MUSIC CRITICISM: This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music, edited by Sinead Gleeson and Kim, Gordon, White Rabbit, $32.99
I’d been writing about music for decades when I had the dumb realisation that “girl is not a genre”. Actually, that was a direct quote from an interviewee, Jessica Hopper, the Chicago music journalist who pointedly called her 2015 anthology The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. Well-meaning “women in rock” round-ups, or references to “all-girl bands” – or any reference to a musician’s gender, which only ever happens when they are not a man – play into the idea that the music industry is a male microcosm, except for some quirks of nature.
Former Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon co-edits This Woman’s Work.Credit: NYT
Despite its title, new anthology This Woman’s Work does not reinforce such a narrative with its 16 essays. Instead, it amplifies the thoughts and work of women from every nook and cranny of the industry.
Much of the buzz around grunge in the mid-1980s onwards circulated around Seattle label Sub Pop, and here its former intern, Megan Jasper, recalls blithely inventing buzzwords in an interview with a New York Times journalist hungry to document this movement that had inspired the Marc Jacobs grunge collection. Jasper is now CEO of the label and describes how her long tenure was reinvigorated when Sleater-Kinney were signed in 2005: “They were punk-rock feminist royalty and I was ready for that kind of reign.”
This Woman’s Work, Essays on Music edited by Kim Gordon and Sinead Gleeson
The finely tuned ears of UK broadcaster and DJ Zakia Sewell are haunted by old rehearsal tapes of her singer mother, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, leaving Sewell to be raised by her white father. The recordings wind up providing a portal to the Caribbean ancestry to which Sewell missed out on having a connection.
The expression “fan girl” is usually applied to one who screams at boy bands, but Booker Prize winner Anne Enright reclaims it for her essay, recounting all the things she wished she had said to Laurie Anderson upon bumping into her, rather than an inarticulate ramble. This includes an account of the time that Enright had been a roadie for a one-woman experimental show, in which Olwen Fouere used a vocoder to split her voice into different registers – something Anderson would surely have approved of.
Essayist Leslie Jamison examines how music moulded her into something men might approve of, starting with her older brother. When he moved from Los Angeles to New York for college and met a girl with whom he made an LA versus NY mixtape, Jamison passionately defended California through Tom Petty and Guns N’ Roses in an attempt to keep him close. She rethinks her relationship with music during the pandemic through dancing with her daughter to playlists of women; this time the educator, not the student.
Fatima Bhutto writes of music that threatens dictatorships, such as that of General Zia-ul-Haq, which exiled her own father, but also Iqbal Bano, who sang the poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz at a memorial evening, and for her defiance was banned from performing in public.
The book’s co-editor Sinead Gleeson writes about Wendy Carlos, attempting to decode the Moog maestra’s genius in the dark of a Dublin lockdown on her own keyboard, bending the pitch, playing with filters.
More oddly, the other co-editor, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, gives a voice – via a translator – to Yoshimi Yokota, who, in 1992, Gordon invited to drum for her band Free Kitten.
“Finally, through this book project, I’m able to ask Yoshimi things I’d always wondered about,” Gordon says, which seems late in the day, particularly when the pair discusses Gordon’s decision to use photographs of Yokota in bondage and in traditional Japanese dress on either side of a picture disc – photographs that Yokota had asked Gordon not to show anybody – “… that was very naughty of us,” Gordon concedes.
Other essays make amends for the past treatment of women, most poignantly that of Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson about Ella Fitzgerald. Back in 2000, Jefferson was set to write a book about Michael Jackson. It was abandoned when Jackson was charged with seven counts of child molestation, but Jefferson later analysed her denial about the rumours of his behaviour in her 2019 book, On Michael Jackson.
In This Woman’s Work, she again examines feelings of complicity, this time towards Fitzgerald. As a pre-teen black girl preoccupied with appearance, the media focus on Fitzgerald’s weight and tendency to sweat made Jefferson “squeamish”.
Now, she concludes: “People should have begged for the elixir of your sweat. I do. I beg for it.”
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