A few years ago, my friend Jill Sternheimer and I started a verbal exchange one night through driving in the streets of New Orleans. We are the nerds of music, and we are regularly witnessing the types of musical retrospective that have not become unusual in this age of ancient exploration through old -tape screens and old reading lists. Jill, in fact, occasionally organizes such exhibitions in Lincoln Center Out Doors, where she is director of public programs. Uigreen, I write about them and occasionally I think about how the history of music in the virtual era is recorded and reviewed. Why, we ask ourselves, was the importance of women as occasionally identified as a trend instead of a source of sustainable impact? We have concluded that, in 2017, anyone will probably not surprise as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the wonderful works of men, and that without a serious review of the cannon, women will remain on the sidelines.

This is a reinforced fact in other ways: through the heavy shelves with books about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, while only one or two in Aretha Franklin or Patti Smith are sitting near Via; through the radio reading lists that still have women only once or twice consistent with the time; Even through the “Rock Classic” t -shirts for sale in large box stores, recorded with the language of the Rolling Stones and the Led Zeppelin plane, but not the pink ticket spinning from the heart. As I have become a musical critic in the 1980s, my first big pieces for my local musical fabric involved Go -Go and Joan Jett, I have occasionally written about women in music as category and individual; Often, in those missions, they asked me to take into account the musical creation of women as a trend, as something rare instead of central. My intrepid classmates who have written stories or anthologies published on the subject (maximum of them, although some are men) have tried to give the speculation that men, photographs and sounds of maximum rock, soul and hop are generated through men. In the 1980s, in my studies of school women, they taught me to distrust the omnipresence of “the pseudogeneral type”, the speculation that a male attitude can constitute all attitudes. Today, a myriad of identities through the gender spectrum flourishes in our shared spaces on social networks and the conversations generated there. However, in popular culture, and especially in music, the pseudogeneric type still queen. Sex writing turns out that a boy gave me when our definitions change. However, I am officially tired of writing about music that recognizes women when gender is the subject, but when music itself is the theme, Almaximum returns its purpose for men. Speaking of this challenge with Jill, then, with several of my NPR colleagues, I began to wonder whether to focus on what women have done in music, instead of constantly noticing Wow, they exist, it can be a way to begin to make this model known.

What you see before you is a list that, I hope, reads as an intervention. Almost 50 women who play a role in NPR have compiled and voted on this list. It presents albums of artists who identify as women, adding some of the combined groups, such as Fleetwood Mac and X, who, in our opinion, had the creativity of women for their spark. These albums were launched between 1964, the year in which the Beatles invaded the United States and put themselves in motion what can be called “the era of the vintage album” and 2016, when Beyoncé inaugurated a new era with his “Visual album” Lemonade. The purpose is to offer a view of the history of popular music with women’s paintings in the center. The list does not constitute an “alternative history. ” It constitutes the history of music, which addresses all significant trends, the social problem, all solid inventions and the new street for self -expression that popular music has crossed beyond fifty years.

The lists have their limits. It worries, in fact, that beyond obtaining the grocery store, the lists are fundamentally lies. They reflect subconscious biases and whispered commitments; They consolidate ideals that may seem applicable at that time, but incomprehensible to the next generation. They are also probably antifminists. As Robin Morgan wrote in the anthology that helped to describe the time of the wave of feminism, the sister of the 1970s is powerful, “the movement of women is not hierarchical. He does things together and experimentally. ” In music, the lists are what comes after a delight: listening revealed in itself, alone and then together, percentage of music and argue on this subject and realize how the non -public expression of an artist can also be non -public (and politics) of an auditor. A list does not indicate the option that any other list of the same topic is valid. Forces authority.

Or is it? Another way of seeing a list is to start the new conversation. We are still mandatory with respect to the position of women in the history of music, despite decades of efforts through historians, criticism, activists and feminist musicians. For the last century, the time in which this list covers more or less, the “most productive” classical lists “are strangely with few women, especially in their most productive ranks. The 500 largest albums of all time in Rolling Stone, compiled in two hundred3 and updated in two hundred, do not come with women in the Top 20 And the Rock and Roll Fame Hall has never resolved the challenge of a vital female subpropination in its ranks.

These lists are roosters that put eggs. What came first here, the concept that men traditionally make music that women, or the institutionalization of an album organization that men have done? Because the vast lists make them larger of the SGT. The organization Lonely Hearts Club de Pepper to Thriller to Never Mind to Ok Computer, with anything, from Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin appearing around No. 30, the paradigms that describe greatness remain masculine at the base. This means that Beatles constitute modernity instead of Nina Simone, and Bob Dylan constitutes the poetism made of populist, while Mitchell or Franklin do so secondarily. Nirvana and pearl jam placed in the middle of the Renaissance of rock in the 1990s, without suggesting that Lanis Morrisette or P. J. Harvey belong to this same place. It maintains the concept that the golden era of hip hop belonged to rappers like Biggie and Tupac instead of Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill. This darkens the fact that the greatest influence of the fresh country is not Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard (or even Garth Brooks), but Shania Twain. It is difficult to see that Jay Z has a primary career as an artist basically due to Beyoncé.

The positive action gives an imaginable correction to this asymmetric vision of the musical beyond and present. (As Rhiannon Giddens says, the hereafter is still present). Why not rebuild these old lists and develop the number of women in them? The challenge is that, once a cannon is formed, an immutability aura wins. To considerably replace, this requires an attitude replacement beyond the undeniable mandate to adjust the numbers. If it were not true, then at least one of the infinite lists of lists generated on paper, on television, in cinematographic documentaries and on the Internet would have an album of a woman at the top. None has. In addition, there have been few lists of lists that focus exclusively on women’s albums.

In the structure of a new cannon, the transformation of the participants in the table has maintained primary parameters. We have left space to recognize the classics of the rock era, as well as the pop blows rejected through others such as Down. There are beginnings that have replaced the music game, and the sets whose effects have an effect in small basically affected communities. There are works that speak firmly and directly about the delight of women, and whose brands have tried to erase the limits of gender. The original nominated list was more than 500 intensity albums, united through all the electorates who participated and presented without bias in the total group.

Our electorate participates in the culture of popular music in other tactics, and this is one of the reasons why this list is canonical, it is also very diverse. Some are criticisms that have interaction in daily conversations about issues of musical flavor and legitimacy. Others are radio manufacturers or hosts that are executed with musicians and incorporate music into the NPR cover. Others are the 21st century edition of the ancient fashion DJ, absorbing new music every day and every day to create a hearing delight that extends from the history of pop and pushes it forward. Voters also diversity from age to sixties and sixties. The other tactics in which these women have interaction with music have made a list that largely reflects concepts about what is canonical, but also questions them.

The most productive artists are expected on the list and, in specific in their ranking, a wonder. The albums are positioned far from others in other more productive lists are related to others in an attractive way when they seem consecutively, telling stories that cross regional, generational and taste divisions. This will ask some readers that the universally praised blue through Joni Mitchell is No. 1 on our list, however, that it almost connected with the bad education of Lauryn Hill says a lot: this last album spoke with another generation of love and independence, and the intelligent position of women in a converted culture, in a very similar way. Nina Simone, recently enjoying a stimulated rebirth through the black feminist reviews of her work, has greatly received third position. Four and five continue with this trend of intergenerational exchange, with the Dupa Supa flying through Missy Elliott, who expected the electronic pop course of the 21st century 3 years before the millennium, the right state of Aretha Franklin never enjoyed a man who, in the 1960s, shaped the sound of the soul.

From these guaranteed options, capable of being heard when possession so close to the other, the list opens in a direction myriad. Where did our love? For the Supremes, which establishes albums in 1964 and, with albums of other women’s teams such as ronettes, it is in some American Whearwork Masterwork Wheels through Lucinda Williams on a gravel road, an album for which it may also have been (of course, it was not to name a “new Dylan. ” Labelle Nightbirds, as a full and adventurous album of Funk as everything that the friend of the George Clinton organization has made, rests near Kate Bush Epic Dogs. The Ideal Jazz singer She Fitzgerald may never have shared a position in a list with the Hip Hop M. I. A. Or X -ray Punk Punk Punk instigator, but considered together, the tactics in which they have conducted the limits of language and voice tell a story of women who speak opposite to the limits of convenience. It is desirable to think about the demanding situations that Brittany Howard of Alabama’s shakes has won the Blues and Rock bureaucracy that motivates it, in the soft of the galas of the avant -garde Diamanda, correctly, made of art.

Why create a barrel of women’s works? A Joni Mitchell Days scene to Laurel Canyon, which will soon motivate her to record blue, turn out to be enlightening. Mitchell worked with David Crosby in his first homonymous album, and attended parties in friends such as Cass Elliott or screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb later declared that the music historian Barney Hoskyns that Crosby had waited for Joni in another room after his arrival. For a pause in the conversation, I would say to the crowd that I was looking to provide someone. Mitchell would emerge, played some songs and retired. “He will return to the floor, and we all sit and we all look at others and say:” What was it? Gottlieb said.

There were women at those festivals, but the maximum of the emerging stars accumulated in the origins of Jacaranda were men. Some have temporarily become Mitchell workers, some lovers: Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne. They listened to Mitchell in Mitchell that they had not heard before: their contempt for the exclusive guitar, transforming popular music into jazz; His words, clear in detail and more emotionally dictates than his. Actually, it was an exception, the genius whose blue, encouraged through this era of his life and published in 1971, is at the maximum sensible of the list of 150 larger recordings of the Vintage NPR album.

But there is also something disabled and unfortunately typical in this scene. In this document, the musician is a dream, wonder and a disruptive. You can claim half of the attention, but your point of valid origin and the position where you return is a margin.

Now, in some other scene, it is presented through literary scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their 1979 exam in Madwoman in the attic: the writer and the imagination of the nineteenth century. They identified that the women had read, during a century, in the lifestyles a story of choice of literature, a “canon that lived in the minds of all the high -level medium -level women who passed to their daughter devouring the classics of the classics of the female mind produced through Austen and the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot Dickins “. “The situation of the women of Gilbert and Gubar who exchange pocket books used in instructions and that have long discussions about pride and prejudices in relation to the heights of those made do not isolate anyone as a woman as exceptional, hitting them in discussion in a way that adjusts the concept of great literature. Recognizing only to the writers, this vision can be extreme, a form of separatism that is isolation that is isolating the artist Female more productive during a collection in a separate room. Canyons have followed and brought to more adjustments, adding greater popularity of color women and women who write beyond North America.

The canonization procedure, literally of the compilation of the lists of the largest influential or maximum influential paintings, is at all times controversial. Many musicians despise lists and other anthologization efforts that threaten to freeze their paintings in hierarchies. This is doubly true for many women, who are concerned that being venerated as the productive maximum in their sex Margine. “Only some other electronic book about women in rock!” Kathleen Hanna screamed in the song “Crochet”, recorded under the pseudonym of Julie Ruin. “You killed the thing. ” The special occasions sponsored through a female product that strives “divas” or “rocker” women that fill our television and PC screens occasionally appear only marketing stratagems that present the paintings of women as a new sensation, wrapped with a small old context or a genuine thought. Being “grouped with women”, as Mitchell has described it, can have the impression of winning a plastic trinket that, in the genuine scheme in pop history, seems like a place for now.

It is a dilemma. Defining women in music as women make their paintings more visual in an environment governed through men and potentially reduces their value. One of the reasons can be a very deep confidence that underlies much more than the prestige of women in music: the concept that men “do”, while women “will be. ” This difference is in the center of the traditional gender binary. Women are connected to herbs and timeless, while men innovate and make history. Men build civilizations and create wonderful paintings, while women handle spaces and unite other people to their stimulating souls and horny energy. These associations could possibly seem obsolete, however, they underlie tactics whose wonderful male or female is discussed and defined in music as in a broader culture. Do you think I’m wrong? Google “Beyoncé” and “Force of Nature”, then do the same for Drake.

Women can be identified for having created wonderful works of art of art, for example, it is one of the albums that seem in the lists that in a different way come with ninety -five % of the music generated through men. Even so, when sometimes they are celebrated more, sometimes it is because of their existential qualities: their wonderful voices, their glamor, their sexual attraction. “The sky is blue, the grass is green; Aretha Franklin is the biggest singer who has ever lived,” he read a recent 1967 album birthday party from Franklin, I never enjoyed a guy like I love you. While the article aimed at the album, Aretha was basically acclaimed as a presence almost beyond the description, comparable to God.

Compare this with the many recent dissections of the SGT. The Lonely Hearts Club of Pepper organization, with its detailed descriptions of the way in which the organization evolved the concept of the album, explored the new recording techniques and has put the history of pop on the head. “Sergeant Pepper, more than any other work, was guilty of the generation of the aura of artistic legitimacy that would institutionalize the presence of rock music in the existing dominant fashion culture,” wrote Jonathan Gould in New Yorker. The Beatles did something vital historically. Aretha Franklin also did, but is celebrated more as a miracle. (Mea guilt: I did the same in my critical writing, once founded on a check in Franklin around the opening line, “it manifests”).

Because the concept that women “will be” at all times influence the way we think of female artists, basically they were canonized as personalities or essences, not marks of things. The concept of “women in music” works in the dominant existing as an birthday party of the ineffable female and endless cliché redefined but. It is an endless repetition of this trick that David Crosby designed for Joni Mitchell, of his appearance, as Magic. The challenge is that magical beings cannot succeed in a forged foot in the genuine world.

What we hope to do with this list is to stimulate discussions about women in music aimed at what they do, recordings, instead of how they are perceived as being. The albums appointed here triggered old trends, directed sound inventions and shape the life of the lenders and works through artists who followed. The women who made them claim authority as producers, leaders of the organization and composers. They collaborated with the equivalent men, not only by serving as “face” and “the voice” of the tubes that made, however, the writing of CO, even if it is uncommon that this fatherhood had arisen when they touched tools or remodeled a prayer. These women will have to be identified by their vision, not only for their mystery air, by the notes they have hit and the melodies they have drawn and the rhythms they have launched, by the stories they have told and are told, every time we pay attention.

You can read the NPR list of the 150 largest albums made here.