A New Canon: In Pop Music, Women Belong At The Center Of The Story
A few years ago, my friend Jill Sternheimer and I started a conversation one night while driving around the streets of New Orleans. Both of us are music nerds, and we regularly attend the kinds of musical retrospectives that have become common in this age of historical exploration via tribute shows and historical playlists. Jill, in fact, often organizes such shows at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, where she is the director of public programs. I sometimes write about them, and often ponder how music history's being recorded and revised in the digital age. Why, we wondered, was the importance of women so often recognized as a trend instead of a source of lasting impact? We came to a conclusion that, in 2017, will likely strike no one as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins.
This is a truth reinforced in many different ways: by the shelves weighed down with books about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, while only one or two about Aretha Franklin or Patti Smith sit nearby; by the radio playlists that still only feature women once or twice every hour; even by the "classic rock" t-shirts on sale at big box stores, inscribed with the Rolling Stones tongue and Led Zeppelin's blimp but not Heart's swirly pink ticker. Since I became a music critic in the 1980s — my first big pieces for my local music rag were about the Go-Go's and Joan Jett — I've often written about women in music as a category as well as individually; often in these assignments, I've been asked to consider women's music-making as a trend, as something unusual rather than central My intrepid peers who've authored histories or edited anthologies on the subject (most of them women, though
