What This Book Actually Is
The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic (1992, edited by Ann Powers) is exactly what the title says. It brought together essays from women writing about rock music at the time, spanning from the 1950s to the early 90s. Before this came out, rock criticism was overwhelmingly male in both authorship and subject matter. This wasn't a textbook or a history book. It was actual magazine and newspaper writing — sharp, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, always opinionated. The contributors include names like Greil Marcus (wait, no — he's a guy), let me get this right. The actual roster has Ellen Sander, Lisa Robinson, Ann Powers herself, Carole Horace, Laura Jackson, and others. Some of these writers were well known in punk and indie circles. Others were working in mainstream magazines and barely got credited for their perspectives.
The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic
The book is organized chronologically by era rather than by artist or genre, which is a deliberate choice. Powers wanted to show how women's writing about rock evolved alongside the music itself. You read about the early R&B and rockabilly days, move through folk and psychedelia, land in punk and new wave, and end up in the hip-hop and dance scenes of the late 80s and early 90s. The practical value here isn't in learning guitar chords or music theory. It's in understanding how the act of criticism itself is shaped by who's doing it. Read a woman's take on Led Zeppelin from 1970 alongside another woman's take from 1989 and you immediately see the gap. The same band, completely different cultural moment, and the criticism reflects that shift without either writer having to make a direct argument about it.
How It Actually Works In Practice
I used this book when I was researching a piece about the gender gap in music journalism. The standard approach most people take is to read it cover to cover like a novel. That works okay for general interest but it wastes a lot of time if you're trying to pin down specific arguments or trace how certain themes recur across different writers and decades. The useful method is to treat it as a reference text and look up the era or artist you care about. Each essay stands alone. They don't reference each other. That means you can drop into any section without reading everything before it. The index helps but it's not exhaustive — some artists are listed under song titles rather than band names, which is a minor annoyance. One edge case that caught me off guard: when you're citing this book academically or professionally, the publication details are slightly messy. Different printings have different ISBNs, and some of the essays were originally published in magazines that have since folded. If you're quoting a specific piece, track down the original publication date and venue separately rather than relying on the book's bibliography. I wasted two days once chasing a citation that turned out to be attributed to the wrong year because the reprint edition changed the source information. Just double-check everything against a database like JSTOR or Rock's Backpages before you commit to a reference.
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What Beginners Miss About This Book
Most people treat this as a historical artifact — a nice museum piece from the early 90s. That's partially correct but it undersells what's actually happening in the writing. The essays aren't just observations about music. They're arguments about who gets to speak about rock music and who gets taken seriously as a voice. Several of the writers explicitly address being ignored or talked over in newsrooms and at concerts. This isn't subtle but it's also not the kind of thing that reads as polemical because it's embedded in observations about specific records and shows. The counter-intuitive part is that the book doesn't read like a feminist manifesto even though that's how a lot of people categorize it. The strongest essays are the ones that just do the work of writing well and letting the perspective come through naturally. When a writer describes the experience of being the only woman in a press pit, for instance, the point lands precisely because it's stated as a factual observation rather than an accusation. The accumulated weight of these observations across the whole book is what makes it impactful, not any single essay. Another thing people overlook: the coverage of women as performers is actually thin in places. This book is more about women as writers and listeners than women as the subjects of rock criticism. You'll find essays about the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, and Prince, but less about female-fronted bands except where those bands intersect with the writers' own careers or scenes. If you're looking for comprehensive coverage of women in rock, this isn't it. It's coverage of women talking about rock, which is a different thing entirely.
The Limitations You Should Know About
The book is thirty years old at this point and that shows in several ways. The coverage stops around 1991. Any discussion of grunge is early and sometimes premature. Nirvana gets mentioned but not deeply analyzed because Cobain's breakthrough hadn't fully landed yet when Powers was compiling the volume. If you're using this to understand the evolution of rock criticism through the 90s and 2000s, you're going to need supplemental reading. The selection reflects Powers' own circle and the magazines she had access to. That means certain voices are overrepresented while others — particularly Black female critics writing about R&B and hip-hop — are present but not as central as the rock and punk coverage. This isn't a flaw in the writing quality. It's a structural limitation of what was available and publishable in the late 80s when these essays were originally written. There's also the issue of availability. The book goes in and out of print. When it's available through major retailers it's usually a paperback reprint at around $16 to $18. Used copies can be cheaper but condition varies. If you need it for serious research and want a consistent pagination across all copies, check the ISBN for the specific edition you're ordering. Different publishers have handled reprints at different times, and the essay order can shift slightly between printings.
Where to Get It
The book is published by Verso. Standard retail editions are available through most bookellers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent shops. Used copies appear regularly on AbeBooks, Better World Books, and eBay. If you're in a hurry and the paperback isn't in stock anywhere new, the Kindle version exists but page numbers won't match the physical edition, which matters if you're citing specific passages. For academic use, check your institution's library catalog. Many university libraries carry it, and interlibrary loan usually fills the gap within a week if your local branch doesn't have it.
What To Read After
If this book opens up the subject for you, the natural next step is "Pretty Messed Up: Feminism, Naivety, and Music" by Ann Powers, which expands on some of the same themes with more recent material. For a broader historical view, "To Live and Die in L.A." by Lester Bangs gives you the male counterpart in tone and energy, though the perspectives are completely different. "Choir of the Whiskey Galley" by Ellen Sander collects her own work and fills in some of the gaps from this volume. The recording industry has changed drastically since 1992. Online publishing has shifted who gets to write about music and how. But the core problem this book addresses — who gets heard, who gets quoted, who gets taken seriously — hasn't disappeared. It's just moved to different platforms. Reading the original essays with that context in mind makes the book feel current rather than archived.
