Don't Call Me Honey

In 2017, Women Confronted the Deep Roots
of Rock's Boys Club

Rock and roll emerged as a cultural force in the mid-1950s, different from the rhythm and blues, country and gospel music from which it borrowed because it belonged to teenagers (white teenagers, specifically.) Its particular spin, its prime idea, was that the creativity and charisma of teenage girls is a source of freedom and power — but not in and of itself, only in relationship to the bad boys and grown crazy cases making this earth-shattering music. The music was a tool that rough men, or strange men, or young men with no particular birthright, could use to defeat the hierarchies that would bar them from success. Girls motivated these boys, who built a new musical world in order to seduce them. "That's all right, mama, any way you wanna do," Elvis Presley sang in this first hit in 1954, a cover of an Arthur Crudup song that turned the bluesman's suave forbearance into something a little more joyful but also angrier. He didn't really mean it was all right.

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“I'd rather see you dead, little girl,
Than to be with another man.
Now baby,Come back, baby, come.“
— Elvis Presley, "Baby Let's Play House“

Capitalism ultimately favors what works, and what Elvis had — his unique blend of softness and prowling desire, love-me-tender vulnerability and masculine entitlement — worked. After his rise, rock and roll forever favored mannish boys who reinforced the genre's emerging patriarchal order with a wink. In the 1960s it was Mick Jagger; in the 1970s, Robert Plant; then it was Bruce Springsteen, who brought noblesse oblige to the role but nonetheless had his biggest success yelling at women to get into his car. From "Baby, Let's Play House" to "Under My Thumb" to "Last Night," women in rock's fundamental texts are either creatures who need capturing or disruptors who need to be controlled. "When I feel like this, and I want to kiss you baby, don't say don't," Elvis moans in "Don't," the 1958 Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ballad that, today, conjures disturbing associations with date rape. So much of early rock and roll treads this line between persuasion and menace.

“It's down to me, yes it is
The way she does just what she's told
Down to me, the change has come
She's under my thumb”
— The Rolling Stones,“Under My Thumb”

Why did teenage girls embrace the men aggressively crossing lines it was in their interest to preserve? Any attempt to comprehend the legacy of rock, and its ongoing influence, must grapple with this question. The simple answer is that these boys were a way out, and girls didn't see that what lay beyond was also a trap. The wild boys or rock and roll treated power like a toy instead of a weapon; they laughed off the responsibility that shackled women in the 1950s, too. One thing it's easy to forget in our current moment of harsh accusation is that women enjoy sex and want to follow their desires. Female desire has always been difficult for our male-dominated society to recognize. The fact is that throughout the history of rock and roll the girls in the crowd who screamed for the boys on the stage have often genuinely wanted to make it with those boys. Even when they didn't that's how their responses were interpreted, the fact that girls as young as 12 were publicly enacting desire was the real source of rock and roll's convulsions.

Chuck Berry, whose genre-crossing pop genius made him one of the few African-Americans allowed in rock and roll's boys' club, described the ideal fan in his song 1958 song "Sweet Little Sixteen": a high school girl with the "grown up blues" whose vast collection of autographs and dance moves makes her an authority, but only in the reflected light of the men onstage making the music that stimulates her. Her power only exists within the limited frame of the rock show, in the bedroom where she retreats to relive her moments of circumscribed glory, and in spaces where men drool over her charms: the dance floor, the star's Cadillac after the show. Otherwise, Sweet Little Sixteen is back at school, her tight dress left behind in her dresser drawer, the patriarchal order she disturbed still in place. After all, the song makes clear, she had to get her Daddy's permission to go out rockin' in the first place.

Women continually did so, as they have in 2017. In the early 1960s, female songwriters (and their sympathetic male collaborators) working with teenage girls in groups like The Marvelettes and The Shirelles staged a kind of intervention. Girl group songs pointed toward the responsibilities and risks of romance and openly acknowledged women's vulnerability. This surge of empowerment was broken, in part, by the presence on the scene of abusers like the producer Phil Spector, who often kept his wife and musical protégé, Ronnie, locked inside their mansion even as her group the Ronettes became international superstars. Soon enough, the boys came crashing back, anyway.

Girl groups were a direct source for boy rock's second wave, led by The Beatles, who covered their songs on their early albums and enlisted Ronnie as a tour guide when they first came to New York. But despite their open love for their female peers, The Beatles put girls firmly back in the audience — at first, their screaming fans were as much a media sensation as was the band itself. Along with their more menacing cousins The Rolling Stones, The Beatles established the sound of what would come to be known as "classic rock": driven, exploratory, alternately romantic and predatory toward women, and made almost exclusively by groups of men.

By the 1960s, women artists had been effectively marginalized within rock. This was still the music business, where few women rose to power, and female upstarts broke the rhythm of the boys' game. Janis Martin, briefly known as "The Female Elvis" for her hip shaking performances, recalled an encounter with country star Porter Wagoner, who shared stages with many male rockers during the 1950s. Sharing a touring bill with him in 1956, she wowed the crowd one night just before he was to take the stage. "[They] just kept yellin', 'Janis, Janis, Janis, we want Janis.' After the show I went to get in Porter's car, he told me I'd have to find my way to the next town, and that was that. I had to call my daddy up, and he had to drive over 100 miles to come and get me and take me to the other towns booked on that tour." Unwelcome as she was among music's power players, it's no wonder that Martin returned to Virginia in 1959 to focus on raising a family.

"I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved"
—“Getting Better” The Beatles

“They just kept yelling, 'Janis, Janis, Janis, we want Janis.' After the show I went to get in Porter's car, he told me I'd have to find my way to the next town, and that was that.”
— Janis Martin

In the late 1970s punk arose in protest against classic rock's excesses, and for a time lent power to feminist women and queer liberationists. But then punk became hardcore, a stringent, macho realm where women had no place, and indie rock, an umbrella term for many small scenes that did welcome women, but favored ones who played down their femininity. In the rock mainstream, heavy metal ruled in two forms: the puritan male reformism of thrash bands like Metallica, and the ass-slapping buffoonery of hair metal bands.

In white America, classic rock reigned into the 1970s, when it morphed into arena rock — a cartoon realm that openly celebrated women's objectification. Album covers, ad campaigns and images published in the rock press of the time overflowed with images of women's body parts; men, too, were often shirtless and even naked, ready for sex at all times. The arena rock touring circuit devised strict and very limited roles for women — they were publicists, wives or groupies, sustaining the ecosystem that allowed men to remain on the road in military-style sieges of the heartland, but barely ever wielding any true authority. The problem of female pleasure was solved, at least on the surface, by the figure of the groupie — a woman who existed for sex, and loved sex (often sincerely), but never threatened the status quo. And so the pattern has continued.

The 1990s brought questions of sexism to the forefront again within the expressly feminist subcultures of riot grrrl and the Lilith Fair, but that strong moment for women in rock didn't last. Within a couple of years, one of the fiercest backlashes against women moving into the rock sphere took place as hybridizing white rappers like Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock led huge audiences in chants of "show us your tits!" before performing songs with choruses declaring, "I did it all for the nookie!" In 1999, four women were raped at a festival celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the classic-rock watershed event Woodstock.

Throughout rock and roll's history, women have protested this status quo even as they've found a way to feel free within it. Every generation has seen those who fight to raise each other's' consciousness and imagine a new reality. Right now, feminist punk is a powerful force, as it was in the 1990s and, before the word "punk" had been coined within music circles, in the softer-sounding but equally radical women's music movement of the 1970s.

“In general … women aren’t allowed to be kick-ass … At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.”–Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth

Pop-punk and emo, in fact, seemed to be more welcoming to girls, with it bright hooky hits and sobbing singalong choruses all about broken-down hearts. Just like The Beatles, right? Yet from the beginning — just like The Beatles, in fact — these scenes mostly assigned women one role, the fan role. The listener. "This world is forcing me to hold your hand," Gwen Stefani, one of Warped Tour's rare female repeat performers, famously sang in her band No Doubt's 1995 hit "Just a girl" She was talking about something bigger than rock — patriarchy, critiqued with a wink for the Top 40 — but also rock itself, where her male bandmates could skateboard along forever while she endured slings and arrows for being too pink, too boopy, too feminine.

“This lesson that your learnin'
Pulling down your panties
And leave your ass burnin'
You act like a whore
So just drop dead
Just drop dead”
— Limp Bizkit, “Just Drop Dead”

“Oh, I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite.
So don't let me have any rights
Oh, I've had it up to here!”
— Gwen Stefani, “I'm Just a Girl”

Jesse Lacey of Brand New, Photo: Daniel DeSlover/PA Images

Over the past decade, the emo and pop-punk scenes attached to Warped Tour have weathered scandal after scandal involving male performers allegedly assaulting or otherwise exploiting women. Now, as part of 2017's great societal reckoning about sexual violence and predation, it seems that this rock and roll circus is meeting its end. In November, Warped alumnus Jesse Lacey, singer for the band Brand New, publicly apologized for past sexual misconduct with a minor. What in the past might have been a shameful inconvenience for the tour now resonated as part of a larger story. The years of excuses, hastily prepared apologies, legal countersuits and justifications that "after all, this is rock and roll" — chronicled by numerous women connected to the scene, including Jessica Hopper, Maria Sherman, Megan Seling and Jenn Pelly — finally may have just been too much for the boys' preserve in which Warped Tour has played a key role.

“Lacey solicited her for nude photos starting when she was 17. He allegedly sent photos of himself undressing, “attempted to manipulate [her] into engaging in sexual situations with other people, on camera, for his viewing pleasure.” — Accounts from victims of Brand New's Jesse Lacey

Some songs, like Big Thief's "Watering," address the subject of rape directly. Others remind listeners that violation takes many forms: the abuse rendered by a lover that's chronicled in Jessica Lea Mayfield's deeply honest album Sorry Is Gone; the coercion leading to codependency detailed in Jhene Aiko's Trip; the state-sanctioned abuse Ibeyi exposes in "Deathless," about a police officer's harassment of a young woman of color. Rhiannon Giddens followed the path of power's abuse back to the beginning of America in songs like "At the Purchaser's Option," a wrenching, defiant recounting of the rape of a young slave. As women demanded these histories and current realities be commemorated, others shouted for change. "I won't light myself on fire to keep you warm," Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys snarls in "Promissory Note," a fast blast connecting street harassment to women's overall subjugation. In "Wanna Sip," the opening salvo from her album-length manifesto of feminist lust, Plunge, Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray makes it clear: "If we do it, it's my way, cuz how you do it when you do it, it's not okay."

I made-believe for him/That my blood was dripping
My blood was dripping into/ His mouth/ Screaming/ Screaming/ He cut off my oxygen/And my eyes were watering/
As he tore into my skin
— Big Thief, “Watering”

Women have shouted back at this silencing throughout the history of punk and indie rock. In 2017, women do seem to have broken down a weight-bearing wall. On NPR Music's list of the top 50 albums of the year, only two, The National and The War on Drugs, could be classified as a rock album made only by men. All over the musical spectrum, from the political punk of Priests to the bedroom Big Star-isms of Waxahatchee, from Lorde's indie-leaning pop to Jay Som's homemade intimacies, from Kesha's glossy boogie to Hurray For the Riff Raff's deep inquiry into roots music, women are the ones taking rock's helm, and often, calling out male oppressors and violators. Indie's history has been uplifted by waves of women making much of its best music and leading its most powerful political movements, from The Breeders to riot grrrl to St. Vincent, now a bona-fide rock star.

“I won't light myself on fire to keep you warm”
— Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys

The year's top-selling rock acts are still all-male bands. Rock needs to remake itself in new shapes, within new communities, if it is to thrive as a space of genuine equality and freedom. More women need to lead, not just as the faces and voices of rock and roll, but as its producers, it engineers, its tour managers, its architects. Girls not just to the front, but everywhere! And so I have a proposal: not a blanket solution, but a step. Kevin Lyman is retiring Warped Tour one year shy of its 25th anniversary. He could give it one more run, with women, LGBTQ and gender non-binary folk in the headlining spots, and behind the soundboards, managing the artists, on any available seat on the bus. Let's dream of a new lineup, a new paradigm, the true end of the boys' club. Men can still participate. How about they stand in the crowd and scream?