Thursday, August 27, 2009
Cream Axtresses: Great Lady Guitarists (and Their Favorite Recipes)
Posted by Tracy Moore on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Comments (29)
Showing 1-29 of 29
gal from the bridges is a really good guitar player. so is kelley anderson. angela messina too.
my favorite female guitarist is joni mitchell. and carol kaye is one of my favorite bassists, male or female.
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Maybe if people would stop highlighting the female experience in music and just accept and portray them as artists in their own right, the division wouldn't be as striking. It's really annoying to read about "women in rock" for me because that stance presupposes that it is a movement rather than someone's singular artistic voice.
I find the artists I gravitate to also reject the idea that females should be singled out. It's a pretty commonly held view in underground circles that I've been around, and Nashville has many ladies who fucking ROCK without giving too much thought to the fact that they're in a male-dominated field. And a bunch of those girls do their thing better than most of the guys anyway.
Not trying to single out your coverage of this Tracy, but I'm talking about mass media portrayals in general.
I've always thought Ani Difranco's a great player even though I don't like her songs that much. KIM GORDON. Lita Ford. Nancy Wilson should be at the top just for "Barracuda" alone.
HighonLife,
You're absolutely right, and those are all really critical points. I think when you have a women in rock issue of a magazine you're automatically ghettoizing the artists, as if what they do is different because they are female.
But you want to highlight excellence, and it always seems more outstanding the rarer it is. So in male-dominated fields, highlighting women who excel is a natural tendency.
I just wish more women were in those lists, so that they could reside among all the greats, 'great' being a thing that transcends gender and allows for multiple approaches and different voices. Putting them in those lists says, "here are great guitarists." Keeping them out makes people need to make lists of great women in art.
Weird, troubling cycle.
Check out Stevie from Laser Flames on the Great Big News. One of the better guitarists around here, and she's a she...
Orianthi.
She was going to play on the MJ tour that never happened. (Also played with Carrie Underwood at the Grammys.)
Where's Barbara Lynn? Not only was she a lady guitarist/songwriter of outstanding quality, but she was doing it in the early 60s,completely obliterating the line between R&B and pop, a rightful heir to Sister Rosetta's throne.
i think that the pool of girls who start playing guitar in the first place is exponentially smaller to start with because it's almost a 'geeky' thing to do, like video games or dungeons and dragons (in that the best players tend to sit alone in their rooms for hours on end perfecting it), but it's a geeky thing that flips and turns out to be cool and gets you laid, and (every now and again) rich and famous. girls tend away from the geeky stuff early on, though. it just starts out a little geeky, you know? maybe i should just delete this.
i think the general sentiment with the "women in rock" thing is, "these chicks are pretty good... for a girl".
Joni Mitchell was a huge influence on Sonic Youth for her alternate tunings. DiFranco shreds with the best, but maybe it's her acoustic preference that also keeps her overlooked.
and basically, The Slits. in general.
St. Vincent is a badass guitarist, male or female. She gets crazy noise out of her guitar, and she is an innovative player. However, I do agree that having a list of female musicians is part of the problem not the solution. It should just be musicians period, no schism necesarry.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Janis Ian. Though she surrounded herself with some of the greatest session players ever on her early albums, if you catch her solo show these days you better be prepared to have her face melted...
Oh, and Eryka from the Heartless Bastards is a fucking bad-ass string slinger, too.
Nashville is home to a really great female guitarist (who can also sing and write songs very well, too): Megan McCormick.
http://www.myspace.com/meganmccormicksmusic
Kelley Deal, Elle? Get serious. Kelley's great, but just go ahead and replace her with Bonnie Raitt already.
I'd say Kim Deal is a good guitarist if she wasn't a bass player. (Her guitar playing in Free Kitten and in the Jim O'Rourke-era Sonic Youth lineup don't show her to be all too great, IMO.) Sorry, but I'm going to be a pedant about the differences between bass and guitar.
Lauren Ellis is the best slide player I've ever seen live. I think she'd give Sonny Landreth a run for his money!
I think that Larry Mell comes closest to the truth here, which is simply that there are fewer great female guitar players because there are fewer girls that start playing guitar. It's the same reason that there are fewer great female drummers, rappers, race car drivers, and bass fishermen.
The gender bias in media coverage of rock and roll and a culture that views girls in rock bands as a novelty certainly contribute to the issue, but I think the small pool of candidates is the main issue.
I can't think of better guitarists of any gender than Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker from Sleater Kinney.
And let me just add that the last time Brownstein and Tuckercame through town, both were new mothers. Extra points for rock-n-roll motherhood.
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