Women in Rock, or women in... something else?

Aka, the one in which I deconstruct back issues of Rolling Stone. Not being a regular reader of Rolling Stone, I first saw this on Lists of Bests a few months ago: "Rolling Stone's 50 Essential 'Women In Rock' Albums."

It's not a terrible list, as far as lists compiled by the editors of a mainstream magazine go, but have you noticed, um, not everything on there is really "rock." Sure there are some fantastic (albeit overly familiar) albums on that list made by women in country, women in soul, and women in hip-hop, but shouldn't a list that calls itself "The 50 Essential Women In Rock Albums" be just that? Or am I getting hung up on semantics again?

Something similar happened when the members of a forum I frequent were asked to name the "best rock voices." After seeing Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce, et al., popping up on each list, I finally pipped up, "Hey, where are the women?" In my experience, male rock fans are more than happy to name their favorite female artists when prodded, and their lists were just as varied as the RS one. But save for Joan Jett, not a lot of "rockers."

I think this quote from Juliana Tringali's 2005 Bitch article, Love, Guns, Tight Pants, and Big Sticks , says volumes women's exclusion in the rock and roll canon:

While female musicians found success in the rock scene, they were more often than not regarded as novelties. Heart’s “Barracuda,” for instance, is arguably one of the greatest songs of the ’70s, but its popularity at the time was tempered by critics’ claims that bandleaders Ann and Nancy Wilson were lesbians—as if that, and not the quality of their lyrics and riffs, were the real issue. The Runaways—self-proclaimed Queens of Noise—featured Joan Jett and Lita Ford, both formidable guitarists. (Ford would later be the first woman inducted into Circus magazine’s Rock Hall of Fame.) A band of Hollywood teenagers assembled by industry provocateur Kim Fowley, the Run aways attracted an audience largely consisting of screaming teenage boys, dispelling the notion that male fans had a more rational appreciation of music and women were the ones who went into fits. But because of both the band’s gender and its provenance, male critics met the Runaways with predictable contempt. (One review opened simply with “These bitches suck.”) Jett recalled these reactions to her band in a 1998 interview in the Onion AV Club: “First, people just tried to get around it by saying, ‘Oh, wow, isn’t that cute? Girls playing rock and roll!’ and when we said ‘Yeah, right, this isn’t a phase; it’s what we want to do with our lives,’ it became ‘Oh! You must be a bunch of sluts! You dykes, you whores.’”