“The Future of Rock Belongs to Women”: How Rock She Wrote Compiles Voices Unheard

A career so dominated by the words and critiques of male writers, it was no wonder that the women of music criticism carved their own niche into this field of writing and reporting.

In the compilation anthology titled, Rock She Wrote, editors and subsequent acclaimed music critics Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers sought to gather some of rock, pop and rap music’s most influential critic pieces written and reported by women. In more than 60 individual works from female writers across four decades, Rock She Wrote offers a vast catalogue of work entirely from a female perspective on popular music, music industry and the innerworkings of musician culture.

Although male perspective could, and still continues, to vary within the lens of music criticism, there is no more unique perspective than that of a woman’s; especially when said woman is playing the role of ‘groupie’ for a night.

In the mid-to-late seventies, a new pseudo-heavy metal band was on the rise; at their core, a hard rock band, but one that would later triumph the genre of ‘glam metal’ with their captivating face paint and flashy style of clothing. In her 1975 article titled, “I Dreamed I Was Onstage with Kiss in My Maidenform Bra,” American journalist Jaan Uhelszki wrote of her infiltration of the band and the search for an all-encompassing cover story in Creem Magazine, as she joined the musicians on stage as an honorary member of their performance.

“I pushed the point and they told me disturbing tales of other fresh faced females who were transformed into raging teenage nymphs after attending a Kiss concert,” said Uhelszki. Her time spent backstage, after refusing to report from the sidelines (“But I don’t want to see the show, I want to be in it!”), consisted of ‘locker room talk’ with several members of the band. She noted the shift in any rocker’s focus at the time, and that was the amount of women that showed interest in being with them, as the role she served in their show was often given to one of Kiss’s lucky fans, a ‘once in a lifetime groupie experience.’

Uhelszki continued, “Kiss’s Street Rock (which has been coined “Thunder Rock”) is no more than a bastardization of heavy metal,” “Its fanatical drive and strong basic rhythm slug you in the gut. I mean, have you ever seen a girl dance in her wheelchair before?”

Even in today’s culture, there exists a negative connotation with the term ‘fangirl,’ as it is associated with a barrage of mostly female super fans with an appetite for just about anything to do with the artist they adore. It strikes the reader as refreshing, even in a piece published in 1975, where female fans of a band are portrayed in the enjoyment they dedicate to their favorite musicians, instead of being reduced to what they merely offer the band members in physical value.

Uhelszki wrote entirely within her own perspective, describing details in time with how they occurred, and sprinkling in a witty and unique outlook on the situation she found herself in. Readers were able to connect with her vulnerability and nervousness, and still be able to relive her performance with the band through her own eyewitness account.

With liberating perspective comes the introspective to one seemingly restrained within the strides of feminist culture from the turn of the seventies to the eighties. Margot Mifflin, a professional keyboardist and freelance writer took to an instrumental magazine titled, Keyboard, to share her experience as a woman in the field of music writing and performing. In a magazine genre proliferated by men and pretentious stance on ‘what made a good instrumentalist,’ Mifflin offered a different way of looking at women in music in her 1990 article, “The Fallacy of Feminism in Rock.”

“The sexism we encountered came from well-meaning fools whose compliments were always qualified with ‘for a girl,’” started Mifflin. “…they told [John Moore] my playing was fine; my gender, however, was not.” In the passing of the seventies, a decade in which Mifflin described by saying, “we enjoyed more musical freedom and diversity in the seventies than we do now,” it had become clear that the rising popularity of hard/glam rock in the eighties came with a more masculine and ‘tough’ image, one that was difficult for women to achieve without maintaining a balance with overall sex appeal.

“In 1981, MTV stalled the feminist momentum we had gathered up to that point,” said Mifflin. The broadcasting of artists like Madonna brought forward what producers described as feminism, but instead made artists like Mifflin feel as though they were being pushed out of the genres they thrived in. Female folk artists were reveling in praise, while women in rock music during this span of a decade were deemed ‘too serious’ and ‘focused on their looks’, lacking a “mainstream role model.”

Mifflin, although writing with an air of bitterness, treaded her emotions in a mature and relatable way, as the reader cannot help but sympathize and question the cultural standpoint of the time alongside her. The writing reflected an array of feelings, but consistently challenged the distaste for women within a genre they contributed greatly to.

As the eighties bled into the nineties, alternative rock and the Seattle grunge scene swiftly overpowered the public interest. Where names like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains bled into one another, women in grunge stuck their ground, bands like Hole, Garbage and Sonic Youth making a name for themselves. In her 1994 article, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Needs Courtney Love,” American writer and musician Pamela Des Barres wrote of Hole and their eccentric lead vocalist, Courtney Love, just months before the untimely deaths of her husband, Nirvana’s own Kurt Cobain, and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff.

“It wasn’t very much like sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll at all for me in the beginning,” said Pfaff. “It was really intense work, just so that people would eventually accept me as a serious bass player. Because I realized right away that since I was a woman, I’d have to be better at what I did to be treated as an equal.” All of the band members in this particular moment within the interview, acquiesced the harsh reality of their position, that their work was metaphorically doubled in order to be treated equally by their male peers.

“But I’ve noticed that a lot of girls in bands will do this whole androgynous thing, and even though sometimes I think it’s natural, other times I think it’s a way of them saying: ‘Look, there’s something wrong. There is a weakness in the female character, so I’m going to cover it up and I’m going to create this masculine persona,’” said Love, when speaking of women’s role in rock music. In such a male dominated space, one that consistently triumphed their success, women seemingly felt the need to align themselves with similar acts and ideals, in order to garner their own success.

Des Barres, while exchanging personal experience in being what was considered a ‘groupie’ back in the sixties, wrote the members of Hole in a way that reflected their character: brutally honest and without care for the approval of the mainstream.

In a compilation of writings that merely reflect what the public thought at the time, it remains important to consider all strides within the equalizing of gender, especially in genres of music that amplified the image of male influence. It becomes no less contemporary to reflect on female oriented writing in the modern day, and instead holds upmost importance for the understanding of a people in a grandiose aspect of life: music.