Book review: This Woman’s Work

I don’t know what the point of this book is. 

Subtitled Essays on Music, the selling point is that everything in it has been written by a woman. Nearly all the reviews think the point is what’s on the publisher’s blurb – “confront male dominance and sexism” blah blah – but I don’t judge a book by its cover. Or even the inside cover. (The front cover – a woman musician, on stage, looking very rock’n’roll – is actually good.)

The blurb (and the reviewers) seem to think that this book exists in a vacuum in which no other women are writing about music. This is bollocks. (Sorry for using a male-centric word in the context of women’s creativity but it’s my favourite term of abuse, to be honest.)

Women have been writing about music since for ever. OK, they have been in a minority but they’ve been doing it. And I have other books about music with essays by women, in among the men, that are more interesting. 

There’s a recent one called Music, Memory and Memoir in which the best essay is by a woman: Helen Pleasance, looking at masculinity and myths about Joy Division. It’s funny that she does this, in the way that observational comedy is funny, because it’s so obvious once it’s pointed out. And it’s also serious, because she talks about ‘our mutual disidentification from the male rock canon’. Which also needed to be pointed out. Nine of the 21 writers in the collection are female. So, not a huge amount of male dominance there. Hurray. 

So, This Woman’s Work is nothing new. And the concept is all a bit “women in rock”. What we’ve got here is a random collection of people with one thing in common. Well, two things, the other being that they like music. Most of them write for a living; some of them write about, or work in, music for a living. That’s it.

I would have liked the editors, Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon, to explain the point of the book, but someone else has written the introduction and it’s incomprehensible. Anyway, the editors don’t seem to have given anyone a brief, because the pieces here are all very different. They’re not actually all essays, because about half are memoir. Those are the best ones. 

I really liked Leslie Jamison’s ‘Double-Digit Jukebox: An Essay in Eight Mixes’. It’s one of the few pieces in the book which isn’t exclusively writing about women musicians: it’s built around mixtapes so there’s a wide range of musicians in there (and it makes me want to listen to them). It raises the perennial question about how much we, as women and girls, are influenced in our musical tastes by the boys and men around us. More importantly, it’s wonderful writing: “I’d play my music loud and drive around experiencing my emotions as if it were my job.”

Megan Jasper’s Losers is an evocative and down-to-earth memoir about her career at Sub Pop. It feels like an authentic description of being in the middle of the music business. I liked that a lot, too.

I also liked the insights into other nationalities and cultures from some of the other memoirists. I felt I learnt as much from their stories as from the actual essays.

The essays themselves fall roughly into three categories: history, appreciation and unreadable. With some crossover, obviously. So let’s try and find something they have in common. Let’s take the title of the book and riff on the idea of ‘work’ for a while.

Jenn Pelly’s essay Fruits of her Labour seems like a good place to start. It’s about Lucinda Williams and in particular her gorgeous song Fruits of my Labor. 

Pelly describes it as “a requiem, a road song, an escape hatch, a poem”, then adds : “I also see it as a labour song.” She goes on to meditate on the song being about rest, restlessness and “a world that still refuses, too often, to take the work of women seriously”.

And talking of labour, Jenn Pelly’s sister Liz has an essay, Broadside Ballads, about Agnes ‘Sis’ Cunningham, folk singer and co-editor of Broadside, the influential magazine of the “singing labour movement”.  It’s a great story, and one with a moral: that “history is made on the margins, by those who maybe never get famous, but who stay on the ground organising with workers, opening their homes for meetings, letting the musicians crash on their couch, transcribing lyrics, printing and mailing the zines.” Women’s work?

Margo Jefferson’s piece Diaphoresis, is an appreciation of Ella Fitzgerald, with some memoir-ish elements. She ponders: “Historically, sweat is for workers… Ella Fitzgerald sweats in concert halls.” She defends Fitzgerald from those who see the sweat and not the tears, for those who notice the weight and not the “ravishing” musicianship. (Women’s work is, of course, also about looking the right way: “labouring to be beautiful”.) She admires the work that has gone into the music. And she concludes: “Ella Fitzgerald, you worked hard for your sweat. You earned it.”

Country Girl by Rachel Kushner is an appreciation of Wanda Jackson, working in music since she was a child, still working now. “She wasn’t available to be interviewed for this, because she was busy recording an album with Joan Jett.”

I couldn't find much else about work, unless you count Losers, which is literally about jobs. So let's finish with a preview of the next book on my reading list, Why Patti Smith Matters by Caryn Rose. I haven’t opened the book yet but the back cover says: “The flyer advertising her first-ever performance at St Mark’s church in 1971 states, ‘Gerard Malanga: POETRY. Patti Smith: WORK.’