However, I'd alway sit up and take notice whenever a female artist appeared on 120 Minutes. Liz Phair, The Breeders, Belly, Veruca Salt, Throwing Muses, and Luscious Jackson offered both diverse music and a fresh perspective in a rock and roll sausage party that had been going on since Elvis first swiveled his hips. Sure, there'd been great rock and roll women before—from Wanda Jackson to Grace Slick to Kate Bush to the Go-Go's—but it had never been like it was in the nineties when a woman with a guitar was no longer a novelty.
Naturally, the media sees a phenomenon and latches onto it with all the depth of a damp Petri dish, so all of those great singers, musicians, and songwriters were to be summed up with the catchy and creative "women in rock" label. Also, naturally, many of those artists resented being reduced to what was between their legs. Yet the phenomenon was a real one and worthy of notice, not just because a stale scene was getting shaken around a bit, but because these artists inspired a lot of girls who'd never thought screaming on stage instead of in the audience was an option. Some of these mind-blown women went on to become successful rockers, like Veruca Salt. Some just gave it a shot, like Tanya Pearson, who surveys the scene in her new book Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s.
Pretend We're Dead is essentially an oral history that grew out of something Pearson calls the "Women of Rock Oral History Project," which found her picking the brains of fifteen women who'd made their musical marks in the nineties. The book works best when commiting to its oral history device, because anyone who reads it will have come to hear what people like Phair, Louis Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, Josephine Wiggs of The Breeders, Kirstin Hersh, and Tanya Donelly have to say about their art and what it was like being a woman in a male-dominated scene. Their perspectives vary wildly, with Wiggs saying she really didn't face sexism at all while Hersh suffered the nightmare of having her son taken from her as a result of mental illness and her chosen career. Because the nineties alt-rock scene is so poorly covered in general, these women's stories have not been told over and over, so they are all fresh and enlightening and long overdue.
Pretend We're Dead only founders when Pearson gets in her own way by inserting herself way too much into the storytelling with irrelevant asides about all the drugs she took and the threesome she had and how she spent her childhood dressing her guinea pig up in doll clothes, in an apparent effort to let the reader know that she's just as cool and interesting as the artists whose lives we actually want to know about. Personalizing a story like this is one thing, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but there are limits to how much the author should discuss her or himself, especially in a book as short as Pretend We're Dead. Pearson's slight tendency to repeat the same artist responses also takes up precious space.
However, the author scores by putting her interviews in proper and illuminating historical context, which is something that oral histories sometimes fail to do, much to their detriment. Pearson actually eschews the oral history format for chapters on how the corporate takeover of alternative rock, the creeping return of musical misogyny, and most intriguingly, 9/11 tolled the death knell of the prominence of women artists in rock and roll by the early twenty-first century.
Pearson also has great taste in music. As I said, I've always wanted to read a book that focuses on my favorite artists of the nineties—and really, many of the artists in Pretend We're Dead are among my favorites of any era—and now I have, so I certainly owe Tanya Pearson many thanks for that.
