Women who write

When Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell started writing about rock and roll in the early '80s, they found themselves operating in a largely male-dominated field. The "Big Daddies of rock criticism," as Powers refers to writers like Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Dave Marsh, and Robert Palmer, were all men. And the pages of the major music magazines were largely a domain for stories and reviews written by men. Women weren't entirely excluded from the business, but as Powers, McDonnell, and many other female writers saw it, they were at the very least tacitly, and sometimes even openly, discouraged from pursuing serious careers in rock journalism.

The '90s have been a good decade for women in rock, a subject that's gotten a lot of play in the media over the past few years. But what about women on rock? Powers, who is now the music editor at the Village Voice, and McDonnell, an in-demand freelancer who just finished a year stint filling in for Greil Marcus writing a monthly music column for Interview, are thriving. The two of them have also edited the first-ever anthology of music criticism by women, Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap. (They'll be reading from their contributions to the book at the Brown Bookstore in Providence on March 20 and Tower Records in Boston on March 21, where they'll be joined by local contributor Tinuviel.) But is the success of Powers and McDonnell indicative of a larger trend?

"Well, it's gotten better for women in the past few years," is Powers's cautious reply. "When writing positions have opened up, they have sometimes been filled by women. There's Karen Schoemer at Newsweek, Danyel Smith at Vibe, Barbara O'Dair at US, Sue Cummings at LA Weekly. But if you look at the major music magazines, it's still a boy-oriented crowd. Women are the minority, and of the women who have had to stick it out for 10 years or more, very few of them are still writing about music full-time. The top-notch women writers are very much in demand. But there's a larger pool of older male critics. So when you're plodding along week by week as an editor and you need that Nick Cave review tomorrow, you're more likely to call a guy."

Sounds pretty clear-cut, but Powers tells me to hold on because her boyfriend, Spin music editor Eric Weisbard, is in the room with her, rolling his eyes.

"Am I misrepresenting the life of an editor?", I hear her ask him. "Is it as easy to find women writers as men?"

"No," she says, returning to the phone, "the music editor of Spin says no, it's about 2/3 [men] to 1/3 [women]. He thinks race is a bigger problem than gender."

McDonnell has at least one theory about why you find fewer women and racial minorities writing about music. "It's an economic issue. It's hard to get a lot of African-Americans and women involved in journalism and academia because they want financial power. And there isn't financial power in those fields. You're already marginalized, so why choose a profession that's going to make you economically marginalized as well."

History, as we've all learned at one point or another, is written by the victors or, these days, by whichever candidate has more money to spend on television spots. But the ongoing history of pop music has usually been chronicled by whoever took one of the more disposable bastard spawns of modern culture seriously enough to write about it. And the fact that a majority of those people were men might not have rung too many alarm bells 20 or 30 years ago. But with more and more provocative women performers claiming rock, pop, and rap as their own, it's become a salient issue.

Of course, this isn't the first time that women have made their mark in music as performers or writers. Patti Smith did both 20 years ago. Her "Masked Brawl," a poetic celebration of Bob Dylan that she contributed to Creem magazine in 1974, is included in Rock She Wrote. The book presents dozens of other female voices that have contributed in varied ways to the discussion of pop music over the years, in mainstream publications like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, in fanzines like Jigsaw, and in memoirs like Marianne Faithfull's Faithfull. There's Jaan Uhelszki's "I Dreamed I Was Onstage with Kiss in My Maidenform Bra," a humorous and insightful first-person account from backstage and on stage with Kiss that appeared in Creem in August 1975; Caroline Coon's probing profile of the Sex Pistols, which ran in Melody Maker in November 1976; and Carola Dibbell's overtly feminist review of a Slits show in Boston, a short article she wrote for the Boston Phoenix in the fall of 1981. And that's just a small cross-section of a book that features everything from a Sonic Youth tour diary excerpt by Kim Gordon and hip-hop poetry by Tracie Morris to a rather academic analysis of youth culture by musicologist Susan McClary and an examination of "The Fallacy of Feminism in Rock" written by Margot Mifflin for Keyboard magazine in 1990. There's even a press release from the indie label Kill Rock Stars, penned by Tinuviel.

"We weren't necessarily looking for the forest when we were among the trees," offers McDonnell. "We chose pieces because we liked them and because we wanted to present a selection of essays, poetry, fanzines, and mainstream media. In a way we were looking for multiplicity rather than unity. We did want to reveal areas of rock history that are usually in the shadows and show that the history of rock that's been presented by males is not the only history that there is."

Just how different that history is has more to do with tone and approach than with arguments of fact. As Powers points out, "The notion that women's testimony to their own experience redefines the nature of experience in general is a long-time feminist approach to writing. And that was something I had in mind when we were doing the book."

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