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For those of you in St. Louis or thereabouts, the lineup for LouFest has been announced, and there are some pretty big names on the bill. It takes place August 28-20 in Forest Park, and the tickets are $38 for each day and $64 for the entire weekend.

From Broadsheet: Bruce Springsteen: The classiest celebrity cheater
Generally, I shy away from posting gossipy links, but I liked this take on the whole "celebrity cheater" mess. Broadsheet always brings the goods.

Bitch hipped me to another new artist, Janelle Monáe. On the video "Tightrope," writer Alyex Vesy says, "Most female pop stars seem to abide by normative definitions of femininity (even indie retro soul singers like Sharon Jones wear dresses), so I love that Monáe has cultivated such a simple yet clearly androgynous look built around menswear."


Some more thoughts regarding the Guardian's recent article about the lack of angry women and he fascination 90s nostalgia courtesy of Jessica Hopper and Nitsuh Abebe . 90s Woman defends Alanis's feminist credentials. (I'm only a lowly blogger without a dog in this fight, so I'll just direct you to three posts written more eloquently than anything I could manage.) The genesis of this, of course, is the new Runways biopic and the recent book about riot grrrl culture, Girl Power, which I reviewed a few posts down.

I'll admit to coming to this "angry women rock" thing from a slightly skewed angle, and mostly after the fact. I only briefly touched upon this when I reviewed the book, but aside from Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney, who garnered enough mainstream success that I could turn on your average rock radio station in 1995 (okay, commercial-alternative -- an oxymoron is there ever was one) and hear their music, most of the political/feminist rock of the 90s was unavailable to a working-class, Midwestern girl like me. (The media blackout and riot grrrl's unavailability to some girls was mentioned in the book.) Initially, I dismissed a lot of it as "art made by people who would probably not let me sit at their lunch table," and by then riot grrrl was already a caricature of what it once was. How does this tie in? It doesn't really, but I'm enjoying seeing it analyzed and dissected.