1. The Guardian
When it comes to rock, women are a gender not a
genre
In denying EMA, St Vincent and Anna Calvi a link to their male forebears, the music press is guilty of
keeping rock divided.
Who owns rock? It was a woman, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who subverted sacred music with the secular to
forge one of the first rock records, Strange Things Happening Every Day, but it's men – specifically that
four-white-guys stereotype – that we celebrate as rock's ultimate chalice-bearers today. Rock's narrative is
written in a way that excludes women who noodle, shred and expand the music in new directions. Where the
roots of rock were sewn by black and female musicians, the genre has been whitewashed, evolving its sound
but narrowing its gaze, pwnd by the male quartet.
Music's cyclical nature means rock flourishes and wanes. During the ebbs, rock's death knell is proclaimed,
mostly by a music press written by, about and for men, but to perceive last year's ebb in the rock-boy-band
flow as a some sort of crisis ignores the large amount of exciting rock being made by women.
I wasn't alone in appreciating EMA's Past Life Martyred Saints, St Vincent's Strange Mercy and Anna
Calvi's Mercury-nominated debut. Then there was a wonderful album and thrilling live shows from Wild
Flag, and the emergence of the Alabama Shakes. Those artists excited critics and fans with their inventive
take on rock. In Anna Calvi's circular picking technique, rock took a gothic, grandiose turn, swirling with
orchestra-sized tensions. In St Vincent's cerebral, film-inspired narratives, chords were out and muscular,
fret-shattering licks ruled. In EMA's Past Life Martyred Saints, droning, Midwest-to-California blues
voyages took both classic rock and feedback-drenched noise to new heights. As far as I could see, rock was
being hewn in to huge, fantastical new shapes. Rock sounded brilliant, and very much alive, from where I
was standing.
When virtuoso female guitarists appear on the rock radar, they tend to gain the spotlight in the lulls between
dominant, malecentric scenes (Britpop, grunge, glam rock), celebrated in isolation as brief, intermittent
flashes of brilliance that flare up between the wider, collective scenes. When these women are innovative
enough to operate successfully outside a zeitgeist, and gain an audience without the legitimacy and safety of
a wider scene, they are seen as ancillary to rock's larger, holistic pantheon. They are rounded up for "women
in rock" trend pieces where "gender is genre", a rock press narrative that creates a separate, and implicitly
lesser, form of rock.
PJ Harvey's record-breaking contributions to indie rock are redoubtable, but rock's one-in one-out policy for
women has made her an inescapable comparison for any rock woman standing alone with a six string and
toe pressed to a distortion pedal. EMA, St Vincent and Calvi continually cite male inspirations when
interviewed, from Jimi Hendrix and Scott Walker to Lou Reed and Bo Diddley, direct, explicit statements
that they're creating in the tradition of rock gods, yet each of these artists have been cast, at one point or
another, as indebted to Harvey, sometimes in the face of polite protestations.
Creating a separate (slow) lane for women, where rock matriarchs, however hallowed, are women's only
forebears, keeps rock divided. It divorces female musicians from their privileged forefathers, denies them
their artistic lineage, and creates a system where women with electric guitars can only be as good as the
women that came before them, celebrated on pedestals but never shoulder to shoulder with favoured male
peers. If rock learned to celebrate more than one image as authentic and valuable, maybe that old death bell
wouldn't ring quite so regularly.