Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists: Guess What's Missing?

Maura put best with this headline that came across my Tumblr yesterday afternoon: "Breaking: panel overwhelmingly made up of white men is really into the artistic output of other men."

Rolling Stone published their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All-Time . At this point, do I even need to say it? Two. Two of the hundred legends and icons great enough to be called "the greatest" are women: Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, respectively.

I never really wanted this site to be a collection of posts detailing yet another aspect of the music industry where women are underrepresented, but this is getting kind of old. And I don't entirely fault Rolling Stone for picking the same artists who've been topping lists for decades: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hedrix, et al... because girls are still too rarely encouraged to play guitar, but their panel of experts should, at least, be hip to the fact that some great guitarists exist outside the Beck-Clapton-Hendrix trifecta. And some of those guitarists are women.

Yes, it's a boy's game and all. This is a fact, and not something that's about to change anytime soon. It dovetails nicely with what I wrote yesterday: women aren't seen as masters of their craft. Women may be topping the charts, but lack the respect male artists get.

Pitchfork's 60 Favorite Music Books Short On Female Authors

I don't fault Pitchfork's writers for only including two female-penned books -- the new Ellen Willis anthology and Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell's Rock, She Wrote -- in their list of 60 Favorite Music Books. When I think of the volumes of music criticism I've read over the course of the last two decades, just as a fan, not enough of them were written by women. I'm trying to rectify that.

And if putting together a list of music writing where women are fairly represented is hard enough, designing a list of criticism solely written by women is near impossible, not because women aren't writing about music, but because women's music criticism is largely unread. Though to read some of the selections on Pitchfork's list, you'd think women weren't interested -- or worse, in capable of -- critically thinking about music. What's most disappointing, though, is more than a few of the writers whose books made the list have some pretty archaic ideas about women as music fans. I'd like to see a list where a Tricia Rose shares billing with Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, but it's no secret that music criticism is still overwhelmingly a boy's club.