The Girls of Rock and Roll

I’m really glad we chose women’s contribution to rock music for a topic. Not only was it something we could all engage with, but it’s really changed the way that I look at women in rock music as well as the media representation of those women (it’s definitely brought out my inner feminist, too). What was incredible was reading other blogs and articles. It really surprised me that women are the ones who are perpetuating the poor representations of female musicians (the ‘no good girl guitarists’ blog) and also female fans (cited in Misrepresentation part 2). I never realised it was that much harder for female performers. In fact, I guess I never really thought about it until now.

‘Perhaps the most common way in which music journalists treat female performers is to ignore them completely. This attitude is particularly noticeable in retrospective writing on rock history, which often obliterates any trace of all but a few token women’ (Davies 2001:302).

Our goal was to critically assess women’s contribution to rock music and how they are represented in the media. I think we’ve done that. We’ve all brought interesting discussion of female rock musicians to the blog. And maybe we’ve even helped to change some opinions on the way?

I found the profiles on female musicians to be the most interesting part of this assignment. It was a great way to address all the things we wanted to discuss, including sexualisation and media representation. It was also a great way to explore the different types of female musicians in rock music. The profiles also enabled us to write about people we are familiar with, it was really great to combine an interest with Uni work. All the women we profiled were iconic because they entered a field that was biased against them and still managed to do great things. They are very inspirational.

As said above, I never realised how bleak the situation was for female rock musicians until researching for the blog. However, I think there is hope for the future. The Internet provides an alternative to the rock music press that has represented female artists and fans for so long: people are less reliant on them as mediators to find new music.And maybe even blogs like this one will help female rock artists to be recognised.

Alex