Chicago-based music and culture critic Jessica Hopper has pretty much done it all over the course of her journalism career, starting out producing her own fanzines and working her way up to her current role as Senior Editor of Pitchfork (and Editor In Chief of the site's print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review). But her interests and expertise in the music field run far beyond that of just chronicling new bands and into the realms of social commentary, given that she's also a long-standing advocate of shining a torch on the gender imbalance that still seems all-pervading throughout the music industry.
The child of prominent journalists herself, Hopper started out covering the Riot Grrrl movement — editing the Hit It Or Quit It zine for 14 years — but her interest in the role of women in various scenes eventually manifested elsewhere, with her Punk Planet essay Emo: Where The Girls Aren't (2003) and her first book, The Girls' Guide To Rocking (2009), being prominent examples. Her most recent tome, The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, continues her commentary on this passion, and will help form the basis of her inaugural BIGSOUND keynote speech.
"We just tend to doubt women's ability to truly understand or appreciate or participate in music that speaks to them."
"I'm hoping to talk about basically the things that lead you to writing in the music industry — just the act of putting out and promoting music — and the things that we do that sometimes marginalise women, particularly young female fans," Hopper explains. "There's sometimes this implication that they don't count, or that they're not real fans, or the different ways that they're made to feel that maybe this isn't the place for them and that they're interlopers. Part of the reason that I want to talk about this is that I do have obviously some experiences of the different levels you need to navigate as a writer and an editor and so forth, but in some ways I was also an exception — I was someone who very fortunately was very much supported with both my interest in music and my interest in writing. Right from the start I felt that this was something I could do and do as a career and really pursue without necessarily being plagued by self-doubt, and I don't think it's because I'm some special human being, but rather because I had a lot different reception than most women receive when they're getting into the industry."
It seems disingenuous that gender is even an issue in regards music criticism let alone a barrier — surely a good writer is a good writer?
"It's not so much necessarily in the actual writing, but it's sometimes the hoops that one has to jump through," Hopper continues. "There's a very particular idea of what fandom looks like, and lots of times young female writers are written off as being 'fan girls' and it's just assumed that they see a band in a particular way — that they're attracted to them, or that they like them for surface reasons and not because the music speaks to them or even inspires them as a musician themselves. We put different motives on why they might be paying attention, and usually they're ones that sort of assume that young girls aren't into it as deep as guys or don't have a true understanding. We just don't take young female fans seriously — we just tend to doubt women's ability to truly understand or appreciate or participate in music that speaks to them."
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Naturally Hopper is implicitly aware that the title of her new book isn't entirely accurate — it's meant to be thought-provoking rather than a truism — and there's been plenty of female trailblazers before her, including prominent Australian scribe Lillian Roxon whose writing in the late-'60s and '70s helped set the foundation for serious music criticism.
"There's certainly a good amount of writing about music these days but there could always be more, especially with women in positions of power to help balance things out," she muses. "I don't know how it is in Australia, but Stateside we historically have very few women in the 'pop critic' roles at the bigger papers, but the really great thing is that a lot of young women and people with perspective instead of being pushed to the margins of criticism or participation, because of outlets like Tumblr and Twitter they can suddenly have voices, and are also starting to have careers born from their work outside official channels. They're writing from their own Tumblrs and for more niche music publications or things that they started themselves, and we're getting a much more diverse world of music criticism, with people who can look at something and bring in their own unique viewpoint rather than people who subscribing to a very old guard, fixed canon of what's good and what counts and all of that."
