Rock and roll is alive and well — and my data confirm it — women are no longer just 'the chicks'
Women in Rock series
Welcome, everyone, to another post in the Women in Rock series.
I’m avidly working on a post about the Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but got waylaid by my struggle in finding the right way to start it.
Like the best songs, I always look for a catchy hook. Last night I finally found it. Let me tell you, it’s a humdinger.
So I beg your indulgence in allowing me more time to write that piece.
I’ve also been immersed in reading about the overall background of the sixties — thanks to Hugh Jones over at The Record Store Years for recommending Mansion on the Hill by Fred Goodman — and it has come as quite a surprise that the music industry in the sixties was a veritable wild west. The artists and record industry people were making everything up as they went along. I mention this because Sister Rosetta died in the early 1970s just when things started to get a bit more ‘normalized.’
Today I want to talk about the current status of rock ’n’ roll, and also about women artists within this so-called genre.
But first — drumroll please! — tomorrow I will be posting the first chapter of my rock ’n’ roll romance comedy, Untouchable. Every Thursday I’ll post a new chapter.
This is something you can opt out on, as you can any topic I write about that you’re not interested in. I’ll give instructions on how to do that when I send it out.
It’s meant to be fun, a bit of an antidote to the seriousness and responsibility of writing about women rockers and the sins of the music industry, through some fictional satire that I found a blast to write.
It’s also a bit of fantasy fulfillment for those of us who have either wanted to be a rock star, hang out with them, or ‘get with’ one. Now you can.
Rock ’n’ roll is alive and well
“Rock is dead,” so I’ve been reading here and there for quite a while now.
I took it for granted as true and wrote the same thing in some of my posts.
The usual claim is that rock as we know and love it died in the nineties, in the aftermath of the suicide of the last mega rock star, Kurt Cobain, and the inevitable demise soon thereafter of the so-called grunge movement that he and his band Nirvana had ushered in.
The lid of the rock coffin was slammed shut in the late 90s and early noughties by the rapid takeover of local radio stations in the U.S. by the homogenizing juggernaught of corporate radio.
It was then nailed shut and lowered into the ground by the wholesale theft of record industry incentives and profits by music thieves, first by file-sharing app Napster and most recently by streaming giant Spotify.1
Yes, all these things happened and had an undeniable effect, but — surprise, surprise — it turns out that rock and roll didn’t die after all.
Like a zombie, not only is it alive and kicking, but it’s got good spirits and juju on its side.
Rock and roll is going to outlast us all. In fact, odds are, it might never die.
I made the mistake of believing the ‘rock is dead’ hype myself because the rock stations in my area seldom play anything beyond ‘classic rock,’ which they seem to define as anything from the late sixties — mostly the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd (not even the Beatles!) — up to and including the ‘grunge’ bands of Seattle — Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots.
Listening to these stations, you’d start to think that post-grunge, Britpop, and later versions of alt rock were either figments of your imagination or so inconsequential as to be not worth any real rock lover’s precious time and attention.
I moved to the UK in 2004 only to discover that Britpop group Oasis — which is, in part, a British response to grunge — was a national obsession, and duly became obsessed myself.2 When I brought them up with friends and family back in the US, they had not a clue.3
You won’t hear Oasis on classic rock stations, despite the fact that their debut album Definitely Maybe in 1994 was the fastest-selling in UK history and their (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? album the following year became an international hit and went 4x-platinum in the US alone.
Do they ever play at least the Oasis hits “Wonderwall” or “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (below) on US radio? Not that I’ve heard.
It’s as if time stood still after things fell apart in Seattle and the radio industry went corporate. Certain rock hits became enshrined in amber by a clutch of iHeartMedia dudes forever nostalgic about their own personal rock ’n’ roll past.
Every once in a while, a song I’ve never heard will play on the local station and I’ll rush to find out what it is. Heck if it isn’t from this century, from a group I’ve never heard of.
My guess is that someone compiling the playlist at corporate headquarters went momentarily rogue and was summarily chastised, told to get back in his box or find himself ejected from the radio dude fraternity.
Of course, you almost never hear women bands or artists on these stations either. Literally, almost never. As if they don’t exist in Corporate Dude world. Heart and Pat Benatar once in a blue moon.
It’s been with a shrug of my shoulders — I’m not a music historian, after all — that I went along with this ‘rock is dead’ narrative. It seems quite pervasive in American culture.
But then two Substack writers I greatly respect for their knowledge of music recently challenged this narrative, leading me to reconsider.
Joe Bonomo came out with an emphatic and yet empathetic explanation in his post “Everything will be alright,” on his stack No Such Thing As Was:
“Whenever people lazily argue that Rock and Roll Is Dead what they really mean, and maybe feel bad about, is that rock and roll long ago retreated from the cultural spotlight, the buzzing center of what we called in an earlier era ‘water cooler talk.’ The last time when loud, guitar-forward rock and roll rode the airwaves (another ancient term) Bush was busy not accomplishing missions and Spotify was in diapers.
“Yet powerful, moving rock and roll’s created all of the time, all over the world, on weekends in front of thousands, on Wednesdays in front of a dozen, in bedrooms, basements, and tour vans. (Just read this Substack!) The Beatles, the Sonics, the Stooges, Ramones, the Clash, Nirvana, Green Day, the Hives, and the rest, those who are famous or aren’t, those you’ve heard and I haven’t, will never stop thrilling kids, who dutifully discover them in their parents’ or uncles’ or aunts’ collections, or who are turned on by them by a friend, or who, alone with headphones, surprise themselves into the bliss of changes, hooks, eighth notes, bridges, the DNA of rock and roll mirroring their own genetic makeup, fuck ups, thrills, heartaches, and joys.”
If you’re not reading Joe, you should be, as he teaches about this stuff and, as you can see, writes like a samurai.
The other person whose recent words I’ve found both timely and reassuring is Kevin Alexander, who writes his On Repeat Records stack reviewing new music and in a recent post had the following uplifting message to impart:
“Every year, I celebrate all the great music we’ve been gifted while worrying that next year will see the other shoe drop. I first did that in December 2020 and have been proven wrong every month since. Not only are there a ton of releases steadily coming out, but it also transcends genre or any other artificial guardrail we try and put up—
“In other words, a ton of good stuff is coming out, and there’s something for everyone. It’s almost overwhelming— but in all the best ways.”
Besides Joe and Kevin, there are plenty of other people breaking new rock and other genres and subgenres of music on Substack, and you can find them through my post on “How to find musicians and music writing on Substack.”
You don’t have to go searching and scrounging around on the streaming platforms or the social media sites, although you can certainly do that if that floats your boat.
But I have to urge you to reconsider, because I’ve been tracking women in rock for the past month or so here on Substack, and I can’t keep up with all the artists and bands I’m finding.4
It’s an abundance of riches whether you’re tracking the girls or the boys or everyone.
Women are no longer just ‘the chicks’
I started to keep a spreadsheet of women rockers with autobiographies or ‘insider’ or authorized biographies for this Women in Rock series, but I was finding few entries after the early nineties.
I was wondering if this was a problem with there being a dearth of women rockers in the new millenium, or if instead they were just too young or too early in their career to think about writing an autobiography or authorizing someone else to write one.
I decided to start adding every woman rocker I could find to the spreadsheet. It was shocking to me once I made that decision how quickly the spreadsheet expanded. I’m now up to 267 entries — artists and groups — and adding more almost every day.
What has blown my mind is that, not only is there no dearth of female artists or female-led or all-girl bands in recent decades, there is in fact a veritable explosion that parallels the eighties.
As just one example, see the video of schoolgirl group The Linda Lindas performing “All in My Head” at the top of this post. Since 2019, they’ve already opened for Bikini Kill, The Rolling Stones, Paramore, Green Day, and Smashing Pumpkins, performed at Coachella, gotten their song “Growing Up” in the Inside Out 2 film soundtrack, and are now headlining their own tour.
Based on which year an artist or group became active, here is how the entries in my spreadsheet break down by decade:5
Before the 1960s - 9 entries
1960s - 28 entries
1970s - 44 entries
1980s - 53 entries
1990s - 29 entries
2000s - 38 entries
2010s - 53 entries
2020s - 13 entries
With this current decade, the 2020s, we have to keep in mind that there was a lockdown that prevented touring and collaboration, so it is bound to be an anomaly and have a lower figure.
Please also keep in mind that I have just started populating this spreadsheet in the past month and consider myself at the beginning of this journey.
If you know of sources for data, please do let me know, as I am keen to make it as complete as possible.
There are a couple other important observations I would make.
Genre used to be fairly straightforward. You were identified fairly easily as being in the rock camp or in a sub-genre such as folk rock, pop rock, punk rock, or metal. Now there are so many sub-genres and so many artists crossing genres that it makes your head spin.
Last year, college student and remarkable writer Reid HT set up a substack called Every Genre Project to describe and illustrate every genre and sub-genre he could identify. He spent the entire year doing this. I don’t know if he accomplished his ultimate objective, but, any way you look at it, it’s an extraordinary site.
His last post in January, before taking off for study abroad in Italy, was on Rock’s Global Takeover. As he shows, the number of sub-genres multiplies exponentially when you start expanding your analysis around the globe. That’s another reason I’m limiting my Women in Rock project to the US and the UK, the two countries I can say I truly know. (If you’re wanting international coverage of women in rock, I recommend Zapato’s Jam.)
Of course, one of my favorite rock and roll movies, The School of Rock, had a genre map on the blackboard, drawn by Jack Black’s character Dewey Finn to educate his prep school charges:
That film came out in 2003. Not sure Dewey would have such an easy time of it drawing that map now.
In my spreadsheet, I had the prescience (or more like good luck) to include a column indicating genre/sub-genre, and I’d say it’s quite telling.
Through the 1960s most artists stayed mostly in their commercial lane with ‘influences’ from other lanes, but starting in the 1970s we start to see acceleration in lane-changing.
In the late 80s and the 90s sub-genres start popping up. That trend dramatically surges in the new millenium, I’m assuming because of the rise of indie rock and artists no longer being subject to the dictates of the record industry in terms of how they define themselves.
I also don’t know how much of the categorization is being applied after the fact based on the arrival of new categories to distinguish among artists. Some of it may be self-identification by artists, some of it I’m surmising might be categorization by music analysts. I’m interested in your own observations and thoughts on this.
Another important observation is the remarkable acceleration in artist collaborations and ‘guest artist’ gigs as they perform with one another on recordings, tours, and concerts in the new millenium. There has always been a lot of this going on behind the scenes — people playing or singing backup for other artists — sometimes paid and credited, sometimes unpaid and uncredited.
But in the past couple decades, with the rise of indie rock and the greater difficulties in securing record label deals, artists have had to become remarkably adept at securing income from multiple sources and marketing themselves through a myriad of channels. Collaborations are a brilliant way to do this. It’s a win-win for the artists involved as long as they can get along and make some decent money in the process.
Most artists appear to be involved in multiple collaborations, even if they’re already a member of a band, as well as performing solo. The days of having clear-cut affiliations and identities is well and truly over. I suspect that a relationship map of these affiliations would be nigh impossible.
An example of what we’re seeing is the group I’m With Her, nominated in 2020 for two Grammys and winning one for their song “Call My Name.”
The group is composed of three singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists:
Sara Watkins, who plays fiddle, ukelele, and guitar, has toured with Jackson Browne and the Decembrists, released six albums and seven singles as a member of Nickel Creek, and released three albums as a solo artist
Sarah Jarosz, who plays mandolin, banjo, and guitar, has released seven albums and eight singles, and been nominated for 12 Grammy awards and won four
Aoife O’Donovan, who plays guitar and piano, is lead singer for Crooked Still, co-founded Sometymes Why and I’m With Her, has released ten solo albums, and been nominated for five Grammy Awards as a solo artist.
This is the new normal. And what I would say is that the business and organizational world talks a good game about collaboration, but the indie music world lives it and role models it.
I was going to share I’m With Her’s “Call My Name” with you, but I discovered their version of Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” and have decided to share that instead. It shows the singing talents of each member of the trio, demonstrates how much joy they’re getting from playing with one another, and shows how women artists are influencing one another across the span of half a century.
Amazing. And proves my points in this post. Rock is alive and well, and women are no longer just ‘the chicks.’
You might ask, is this group really rock? And I would respond, can we even tell anymore? And do we care with music like this?
Too many metaphors, and gruesome ones at that. Apologies.
Oasis is a Manchester band and I lived near Manchester for four years. It’s a great city.
They didn’t know Blur, Suede, or Pulp either.
No, Substack is not paying me to endorse them. It’s just a quid pro quo for providing a site where I have the opportunity to ‘sound off.’
Yes, I am a numbers nerd.
Thanks for the mention, Ellen! Terrific piece!
Sister Loretta rocks like hell.