Tuesday 2 April 2013

HELEN McCOOKERYBOOK: The Womens' story


The Raincoats
The Slits

The Womens' story
By Helen McCookerybook



ED NOTE: This essay is based on research for Helen Reddington's Lost Women of Rock book. Details at the end

At the core of British punk music and the punk subculture in the 1970's was the concept of subver-sion, and the punk women in the London punk environment who formed and joined bands exercised a double subversion: not only the subversion associated with the subculture itself, but also a subversion of sounds normally associated with 'male' music making in the pop and rock arenas.

If you listen to music by The Slits and The Raincoats, for instance, they do have their own 'sound,' with space, vocal harmonies and clear and distinctive bass-lines to the forefront. In my book The Lost Women of Rock Music: female musicians of the punk era, I explored politics, the media, gender issues and social context but not the musical legacy of punk in any detail; this article is based on a more detailed academic paper that is currently in progress, and is based in part on interviews with musicians Tessa Pollitt of The Slits and Gina Birch of The Raincoats.


HELEN McCOOKERYBOOK AT GONZO
Take One
CD - £9.99

Poems And Rhymes
CD - £9.99

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...BECAUSE SOME OF US THINK THAT THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT
What happens when you mix what is - arguably - the world's most interesting record company, with an anarchist manic-depressive rock music historian polymath, and a method of dissemination which means that a daily rock-music magazine can be almost instantaneous?

Most of this blog is related in some way to the music, books and films produced by Gonzo Multimedia, but the editor has a grasshopper mind and so also writes about all sorts of cultural issues which interest him, and which he hopes will interest you as well.