photo of Bikini Kill by Pat Graham

[Editor’s note: Liner Notes chronicles how Chelsea Schlievert Yates discovered music through the ’80s and ’90s while growing up in Norfolk, Neb. We hope to post a new installment every other week. Read more here.]

by Chelsea Schlievert Yates

My husband, Nick, recently enrolled in a “History of Rock Music” class for school. As soon as he brought home his textbook, I grabbed it from him. I was curious about its narrative and structure and wondered how it compared to the book I’d used in the “History of Rock and Roll” course I’d taken in 2000, my senior year at the University of Nebraska.

I still have my textbook, which was accompanied by a multi-disc CD set. ZZ Top graces its cover. As I flip through its pages, now yellowed and raggedy, I’m greeted by many familiar faces: Elvis, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Zeppelin, Dylan, the Stones. A photo of Kurt Cobain brings the text to a close.

The first time I opened that book at the start of the semester in 2000, I was thrilled. Finally, the “big guns” of rock ‘n’ roll, together at last, just for me. My class met on Monday and Wednesday nights, and the idea of it blew me away: I was actually going to get college credit for hanging out with classmates a few evenings a week to talk about music. For homework, all I had to do was listen to more music and write about it. Somehow it felt like I was cheating the system.

The semester was the last of my undergraduate years, and in addition to my rock music class, I’d also enrolled in an American women’s history course and was completing hours for my senior thesis. Additionally, I’d picked up an internship at the Sheldon Art Gallery. Smooth sailing on the seas of cool subjects and opportunities, I thought. I wasn’t prepared for the way in which my studies in art, music and gender would collide, or the major impact that convergence would have on me.

My rock music class moved chronologically, beginning with a quick look at the precursors of early rock: rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, country and folk. Then, boom: Elvis, and we were off on our musical adventure. We broke down Beatles tunes, learning how to listen for John, Paul and (to a lesser extent) George’s distinct songwriting styles. We dissected The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and scrutinized Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock performances of “Voodoo Child” and the “Star Spangled Banner.”

After buzzing by Stax, Motown and Muscle Shoals, we spent two class periods considering the artistic significance of Frank Zappa. Occasionally, on our journey through rock history we’d bump into women musicians, primarily in the forms of 1960s girl groups (such as the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Supremes) and as rock and pop’s “exceptional women” — women such as Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin who proved, if for a time, they could hold their own against a backdrop of male artists, executives and industry folks.

And at some point during the semester, I had a realization: rock music, like pretty much everything else, was a gendered space.

This might seem obvious today. Few will deny that the rock music industry developed as a patriarchal institution and — though we’ve come a long way — that it still functions as one. But to me at age 21, this was huge. Until that point, I’d never considered the ways in which the modes of power that shaped popular music shaped me, too. I’d always felt such a personal connection to the music I listened to. It was part of who I was. I knew the effect it had on me. Didn’t I?

I’m not interested in presenting a feminist critique of the music industry at-large here; rather I want to revisit growing up as an unknowing participant in that industry. Those who have been reading my column since it started last summer know that women have rarely appeared in it — as influential artists or mentors. If they’ve been anywhere, it’s often been on the periphery. Was this because they didn’t exist? Or because rock has, historically speaking, been so heavily a “boys club” that locating them within it just wasn’t that easy? Or was it bigger than that — something beyond my consciousness, having to do with the ways histories are shaped, information is disseminated, learning is shared and knowledge is consumed?

When I was a teenager and young adult in the 1990s, there were some major energies at work to shake the male-dominated music world. For me, two that mattered most — in very different ways — took the forms of Lilith Fair and riot grrrl.

In the late 1990s, many of the stereos in my all-girls dorm blared with the sounds of Sarah McLachlan, Melissa Etheridge, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Jewel and the Dixie Chicks — musicians who participated in the Lilith Fair, a touring music festival developed in the late ‘90s to celebrate women in music. It featured only female artists or female-led bands, and its headliners, often widely known in the adult contemporary circuit, delivered songs that tended to be neatly polished by major labels. Lilith packaged and sold a cleaned-up, safe, easy-to-digest version of women’s empowerment, and through its ticket sales, commemorative T-shirts and CD compilations, it taught me that feminism, like coolness (which I’ve explored elsewhere), could be mass-marketed.

As a college kid, I wanted to get behind Lilith’s message, but something always stopped me. I understood Lilith’s focus as a careful, quiet celebration of women and away from any sort of real message of change. But was that so bad? If mass audiences united because of a diluted interpretation of feminism, that was still better than nothing, right? Even as Lilith musicians and others, such as media-dubbed “angry women in pop” Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple rocked on MTV and VH1, and the Spice Girls sent their message of “girl power” internationally, I just never felt it was enough.

Around this time, Patti Smith showed up in my music textbook. Tucked in between The Stooges and the Ramones, I could tell she wanted out. She was ready to dance, and I was in need of a new partner. When I first started listening to Patti, I didn’t hear her as a “woman artist”; through my headphones, she was another musician — like David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Holly — who kicked all sorts of ass. And she messed everything up for me. The more time I spent with her, the more I started to consider where all the women had been in the rock ‘n’ roll world I’d created for myself. Patti urged me to dig a little and rattle the cage of what I thought I knew about music. Between her albums, my women’s history lessons and my rock music listening homework, things started to shift, and questions erupted:

— Why had my high school fantasy been to be the token girl, passive and silent, in an all-guy rock group? Why were there never any other girl musicians in my daydream band?

— Why did I always feel like I had to stand back at shows, out of the way of boys in mosh pits? There were obvious answers — safety and survival, for example — but why did I need to worry about such things at a concert, anyway?

— When I looked at the stacks of CDs on the shelf in my room, why were hardly any by women?

— Whenever MTV, VH1, Rolling Stone or Spin Magazine featured any of those “100 Greatest ______ of All Time” countdown lists, why were there so few women on them? (Fill in the blank with whatever you like — Musicians, Guitarists, Drummers, Metal Bands, Hip-Hop Artists, etc. Unless the category was specifically “Women Musicians,” the rest tended to yield similar results.)

— When it came to the numerous crushes I’d had on musicians, why did I always imagine myself in a supporting role to them — as Eddie Vedder’s number one fan or the one waiting quietly backstage to greet Mike Ness when he closed a set? Why didn’t I ever see myself onstage with them, performing together, sharing the spotlight?

— And above all, why was it nearly always the guys in my life whom I looked to for musical expertise?

courtesy photo of Patti Smith

I grew up learning to consume rock music on male terms and through male influences — through men and boys (my dad, boyfriends, guy friends), by watching countless rock videos on MTV produced by, through and for the male gaze, reading music magazines largely staffed by men, listening to radio stations that played music dictated as “popular” by the male-dominated music industry. And I never thought to question any of it. Rock music equaled dudes. It wasn’t that I didn’t listen to women rock musicians; sadly, as a part of the system, I saw them as just that: women. Onstage they were exceptions to the standard laws of rock; they were curiosities. It was exciting to see them perform, but to me they just never seemed relatable or real.

But Patti changed that. In her music, so many of my interests aligned: art, poetry, punk, subversion, empowerment. She wasn’t silent, she wasn’t always pretty, and she wasn’t an accessory. She didn’t have a beautiful singing voice, but that didn’t stop her from using it. She encouraged me to question the entire narrative set forth by my rock music textbook and to seek out those who weren’t in it.

Because of Patti, I stumbled upon riot grrrl. I was too late for most of the riot grrrl activity; after all, the punk-feminist movement experienced its hey-day in the early 1990s when I was in junior high, happily listening to bands like Poison and Skid Row. I was far removed in both time and place from the young women of Olympia, Wash., and Washington DC who set a nationwide movement in motion through their music, zines, community organizing and protests (I later learned, thanks to writers like Sara Marcus and John Wenz, that a riot grrrl chapter had existed in Omaha).

I’d heard riot grrrl bands years earlier through friends who were into punk music, but to be honest, riot grrrl initially scared the bejeezus out of teenage me. A movement generated through music and by girls not much older than I was at the time, it was in-your-face, aggressive, and it threatened the male-dominated world of punk in which I’d invested so much of my own identity (which, as I’ve previously written about, was also a major point of internal contention). At the time, I was only beginning to be introduced to things like feminism and gender studies; I was trying to grasp not only the heaviness of such concepts but also understand how and why they should matter to me.

But the more I listened and grew through punk and the more I learned about race and gender, I started to appreciate riot grrrl. Riot grrrls didn’t give a fuck, but they also totally gave a fuck. Their music was angry, rough, clever, challenging. They were open about otherwise taboo topics like sexual assault, domestic abuse, sex and patriarchy. Riot grrrl bands didn’t request but demanded a place for girls in music. They issued DIY calls to girls to pick up instruments and start playing. At their concerts, they altered the dynamics of punk shows by insisting all guys move to the back and sides of the venue and all girls to the front of the stage. By the time I was introduced to riot grrrl, I’d been to enough shows to understand what kind of feat that was.

Riot grrrl dialogued more with my women’s history class than it did with my rock music survey, and it brought a new relevance to punk for me. I appreciated The Clash and the Dead Kennedys, but I discovered something new in Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Sometimes, I heard the stories of girls I’d grown up with or women I’d met in college; sometimes, I heard my own. To me, riot grrrl never seemed “anti-boy”; it was just “pro-girl,” and I began to realize that those two ideas didn’t necessarily share the same meaning.

Backed by my rock history and women’s studies classes, Patti and the riot grrrl bands compelled me to apply that which I was considering academically to my personal experiences with music and art. The following year, I left Nebraska for Lawrence, Kansas, to attend graduate school. If Nebraska was where I learned to love — and question — music, then Lawrence was where all my lessons were thrown into a blender and pureed on high speed. My coursework at the University of Kansas focused on cultural studies, race, gender and art. I took classes on gender and music studies, found a lifelong mentor in Sherrie Tucker, an American studies professor who’s caused major waves in the world of jazz studies by injecting its dominant history with heavy doses of much-overdue gender analysis.

I interviewed writers like Hettie Jones and Joyce Johnson, women affiliated with the avant-garde and beat scenes of post-World War II America, whose contributions had been overlooked in history books and literature anthologies primarily because they were women. I volunteered with the university’s art museum as well as with a local sexual assault prevention and support organization, and I coordinated a community awareness program showcasing the impact that art and music can have in healing and recovery.

This was all against the backdrop of Lawrence’s colorful music scene, where the question never seemed to be what to see or listen to, but what not to. On any night, Lawrence’s main drag, Massachusetts Street, reverberated with the sounds of live music from local acts and touring bands. Most Mass Street music venues were a few doors or blocks from each other. It was completely doable — and sometimes just plain expected — to bounce between a couple a night. Moving between performances by Junior Brown and the Arcade Fire, North Mississippi Allstars and Split Lip Rayfield, Ziggy Marley and The Get Up Kids, Robert Randolph and Gillian Welch, and Frank Black and Neko Case made for music experiences that were equally amazing and surreal.

Lawrence supported me as I continued to grow through music. It taught me about the power of convergence, community and discovery on numerous levels. I strongly believe in the need to recognize those whom have been overlooked or not taken seriously by dominant narratives — discourses shaped by power, race, gender, money, you name it.

It’s one of the reasons I’m continually energized by the work that Hear Nebraska is doing for Nebraska music. At my job at the University of Washington, I’ve been fortunate to work with Women Who Rock, a project that brings together scholars, musicians and activists to explore the role of women in popular music. It’s made up of several components, including an online oral history archive, college courses in digital media-making, an annual public gathering and film festival. It’s an amazing opportunity for anyone interested in community-building through music and documenting and celebrating under-acknowledged musicians.

I was sorry to see that Nick’s rock music textbook (published in 2006) told pretty much the same story as mine (published in 1996) — mostly white men, with an occasional nod to notable African American influences and exceptional (and often white) women. I also found it ironic that the appendix, titled “Some Artists Who Fell Through the Cracks,” included not a single woman.

Some reading may ask if any of this still matters. I believe that it does, especially for someone like me who, until college, had never thought about race, class and gender inequalities and was quite unaware of how such things were at work shaping her concepts of cool, art, music and, ultimately, self-identity.

I guess I see it as a call to all of us impacted by music — to think more critically, write more words, record more voices, plug more guitars into more amps, bang more drums and open our eyes, ears and hearts more than we ever have before.

Chelsea Schlievert Yates is a Hear Nebraska contributor. She grew up in northeast Nebraska and now lives in Seattle, Washington. Reach her at cdschlievert@gmail.com.