Rock music has been divided up into various different movements (British Invasion, Punk, Grunge etc.) since its creation. The most interesting bands always tend to either spearhead these movements or work outside of them to carve out a space for their sound. Think of The Beatles leading the British Invasion or Radiohead mixing Grunge sounds with electronic music, which is typically far outside the boundaries of your standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals rock band construction.
The genre has been predominantly male centered over the decades as well minus the occasional female innovator like Janis Joplin, Patti Smith or Siouxsie Sioux. What's really interesting is that this dynamic has shifted over the past decade or so. When you look at all of the most interesting rock artists of recent memory (St.Vincent, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen) you see a much more focused female perspective than in the past.
It's pretty much impossible to pinpoint exactly why this is, but one of the main reasons seems to be that female rock artists are less beholden to any particular era or musical idea because there are so few female rock icons of the past. Where their male counterparts can all aspire to be the next Eric Clapton or Paul McCartney, female artists are more free to create something new without worrying about being compared to anyone else.
Annie Clark embodies this with her band St. Vincent who have released four albums over the last 10 years and (fingers crossed) should be releasing a new one this year. No St. Vincent album sounds exactly like the one that preceded it. The connective tissue that ties them all together is Annie Clark's mix of sweet vocal quirks and panicked guitar playing. She sounds Black Sabbath if they were fronted by a choir girl with a penchant for orchestral music, creating a dichotomy that is unlike what any rock band has done since the nineties.
You can hear this in her song Huey Newton. The gist of the song is that Clark had a fevered dream on an airplane about an apocalyptic scenario where "cardboard cutthroats", "blind psychics" and other odd ball characters wander what's left of the Earth. She opens the song in a relaxed manner that allows the listener to sink into the bizarre world she is depicting. Then around the halfway mark she drops one of the heaviest guitar riffs any one has written this decade and lets the song proceed into a kind of catchy chaos.
No one on top 40 rock radio is doing anything that interesting right now and what's even more impressive about Clark is the way she is able to take traditional rock instrumentation and imbue it with a sharp femininity. Her song Cheerleader accomplishes this by being an indictment of how women can be relegated to roles as stereotypes.
In Cheerleader Clark sings from the point of view of a narrator who has "told whole lies with a half smile" and "played dumb when I knew better. Tried so hard just to be clever." This sets the tone of repression in a narrator who is telling herself that she has to act the way society tells her to even if it feels unnatural to her. This all comes to cathartic rebellion in the chorus, which simply goes "I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more."
This is about as rock n' roll as you can get. The genre was founded on rebelling against the staid musical climate of mid twentieth century America and it's this sense of constantly striving to innovate that characterizes the best rock music. Even when the genre itself starts to tread back into the formulas of the past there's always some energetic new voice to reinvigorate the musical climate. This happened in the seventies with the explosion of Punk, in the nineties with Grunge and it's happening now with artists like Annie Clark.
Kurt Cobain famously said "the future of rock belongs to women" and I think nothing characterizes how right he was better than Annie Clark performing Nirvana's famous song Lithium when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently. it's one of the very rare passing of the torch moments that comes along once every generation or so and it makes me more excited for the future of rock music than I ever have been before.
Who are your favorite rock musicians?
