An Important History

Hi friend,

A steady flow of music documentaries has been released over the past year, paying tribute to everyone from The Beach Boys to Céline Dion to Led Zeppelin to Luther Vandross – and more are on the way. In addition to all the entries that premiered at Sundance earlier this month (including this one about the birth of house music, which we want to see), we can also look forward to a film about Lillith Fair from Dan Levy’s production company.

Not every star gets the documentary treatment, though. Some may have been relegated to the annals of history were it not for passionate fans and the work of people like Tanya Pearson.

Pearson, who describes herself as “a staunch proponent of lesbianism, aging, not eating animals, senior dog adoption, punk rock, and Judy Garland” — a.k.a. someone we’d really like to hang out with — is the founder of the oral-history project Women of Rock. She started collecting interviews after she realized how many women have been underrepresented in rock coverage, and how easy it would be for their histories to be forgotten.

This all led to her new book, Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s (here on Bookshop, here on Amazon). It features interviews with The Breeders’ Josephine Wiggs, Babes in Toyland’s Lori Barbero, Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon, Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, Hole’s Jill Emery, and L7’s Donita Sparks, among others. It’s a great read that will both incite and cure your nostalgia for the ‘90s.

Read on for our exclusive excerpt of Pretend We’re Dead, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

In 1991, journalist Barney Hoskyns wrote that angry girls with electric guitars had “highjacked rock and roll” and that these “psycho babes from hell” were symptomatic of a new wave of post-feminist expression. This article appeared in Vogue, just to give you a sense of how widespread and mainstream the alternative genre had become. In his 1979 book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige provides an account of how the mainstream media deal with youth subcultures.

According to this narrative, youth cultures emerge seemingly spontaneously “from the streets,” from outside the capitalist economy. They are then inevitably co-opted by the mainstream, diluted, and commodified. Radical bands are seen to lose their edge as they are signed to major record labels; entrepreneurs soften street fashions as they package them for mainstream high-street consumers; leaders of the style are nominated and often endowed with additional glamour and charisma. Media plays a key role here, albeit veering erratically from fascination with taboo behavior to melodramatic “moral panic.” In the ’90s, the media played an important role in positioning women as arbiters of a new feminism, while also laying the groundwork for the eventual backlash. The ’90s witnessed an explosion of different forms of femininity, a conflation of styles, sounds, genres, and aesthetics that left the media scratching its head. Radio, MTV, and music magazines shaped public opinion but had a difficult time corralling and categorizing these rock women — and the media loves putting women in categorical boxes.

L7 were hard rock, were androgynous, and deliberately chose a gender-neutral band name; Shirley Manson was a little bit goth, a little bit pop, and 100 percent opinionated; Liz Phair wasn’t loud, but she was sexual and explicit; Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland screamed and thrashed their guitars in tattered vintage, lipstick-smeared fury; Kristin Hersh was the nice mom, cerebral, genius, and progenitor of modern indie rock; Alanis Morissette emerged in 1995 with hair in her face and a unique vocal affect unveiled in her single “You Oughta Know,” exemplifying rage and vulnerability. For a glorious moment, she made being pissed off — and going down on your significant other in a movie theater — cool, although still unhygienic.

Mass media, whether it’s aware of it or not, internalizes institutional values while operating under the illusion that it is free, objective, and unbiased. It employs strategies, rooted in the coloniality of gender, women, and women’s work and perpetuates myths that we consider natural or innate — myths like (1) rock is masculine, rebellious, and anti-establishment; (2) women are predisposed to compete; (3) women in rock are a novelty or phenomenon; (4) mass media subscribes to gendered categorizations; and (5) mass media preserves the male gaze.

Using this logic, for example, an unwed, childless, hard-rocking woman becomes a spectacle, while child-rearing rock women become dangerous aberrations to our collective understandings of what a wife and mother should be. Women, by virtue of their biology, do not fit into the rock mold, which is all about cock, sex, and masculine sexual prowess. Some, like Courtney Love and Kristin Hersh, were young wives and mothers who upended that revisionist ideology. Hersh went on to have four children and lost custody of her eldest due in part to how she was portrayed in the media (mentally ill) and for being unsuitably employed.

Excerpted from Pretend We’re Dead by Tanya Peterson. Copyright © 2025 by Tanya Peterson. Used by arrangement with Da Capo, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing Group. All rights reserved. 

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TO WATCH We’ve been seeing rave reviews for the new film My Dead Friend Zoe (in theaters), which is about a U.S. Army vet trying to process her grief over the death of her best friend by talking to her all the time as if she was still around, to the concern of her family and counselor (played by Morgan Freeman). It’s poignant but also lighthearted, which feels like a hard combo to nail.

TO GET It’s almost Daylight Savings Time, which can be a tough shift — but we’re making the transition easier with the Loftie Clock. Its gentle, science-backed approach to waking up is so much more pleasant than the jarring phone alarms we used to set. Its two-phase alarm system mimics the body’s natural wake cycle, and at night, its warm light and white noise features promote restful sleep. It’s normally $159.99, but Gloria readers can get 20 percent with code GLORIA20. #partner

TO LISTEN The Oscars — hosted, for the first time, by Conan O’Brien — is this Sunday, and ahead of the ceremony we are listening to this dishy podcast interview with the awards show’s former writer, Bruce Vilanch. Some of the anecdotes are truly bonkers! Speaking of the Oscars, here are some fun food and drink suggestions for the night of, including a tasty popcorn idea.

TO READ Three of late feminist Andrea Dworkin’s polarizing books from the ‘70s and ‘80s – Pornography, Woman Hating, and Right-Wing Women (relevant reading) – were rereleased with new covers and intros this week. This is a big deal; all were out of print for years, and were extremely hard to come by, though PDFs have circulated online. This piece by Moira Donegan, who wrote a new and critical intro for Right-Wing Women, is a good entry into how Dworkin’s work was received when she was still alive.

Love this essay about not drinking. • A long, extremely informative, piece on osteoporosis prevention from a doctor (including some surprising info about prunes). • Women with dense breast tissue need additional screenings, but oftentimes insurance will not cover them. • Menopause’s effect on the brain.

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