{"id":30716,"date":"2019-12-16T10:45:41","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T15:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/?p=30716"},"modified":"2019-12-14T18:47:14","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T23:47:14","slug":"2010s-best-books-by-women-in-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/2010s-best-books-by-women-in-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decade’s Best Books by Women in Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If I hadn\u2019t read Sara Marcus\u2019 Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution<\/em>, I wouldn\u2019t be a rock writer. It was 2013. I had recently graduated art school and was dividing my time between three retail jobs: a liquor store, a grocery store, and a clothing store. One of my friends had recommended it to me, and even though I didn\u2019t think of music as a big part of my identity anymore \u2014 something I\u2019d felt pushed out of because I didn\u2019t have the right taste or the correct opinions or the appropriate body of knowledge \u2014 I suddenly found myself reading about music a lot.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because I was hanging out with female DJs. Or I wanted to ably push back when men told me everything that was wrong with what I listened to in break rooms. After four years of honing how my eyes took in information, it’s possible I was trying to improve my ears, too. But when I read Marcus\u2019 2010 release on long bus rides between cash registers, something in me changed.<\/p>\n

Girls to the Front<\/em> blends passion with criticism, betraying Marcus\u2019 clear love for and intimate experience with riot grrrl while carefully laying out its many skeletons. Male critics love to trot out the feminist punk phenomenon as evidence they remember women play music, too: \u201cI\u2019m not sexist; I\u2019ve heard of Bikini Kill!\u201d But Marcus declares the movement as an important part of music history worthy of critical scrutiny \u2014 and hardly a beginning or end point for women in rock. Reading her book turned on a light in me I didn\u2019t realize existed, and made me want to build on her work.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I was the only one to react that way, either. In many respects, Girls to the Front<\/em> anticipated the next 10 years of music books. 2010 to 2019 was a banner time for publishing women writing about rock. And I\u2019m not just saying this as someone who was so inspired by a book about ladies\u2019 sweat-stained expressions of rebellion that I made a slow professional shift; I have the receipts. Not only did this decade give us more women\u2019s stories, but we also witnessed small but meaningful strides in the kinds of stories prioritized (memoirs from the likes of Kim Gordon<\/a>, Liz Phair<\/a>, Carrie Brownstein<\/a>, et al became so ubiquitous they didn’t even fit into this list). What follows is a roving, incomplete list of books \u2014 one from each year \u2014 that marked small but powerful shifts in the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll landscape.<\/p>\n

2010: Patti Smith\u2019s Just Kids<\/em><\/h2>\n

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The 2010 debut from ’70s punk-poet icon<\/a> set a new standard for memoirs well beyond the rock pantheon. In lyrical prose, Patti Smith describes her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe \u2014 its evolution from friendship to romance to creative wellspring. Even more than a eulogy for one of her most formative friendships, though, it\u2019s a love letter to her influences: Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, William Burroughs, and so on. She gives longform life to Rainer Maira Rilke\u2019s romantic ideas of art as a calling. And because of this title\u2019s wild success \u2014 it was a bestseller that garnered numerous awards including the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction \u2014 Just Kids<\/em> opened the memoir floodgates for everyone from Kim Gordon to Ani DiFranco.<\/p>\n

2011: Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Ellen Willis is probably best remembered as a feminist cultural critic who touched on everything from decriminalizing drugs to antisemitism on the Left. Somewhat lesser known is that she began her career as a music writer. In 1968, Ellen Willis became the first pop music critic at The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the first ever music critic to write for a national audience. Despite influencing writers such as Griel Marcus and Ann Powers, Willis died in 2006 never seeing her music criticism get its due. In this tome, her daughter, Nona Willis Arnowitz, brings together writing that, while very of its time, was a hugely important landmark for music coverage.<\/p>\n

2012: Alice Bag\u2019s Violence Girl<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Before she was releasing Christmas tracks about punching nazis<\/a> or clacking away on typewriters alongside Allison Wolfe and Kathleen Hanna<\/a>, Alice Bag was screaming with The Bags. She first cemented her punk legacy with a cameo in Penelope Spheeris\u2019 Decline of Western Civilization<\/em>, but Bag has long proven her stay power. In her book, she describes growing up Latinx in L.A.; unlearning the violence she grew up surrounded by; going hip-to-hip and lip-to-lip with both men and women; and how these experiences shaped her life\u2019s work as an activist, educator, and musician. Early L.A. punk was queer and brown, and it had so many women \u2014 and Alice Bag will not let you forget.<\/p>\n

2013: Evelyn McDonnell\u2019s Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways<\/em><\/h2>\n

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I do a women\u2019s rock history podcast<\/a>, and my first season is on the Runaways; there may be some heavy bias in this choice. But I\u2019m letting it stand because Evelyn McDonnell has long written about the varied and important ways women have contributed to popular culture, and to me, this is her magnum opus. Queens of Noise provides cultural context while separating fact from fiction for one of rock history\u2019s most storied, undervalued bands. In 2015, the Runaways\u2019 bassist Jackie Fox revealed she was raped<\/a> by the band\u2019s manager and producer, Kim Fowley. While McDonnell\u2019s book hints at this, she resists outing Fox or even letting Fowley\u2019s predatory, abusive behavior define the band\u2019s legacy. The book is not about what was done to these women; it\u2019s about what these women did for themselves.<\/p>\n

2014: Viv Albertine\u2019s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.<\/em><\/h2>\n

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While Viv Albertine’s memoir tells the story of being an influential musician at the center of 1970s British punk, it\u2019s also an account of everything that comes after that: marriage, motherhood, cancer, divorce \u2014 even relearning how to play the guitar. Among other things, Albertine reveals shrinking her musical past to emotionally accommodate her husband and fighting with her publisher to forego a ghostwriter. Thank the stars she won that fight, because her voice is strong, insightful, and intimate. One of the simple elegances of Albertine\u2019s autobiography is how she marks time in a way familiar to so many women and femme music lovers: what she was wearing in that moment, what she was listening to, and who she was dating.<\/p>\n

2015: Jessica Hopper\u2019s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic<\/em><\/h2>\n

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When I initially saw this in a bookstore, I actually scoffed. At the time, I was regularly reading so much excellent music criticism from women that my brain couldn\u2019t yet wrap itself around the bold and unfortunate fact of the title. Highlights include Jessica Hopper\u2019s essay on emo (\u201cWhere the Girls Aren\u2019t<\/a>\u201d); Hole fact-checking Wikipedia during an oral history of Live Through This<\/em>; and an interview with journalist Jim DeRogatis where Hopper unpacks her initial instinct to separate R. Kelly\u2019s art from his abuses and admits that was a mistake.<\/p>\n

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2016: Laura Jane Grace\u2019s Tranny<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Against Me!\u2019s Laura Jane Grace uses diaries entries dating back to the third grade to open up about transitioning, which makes it a landmark trans memoir. But beyond what the book means for transgender visibility, Grace also talks about what led her to punk and anarchism; being part of one of the most celebrated punk bands of the aughts; and reconciling her DIY punk past with finding commercial success \u2014 and what it meant when early audiences rejected Against Me! for \u201cselling out.\u201d<\/p>\n

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2017: Jenn Pelly\u2019s The Raincoats – The Raincoats (33 1\/3)<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Stories of ’70s heroines really came of age this decade, but so did the critics raised on them. If contributing Pitchfork editor Jenn Pelly\u2019s articles are like singles, here was her first LP. Drawing on glimpses into the Raincoats’ personal archives and using interviews from bands such as Sleater-Kinney and Gang of Four, Pelly provides a tender, collage-like account of the Raincoats’ self-titled debut and how its influence lives on. But perhaps as important as the book was its New York launch party, which bridged multiple generations of music. In attendance was a veritable who\u2019s-who of women in rock, and it led to Bikini Kill\u2019s reunion tour.<\/p>\n

2018: Michelle Tea\u2019s Against Memoir<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Against Memoir<\/em> is exactly what the title suggests: it\u2019s not a memoir, but it\u2019s not NOT a memoir, either. Which also to say, it\u2019s not a music book, but it\u2019s not NOT a music book. Some writers observe things like how music is made or who it\u2019s made with; Tea chronicles what happens after it\u2019s heard, sandwiching it between myriad other cultural observations and self reflections. The result is a piecemeal queer history of music that resists historicization. Highlights include her \u201cTransmissions from Camp Trans<\/a>\u201d \u2014 Camp Trans being the trans-inclusive music festival that sprung up across the road from trans-exclusionary Michigan Womyn\u2019s Music Festival \u2014 and her history of HAGS<\/a>, a ’90s San Francisco dyke gang orbited by Tribe 8 who kept bands like L7, Lunachicks, and 7 Year Bitch on heavy rotation.<\/p>\n

2019: Shawna Potter\u2019s Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot<\/em><\/h2>\n

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Drawing on over 20 years of experience fronting the hardcore band War on Women, Shawna Potter has been an active voice for improving physical and psychological safety for marginalized people in music spaces. She\u2019s led trainings at large clubs and tiny DIY venues alike, and now she has a book of actionable advice for minimizing and responding to harassment. Potter takes the conversation beyond acknowledging the aggression targeted at so many people in music, especially women and gender-nonconforming people, and declares, \u201cHere\u2019s some things we can do about it.\u201d This, like so many other titles on the list, gives us a glimpse into what the next decade (hopefully) holds: a more inclusive future for women in rock – musicians, fans, and writers alike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I hadn\u2019t read Sara Marcus\u2019 Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, I wouldn\u2019t be a rock writer. It was 2013. I had recently graduated art school and was dividing my time between three retail jobs: a liquor store, a grocery store, and a clothing store. One of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":30736,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[9483,813,9479,3141,9481,9477,9475,1243,4275,9474,354,968,4186,9482,9472,9480,5308,9476,9478,9473],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/bikinikillbook.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30716"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30743,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30716\/revisions\/30743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}