One of the best albums released this year is called Tell Me How You Really Feel. It was created by Courtney Barnett, a 30-year-old singer-songwriter from Melbourne in Australia recently described as “the ultimate paradoxical millennial”.Her writing is fresh, eloquent and full of surprises. One of the album’s best songs is aimed at a male internet troll, and has a chorus that paraphrases Margaret Atwood: “I wanna walk through the park in the dark/Men are scared that women will laugh at them … Women are scared that men will kill them.” It is called Nameless, Faceless, which has obvious echoes of Nirvana’s 1991 track Endless, Nameless – and highlights the fact that one of Barnett’s clear inspirations is Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who once wrote of “the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock’n’roll”.
At long last, this might finally be coming true. In September the annual Mercury prize was won by Wolf Alice, the London-based quartet whose creativity seems to be chiefly driven by their guitarist and singer, Ellie Rowsell. Any list of contemporary musicians who are doing interesting and iconoclastic things with rock(ish) music ought to be brimming with women’s names: Barnett, Rowsell, the genre-defying American solo artist St Vincent, the Anglo-French group Savages, the all-female Brixton band Goat Girl. And last week there was news of a remarkable development at music’s grassroots: according to the guitar manufacturer Fender, 50% of “all beginner and aspirational players” of the instrument in the UK and US are now women. This apparently chimes with the findings of research in 2016, which were linked to the popularity among girls of Taylor Swift. Though she is not seen with a guitar nearly as much these days, the trend has continued. This is nothing but a good thing, and it would be even better if the gender balance were tilted even more.
Guitar-driven rock is now heading towards its mid-60s, and is largely absent from the singles charts that were once a massive part of how its exponents judged their worth. On a bad day, there is a sense that most rock musicians are running out of creative permutations, as if the possibilities offered by 12 notes and the 4/4 beat have all been used up. That said, it is hard to separate the question of whether rock has any life left in it from a mountain of ideas that have long been bound up with the dominance of men, and the fact that most of them have now curdled into hopeless cliche. Picture David Brent from The Office playing his infamous Bruce Springsteen-esque anthem Free Love Freeway, and you should instantly understand that things that once seemed thrilling and romantic – cars and girls, leather trousers, Jack Daniel’s – now look not just outdated but completely ridiculous.
Back in 1996, the writers Joy Press and Simon Reynolds published a brilliant book called The Sex Revolts, hailed as “the first book to look at rebellion and rock’n’roll through the lens of gender”. On the subject of the archetypal band, they wrote of “the bliss of boyish camaraderie, the potency of strength-in-numbers that falls midway between a teenage gang and a military formation”. Any male music fan of a certain age will probably recognise the allure of that stuff: at least 25% of my record collection is full of it. But for at least 15 years, these notions have steadily been falling into decline. The only big-selling, halfway credible British group who still embody such things are the increasingly lonely Arctic Monkeys; if they are not around, you are either left with callow pasticheurs like the much-mocked British band Catfish and the Bottlemen, or the array of ageing old rockers that’s headed up by what these days passes for the Rolling Stones.
By contrast, there is a different, women-centred lineage that continues to inspire not just high-achieving musicians but people picking up guitars and microphones for the first time. Its beginnings lie in the cleansing fires of punk rock, and such pioneering artists as Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Penetration’s Pauline Murray. Twenty years after those talents arrived, the most creative aspects of so-called Britpop were embodied by Elastica, a female-fronted quartet whose music was full of confrontation and wit – while in the US, the so-called grunge era saw the rise of bands such as Babes in Toyland, L7 and Hole, commanded by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love. At around the same time, the still-overlooked genre-cum-upsurge known as riot grrrl emerged from Olympia, the capital of Washington state. Among the avowed aims of the women at the heart of it was to make themselves heard “in the face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can’t play our instruments”; the riot grrrl ideal eventually inspired those noble Russian provocateurs Pussy Riot.
Put all those things at the centre of modern musical history, and a few other things become clear. By some distance, the pre-eminent English songwriter of the last 20 years is surely PJ Harvey, whose feats of invention and creative boundary-pushing have never let up. Judged by similar criteria, there are few more exciting modern talents than the aforementioned St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, whose inspired approach to her instrument was summed up by a former collaborator: “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar … She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”
A lot of the current crop of successful women musicians would be uncomfortable with anyone zeroing in on their gender. With good reason, piously opining about such things – particularly if you’re a man – has been serially mocked with the cliched journalistic category of “women in rock”, an idea so hoary that it has its own Wikipedia page. I can only write as someone with a deep attachment to the noise made by guitars and drums, and a slight discomfort about making a point that nonetheless seems self-evident: that the small number of artists doing anything interesting with the rock form are disproportionately female, and a lot of that is down to two things – the absence of testosterone, and an instinctive avoidance of all the macho baggage that now sits on rock like a dead weight.
The upper reaches of bills at festivals are still depressingly male-dominated. Last year the Guardian discovered that among 370 gigs listed for one night on the Ents24.com listings website, 69% of the acts were made up entirely of men, just 9% were female-only (half of whom were solo artists), and almost three-quarters of mixed-gender acts contained no more than one woman.
And yet: as women and girls apparently crowd into guitar shops, a belated rebalancing might be upon us, something that is also suggested by developments in my own home. As I write this, my nine-year-old daughter is practising the drums: a fearsome noise that regularly crashes through the house, righteously drowning out whatever old-fashioned guff I am listening to upstairs.