“What will it take for women in music to get their due?” asks music critic Ann Powers in her introduction to How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History From NPR Music, edited by Alison Fensterstock (HarperOne, 2024). “And more to the point: Why do we have to keep having to ask that question?”
The volume, which grew out of National Public Radio’s “Turning the Tables” series, highlights the achievements of women in popular music when so many of the received histories of rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop skew heavily male. There’s a list of the “150 Greatest Albums Made by Women,” plus appreciations of seminal artists—from Willie Mae Thornton and Ronnie Spector to Joni Mitchell and Beyoncé—that remind us how women have always broken barriers in music, whether or not we were paying attention. Last year’s starred review called the book an “indispensable survey of the too-often neglected role of women in creating the music we all listen to.”
Someone who knows a lot about the challenges faced by women in the music industry is Neko Case, a founding member of the New Pornographers and Grammy-nominated solo artist whose albums include Blacklisted and Middle Cyclone. Case’s first book, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central Publishing, Jan. 28), shares a lineage with such powerful musical memoirs as Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010), Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl (2010), Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015), and Rickie Lee Jones’ Last Chance Texaco (2021), a book Case cites as an inspiration in her acknowledgments. Our starred review calls Case’s memoir a “sweet-and-sour study of a songwriter’s coming-of-age.”
The Harder I Fight recounts Case’s hardscrabble childhood in the Pacific Northwest, the child of young parents who often left her to her own devices; she recalls seeking refuge in nature, with animals, as well as through music. “I listened to music like it was more important than eating and breathing,” she writes. She formed the band Maow (“we were pure appetite”) with two women friends, and she found an affinity for singing, drums, guitar, and songwriting. The sexism she encountered was, in her words, “so…obvious.” Check out her recent conversation with contributor Kate Tuttle about the book.
Few female pop musicians were more misunderstood and underestimated than Sinéad O’Connor, the Irish singer, songwriter, and activist who topped the charts in 1990 with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” then gained notoriety in 1992 after tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a live performance on Saturday Night Live (a protest against child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). O’Connor died in 2023 at the age of 56, and now she’s the subject of Sinéad O’Connor: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2024), part of a long-running series by the publisher. The book features early interviews with NME and Rolling Stone as well as a transcript of her appearance on The View in 2021 while promoting her own candid memoir, Rememberings. Like Case, and so many of the women featured in NPR’s anthology, O’Connor moved to the beat of a different drum.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
