Like shooting elephants on the veldt or smoking cigars in the parlor, rock has often been considered something the boys do while the girls scream and faint. This compilation of some 30 articles and essays by female writers confirms what should have been clear all along: Women don’t just know rock, they see things men don’t.
From London to Los Angeles, from the pages of New Musical Express to Rolling Stone, women have been writing about rock and pop music for more than 30 years. Rock She Wrote collects the best of women's writing on music from the 1960s to the present, from the days when women were only tolerated as screaming groupies behind the scenes to the day they took center stage as performers and critics in their own right. These vibrant, subversive, irreverent and often brilliant voices on the music of then and now tell the sidelined history of women in rock. Patti Smith (on Bob Dylan as a sex symbol) Marianne Faithfull, Caroline Coons (on The Sex Pistols) Patricia Kennealy Morrison (Rock around the Cock: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison), Kim Gordon (Boys Are Smelly: Sonic Youth Tour Diary), Riot Grrrls; just a few of the names who turn rock 'n' roll on its head in this provocative collection. The articles in Rock She Wrote bring together feminism and rock 'n' roll, the music of female self-discovery, the beats of liberation and power, and the intimate details of popular culture.
