Women Who Rock
CBC Books | | Posted: December 4, 2018 10:13 PM | Last Updated: December 5, 2018
Evelyn McDonnell, editor
From Bessie Smith and The Supremes to Joan Baez, Madonna, Beyonce, Amy Winehouse, Dolly Parton, Sleater-Kinney, Taylor Swift, and scores more, women have played an essential and undeniable role in the evolution of popular music including blues, rock and roll, country, folk, glam rock, punk, and hip hop. Today, in a world traditionally dominated by male artists, women have a stronger influence on popular music than ever before. Yet, not since the late nineteen-nineties has there been a major work that acknowledges and pays tribute to the female artists who have contributed to, defined, and continue to make inroads in music.
Writer and professor of journalism Evelyn McDonnell leads a team of women rock writers and pundits in an all-out celebration of 104 of the greatest female musicians. Organized chronologically, the book profiles each artist and places her in the context of both her genre and the musical world at large. Sidebars throughout recall key moments that shaped both the trajectory of music and how those moments influenced or were influenced by women artists. (From Black Dog & Leventhal)
From the book
"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...
From Women Who Rock by Evelyn McDonnell ©2018. Published by Black Dog & Leventhal