Giving women in music their due

Plus: The Emmys, Mrs. Roper, and a guide to the best of the fall

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when we learned about the stellar cast of the next Black Mirror. It was the week when passengers offered the scoop on a nine-month cruise. And it was the week when Shohei Ohtani was simply the best. Let's get to it. Centering women in popular music history Our friends at NPR Music are coming out with a book called How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History. Here's an excerpt from the introduction, written by NPR music critic Ann Powers. What will it take for women in music to get their due? More to the point: Why do we keep having to ask that question? Since the days when the shouts and moans of the blues queens defined recorded music (and before that, but that’s where this story begins), women have been musical pathfinders, innovators, and standard-bearers. Yet they have perpetually been treated as novelties, shiny and sweet but insubstantial, not truly essential to anything. So many women have tried to correct this error — as artists, historians, and fans, shouting “women matter” from the rooftops — only to be forgotten or actively erased. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken. Women cannot only be appreciated as the Next Big Thing. They are fundamental, and always have been. HarperOne I’d spent many years working to help correct the record, only to see the old prejudices reinscribed. By 2015 I knew something serious would have to be done. That year, Jill Sternheimer, Alison Fensterstock, and I started a conversation while drinking beers in plastic cups one night in New Orleans. We’d met up to attend the Ponderosa Stomp, an occasional festival devoted to obscure elders from the golden age of garage rock and undercover soul. We regularly go to such retrospectives, which are now common, since writing music’s genealogy is a major form of fandom and entrepreneurship: tribute shows, streaming documentaries, career-spanning playlists, and books like the one you’re holding now. Jill, in fact, often organizes such events at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, where she has served as the director of public programs. Alison has curated music retrospectives for museums and for magazines, and in my writing I often focus on history, too, trying to tease out how artists’ legacies form and expand or contract over time. That summer night, we’d just seen the guitar player Barbara Lynn — then seventy-five years old — barrel and slide her way through a dazzling set of her R&B classics. Lynn was one of the genre’s most elegantly fierce instrumentalists, yet she is hardly remembered now — and when she is invoked, it’s as a novelty, that rare lady with an ax. Why, we wondered together, doesn’t Lynn get her due? We came to the obvious and oft-stated conclusion: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins. That night we asked ourselves: What can we do to stop the cycle? The answer: we developed a multiplatform series called Turning the Tables. Its very name contains the acknowledgment that the erasure or marginalization of women in music is cyclical, that it has happened again and again despite generations of feminists trying to stop it, and that a serious reset would be needed to make women visible and audible at the center of an art form where, without being fully acknowledged, they have always played a crucial role. Turntables spin and a record plays out, as if it can sound only one way. But hip hop has taught us that the sound can change if a DJ puts her hand on an album and scratches. To turn the tables in music history, that kind of touch is necessary. Make a mark and ensure that it’s heard, discussed, recorded. Change the way people think about the sounds and stories they’ve taken for granted. Redirect the music history; trouble its groove. Turning the Tables doesn’t just put women and other marginalized people at the center of the narrative — it changes the tale. Turning The Tables grew from an initial list to an expansive project aimed at reconsidering and resisting a stagnant canon. This illustrated book collects work from the Turning the Tables series centering women in popular music history and excerpts from fifty-plus years of NPR interviews with women artists. How Women Made Music is out on October 1. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend NPR's Elizabeth Blair had a fascinating feature about identical twin artists Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, known as Osgemeos, who are about to have a big retrospective in D.C. at the Hirshhorn Museum. I was fascinated by this piece about live reality-show experiences from NPR's Nina Liewehr Fill, as part of the terrific "I'm Really Into" series. I had no idea such a thing even existed, and it turns out they're all over the place. NPR's Neda Ulaby reported on "Mrs. Roper Romps," which are indeed gatherings of people dressed up like Mrs. Roper from Three's Company, and frankly any excuse to wear a caftan sounds pretty relaxing to me. We'll cover it on an upcoming episode of the podcast, but the new film His Three Daughters, starring Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon is now on Netflix, and it's one of my favorite movies of the year. It's about three sisters gathering in their father's apartment as he's dying, and those three lead performances are just as marvelous as the names attached to them would suggest. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance. Christine Tamalet We talked about the Emmys, of course, with their tolerance of category fraud — up to a point. And I wrote up some takeaways from the big night. Plus: Glen talked about the Emmys on Here & Now, while I talked about them on All Things Considered. Aisha, Glen, Stephen and I had a great time picking some of the things we're most excited to watch and listen to this fall, from great films to a blast of music we collaborated to try to describe. Aisha wrote a review of the body-horror creeper The Substance for NPR.org, and we have an episode about the movie next week. Aisha, Stephen and Isabella Gomez Sarmiento talked about My Old Ass, an insightful film starring Aubrey Plaza as the older version of an introspective 18-year-old, played by Maisy Stella. And Stephen, Ronald Young, Jr. and Jordan Crucchiola dug in on Transformers One and talked about what's making them happy this week. Stephen continued to cover what's up with music charts, and things continue to look good for Shaboozey. Stephen also joined All Songs Considered to talk about the 20th anniversary of Arcade Fire's album Funeral. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Jordan Crucchiola: The Perfect Couple, streaming on Netflix (here's the PCHH episode on it — we liked it too!) Ronald Young Jr.: Attack On Titan Stephen Thompson: How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy