“Music journalism” is, by and large, about as useful as road treadmills:<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And one of its biggest, oldest, hoariest memes – nearly every “music journalist” trundles it out every four or five years or so – is to trot out a couple of female musicians and write glowingly about “women breaking into the testosterone-laced world of rock and roll!”.<\/p>\n<p>They all need to take a pill. \u00a0It was all done, usually better, by 1984 or so.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Oh, sure – there’d been women in popular music for decades. \u00a0Peggy Lee – a native of my hometown, Jamestown ND, made it very, very big between the end of the war and 1960. \u00a0 There’d been any number of other women selling an awful lot of records – everyone from the Shangri-Las to Linda Ronstadt. \u00a0Most of them were not rock and rollers – they were R&B and pop singers, mostly, and for the most part they operated pretty much within styles that’d been defined by guys, either before or for them. \u00a0 More or less. \u00a0(With some exceptions).<\/p>\n<p>But during the eighties, women went from curiosities to hitmakers in their own right.<\/p>\n<p>For my money? \u00a0The Pretenders – which was really Chrissie Hynde’s baby from the beginning – were the best of the lot for my money…:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9vUsQMgEveo\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I need more.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_KcqvjSX9R4\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Heck, even when it’s lip-synched I love it…<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/aDeHAM93fuc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Joan Jett? Who brought the fun of the Ramones and the “tight” of a solid metal band…<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S8V5rxQyAXY\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>…and, in her own way, may have been the apogee of punk rock.<\/p>\n<p>Not that she didn’t have a way with an older cover:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8tsB2b0_SO4\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"243\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jett and Hynde pretty much paved their own paths in the business…<\/p>\n<p>…and, love her or hate her, so did Madonna, one of the top-selling acts of the past thirty years or so:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8tsB2b0_SO4\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"243\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I wasn’t a fan – but there’s no denying that she built herself into a star in the eighties – like Hynde and Jett – and has pretty much kept herself there.<\/p>\n<p>Other female artists were perhaps less significant in an industrial or social sense. Still, when asked the question “who would win if Susanna Hoffs went to war with Mikki Steele to determine who was hotter…”<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5kIiFjAeEbI\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>“…the answer would be “everyone”. <\/p>\n<p>So – “music journalists” will keep right on declaring every new female act that comes along to be the ones that “cracked the testosterone-laced world of rock and roll”. <\/p>\n<p>But now you all know better. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>“Music journalism” is, by and large, about as useful as road treadmills: And one of its biggest, oldest, hoariest memes – nearly every “music journalist” trundles it out every four or five years or so – is to trot out a couple of female musicians and write glowingly about “women breaking into the testosterone-laced world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-real-eighties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24634,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24633\/revisions\/24634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}