Critiquing it is like shooting fish in a barrel; it’s just too easy.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reflects the worldview of Rolling Stone magazine and major players in the commercial music industry.  The “meta” issue at play is how to put rock and roll, or any type of music, in a museum.  What good is looking and reading about music when you haven’t heard it?  Posting individual listening stations at each display would make progress through any exhibit impossibly slow, compromising an institution’s ability to remain financially solvent.  Curators have to assume that we know what the music, at least some of it, sounds like.  The cultural authorization that results from exhibits of this type is also problematic, as are issues of inclusion and exclusion.  Who gets recognized, who doesn’t, and why?

These problems are especially germane to an exhibit about women and rock.  I imagine that although some of the people who saw the exhibit were music nerds like me and Amy, most were not.  Those of us who are already familiar with the music could “play” it in our heads.  What would everyone else do? We were there on the President’s Day holiday, and the majority of visitors in the galleries were either middle-aged couples or moms with their pre- or just-teen daughters.  The solution proffered by the Rock Hall was to focus on performers who visitors might be familiar with.  Hence a couple of displays devoted to Lady Gaga (the meat dress!), pop stars from the 80s on, the most well-known punk, new wave and “alternative” acts, several rap, hip-hop, and nouveau girl group artists, and some appropriately reverential educational videos about early blueswomen and R&B singers from the 50s and 60s.  Emphasis was on singers.  “Wait,” you may say, “I thought you were talking about rock?” Indeed.  “Rock” here is stretched so thin as to be a meaningless term – a common discursive move.  “Rock,” the exhibit claimed, is an attitude, and apparently these selected artists all have it.

We were a bit amazed by some of the performers who were barely recognized, or left out entirely. Wither the Slits? The Raincoats? Poly Styrene?  Patsy Cline? Emmylou Harris? Exene? Mo Tucker?  Oh yeah, listed in a paragraph on a small sign, maybe.  Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, and Liz Phair were there, but where were the rest of the women from the 70s to the 90s and beyond who made or continue to toil in the rock trenches? Where were the non-Americans? (Joni Mitchell was included, but she’s lived south of the 49^th parallel for a long time.) Pioneering female rock group Fanny was represented with a group photo on a swinging door that led to a side exhibit; Amy and I were relieved that it was not the entrance to the restroom, which is what it looked like.

After a while, it seemed that artists who were able to donate “stuff,” usually in the form of stage attire identified by the name of the designer, were the de facto focal points of the exhibit.  That wasn’t necessarily the case, as it turns out.  Upon my return, I asked June Millington of Fanny whether she’d been contacted about the exhibit. She hadn’t, although she knew that her photo was being used and that the curatorial staff had her contact information.  Too bad, as Millington has plenty of stuff, in the way of guitars, other instruments, and memorabilia that I’m sure she’d have been happy to lend and that could have formed part of more interesting exhibits. (I also emailed one of the Raincoats with the same question; if I get a response I’ll post her answer in the comments to this piece.)

The exhibit was accompanied by a PBS documentary, so upon my return home I watched that, hoping that it would fill in some blanks.  I’m sorry to say that it did not.  (It streams here: http://video.pbs.org/video/2168854975). Although narrated by leading male and female critics, and hosted by Cindy Lauper, it omitted even more artists in order to create a smooth narrative from Bessie Smith to Janelle Monae, culminating in an implied celebration of “poptimism,” currently a vogue amongst writers, bloggers and some academics who think critically about popular music.  I think that the critical turn to poptimism is well intentioned, as it attempts to break down hackneyed binaries that as much as we don’t want them to continue to inform discussions of popular music (e.g., authentic/commercial, male/female, white/black, rock/pop), but believe it does not deal adequately with other things, for example: the political economy of the industries; entrenched sexism; the tyranny of playlists, Pitchfork, and tightly constructed radio formats that shut down possibilities for artists like Amy, a long-time critical favorite whose music has always fallen between the cracks; the tracking of women away from rock and into softer or more “appropriate” pop listening practices as they age; the myth of the “middle-class musician” who can actually afford things like health care and a guarantee of a decent living; and the politics of representation and identity in their myriad configurations.[1]

Calling it all “rock” does not attenuate or explore these and other issues.  Ultimately, the story of “women who rock” is not all about clothes and good feelings. Writing so much and so many out of what could, because of its institutional status, become the foundation of the sanctioned and commonsense history of women and rock threatens to erase or trivialize their past, present and future contributions.  We scholars and critics have our work cut out for us if we want to capture the more inclusive and nuanced history that the subject deserves.

Who is June Millington? To start, she’s a lead guitarist who wields a mean Les Paul. Filipino-American Millington, and her sister Jean, a bassist, started what would become the group Fanny, a group still known to few, while in high school in Sacramento in the 1960s. Fanny was the second female group ever signed to a major label, scoring a contract with Reprise Records, an imprint of Warner Brothers during the period when it was the hottest rock label going. Fanny achieved chart success with “Charity Ball” in 1971, and recorded their third album, Fanny Hill, at Apple Studios in London. They worked with such esteemed produced as Richard Perry and Geoff Emerick, better known as the engineer on many Beatles’ albums. After she left Fanny, June Millington went on to be a founding mother of the Women’s Music movement of the 1970s.

June Millington’s most significant achievement is something else that few have heard of. Twenty-five years ago, Millington and her life partner Ann Hackler founded the Institute for Musical Arts (IMA), “a nonprofit teaching, performing and recording facility supporting women and girls in music-related businesses.” (1)  Originally located in Bodega, California, IMA is now located in Goshen, Massachusetts on a 25-acre property outside of Northampton, Massachusetts. IMA, described by Hackler as “the love child of an educational activist and a rocker,” (2) provides performance space for concerts by established musicians, residential summer camps for girls who range from pre-teens through college, and a state-of-the-art recording studio.

Hackler is a long-time social activist who was running Hampshire College’s Women’s Center when she first met Millington in 1981. Millington was not an activist like Hackler, but was very attuned to the limitations of the music industry for women, and to the empowering possibilities of playing in a band with other women. For Millington, musicianship was key, as well as understanding and having access to the recording studio.

2002 saw the first of IMA’s summer rock and roll camps for girls. The program has now grown to several camps a summer, including a studio intensive for older teens. (Full disclosure: my 13-year-old daughter attended one of the teen sessions this summer.) Parents, even those who study and write about gender and popular music for a living (ahem), are banned from the grounds until the final concert. The girls live together in yurts or bunk in the barn/performance space/recording studio, take lessons, and have access to all of the instruments and many of the teachers, including Millington, throughout the day and night. They learn, among other things, how to run a sound system, how to write and arrange music, how to record, engineer, and mix, how to collaborate as members of a band; how to write songs, how to run a band rehearsal, and more. That is, what young men learn when they start bands in their early teens (3). Several ex-campers are now pursuing careers in their own right. One, Sonya Kitchell, toured with Joni Mitchell.

Inspired by her work with the camp, June and Jean Millington, along with Jean’s son, drummer Lee Madeloni, recorded and released a new album, Play Like A Girl, earlier this summer. A Kickstarter campaign brought in enough donations to take it on the road. The title song includes the voices of campers, and a few performed with the Millington sisters on the road. They also took their pedagogy along, holding workshops for girls when possible.

IMA is motivated by, in Hackler’s words, a lesbian-feminist analysis (4). Hackler’s analysis may stem from a second-wave feminist foundation, but steers away from the excesses of identity politics while incorporating strong elements of multiculturalism and other elements more associated with the so-called third wave of feminist theory. Most of all, IMA’s work is feminist praxis as feminist pragmatics. Rather than focusing too much on getting the name of the theory right and articulating it to a particular wave or generation, Millington and Hackler forged a solution to a problem: teach girls the tools that will help them make it in the music industry, let them have at it, and have a lot of fun while doing it. So far, it seems to be working. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for all of our pedagogy.

1. IMA website, http://www.ima.org/home.html
2. “Women in Industry #11: Ann Hackler,” Wears the Trousers, http://wearsthetrousers.com/2011/08/wii-11-ann-hackler/, retrieved 11/28/11.
3. Mary Ann Clawson, “Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescent Rock Band,” Popular Music (1999), 18: pp. 99-114.
4. Conversation with the author in the IMA kitchen, July 17, 2011.