HIT GIRLS : women of punk in the usa, 1975-1983

A necessary & invaluable compendium of American punk bands fronted & formed by women who are overlooked no more.Hit Girls is the American punk rock encyclopedia every female music fan could ever want. It features nearly 100 bands with women on guitar & bass, drums, vocals, & more. Larson reveals how women were crucial to the underground success of the bands cited in the book even though they’ve been excluded from broader histories of punk to date. The women profiled in Hit Girls defined themselves as musicians & artists despite, & often while overtly resisting, pervasive cultural misogyny & sexism in the music industry.The book is organised by geographic region in the US: Midwest, South, Northwest, West Coast South (Los Angeles & the surrounding area), West Coast North (largely the Bay Area), & East Coast. Within each section, Larson provides profiles of anywhere from 10 to 20 bands, most accompanied by reproduced images of record sleeves & photographs. Each section also contains interview transcripts with various women from the profiled bands. Occasionally, other ephemera is also reproduced, such as handbills & gig posters, or venue calendars. Hit Girls has a foreword by Ann Magnuson, a multi-talented performer who also happens to be a member of the New York City-based band Pulsallama. Throughout Hit Girls, essays or flash pieces by women musicians also appear, such as “¡Feminista!” by Alice Bag & “Neo Boys Liner Notes” by Suzi Creamcheese.The collage of descriptive text, lyric analysis, & interview material with image reproductions makes Hit Girls feel a bit like a collection of zines. It’s as if it were designed to be gloriously distributed to everyone you know — anyone who’s interested in punk, in women in music, or in excavating histories of feminism & marginalised voices should have a copy of Hit Girls... – Audrey Golden, Louder Than War Think punk was only a boys club? Read about the women who were the punk revolution! Women have been kicking against the pricks of music patriarchy since Sister Rosetta Tharpe first played the guitar riffs that built rock-n-roll. The explosion of punk sent shockwaves of revolution to every girl who dreamed of being on stage. Punk godmothers Suzy Quatro, The Runaways, Patti Smith, Poison Ivy, Tina Weymouth, Debbie Harry, The Go-Gos, and Fannys Millington sisters provided the template for thousands of girls and women throughout the United States to write and record their songs. Hit Girls is the story local and regional bands whose legacy would be otherwise lost. Despite the modern narrative labeled women as anomalies in rock music, the truth is: women played important roles in punk and its related genres in every city, in every scene, all over the United States. The women and bands profiled by Jen B. share their experiences of sexism and racism as well as their joy and successes from their days on stage as they changed what it meant to be in a band. These pioneering women were more than novelty acts or pretty faces--they were fully contributing members and leaders of mixed-gender and all-female bands long before the call for girls to the front. The women of Hit Girls are now rightfully exalted to cult status where their collective achievement is recognized and inspiring to new generations of women rockers. Included are interviews with: Texacala Jones, Stoney Rivera, Mish Bondaj, Alice Bag, Nikki Corvette, Penelope Houston, and many more formidable and infamous women who made their voices heard over the screaming guitars. Hit Girls includes over 100 rare and never-before seen images. Author Jen B. includes a comprehensive playlist of all the artists. Foreword by punk journalist, Ginger Coyote. Jen B. Larson is a writer, musician, and public art schoolteacher living in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in English literature and creative writing as well as an M.Ed. in special education. Her bands, Swimsuit Addition, beastii, and Jen and the Dots, have performed and recorded extensively over the last decade.