Revolution Girl Style: Fifty Years of Women in Rock and Roll Essay

Revolution Girl Style: Fifty Years of Women in Rock and Roll Rock and roll was born of a black man's soul and a white man's...well, his whiteness; his wallet and radio station. Rock is the white man's version of black man's music; it's full of rebellion and rawness and soul, a style of music that captured America's youth and the fire and brimstone of the clergy's private hell. Elvis heard Big Mama Thornton's throaty and soulful "Hound Dog" and the rest is history; unquestionable talent aside, it was his white skin that allowed certain DJs to play him on the radio in the midst of the rigid segregation of the nineteen-fifties. Ever since then, rock has constantly walked the line between trendsetters and trendfollowers; those who innovate and those who capitalize. It is, perhaps, a natural occurance when you combine rebellion with big business. An innovative band or artist does something raw and passionate; other artists or labels take it and water it down just enough to make it marketable. As such, rock also has to keep reinventing itself, for t oday's innovation will quickly become tomorrow's tripe. The rawness of rock either frightens people or attracts them; its ability to shock and offend is legendary and vital to the survival of the genre. "Rock has always professed (although many times hypothetically) to ally itself with rebellion and to the dismantling of the status quo." (Juno 4) In the 1960s, racial tensions far surpassed gender ones; the Supremes encountered far more prejudice because of their black skins than Janis Joplin did because of her gender. But in the late sixties and early seventies, the faultlines that held together America's illusions of bliss fractured, and out of the cracks came people fighting for sel... ... Juno Books, 1996. Laven, Anna. Telephone interview. 11 April 2004. McDonnell, Evelyn and Ann Powers, ed. rock she wrote: women write about rock, pop, and rap. New York: Copper Square Press, 1995. Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. New York: Touchstone Books, 1999. O ¹Dair, Barbara, ed. Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. New York: Random House, 1997. O ¹Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk. San Francisco: AK Press, 1999. Sinker, Dan. Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews. New York: Adeline Press, 2003. Sinker, Dan.  ³Venus. ² Punk Planet July-Aug 2002: 64-67. Swirling, Ross. Telephone interview. 11 April 2004. Turner, Chà ©rie. Everything You Need to Know about the Riot Grrrl Movement: The Feminism of a New Generation. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2001.