Why we need books about music by women

Here’s the good news: “In 2022, lots of women are writing books about music and getting them published.”

That’s the first line of a recent article by Jude Rogers in The Quietus. She has her own new book to promote and everyone says it’s good. I am trying to get my local library to stock it. They have a suggestion form. I also asked them to get the new anthology This Woman’s Work. “More music writing by women, please,” I said in the comments box. 

It's good that there’s more music writing coming out now by women, but it’s scuppered my plans for the Women’s history of pop section in my blog. I’ve got a backlog of books that I’ve read but not yet reviewed, and I’m not going to keep up.

A while ago American music writer Jessica Hopper put together a spreadsheet of books about music by women. (Actually it’s titled “non-men” but I’ll overlook that.) I was planning to work my way through it, but that’s now feeling a bit ambitious. If the list keeps getting longer, though, that can only be a good thing. 

Because writing about music has been a boys’ club for too long, and women have things to say too. 

And sometimes a different perspective. As Jude Rogers explains it, this could mean a new approach to music journalism: interviewing male musicians in a different way from “another afternoon bantering in the pub”, giving them “a more surprising set of questions”. Or it could be wider, like her aim for her book: “the raising-up of female experiences, and their importance to the understanding and appreciation of pop music”.

I don’t know whether men and women experience, understand or appreciate music differently, or just that they express it differently. My gender-non-conforming instincts have always made me wary of generalisations like that. But I do know that it’s normally the men’s experience, understanding and appreciation that gets heard. Enough’s enough. Roll over, Greil Marcus.

It’s probably true that men and women talk about music differently. There’s a great running gag in the Punk Girl Diaries fanzines about boyfriends who are obsessed with catalogue numbers. It made me laugh, anyway, because I had a boyfriend in the 1970s who did actually memorise the catalogue numbers on his records – the A sides and the B sides. Why would you do that? (At the time, I didn’t ask.) We’re talking about art here, not trainspotting. 

I love collecting facts about music, but only if they are useful. If there’s a  male/female divide it’s definitely not a facts versus feelings thing. I know plenty of women who are geeky about music.  But I don’t like stand-alone facts: I like the sort that want to have a conversation. The sort of facts that illuminate what you already know and give you a new perspective. I have, after all, just read a 130-page book about just one song (Roadrunner). It’s all about connections: times, places, influences, transformations. (It’s by a bloke.) 

But, to be honest, I enjoyed Laura Barton’s Guardian article on the same song, and her pilgrimage to Route 128 in Boston, more. It was shorter, and there was more heart in it. And I suspect the book might not have existed if she hadn’t written that article first. 

Oh, and Laura is another of the women writers who have books about music coming out soon.

To be continued….