by Kim Gordon
First published 2022
Kim Gordon and Sinéad Gleeson bring together award-winning female writers to examine the women who transformed music. The collection features Anne Enright writing about Laurie Anderson, Margo Jefferson exploring Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald, and Fatima Bhutto connecting music to dictatorship. Contributors including Rachel Kushner, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, and Ottessa Moshfegh tackle the experimentalists and activists who broke genres and carved out space in male-dominated fields. These essays challenge the historic narrative where men wrote about music for men, confronting the sexism embedded in musical canons. The writers examine vocal auteurs, folk and country pioneers, jazz's racialized tropes, and the sounds of Trap and Carriacou. They tell stories of lost homelands, propaganda, mixtapes, and violin lessons, celebrating women who had to speak louder to tell their stories.
Genres: gender-studies, feminism, non-fiction, biography-memoir, music, 21st-century, activism, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: activism, biography, gender-studies
272 pages · Hardcover · Da Capo