Women Who Rock And Rock This Weekend’s Grammys

Nominees in the category are Fiona Apple (“Shameika”), Phoebe Bridgers (“Kyoto”), HAIM (“The Steps”), Brittany Howard (“Stay High”), Grace Potter (“Daylight”) and the aforementioned Big Thief, fronted by singer/guitarist Adrianne Lenker (“Not”).

So much for the moldy old trope that women can’t rock.

It was always a ridiculous notion, given Sister Rosetta Tharpe was rocking before Billboard critic Mourie Orodenker used the phrase “rock and roll” for the first time to describe her music in 1942. 

It took a while for Sister Rosetta to get her propers, though. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame finally got around to inducting her just last year. 

Rock has largely been a boys’ club since coming into prominence in the mid to late 1950s. Popular song themes throughout the genre’s existence have included vague (or not so vague) references to sex, cars, fights, rebellion, drugs and alcohol – subjects considered off-limits for delicate flowers of womanhood in the repressive ‘50s. 

But there were women who longed for the freedom to musically express themselves the way male artists were always privileged to do. Among the first to be signed to a major label were Goldie & The Gingerbreads, first by Decca in 1963 and then by Atlantic the following year. Atlantic Records chairman Ahmet Ertegun saw them perform at a party made famous as author Tom Wolfe’s “Mods and Rockers Ball,” and signed them almost immediately.

Another early entry was The Pleasure Seekers, an outfit from Detroit featuring a guitarist by the name of Suzi Quatro. 

Janis Joplin earned a posthumous No. 1 with Pearl in 1971 as a solo artist. The same year, an all-woman band cracked the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart when Fanny performed the feat at No. 40 with Charity Ball. 

But the floodgates were about to open for female artists not content to live as pop confections or folksy girls with guitars. Fleetwood Mac, Heart and The Pretenders, all fronted by formidable women notwithstanding, largely unheralded women have produced some of the most innovative and sometimes gloriously unhinged rock music of the era.

Los Angeles produced many of them including The Runaways, comprised of  Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West and Jackie Fox; and The Go-Go’s, with Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, Kathy Valentine, Charlotte Caffey and Gina Schock, who rode their debut album Beauty and the Beat to No. 1, a first. Then came The Bangles, a favorite in LA’s Paisley Underground scene, with hits like “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

Some five years later and a thousand or so miles up the West Coast, Seattle’s grunge scene was exploding, with women rocking right along, in bands like Hammerbox and The Gits. 

Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a Riot Grrrls movement that included Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Bratmobile, Heavens To Betsy, 7 Year Bitch and more was taking shape heading into the 1990s. The Riot Grrrls are especially notable for espousing “radical” third-wave feminism and identity politics. They weren’t singing “My Boyfriend’s Back.”

Even staid New England was churning with music from bands like Belly and Throwing Muses.

“If you look at any history of that time, you’d think almost no women were making music,” Seattle Magazine quotes Gretta Harley, who, with Sarah Rudinoff and Elizabeth Kenny, wrote a rock musical called “These Streets: A Rock ’n’ Roll Story.”

Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna told the Washington Post about seeing The Go-Go’s in concert in 1982, when she was 14. “As a young girl, going into a space where women own the stage, and own it unapologetically, like they were born to be there – to me it represented a moment of possibility.”

For a new generation of girls, who have not had a concert experience of any kind in a year thanks to COVID, the Grammy Awards and its all-female Rock category may represent that “moment of possibility” made very real.