How did Blender do it? How did they start compiling a list of music’s creepiest, most repulsive, often genuinely criminal people – and stop at just 25? I don’t know what it is about the music biz, but it has long been a magnet for shady characters. I suppose it’s all the money flowing in and out for a commodity that is so slippery and elusive – the music industry basically made up its own rules as it went along, and changed them when it could if it suited the corporate bottom line. And fame does funny things to musicians, and often to their extended, even bloated, entourages.
And we listeners aren’t blameless in this either. Just like in the world of sports, we put our favorite musicians on pedestals and laugh off their idiosyncrasies as “part of the lifestyle”. Hey, if Phil Spector pulls a gun on you in a deserted parking lot or, say, in a bedroom in his home, will you excuse him because he did after all create the “wall of sound” and produced some of the greatest pop songs in the past half century? Plus he did the same thing to apparently half the musicians he’s produced over the years?
So how does Phil Spector NOT make it onto Blender’s list? Check out the list here – who do you think belongs on this list? (Yeah, yeah, I know – critics who make lists. What else you got?)
When I prepared the segment on GIRLS LIKE US: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon – and the Journey of a Generation for Soundcheck I had no idea that it would resonate with me, a gen-Xer. Among the many stories author Sheila Weller novelistically recounts is how Joni Mitchell, then Joan Anderson, finds herself pregnant and unmarried at 20. 8 years before Roe vs. Wade, there were frighteningly few options for women in this predicament. Joni decides to give up her daughter, a painful decision, which, it’s suggested, may have fueled Mitchell’s remarkable career and artistry. My mother, who died in a car crash two years after Blue came out, found herself in the same situation, the same year as Joni Mitchell. Before she met my father, she became pregnant and unmarried she gave up her daughter (my unfound half-sister) for adoption. 
Where are the women in rock? I happen to know they’re still out there – I share an office with one, as you may have learned in our posting last Wednesday – but Women Who Rock just don’t seem to be as visible as they were 15 years ago, when Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney were leading the charge of the riot-grrls in the Pacific Northwest and Courtney Love’s Hole was taking no prisoners. Women in music now? Well, there’s Britney and her ilk, or there are undeniable and genuinely musical forces like Feist and Cat Power. But where is that amps-up-to-11, pin-your-ears-to-the-wall sound that once proved that gender had nothing to do with your ability to rock? And if it really IS gone, what’s wrong with that? Does rockin’ hard define a woman any more than anything else? 
Windows 
Windows 
Windows 
