Women Who Rock: a review

When I heard that Jessica Hopper had directed a TV series about women musicians, I knew it would be good. 

Jessica is a music critic turned author, producer and director. Her first book was aimed at teenage girls and called The Girls’ Guide to Rocking: How to Start a Band, Book Gigs, and Get Rolling to Rock Stardom. Her next book was called The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic. And she once co-compiled a list of books about music by women, describing it as “writing on popular music that takes place outside the usual heteropatriarchal frame”. 

She is, to borrow a word from some of her interviewees, “badass”.

The TV series is now on Sky Arts in the UK. I’ve only seen one episode so far (the next one is on tonight) and I loved it from the start. Because there were lots of talking heads, and NONE of them were men.  

As Hopper says in a Guardian article, it’s about showing women “as the reliable narrators of their own history, of music history itself”. The proverbial male gaze is remarkably absent. 

This is a rare thing in a world that is used to BBC Four’s male-dominated documentaries: a programme by women, about women and for women. And not just for women either. My husband enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. But not quite as much, because for me it meant something special. You know, women doing it for themselves. Nothing about us without us. All those slogans.

It doesn’t sloganeer though; it’s cleverer than that. That’s just me, editorialising. It tells stories. The stories themselves make the point strongly enough. As do the pictures (there are lots of old clips). 

When I was young, I thought it was novel and radical for women rock musicians to look like women. I thought that the punk/post-punk movement was the first time that women had played electric guitars while wearing frocks. Wrong. Here, you see Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing guitar wearing a fur coat, a dress and high heels. Wanda Jackson playing guitar in a strapless fringed dress and stilettos. Feminine as fuck.

Yes, you can be a woman who rocks without being an androgynous rock chick. It’s always been possible. We just forgot.

We forgot a lot. You don’t hear much about these women pioneers from the blues and rock’n’roll eras. If a man had been making this programme it would probably have started (and more or less ended) with Janis Joplin, who appears near the end of the hour-long show. Another difference is that a lot of the women in the programme are black. That turns conventional rock history on its head, too.

The first episode hangs on the framework of an interview with Mavis Staples. Within this, there are shorter interviews (Nona Hendryx, Chaka Khan) and even shorter talking-heads commentary. Sometimes it is hard to see where the difference is, because everything here is in dialogue. 

Hendryx and Khan talk about other women as well as themselves. Women talk about other women as friends, mentors and inspiration. The rock critics and authors talk about the historical context. The musicians talk about each other.

So Mavis Staples talks about having Mahalia Jackson as a “friend and teacher”, Nona Hendryx talks about her friendship with Nina Simone, Chaka Khan talks about getting advice from Etta James. And everyone talks about their role models.

That takes the story back to the earlier years of the 20th century – Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton. That’s where the old clips come in, and it’s worth watching just for them.

The story moves forward chronologically, in the sense that this first episode starts in the 1950s and 60s with Mavis Staples and ends in the 1970 with Labelle and Chaka Khan. But it’s not a straight “history”, focused on dates. It moves around, as one story circles back to another. And the story comes full circle later, with Janis Joplin introducing Big Mama Thornton on stage and covering her song, Ball and Chain.

And it’s not just about the history of music, it’s about the history of society. That means it’s about (in turns) the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers and the hippie counterculture. The underpinning narrative is about social change.

It’s not about “women in rock” either, as something anomalous that needs to be discussed and put in a box. It’s about “women WHO rock”: a history, not an issue. And a history with a wider context.

In short, it puts women centre stage. It lets them tell their own stories. It makes them central in history and to society. It shouldn’t be unusual, but it is. And that’s pretty badass.