MUCH LIKE the author, the title of Jessica Hopper’s recently published book, culling from the past 13 years of her work as a music writer, pulls zero punches: The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.
“It was sort of the joke title,” Hopper says, speaking on the phone recently during a lunch break from her day job as a senior editor at Pitchfork (where, full disclosure, she has edited some of my work). “But Tim Kinsella, the owner of Featherproof Books, insisted, ‘That has to be the title!’ And it creates a conversation. It seems to be serving its purpose well.”
And, as she points out, the title is (unfortunately) true. There have been precursors like Rock She Wrote, which compiled criticism by a variety of female writers, including Mary Gaitskill, Jaan Uhelszki, Patti Smith, and Kim Gordon; and a pair of expansive books about punk and rock written by Caroline Coon and Lillian Roxon. But a book focusing on the body of work of one woman critic who’s still alive and working? This, for now, is it.
Hopper is probably one of the best candidates to help lead the charge for more collections like this one. The Chicago-based writer has built up an impressive résumé. She started a self-published fanzine Hit It or Quit It while still in high school, and kept up a column in Punk Planet. More recently, she was music editor of Rookie, and an in-demand writer for Spin, the Village Voice, and BuzzFeed (another disclosure: Hopper’s also written for the Mercury; one of the book’s pieces originally appeared in these pages).
More than that, Hopper remains one of the sharpest and most fiery writers working today, filling column inches with deeply felt and unabashedly feminist stories and reviews of small noise-punk bands like Coughs and arena-ready superstars like Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. She’s also one of the most fearless critics out there, as noted by her work covering the controversy surrounding R. Kelly and, in one of the key pieces in this book, “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” the sexism she witnessed in her hometown punk scene.
“After I wrote that, I knew there was no going home again,” she says of the 2003 essay. “I ran a PR company that was very much involved in that world. I was essentially shitting where I ate in a lot of ways. But once I figured out how I felt about this stuff, I couldn’t go back with the same enthusiasm and blind interest now that I could see other music and other avenues opened to me and other people who were marginalized by the punk scene.”
The scale of Hopper’s collection is especially impressive when you factor in that most of it was written while her two sons were very young.
“A lot of this book got written during nap times, before they were in school and daycare full-time,” she says. “I really learned to map out pieces in my head so that once they were asleep I could just peel out into the more intellectual territory I needed to mine and deadlines I had to meet…. I did not think, once I had kids, I would ever be writing 40-plus hours a week at times. I thought I would just kind of do enough work to keep my career alive, but going full-tilt breadwinner really changed the entire scope of my career and in a lot of ways made the book possible.”
The title of Jessica Hooper’s book may be accurate and the point about this being the first book specifically comprised of a female rock writer’s criticism is duly noted well into the 21st Century. A bit misleading though as an early female pioneer of rock writing was Ellen Willis and her essays were published in her lifetime up through her passing in 2006.
Having said that, and in no way wanting to disparage Jessica Hooper’s breakthrough here, there are other kinds of rock writing besides criticism. A couple of Pacific Coast female pioneers of rock writing in SF WEEKLY and EAST BAY EXPRESS that included criticism, Ann Powers and Gina Arnold have also written books that while being closer to socio-musical memoir and biography should be noted as context for the trail continuing to be blazed by Jessica Hooper. Ann Powers’ 1990’s and aughts boho Pilgrim’s Progress is covered in the aptly titled WEIRD LIKE US: My Bohemian America from Seattle to San Francisco record shop shifts and lifestyles to alt journalism via (still indie) SF WEEKLY movin’ on up fast to NY TIMES back down by her own choice to no longer quite so indie VILLAGE VOICE back up to corporate LA TIMES to last heard over NPR essaying pop big game hunting from Alabama, where as Groucho noted the Tuscaloosa!
Gina Arnold’s EXILE IN GUYVILLE a reassessment of Liz Phair was reissued in 2014 with a think piece by NY TIMES book reviewer Dwight Garner last June that is as chunkily accessible as it is ambitious in championing that alchemical moment in pop that used to be weighed or buoyancy-tested for gravitas and annointed somewhat pretentiously by trademarked rock-as- art writers like Greil Marcus and Ellen Willis’s onetime partner of the VV PAZZ & JOP Awards, the Dean of Rock Writing Anal Retentive Concision, Robert Christgau. Like Jessica Hooper and Robert Ham’s appreciation above, these are essayists and journalists as well as critics whose writing about the music our lives play background to works on a whole lotta levels.
Correction: Ham on Hopper, not Ham on Hooper…
Also: A line from Ann Powers’ WEIRD LIKE US that provides a frame for hopefully future generations of kids as seekers after truth. Writing about rock was a way to write about the world. That has been lost along with the curiosity about the world as each new tech disruption contributes to the NarciStick Selfie effect.