Angry Women in Rock: Volume One - Softcover

Juno, A.

4.05

204 ratings by Goodreads

9780965104203: Angry Women in Rock: Volume One

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965104206 ISBN 13: 9780965104203

Publisher: Juno Books, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This book takes off where Gillian Garr's 1992 She's A Rebel leaves off, and is a perfect companion volume for that great book. It features interviews (that read like thoughtful essays) with Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill), Valerie Agnew (7 Year Bitch), Lois Maffeo, Naomi Yang (Galaxie 500), Kendra Smith, Phranc, Candice Pederson (K Records), Bettina Richards, Chrissie Hynde, and June Millington (Fanny, the "Godmothers of Womyn's Rock").

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

We are currently at an interesting phase in the history of rock with the influx of women entering as a steady and unstoppable force. Perhaps, like a Trojan horse or a mutating virus, they can't help but change the status quo in, as yet, unknown ways. The best of these musicians choose to address a plurality of issues rather than dualistic and static sound-bites. They embrace paradoxical thinking, birthing new ways of expressing creativity, politics, humor, and poetics. Women now occupy simultaneously the male territory of "neutrality" that accompanies power while still retaining an "otherness"--a place alive with risk-taking creativity. This will not last long. Already, "women in rock" is not a novelty and in another generation their commonplaceness will hopefully mean creativity is finding avenues other than gender to inhabit. I look forward to a future where gender is no longer a glaring issue, defused from the territory of power, and we can address the more central concerns to our planetary survival and play.

-- From the Introduction

Creativity, sexuality, politics, fame, misogyny, strapping on rubber phalluses, all this is clearly dissected in question-and-answer format . -- Q

This bookstuffed with ideas, history, wise (and wise-ass) remarks, and most importantly, hope for the futurewill be thumbed through often. -- Puncture

[Today], indie chicks proliferate, all tousled and tight-trousered and signed to major labels. Angry Women in Rock gives us some portraits of women whose independence is their substance and not just their style. -- Seattle Weekly

From Publishers Weekly:

Okay interviewer/editor Juno has an obvious predilection for the early '70s?its music, its brash feminism and some of its more transient trappings (the interviews feature drawings of "Healing Herbals" in the margin of each page, and when interviewing Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8, Juno points out that Breedlove is Sagittarius). Still, Juno got some good dirt from some pretty scary and hip women. Forget the laws of journalism: Juno needs her 13 subjects to be pissed, and many of them cooperate. The best parts of the book offer hands-on technique?7 Year Bitch's Valie Agnew on drumming; Naomi Yang, formerly of Galaxie 500, on playing bass?and discographies and equipment lists. One learns that erstwhile Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith was a slalom skiing racer, and that gender-teasing folkie Phranc was a nude model for art students. Luminary Joan Jett is too friendly to be angry, and Chrissie Hynde reminds us that "Cool people like their privacy." Juno can't avoid clumsy definitions of feminism, or resist denouncing certain activities (reading Vogue) or persons (Courtney Love, Robert Christgau) as vaguely counter to the cause. Her "Women in Rock Map" is woefully incomplete and places Brit Dusty Springfield in Memphis because she recorded her definitive album there. Worse, she leaves out angry women who rock the mic?where are Roxanne Shante, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte? Despite its inadequacies, the book is a worthwhile supplement for the collector of women-in-rock literature or women who want to take guitar in hand.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.