Girls Rock : Fifty Years of Women Making Music

Title - Girls Rock : Fifty Years of Women Making Music
Author - Mina Julia Carson
ISBN - 0813123100
/Publication Date - 2004

Plot - The music industry for much of its existence has been a male dominated field.  When trying to come up with the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, only two women made the list.  And yet women have been an integral apart of the rock world for at least the last 50 years.  This book tries to rectify the discrepancy between what people think and how integral they have been a part of the scene.  The beginning of the book starts out trying to discuss the origins of the creativity of the women in the music scene.  As opposed to males, they were not trying to rebel against their family.  Frequently, women's families were integral to the development of their music.  Many of the women also began with learning a different instrument before they actually learned to play on the guitar.  The book then goes on to cover the issue of sexuality and race in the music industry.  Many of the Rhythm and Blues artists of the time were women.  And many of them had their starts playing gospel music.  But when they made it to the music scene they found that what people expected out of women was sex. 

Despite these expectations, women in the industry have found ways to deal with how men portray their sexuality and have found ways to take control of their musical careers and how they are portrayed.  They had to find ways to take control of the message.  Some of the women did this by coming out of the closet..  Others of them decided to make themselves blatantly sexual.  While others would decide to try to confuse sexuality by toning down the blatantly sexual images.  But with the rise of television, they had to fight the images that were imposed upon them.  MTV created world where musicians did not always have control over how they were viewed.

Finally, the book covered how women in rock had to survive and thrive in the industry.  The nature of music is that if you are going to last, you need to continue making successful music, worth people buying.  To last, a female musician must be as successful at selling their music as any man would.  Women need to find ways to connect with their fans in order for them to have any sustainability.  Current technology has aided them a lot in this endeavor, as many are taking to the Internet to keep an active conversation going with the people who purchase their music.

Critical Review - Girls Rock, told by Mina Carson, develops an interesting look at the music scene from a feminine perspective.  Mina Carson would probably argue that it was really a feminist perspective, as the thrust of the book is to tell how women have succeeded in rock, and much of that was due to a rise in the power of women.  Rock, according to Carson, was a vehicle whereby women could assert some sort of power in society.  Of course much of this power was muddled with other complications like how people viewed the musicians themselves.

While an interesting study of the music is going on, I feel that Carson sometimes gets lost in the sexualization of the music and the people.  Maybe the fault of this is that she is trying to discuss things from a woman's perspective, and from the beginning that is complicated by notions of sex.  But as she decried at the beginning of the novel that women guitarists are not as well regarded as their male counterparts, this might be because people end up focusing on the sex of the women, and not the music that they produce.  I think it might have been a more interesting examination if she had spent more time discussing the musical background and talents of the artists, and not their sex, whether that be a physical attribute, or their sexual orientation.

Reader's Annotation - While Girl power seems to have permeated the culture in all sorts of areas, sometimes society seems to forget one thing  Girls Rock!  And they rock as well as any man might do.

About the Author - Carson's beginnings started with her being a musician.  She spent a great deal of her time playing guitar from the time she was in junior high school.  She has been interested in music and its history from those early beginnings.

This would take her into research about social movements throughout history.  From which she has had an interest in progressive politics, the women's movement and gay and lesbian movements that have happened in society.  It is with this rich cultural background and appreciation for music that she approached her project for Girls Rock!

Genre - Music

Curriculum Ties - Discuss the representation of Women in the music industry.  How might ideas of women effect how we view them as musicians?  - Psychology, Social Science

Booktalking Ideas - Discuss some of the successful female artists who are out there.  How do we remember them?

Reading Level - Grade 9+

Challenge Issues - Some parents might complain about the excessive content about sexual orientation, and sex that permeates a good deal of the book.

Overcoming Challenges - Make sure to compare some of the male musicians with the female ones.  Discuss the balanced portrayal the novel gives that relates to women.  As the women in the music scene are influenced by their families as much as anything else.

Why Included - Girl power is such a prevalent thing now that I wanted to read something that seemed to have a bit of that resonating in what I was reading.