Because as Ari also sang, “silence is a rhythm too.”
World stop!
Now, carry on.
These essays are presented in chronological order based primarily on when the subjects first began their recording careers.
The playlists consist of tracks generally picked by the writers of the essays (June Millington picked her own Fanny favorites). Since this book covers a recording industry that moved from 78 rpm vinyl singles, to 45s, to albums, to CDs, to MP3s, to mixtapes, to online videos, figuring out what information to include in these lists and how to format them was tricky. We are simultaneously trying to provide a sense of historical record and provide a simple list of songs for you to find on your favorite streaming service or even to purchase. The dates indicate when a song was first made publicly available as a single, album track, download, or similar. The album titles (in italics) indicate either the long-playing record on which the song was first made available or a compilation on which it was eventually made available, sometimes decades after having been recorded or released as a single. In a few cases, the songs have never been released on albums or even as singles.
ILLUSTRATION BY LINDSEY BAILEY
It’s 1931 and we are riding high-water trouble with Bessie Smith and her ensemble of formidable seamen: Louis Metcalfe on cornet, Charlie Green on trombone, Clarence Williams on piano, and Floyd Casey on drums. Even before we hear the voice of the Empress, a tremulous muted horn announces that all is not calm out in these parts. Uncertainty hangs in the air as “Shipwreck Blues” opens with fits and starts before the band finds a pocket of smooth currents for our regal superstar to ride and make her entrance. This is the moment when our heroine executes the kind of undeniable authority that was, at that point in her career, synonymous with her name. She delivers crisp, clear-eyed orders to a “Captain” to whom she is not beholden, instructing him to “tell your men to get on board.” We are made privy to the alluring force of her effortless control of this sonic space, the space of the blues that she dominated across the span of the 1920s. Bessie is past the peak of glamorous superstardom, but she sings with the conviction of an artist who knows that she has changed the game, having led a cultural revolution that would forever transform pop. We envision her on board that ship as though she were dressed for the jook, strewn in her trademark feathers and jewels. I like to picture her leading her mates, like Washington crossing the Delaware, holding it down at the mast while looking gravely out into the storm. Smith is seemingly with the crew but not of the crew. She is our glamorous and seductively singular figure, a formidable contralto whose genius as a blues storyteller enabled her to spin gripping yarns and draw startling truths out of plaintive laments. So seasoned at this stage of her career, she embraces her role as the adventuress with delicious and winking imperiousness. She surveys the scenery of the song—an ecological universe of imminent catastrophe—while also doing her damnedest to work with the band and steer her vessel toward those extra helping hands that she spots on shore.
Clever euphemisms abound as they do in all good blues numbers. But lest we get too cozy with these sexual metaphors of ships riding into dock, our heroine flips the script in the second verse, turning inward. “I’m dreary in mind,” she croons, “and I’m so worried in heart / Oh, the best of friends sho’ has got to part.” This was Smith’s trademark move in classics like “Thinking Blues” and “In the House Blues,” jams that revel in the complexities—the affective ambiguities—of a black woman’s inner lifeworld. Growling, wrestling, fretting, mourning loss and rupture—this is Bessie Smith, our great pioneering vocalist of the modern century, the one who drove the blues into the center of the Roaring Twenties and dominated the race records industry during that high-rolling decade. As she would do on her vast array of recordings—beginning with her debut on Columbia in 1923 and continuing through her last sessions with Okeh Records in 1933 and up to her untimely death—Smith builds indelible, hypnotic drama through impeccable timing and the profundity of her interpretative powers.
Smith’s sound was drawn, in part, from the traumas of a childhood in which poverty, abandonment, and an abusive older sister shaped her polyphonous delivery. Bessie sang at the crossroads of protracted ache and steeliness. She began cultivating her skills at a young age, on the streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee, busking with her brother Andrew to survive orphanhood, picking up dance work and showbiz knowhow from brother Clarence, and finding a teacher, a rival, and possibly a lover in the form of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the country blues legend who paved the way for Smith to forge her own star charisma. Smith’s storied relationship with Rainey is the stuff of contradiction, innuendo, “prove it on me” secrets, and ride-or-die gangsta lore. It’s crucial to recognize the extent to which their collaboration and competition—beautifully rendered in Dee Rees’s 2015 Bessie biopic—encapsulate the richness of all that so often gets left out of histories of the blues: in this community of artists who birthed the modern world of popular music, black women mentored black women, offering them secrets of the performing trade, business wisdom, and warnings. They also jockeyed for the limelight, stole one another’s lovers, and battled for gigs and the adoration of fans.
Yet that period of apprenticeship when “Mother of the Blues” Rainey taught her pupil a thing or two about working the crowd and cultivating an aura on stage also reminds us of the secret history of those pioneers of the form who were experimenting, rehearsing, and exercising their aesthetic aspirations alongside one another. Taking what she needed from Rainey, Smith struck out solo in 1913, working the tent show act on her own terms, building a devoted following with the intensity, wit, and luminous sex appeal of her stirring persona. Her sound accrued knowing sophistication on the road and under the big tent, out in the crowds where black migrant peoples who suffered myriad forms of displacement (from floods, economic exploitation, and white supremacist terror) pressed up close to each other and close to the stage, listening carefully to her rendering of their sorrow. She, in turn, learned how to convey the authenticity of a people’s despair, to name the turmoil sonically and exorcise it for the masses.
Her Chitlin’ Circuit celebrity reverberated along Southern and East Coast subcultural frequencies in those years before Mamie Smith’s 1920 smash “Crazy Blues” broke the blues game wide open for black folks who’d been passed over as artists as well as consumers by a racist recording industry in the nascent days of the business. Bessie the lioness, Bessie the brawler, known for her rough-around-the-edges survival instincts and sounds, would have to wait until a Columbia deal came her way in 1923. When she finally stepped into the studios ready to take hold of Lovie Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues,” she knew some things about the appeal of blues grit that set her style apart from Hunter’s vaudevillian floss and vamping. The performance that she belted into a conical horn and onto wax shifted the artistic weight of the recorded blues from its Tin Pan Alley theatricality (led by the likes of Hunter, Mamie Smith, and Ethel Waters) to a kind of erotic melancholia that was all Bessie’s own. That big-label debut, backed by “Gulf Coast Blues,” announced to the broader public the arrival of an assured artist who could express agony as forceful declaratives, as statements of simultaneous determination and aching undoing. Smith conveyed to the world her powerhouse ability to utterly dominate the twelve-bar blues form, to use a structure that relies on repetition and improvisational revision as a platform on which to consider a continuous stream of emotional vantage points and testimonials. This was singing that, as Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, and other black feminist scholars have shown, testified to and for the complex interiority of a generation just on the other side of emancipation and staring down the misery of Jim Crow. Smith was off and running on a different plane now, a live theater vernacular sensation turned record industry phenom who would go on to record 160 songs for Columbia and collaborate with fellow geniuses Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins, who were working out their own revolutionary blueprints in jazz.
What to call such a woman? The monikers given to her (“Queen of the Blues” before being quickly promoted to “Empress”) set in motion the kind of diva tropes that have long been and remain a mainstay in pop culture. Bessie’s own penchant for beaded headdresses and sumptuous garments solidified this labeling. Such terms seemingly aim to capture the regal energy and superlative achievements of women (particularly black women) operating at the height of their talents and above all the rest, sometimes at the risk of drifting into shallow hyperbole. But back in Bessie’s day, that title would have surely taken on a special meaning for the dispossessed, whose country denied them their citizenship, protection, and due process of law. It was these people—the ones whose ardent consumerism drove the “race records” industry—who championed a vocalist who promised to build an empire of black sonic alterity in which they could unmask themselves, their nightmares, their dreams. They elected her, this queer sister who unabashedly and fiercely loved women as well as men, to look out for and after them; to voice a compendium of social, sexual, and existential desires for them; and to guide them through the disaster called Jim Crow America.
Listen closely and we hear all this in those late recordings. The trills in “Shipwreck” are signs of a veteran musician ever so loose and savvy and playful enough at this moment in her artistry to dance around the melancholic conventions she had helped to make madly popular throughout the Harlem Renaissance twenties. Now a veteran of the form she’d reimagined, she digs in to the sly histrionics of her own storytelling abilities rather than depending on the conventions of heartbreak. She is not our Bessie longing for jelly on her roll or sugar in her bowl—which is not to say that erotics have nothing to do with the struggle at the heart of her performance. The Empress lets us know that this emergency, this impending disaster in which a woman finds herself with “friends” no more, demands a captain to “blow his whistle” and give his men the signal that service is necessary and urgent, because the only thing as ominous as the nautical perils ahead is a despondent and unsatisfied woman.
Blues is the source of Bessie’s agency and infinite transformations. She uses her power to be both heroine in distress and storm system, “shipwrecked” protagonist and the conductor of an ensemble that oscillates between supplying the sounds of a superstorm as well as the steady vessel that will ride this rough water like a surfboard into port. Smith “rains” down on us in these final verses, sounding out a deluge at precisely the moment her lyrics suggest the tragedy of stasis.
Signature Bessie, indeed—but also a Bessie whom we might imagine as the sonic analogue to Romare Bearden’s rendering of the Greek god Poseidon in his classic painting Black Odyssey
