Girls To The Front (With A Dictaphone): Pitchfork’s Jessica Hopper on Making Space For Women In Music
Ask any woman who writes about music even semi-seriously, and she’ll probably have stories about men challenging her authority, her commitment, and her reasons for just being in the room. Australian critic Anwen Crawford, writing in the New Yorker, recently recalled a drive-by sneering from a classmate who spotted a picture of Bjork on her school folder: “I bet you don’t even know who she is”. In the same piece Crawford recounts a story from Robert Milliken’s biography of pioneering Australian journalist Lillian Roxon: a young female mentee of Roxon’s was assigned a story on The Who, then had to explain to her (male) editor that there was in fact a difference between groupies and female rock writers, and so no, she wouldn’t blow him.
Jessica Hopper – senior editor at Pitchfork.com, editor-in-chief of their print quarterly The Pitchfork Review, and now author of the self-explanatory The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic – has had those moments, but with two decades of writing about music under her belt before her 40th birthday, they’re now few and far between. “People generally know why I am at a show, and know they might get socked if they suggest otherwise.”
Hopper’s book is broken up into themed parts – alongside CHICAGO, NOSTALGIA, BAD REVIEWS, one of the sections is titled REAL/FAKE. Interestingly, all the subjects of the essays and reviews therein are women: Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey (twice!), Taylor, Miley, and Hopper herself, in a 2005 conference paper about affecting a grunge obsession to impress a boy. One of Hopper’s guiding principles or causes — whatever you want to call it — is beating away at the enduring perception that the way girls and women love music is somehow less valid or genuine than the way men do; that we’re feigning fandom for male attention and only pushing to the front out of frontman thirst; fake rock girls in Nirvana shirts we bought at H&M.
“I think it always comes down to this idea that women do not belong here in any sort of serious way, that we are interlopers and amateurs, not genius artists and experts,” says Hopper. She’s talking to me from the Pitchfork offices in Chicago, where she and her colleagues are putting the finishing touches on both the company’s eponymous magazine and its festival.
Hopper pokes at this idea throughout the book, both through the lens of her own place in the industry and, more overtly, in an exploration of why female artists as diverse as Taylor Swift, Grimes and Lana Del Rey are all so often assumed to be passive puppets with a svengali figure pulling their strings.
The first essay in the collection, and arguably the one that first made her name as a writer, is a wise, furious dispatch from 2003 titled ‘Emo: Where The Girls Aren’t’. In it, she rails against the whittling down of ‘90s punk and hardcore and their rich political lineage into the lovelorn pencildickery of emo, with its “myopic songs that don’t consider the world beyond boy bodies, their broken hearts or their vans”. She writes that a young male acquaintance questions the premise of her column before she’s even written it: if emo is sexist because the songs are all by boys and about girls, then isn’t all rock sexist? Yup, she says, staring down everyone from Muddy Waters to Justin Timberlake; women have been carving and re-carving out their place in music since well before Rolling Stone started patronising us with one dedicated issue a year, even as it keeps shrinking and calcifying around us.
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Hopper is well-established as a Chicago-based writer — she moved there from LA in 1997, to be closer to several bands her PR agency worked with — but she grew up in Minneapolis, riding her bike around the streets where The Replacements had turned their suburban dirtbag ennui into generation-defining rock a decade earlier.
“You knew that something was special there, but also I thought the rest of the world was like Minneapolis,” she says. “I lived in Mexico City for a little while as a child, but I thought every place was as special and as musical and as punk as the culture of Minneapolis, and then I left it and found out that it was quite a unique space. And I was sort of taken aback by – not every place has this many great bands, and people with bass tattoos — I mean, it was pretty much Punk City at that time. But also it was a scene that I was very much allowed to participate in, even as a little 15-, 16-year-old person making a fanzine.”
At the end of the Teen Grunge Poserdom story, Hopper recounts one of those happy accidents of musical discovery that end up being watersheds. In a last-ditch effort to maintain conversations with Grunge Boy, she bought the first Kill Rock Stars compilation for the Melvins and Nirvana – but instead discovered Bikini Kill, and riot grrrl, and the fact that her “teen-girl soul mattered”. She dove headfirst into a scene that felt important and immediate and new, and pushed its adherents beyond passive consumption of music as product.
“You had to be very proactive, you had to be an active participant,” she says. “Were you going to put on shows? Were you going to make stickers for bands? Were you going to show up at shows even when you didn’t have a vested interest because that was how you kept alive? And so it really – they’re very crucial young years that absolutely dictate, still, the sort of moral aspect [of] how I participate in music culture 20 years later.
“But for the most part I was very lucky [because] my interest as a teenage girl wasn’t dismissed as being less than genuine … Because I was supported, there wasn’t any sort of time where I thought ‘Oh, I don’t belong here’, and also because I saw other women doing what I was doing, and I saw other teenagers doing what I was doing, and a lot of the people who were involved in music that I knew, be they in bands or running record labels or doing fanzines, all of them had started as teenagers.”
Hopper joined Pitchfork last year after three years as music editor for Rookie, the website for teenage girls (and grown women who identify as teenagers) founded by Tavi Gevinson. Gevinson – who, like Hopper, began what turned out to be a career in her early teens by simply starting to write about her obsessions and finding her voice as she went along – has become one of the loudest advocates for the opinions and passions of teenage girls to be taken seriously. Hopper says the biggest difference between now and her early days as a writer – or even between now and 2003, when she wrote ‘Where The Girls Aren’t’ for now-defunct Chicago zine Punk Planet – is that young writers have far fewer compromises to make to get their work out there. They can have “entire discographies in 20 minutes”, she points out, and they don’t need to make a zine or pester jaded editors with pitches.
“Getting eyeballs on your piece required that you had something that one of the gatekeepers wanted to open the gate for. And sometimes back then, that meant that you had to work within a particular framework, and maybe not have a distinct or original or very personal voice. We don’t need those gatekeepers in the same way anymore, and so someone who’s a young person writing about music, or starting to in 2015, I think there’s a much greater chance that we hear something undistilled and authentic and original.”
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Jessica Hopper will be in conversation with Myf Warhurst for the Wheeler Centre and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on Monday July 20; $12-20 tickets here
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic is out now.
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