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The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Jessica Hopper's music criticism has earned her a reputation as a firebrand, a keen observer and fearless critic not just of music but the culture around it. With this volume spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why The New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful, and humorous writing, this book documents the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. The book journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence, decamps to Gary, IN, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death, explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love, and examines emo's rise. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music. The pieces in The First Collection send us digging deep into our record collections, searching to re-hear what we loved and hated, makes us reconsider the art, trash, and politics Hopper illuminates, helping us to make sense of what matters to us most.
250 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 12, 2015
169 people are currently reading
5755 people want to read
About the author
Jessica Hopper
4 books203 followersJessica Hopper is a Chicago-based music critic and the author of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic. She was formerly the Editorial Director at MTV News, and an editor at Pitchfork and Rookie. Her essays have appeared in Best Music Writing for 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011. Her book The Girls' Guide to Rocking was named one of 2009's Notable Books For Young Readers by the American Library Association. Her memoir, Night Moves, was published September 2018 from University of Texas Press.
Her forthcoming book, No God But Herself, is an examination of women in pop music in 1975, and is due out in Fall 2021 from MCD x FSG.
Her forthcoming book, No God But Herself, is an examination of women in pop music in 1975, and is due out in Fall 2021 from MCD x FSG.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 270 reviews
August 13, 2015
When I was 22, 23, I lived in East Hollywood in a horrible apartment with mold on the ceiling and a ratty carpet. It was an embarrassment, but looking back on it, it was where I needed to be at the time. I worked at a bookstore and I would get home from work at 1am. But that was never the end of my night. I was too keyed up to sleep right away, so I'd get a case of domestic beer (Budweiser was my brand back then...what?), and stay up until 4, 5am, drinking, reading, and most of all, listening to albums.
The records that were important to me then were The Stooges' Fun House, Tom Waits' Closing Time, and above all else, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. I consider the release of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to mark a kind of turning point for me, when I started to emerge from this weird self-imposed exile and start actually living my life. I met the woman I'd eventually marry, started taking my work more seriously, just generally got my shit together. But for awhile there, all I really had was Fun House and Astral Weeks and a lot of bad beer.
Jessica Hopper's collection of criticism took me back to that period in my life (from a safe distance, mind you), and reminded me of when music was vitally important for me. But while there's plenty of Van Morrison referenced here, this is a more modern collection. Reviews of everything from Tyler the Creator to Coughs to Animal Collective. I even enjoyed reading about acts I'd never heard before.
My favorite section was probably the "Bad Reviews" section. Who doesn't love a good teardown every once and awhile.
Side note: reading a book like this in the era of streaming music is great. Haven't heard of a band referenced? Just pull them up online. Twenty years ago, it would have been a completely different experience.
The records that were important to me then were The Stooges' Fun House, Tom Waits' Closing Time, and above all else, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. I consider the release of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to mark a kind of turning point for me, when I started to emerge from this weird self-imposed exile and start actually living my life. I met the woman I'd eventually marry, started taking my work more seriously, just generally got my shit together. But for awhile there, all I really had was Fun House and Astral Weeks and a lot of bad beer.
Jessica Hopper's collection of criticism took me back to that period in my life (from a safe distance, mind you), and reminded me of when music was vitally important for me. But while there's plenty of Van Morrison referenced here, this is a more modern collection. Reviews of everything from Tyler the Creator to Coughs to Animal Collective. I even enjoyed reading about acts I'd never heard before.
My favorite section was probably the "Bad Reviews" section. Who doesn't love a good teardown every once and awhile.
Side note: reading a book like this in the era of streaming music is great. Haven't heard of a band referenced? Just pull them up online. Twenty years ago, it would have been a completely different experience.
December 30, 2025
Jessica Hopper and I have diametrically opposite opinions on Henry Rollins and Sonic Youth. If I had known that before reading this collection, this reading experience might have started out on the wrong foot, but I am glad I didn't crack this book open prejudiced, because while I shall never agree with her on Henry, in every other way that counts, Hopper and I are from the same breed of weirdos who simply cannot exist without music, and who will talk about it until we are blue in the face to anyone who is (un)lucky enough to cross our paths. The main difference between us is really that she has figured out a way to make that her livelihood, as where for me, this is just a very intense hobby that doesn't pay the bills.
So while there is definitely a divergence of taste at play, most of the time, Hopper's incredibly sharp and insightful writing hits the bullseye, and when she writes about artists I don't know, she makes me curious (Christian rock is probably the last genre I'm interested in, but a Christian rock artist's album about losing his faith? Now that is intriguing!) and often makes me feel validated. She is thoughtful, nuanced and understands that context is as much a part of the art as the records and shows she talks about are.
People online (and sometimes on this website) don't always understand what the subtleties of being a professional critic are, but Jessica Hopper understands that opinions and personal tastes matter, but that there are greater cultural currents that one needs to look at to evaluate what makes a record good or bad. And she write about all of that with a confident, witty and often surprisingly evocative prose, that make her a pleasure to read on top of being the kind of writing that gets you thinking. That's not as common a gift as one might think.
I found a lot of wonderful food for thought here, often in essays about artists I didn't even know or usually listen to. And her afterword to this new edition tore me open: differences in opinions aside, Jessica Hopper and I have been on a path looking for the same truth our whole life. I am so jealous of her cool AF career and I am infinitely grateful for what it wielded. She's not perfect, but this book is an incredible collection of incredible writing.
Highly, highly recommended to music lovers and to pop culture enthusiasts.
Also, OMG, teenage guys pontificating to girls about Dinosaur Jr was a thing everywhere in the 90s, was it? Jesus Christ.
So while there is definitely a divergence of taste at play, most of the time, Hopper's incredibly sharp and insightful writing hits the bullseye, and when she writes about artists I don't know, she makes me curious (Christian rock is probably the last genre I'm interested in, but a Christian rock artist's album about losing his faith? Now that is intriguing!) and often makes me feel validated. She is thoughtful, nuanced and understands that context is as much a part of the art as the records and shows she talks about are.
People online (and sometimes on this website) don't always understand what the subtleties of being a professional critic are, but Jessica Hopper understands that opinions and personal tastes matter, but that there are greater cultural currents that one needs to look at to evaluate what makes a record good or bad. And she write about all of that with a confident, witty and often surprisingly evocative prose, that make her a pleasure to read on top of being the kind of writing that gets you thinking. That's not as common a gift as one might think.
I found a lot of wonderful food for thought here, often in essays about artists I didn't even know or usually listen to. And her afterword to this new edition tore me open: differences in opinions aside, Jessica Hopper and I have been on a path looking for the same truth our whole life. I am so jealous of her cool AF career and I am infinitely grateful for what it wielded. She's not perfect, but this book is an incredible collection of incredible writing.
Highly, highly recommended to music lovers and to pop culture enthusiasts.
Also, OMG, teenage guys pontificating to girls about Dinosaur Jr was a thing everywhere in the 90s, was it? Jesus Christ.
May 15, 2015
My review for the Chicago Tribune:
The show-business saying "everyone's a critic" came into common usage in the middle of the last century, but it's arguably never been more true than now. In our era of Yelp and Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, every literate person with a reliable Internet connection can opine on every commodifiable element of human experience.
So why write criticism professionally, and why write criticism on a writer who is herself a professional critic? The title of Pitchfork senior editor Jessica Hopper's "The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic" sums up why this particular book is important. Hopper acknowledges in her opening note that this self-reflexive and confrontational name is "about planting a flag" and offers nods to her forebears, while suggesting that her readers consider why there haven't been more. "There's Ellen Willis' 'Beginning to See the Light,'" she writes, "though it wasn't all music writing, and then her posthumous collection that was," and she mentions "Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia" from 1969 and Caroline Coon's "1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion" before adding, "We should be able to list a few dozen more — but those books don't exist. Yet."
But it's not just the book's significance as a feminist and musical milestone that recommends it. Every piece, ranging from the one on Tyler the Creator in the book's sixth chapter under the heading "Bad Reviews" to St. Vincent in the eighth under "Females," is powerfully written, wittily observed and unafraid to argue. Taken individually — all appeared elsewhere prior to their inclusion here in outlets such as Punk Planet, Village Voice, SPIN and Chicago Reader — and as a whole, they make an airtight case for why the professional critic still matters, and why it is a thrill to spend time in the presence of someone whose job it is to care so much and so intelligently.
Like the best critics — Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag — Hopper is gifted at balancing the macro and the micro, identifying a pattern and helping the reader appreciate its scope and significance, while peppering in details that make the writing electrifying on the sentence level. In "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't," she asks: "Who do you excuse and why? Do you check your politics at the door and just dance or just rock or just let side A spin out? Can you ignore the marginalization of women's lives on the records that line your record shelves … because it's either that or purge your collection of everything but free jazz, micro house 12"s and the Mr. Lady Records catalog?"
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And like the best critics — Byron Coley, Eve Babitz — she's practically a poet when it comes to the brilliant metaphor or the apt comparison: writing of Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" that a secondary version of "Beside You" is "totally chardonnay," writing of Coughs front woman Anya Davidson that she "took to the floor, shuffling around like an expiring windup toy" and writing of Lana Del Rey that she is "Amy Winehouse with the safety on."
Good criticism is rarely only about the thing it is ostensibly criticizing; rather, its critique is grounded in the specifics of its own occasion — here, rock music — while reaching to answer more abstract questions — here, questions of identity, ethics, representation and consumption. And that is why professional criticism is exciting, an answer that Hopper's book offers on every page: to help us understand why and how culture affects us for better and for worse, and why and how we can in turn engage with and affect that culture.
The show-business saying "everyone's a critic" came into common usage in the middle of the last century, but it's arguably never been more true than now. In our era of Yelp and Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, every literate person with a reliable Internet connection can opine on every commodifiable element of human experience.
So why write criticism professionally, and why write criticism on a writer who is herself a professional critic? The title of Pitchfork senior editor Jessica Hopper's "The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic" sums up why this particular book is important. Hopper acknowledges in her opening note that this self-reflexive and confrontational name is "about planting a flag" and offers nods to her forebears, while suggesting that her readers consider why there haven't been more. "There's Ellen Willis' 'Beginning to See the Light,'" she writes, "though it wasn't all music writing, and then her posthumous collection that was," and she mentions "Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia" from 1969 and Caroline Coon's "1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion" before adding, "We should be able to list a few dozen more — but those books don't exist. Yet."
But it's not just the book's significance as a feminist and musical milestone that recommends it. Every piece, ranging from the one on Tyler the Creator in the book's sixth chapter under the heading "Bad Reviews" to St. Vincent in the eighth under "Females," is powerfully written, wittily observed and unafraid to argue. Taken individually — all appeared elsewhere prior to their inclusion here in outlets such as Punk Planet, Village Voice, SPIN and Chicago Reader — and as a whole, they make an airtight case for why the professional critic still matters, and why it is a thrill to spend time in the presence of someone whose job it is to care so much and so intelligently.
Like the best critics — Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag — Hopper is gifted at balancing the macro and the micro, identifying a pattern and helping the reader appreciate its scope and significance, while peppering in details that make the writing electrifying on the sentence level. In "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't," she asks: "Who do you excuse and why? Do you check your politics at the door and just dance or just rock or just let side A spin out? Can you ignore the marginalization of women's lives on the records that line your record shelves … because it's either that or purge your collection of everything but free jazz, micro house 12"s and the Mr. Lady Records catalog?"
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And like the best critics — Byron Coley, Eve Babitz — she's practically a poet when it comes to the brilliant metaphor or the apt comparison: writing of Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" that a secondary version of "Beside You" is "totally chardonnay," writing of Coughs front woman Anya Davidson that she "took to the floor, shuffling around like an expiring windup toy" and writing of Lana Del Rey that she is "Amy Winehouse with the safety on."
Good criticism is rarely only about the thing it is ostensibly criticizing; rather, its critique is grounded in the specifics of its own occasion — here, rock music — while reaching to answer more abstract questions — here, questions of identity, ethics, representation and consumption. And that is why professional criticism is exciting, an answer that Hopper's book offers on every page: to help us understand why and how culture affects us for better and for worse, and why and how we can in turn engage with and affect that culture.
July 6, 2025
I vacillated between a 4 and a 5 on this one for a while, but the last section sealed this as a comfortable 5. This collection is smart, compelling, unique. feminist, and insightful cultural criticism through the lens of music. There are great pieces featuring huge artists everyone knows, Kacey Musgraves, Joni Mitchell, Kendrick, Lana Del Ray, Bjork, Fiona Apple, etc. as well as many pieces I love about more niche artists and quite a few entries about people I had never heard of. (Because of this I added a ton of songs from Abe Vigoda -- the band, not the actor for whom they are named -- to my Spotify. I am enjoying the heck out of their work, especially stuff off the album Crush. Also getting my groove on to Canadian Socialist feminist artist Mecca Normal. Thanks for these additions, Jessica!) I particularly liked the oral histories of the women who worked at Rolling Stone in the early days and of the making-of Live Through This, an album I love and have been listening to very regularly for over 30 years.
Hopper is clear: as long as we (women, POC, LGBTQ+, and others who simply believe in a more equitable world) keep trying to play by the rules created by White cis-het men, we lose and the patriarchy thrives. I urge people to read this because it matters and because it is extremely good. (Make sure you get the 2021 reissue since there are a couple of pieces here you won't get in the original, including the Samantha Irby intro, and Hopper's bracing epilogue.)
Hopper is clear: as long as we (women, POC, LGBTQ+, and others who simply believe in a more equitable world) keep trying to play by the rules created by White cis-het men, we lose and the patriarchy thrives. I urge people to read this because it matters and because it is extremely good. (Make sure you get the 2021 reissue since there are a couple of pieces here you won't get in the original, including the Samantha Irby intro, and Hopper's bracing epilogue.)
April 11, 2016
Jessica Hopper is a bad ass. Not just for speaking her truth about all aspects of popular music (and not so popular music) and not just for being a woman in the male populated music critic industry. Her eloquent and descriptive opinions are bad ass. Her words themselves are bad ass. Her writing sure as hell is, and so is her obvious fearlessness. I knew nothing about Jessica Hopper going into this collection, but very quickly understood that I really liked this woman. I didn't always agree with her (hell, a lot of the time I didn't even know who she was critiquing) but she consistently made it very clear where she was coming from and why - with humor as an added bonus.
Music has always played a large part in my life. One of my favorite childhood memories is dancing on the tops of my dad's feet, something we did after dinner almost every night, listening to Disc 2 of the Forrest Gump soundtrack over and over. I fondly remember singing along as a family to "American Pie," Loggins and Messina, Jimmy Buffet, and Alanis Morissette on long car rides. As a young teenager I spent all of my money on CDs and cheap concerts. I have always been the kind of person who feels things very strongly -too strongly, probably- especially as a child and young adult. Struggling as I did with deep, sometimes uncontrollable emotions, music was something that felt just as deeply emotional as I did. I found, and still find, a hell of a lot of comfort in that.
Great music -the kind that makes you feel something there is no word for- has always sent chills up my arms, and tears down my cheeks; I've felt Kurt Cobain's voice reverberating in my own stomach, Clapton's guitar solos vibrating in my soul, Bowie's lyrics scrolling on repeat deep down in my core. Pink Floyd's trip to the dark side is my trip, too. Thom Yorke's pain is my pain. Neil Young's stories are my stories. And I could go on and on...
While Jessica Hopper's tastes are different from my own (she's a punk-loving riot grrrl) I knew she could relate to feeling these kinds of connections as soon as I read the first article in this collection. I very much enjoyed reading her take on a variety of music topics ranging from the problem with R. Kelly (he is a rapist), to overrated festivals (Lollapalooza, Coachella), to feminism in today's music industry (not Miley, but it is there if you look in the right places), along with many other interesting/troubling/important/funny things.
I would highly recommend The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic to all music lovers. Jessica Hopper has a voice that resonates.
Music has always played a large part in my life. One of my favorite childhood memories is dancing on the tops of my dad's feet, something we did after dinner almost every night, listening to Disc 2 of the Forrest Gump soundtrack over and over. I fondly remember singing along as a family to "American Pie," Loggins and Messina, Jimmy Buffet, and Alanis Morissette on long car rides. As a young teenager I spent all of my money on CDs and cheap concerts. I have always been the kind of person who feels things very strongly -too strongly, probably- especially as a child and young adult. Struggling as I did with deep, sometimes uncontrollable emotions, music was something that felt just as deeply emotional as I did. I found, and still find, a hell of a lot of comfort in that.
Great music -the kind that makes you feel something there is no word for- has always sent chills up my arms, and tears down my cheeks; I've felt Kurt Cobain's voice reverberating in my own stomach, Clapton's guitar solos vibrating in my soul, Bowie's lyrics scrolling on repeat deep down in my core. Pink Floyd's trip to the dark side is my trip, too. Thom Yorke's pain is my pain. Neil Young's stories are my stories. And I could go on and on...
While Jessica Hopper's tastes are different from my own (she's a punk-loving riot grrrl) I knew she could relate to feeling these kinds of connections as soon as I read the first article in this collection. I very much enjoyed reading her take on a variety of music topics ranging from the problem with R. Kelly (he is a rapist), to overrated festivals (Lollapalooza, Coachella), to feminism in today's music industry (not Miley, but it is there if you look in the right places), along with many other interesting/troubling/important/funny things.
I would highly recommend The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic to all music lovers. Jessica Hopper has a voice that resonates.
August 19, 2015
I'm in two minds about this collection of essays. There's some great stuff in there, and I really like what Hopper stands for and her style of music criticism that goes beyond technicality and into the sociocultural impacts of music. A really poignant piece was the one on R Kelly (is music a moral experience - can we ever separate a song from the artist who made it, the words they speak and the broader context of it), and I found the piece about advertising x musicians really interesting. I did feel though that while she does have a way with words, some of the language was superfluous and vocabulary misused. I also felt that many of the pieces included lacked depth in their unpacking of an album, artist or performance, and it left me wanting - the reason why the R Kelly piece and the advertising piece stuck out to me is that there was a thoroughness in the research and vigour in the approach, rather than a simple musing in Hopper's general thoughts. Nonetheless it's inspiring to read someone who has made a living of a vocation that would no doubt be really challenging to pursue.
October 4, 2021
I don't think Jessica Hopper is quite in "my generation" (I think she's a young Gen-X and not quite a millennial) but that's OK, because she probably captures the last two decades in rock music and culture better than anyone else I've ever read. Even the reviews in this collection for artists I don't care a great deal about (like, for example, Lana Del Ray) are vital reads.
Also, I think it's important that she is from, and remained in, the Midwest. There's a passage in her afterward that indicates she thinks so too. As a fellow Midwestern journalist who has never lived on a coast, it's something I greatly admire about her: "Cloistered in the Midwest and writing for a weekly print paper that didn't even have a website simplified things. I was not in the New York music journalism hothouse. I didn't have a college buddy network, or even a degree. In lieu of mentors, I had my friends, fellow dirtbags and weird kids, who were trying to build a thing, make something cool and courageous on their one because they had to."
So yeah, I think this is pretty vital reading for anyone who has any interest in music and culture from the past 20 years.
Also, I think it's important that she is from, and remained in, the Midwest. There's a passage in her afterward that indicates she thinks so too. As a fellow Midwestern journalist who has never lived on a coast, it's something I greatly admire about her: "Cloistered in the Midwest and writing for a weekly print paper that didn't even have a website simplified things. I was not in the New York music journalism hothouse. I didn't have a college buddy network, or even a degree. In lieu of mentors, I had my friends, fellow dirtbags and weird kids, who were trying to build a thing, make something cool and courageous on their one because they had to."
So yeah, I think this is pretty vital reading for anyone who has any interest in music and culture from the past 20 years.
September 5, 2017
Wonderfully written, a little scattershot, very readable. I learned so much about music that I'll never listen to.
Read
February 1, 2023This has been my favorite exchange lately (from an interview of Kate Berlant by Nathan Fielder)
BERLANT: No, it’s true. Music taste in youth is such a terrifying barometer of your social worth.
FIELDER: The good thing now is, music is so uncool that no one cares anymore.
It makes me LAUGH, as someone whose music taste has always been uncool. I mean, to ME, I think your entire identity should be defined by your Goodreads account, not by the COMPLETELY FAKE and TOTALLY WONKY Spotify Wrapped algorithm (I will never accept that Super Freaky Girl was my most played song of 2022).
But whatever. If music is the art form that most people use to define who they are, no matter we demand so much authenticity from musicians, more than what we ask of writers and actors. Hopper’s articles go into this - why is it important that Kendrick is from Compton? How has Lana Del Rey constructed her image?
And at the same time, she points out that it’s all performance!!! Hopper studies the interplay between fans and artists - how the artist is perceived by their audience, and how they respond to that perception. Together, identity is constructed. What does it mean to be a fan of post-punk? What does it mean to go to Warped? To consume R. Kelly’s music? Who goes to a Pedro the Lion concert?
Even as someone with bad music taste & limited knowledge, I loved this book. Hopper makes music fascinating because she clearly finds people fascinating. I loved the smart things she had to say about our biggest stars, and I loved the dives she took into niche sub cultures and bands/albums I’d never heard of. I feel well-prepared to judge other people’s music tastes this year.
BERLANT: No, it’s true. Music taste in youth is such a terrifying barometer of your social worth.
FIELDER: The good thing now is, music is so uncool that no one cares anymore.
It makes me LAUGH, as someone whose music taste has always been uncool. I mean, to ME, I think your entire identity should be defined by your Goodreads account, not by the COMPLETELY FAKE and TOTALLY WONKY Spotify Wrapped algorithm (I will never accept that Super Freaky Girl was my most played song of 2022).
But whatever. If music is the art form that most people use to define who they are, no matter we demand so much authenticity from musicians, more than what we ask of writers and actors. Hopper’s articles go into this - why is it important that Kendrick is from Compton? How has Lana Del Rey constructed her image?
And at the same time, she points out that it’s all performance!!! Hopper studies the interplay between fans and artists - how the artist is perceived by their audience, and how they respond to that perception. Together, identity is constructed. What does it mean to be a fan of post-punk? What does it mean to go to Warped? To consume R. Kelly’s music? Who goes to a Pedro the Lion concert?
Even as someone with bad music taste & limited knowledge, I loved this book. Hopper makes music fascinating because she clearly finds people fascinating. I loved the smart things she had to say about our biggest stars, and I loved the dives she took into niche sub cultures and bands/albums I’d never heard of. I feel well-prepared to judge other people’s music tastes this year.
July 12, 2021
There are some real standouts in this collection, especially Hopper's later turn towards oral histories—the making of Hole's Live Through This (one of my favorite albums ever), the women who made Rolling Stone into a credible magazine with journalistic standards—and her interviews. As someone who interviews people for part of my living, it is very difficult, and she does it very well—you can tell by the answers she gets out of the likes of Björk and Grimes, and the way her profiles unspool. I'm less fond of the contemporary album reviews—which all blur together, except for her exceptional spotlight on Chalk Circle, DC's first all-women punk band—but loved the unvarnished sneer of the reissue reviews, in which I actually learned a lot about the artists.
And I came out of this with a big reminder of what I love about music, some new musicians to give a try, and a whole host of albums to fall back in love with.
And I came out of this with a big reminder of what I love about music, some new musicians to give a try, and a whole host of albums to fall back in love with.
July 6, 2015
I want to go back in time and give this to 15 year-old me. Required reading for all teen girls showing a real interest in music.
December 17, 2024
"Rock culture has not merely assimilated male supremacy but, with its own Orwellian logic, tried to pass it off as liberation." -Ellen Willis
i know my fans have been waiting for this one. i read much better in the summer months for some reason and have not finished a real book (one not about farting) since like september or something dumb like that which is crazy.
anyway, this book is awesome. obviously a masterclass in feminist music critique but also just writing in general. some of the early, shorter articles come and go without much impact, but that’s just to ease you in as the articles get increasingly enthralling the deeper you get into the book (the one about the first women to join rolling stone’s editorial ranks was one of my favorites). so this is a book that is not only full of incredibly well-written articles but is also expertly edited. the heavy focus on the chicago music scene also appealed to me for obvious reasons. very much appreciated the cupcakke shoutout.
i bought this while i was seeking refuge in various bookstores after locking myself out of my apartment earlier this year. i’m so glad i did!!!! i wrote one (1) article on a concert i went to for loyola’s radio station when i went there, and this book made me remember how fun and celebratory and joyous that was. ahhh i love music. especially cupcakke
i know my fans have been waiting for this one. i read much better in the summer months for some reason and have not finished a real book (one not about farting) since like september or something dumb like that which is crazy.
anyway, this book is awesome. obviously a masterclass in feminist music critique but also just writing in general. some of the early, shorter articles come and go without much impact, but that’s just to ease you in as the articles get increasingly enthralling the deeper you get into the book (the one about the first women to join rolling stone’s editorial ranks was one of my favorites). so this is a book that is not only full of incredibly well-written articles but is also expertly edited. the heavy focus on the chicago music scene also appealed to me for obvious reasons. very much appreciated the cupcakke shoutout.
i bought this while i was seeking refuge in various bookstores after locking myself out of my apartment earlier this year. i’m so glad i did!!!! i wrote one (1) article on a concert i went to for loyola’s radio station when i went there, and this book made me remember how fun and celebratory and joyous that was. ahhh i love music. especially cupcakke
April 30, 2019
There's a point about 80% through this collection where one of the pieces has the author remarking on the pieces she's been paid for in the past year; too many short and ultra-short "takes" and not enough long reads to be satisfying. And as a reader I felt the same way... the longer pieces were the best ones. But it's also a reminder that to survive as a music writer at all these days must be a struggle.
As for the shorter profiles, I haven't read music writing in ages! I remember, reading these pieces, particularly the ones about the author as a young person, about how invigorating it was to read Rolling Stone and zines et al. as a teenager and feel connected to a nebulous group of new music lovers... it might simply be that I'm out of practice reading the genre, but its probably that I can't technically still count myself in that group, that I missed that feeling reading these pieces. My favorites here though were those about Kendrick Lamar and Lana del Rey
As for the shorter profiles, I haven't read music writing in ages! I remember, reading these pieces, particularly the ones about the author as a young person, about how invigorating it was to read Rolling Stone and zines et al. as a teenager and feel connected to a nebulous group of new music lovers... it might simply be that I'm out of practice reading the genre, but its probably that I can't technically still count myself in that group, that I missed that feeling reading these pieces. My favorites here though were those about Kendrick Lamar and Lana del Rey
February 8, 2022
I think I was expecting a manifesto from the way this is titled, but no, it's literally the first collection of criticism by a living female rock critic. And I'm not complaining either way, because the critic in question (Jessica Hopper) is a fantastic writer. Many of the pieces in "The First Collection" are very short, having been originally record reviews or interviews with the artists in question, and limited in space due to where they were published. The longer essays (dealing with a legendary underground LA club for punk rock, the way in which emo excludes women, the return of Sleater-Kinney, and so on) resonate as fantastic, astute looks at rock and roll and other music in a way that few writers today bother trying to do anymore. This was a great, fun, fast read (I got it on Friday, started it on Saturday, and really got far into it Sunday and Monday, before finishing it this morning). This may be my first exposure to Jessica Hopper's writing, but it won't be the last.
December 12, 2015
I sometimes find myself feeling mildly embarrassed at the thought of sharing with others the feeling that music still matters to me. That it matters in a vital way. Not like entertainment or a hobby, but a visceral emotional connection as well as a form of critical intervention in life.
I felt a surge of pride and comraderie when I opened Jessica Hopper’s collection of music reviews. She is unembarrassed in declaring the central importance of music in her life, beginning with her first piece, I have a Strange Relationship with Music.
Part of her allure is that she’s kin—a punk—and writes like one. Despite the fact that her taste would match those of most hipsters (Hopper later became a writer for Pitchfork), she never writes with the irony-for-irony-sake that defines the hipster aesthetic. Instead, she writes with a punk’s heart: filled with community, commitment, and faith (and of course, a penchant for confrontation). Her reviews implicitly argue that the stakes are high for whether music is good or bad, garbage or transcendent.
And yet, she cannot be reduced to *only* a “punk writer,” confined to myopic debates about obscure bands in esoteric zines. She’s fluent in the mainstream, and in genres other than rock. She aims high in her writing, seeking to be in communion with previous rock criticism and an array of artists. In that first piece about her relationship with music, she speaks of her deep connection to the songs from 1967 that comprise Van Morrison’s T.B. Sheets (also a love of mine!).
As the book’s title suggests, Hopper is a terrifically self-aware razor-sharp feminist. Her take-downs are delightful, but also constructive. We leave her reviews with an expanded consciousness, with new insights, with deeper commitments. In short, Hopper remains a true and steadfast *critic*—her criticism is not reactionary or reductionist like Twitter-shaming.
Consider her enlightening take-down of Miley Cyrus. While I should really re-print the entire three pages of brilliance, suffice this brief passage:
“What else could she do but nuke it, saturate herself in our greedy gaze until she dissolves, give it all away, turn herself out until our knowledge of her is borderline gynecological?” (133).
…And another one:
“Though Cyrus has a lovely, albeit generic voice, singing is not her truest gift; instead, it’s the sheer quality of her mirroring, the way she gives us exactly what we want in lethal doses, grinding against our most American horror... She’s playing it like a rebel, but she’s simply being who we’ve goaded her to be” (134).
In the best feminism possible, Hopper does not simply critique the garbage gender politics that Miley represents (lest anyone mistake Hopper’s takedown of a female pop icon as anti-feminist); she deftly turns and takes aim at the public that consumes her and is not strong enough to resist the culture industry.
On a less political, but no less satisfying note, I am vindicated and grateful for Hopper’s thorough rejection of Animal Collective (finally, someone who understands! In Hopper’s piece entitled: “Nu Age: Animal Collective and Bell Orchestre,” she delivers:
“To invoke the Minutemen: Do you want new wave or do you want the truth? Here we are, 20 years later, and the new wave sounds more and more like old New Age. We’re dealing with a fresh crop of musicians who pass off extreme indulgence as experimentalism and neck beards as a sign of higher consciousness. They cite barely Googleable influences so we won’t notice the similarities between them and, say, any popular jam band or latter-day solo album by a member of Tangerine Dream. There are a bunch of names floating around for this stuff—nu-folk, freak-folk, New Weird America—but I have my own: new-jack hippy-wave (when I am feeling gracious) or downtown bullshit city (the rest of the time). Why, you may ask, am I hating on both the player and the game? Simple: I do not like being lied to. And the truth is there is no new in this new (135).
But wait, here it comes:
“Boring is one thing; trying to pass off massage music as experimental is another. Feels is the sort of album meant to be augmented by the sound of a $39 feng shui fountain percolating in the background, because nothing goes with a gurgling plug-in waterspout like songs with copious amounts of zither” (136).
Take that! (That $39 detail is the greatest). Me and Jessica vs. everyone else; Jessica and I win.
Some of Hopper’s finest writing is in a feminist critique of emo (or, atleast its 2003 iteration). Andy Greenwald’s book, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, written the same year as Hopper’s piece, already covers some of her ground (if I remember correctly—I read it around the time it was published), though that doesn’t diminish the power of the piece.
Of the 42 pieces, there are only a few duds in the collection. Despite several re-readings, a brief piece on Lady Gaga remains obtuse to me (something about Lady Gaga, unlike Brittany Spears, understands the irony of being a pop star. Or something.). And a piece written after Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t say anything. The premise—taking a road trip with a friend to Gary, IN to visit Jackson’s family home on the night of his death—is promising enough, but all Hopper manages to deliver is what we all know: Gary is a deindustrialized city. Michael Jackson is from there. Exploitation of his legacy is not sufficient to revitalize the city (duh).
One piece in this collection is so good that I think—I daresay—it will become a classic of the genre. Her piece on David Bazan is emotionally touching and intellectually vibrant. Bazan is most famous for when he led Pedro the Lion, an indie rock band from the late 90’s and early 00’s that stood out for being a band that identified as Christian and had musical integrity and underground cred. Bazan, known for his anguished lyrics and sparse instrumentation (I always had thought of them as an emo band), fell from Christianity, and subsequently did solo work that explored his troubled relationship with God. Fascinatingly, Bazan’s transition to agnosticism challenges many of Bazan’s evangelical Christian fans that Hopper interviews. They like his music but have difficulty reconciling his non-believer lyrics with their own religious orthodoxy, choosing to interpret his lyrics in such a way that does not contradict them. Hopper is generous and sympathetic to them, while pointing out their intellectual dishonesty. She is equally sympathetic to Bazan, who she reveals as an intellectually rigorous searcher, performing in DIY spaces like fans’ living rooms, having spiritually probing conversations between songs.
Hopper’s book is to be celebrated. As she says in the preface, it’s a planted flag. Let us hope that many young women (and men) pick up this book, and with it, the feminist flag and the punk flag.
I felt a surge of pride and comraderie when I opened Jessica Hopper’s collection of music reviews. She is unembarrassed in declaring the central importance of music in her life, beginning with her first piece, I have a Strange Relationship with Music.
Part of her allure is that she’s kin—a punk—and writes like one. Despite the fact that her taste would match those of most hipsters (Hopper later became a writer for Pitchfork), she never writes with the irony-for-irony-sake that defines the hipster aesthetic. Instead, she writes with a punk’s heart: filled with community, commitment, and faith (and of course, a penchant for confrontation). Her reviews implicitly argue that the stakes are high for whether music is good or bad, garbage or transcendent.
And yet, she cannot be reduced to *only* a “punk writer,” confined to myopic debates about obscure bands in esoteric zines. She’s fluent in the mainstream, and in genres other than rock. She aims high in her writing, seeking to be in communion with previous rock criticism and an array of artists. In that first piece about her relationship with music, she speaks of her deep connection to the songs from 1967 that comprise Van Morrison’s T.B. Sheets (also a love of mine!).
As the book’s title suggests, Hopper is a terrifically self-aware razor-sharp feminist. Her take-downs are delightful, but also constructive. We leave her reviews with an expanded consciousness, with new insights, with deeper commitments. In short, Hopper remains a true and steadfast *critic*—her criticism is not reactionary or reductionist like Twitter-shaming.
Consider her enlightening take-down of Miley Cyrus. While I should really re-print the entire three pages of brilliance, suffice this brief passage:
“What else could she do but nuke it, saturate herself in our greedy gaze until she dissolves, give it all away, turn herself out until our knowledge of her is borderline gynecological?” (133).
…And another one:
“Though Cyrus has a lovely, albeit generic voice, singing is not her truest gift; instead, it’s the sheer quality of her mirroring, the way she gives us exactly what we want in lethal doses, grinding against our most American horror... She’s playing it like a rebel, but she’s simply being who we’ve goaded her to be” (134).
In the best feminism possible, Hopper does not simply critique the garbage gender politics that Miley represents (lest anyone mistake Hopper’s takedown of a female pop icon as anti-feminist); she deftly turns and takes aim at the public that consumes her and is not strong enough to resist the culture industry.
On a less political, but no less satisfying note, I am vindicated and grateful for Hopper’s thorough rejection of Animal Collective (finally, someone who understands! In Hopper’s piece entitled: “Nu Age: Animal Collective and Bell Orchestre,” she delivers:
“To invoke the Minutemen: Do you want new wave or do you want the truth? Here we are, 20 years later, and the new wave sounds more and more like old New Age. We’re dealing with a fresh crop of musicians who pass off extreme indulgence as experimentalism and neck beards as a sign of higher consciousness. They cite barely Googleable influences so we won’t notice the similarities between them and, say, any popular jam band or latter-day solo album by a member of Tangerine Dream. There are a bunch of names floating around for this stuff—nu-folk, freak-folk, New Weird America—but I have my own: new-jack hippy-wave (when I am feeling gracious) or downtown bullshit city (the rest of the time). Why, you may ask, am I hating on both the player and the game? Simple: I do not like being lied to. And the truth is there is no new in this new (135).
But wait, here it comes:
“Boring is one thing; trying to pass off massage music as experimental is another. Feels is the sort of album meant to be augmented by the sound of a $39 feng shui fountain percolating in the background, because nothing goes with a gurgling plug-in waterspout like songs with copious amounts of zither” (136).
Take that! (That $39 detail is the greatest). Me and Jessica vs. everyone else; Jessica and I win.
Some of Hopper’s finest writing is in a feminist critique of emo (or, atleast its 2003 iteration). Andy Greenwald’s book, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, written the same year as Hopper’s piece, already covers some of her ground (if I remember correctly—I read it around the time it was published), though that doesn’t diminish the power of the piece.
Of the 42 pieces, there are only a few duds in the collection. Despite several re-readings, a brief piece on Lady Gaga remains obtuse to me (something about Lady Gaga, unlike Brittany Spears, understands the irony of being a pop star. Or something.). And a piece written after Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t say anything. The premise—taking a road trip with a friend to Gary, IN to visit Jackson’s family home on the night of his death—is promising enough, but all Hopper manages to deliver is what we all know: Gary is a deindustrialized city. Michael Jackson is from there. Exploitation of his legacy is not sufficient to revitalize the city (duh).
One piece in this collection is so good that I think—I daresay—it will become a classic of the genre. Her piece on David Bazan is emotionally touching and intellectually vibrant. Bazan is most famous for when he led Pedro the Lion, an indie rock band from the late 90’s and early 00’s that stood out for being a band that identified as Christian and had musical integrity and underground cred. Bazan, known for his anguished lyrics and sparse instrumentation (I always had thought of them as an emo band), fell from Christianity, and subsequently did solo work that explored his troubled relationship with God. Fascinatingly, Bazan’s transition to agnosticism challenges many of Bazan’s evangelical Christian fans that Hopper interviews. They like his music but have difficulty reconciling his non-believer lyrics with their own religious orthodoxy, choosing to interpret his lyrics in such a way that does not contradict them. Hopper is generous and sympathetic to them, while pointing out their intellectual dishonesty. She is equally sympathetic to Bazan, who she reveals as an intellectually rigorous searcher, performing in DIY spaces like fans’ living rooms, having spiritually probing conversations between songs.
Hopper’s book is to be celebrated. As she says in the preface, it’s a planted flag. Let us hope that many young women (and men) pick up this book, and with it, the feminist flag and the punk flag.
January 7, 2020
This was very enjoyable, at times powerful, and definitely thought-provoking. The first essay after the intro, "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" really stuck with me because it spoke to something I had never really considered: the majority of emo songs are by men about how women have destroyed or wronged them, or at minimum made them sad. It made me look at how my music tastes have changed over the years; I always thought I fell away from that music because I was no longer a distraught teenager, but I think there's something to the theory that emo died in part because women couldn't identify with it. They moved on and found something better. While that wasn't a conscious progression on my part, it's certainly what happened to me.
Her interview with Jim Derogatis, the journalist who fought against R. Kelly from the get-go, was also very powerful. And while I was reading her interview with Hole, I kept wondering if Taylor Jenkins Reid read that piece before writing Daisy Jones & the Six, because it read so much like the book.
This was issued by a small press and there were some editing issues. But overall a great collection.
Her interview with Jim Derogatis, the journalist who fought against R. Kelly from the get-go, was also very powerful. And while I was reading her interview with Hole, I kept wondering if Taylor Jenkins Reid read that piece before writing Daisy Jones & the Six, because it read so much like the book.
This was issued by a small press and there were some editing issues. But overall a great collection.
September 12, 2025
the best moments of this collection were a masterclass on writing about music and taught me new appreciation for some artists and albums. i don’t know what to do about having been born in a time so easy to pick on when it comes to things like this — hard sometimes to sort out what is grouchiness and nostalgia vs meaningful critique
August 13, 2021
What a fabulous updated edition to Hopper's original collection of the same name put out in 2015 with Featherproof Books. Allow me to brag that I have both. When I read the first edition I was finishing up graduate school after leaving behind corporate radio music programming, thirsty for all things female rock criticism all the time. I had found Ellen Willis a few years earlier when her daughter put out a collection of her rock writing, Out Of The Vinyl Deeps. Jessica Hopper knows her lineage in female rock writing and she is right up there with all the greats--Lillian Roxon, Ann Powers, Lisa Robinson, Jaan Uhelszki, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, and so many others--and of course with the new generation of her peers, Jenn Pelly, Liz Pelly, Lindsay Zoladz, Amanda Petrusich, and co.
The range of her writing, and the range of music she covers in these pages, is impressive. Her prose is simple and elegant. It does the job. Many of these pieces are short, as Hopper explains, because she wrote for City Pages in Chicago, Punk Planet, The Village Voice, and many underground zines and alt weeklys to pay her bills over the years. That is how you get the chops. There are no excerpts from her own zine, Hit It Or Quit It, but I wish there was a big anthology of those writings too. She is hard to study because she makes it look so easy. These reviews and interviews are effortless because Hopper is so comfortable arranging them. It's all she's ever done since she was fifteen.
"When I was fifteen, I was furious at the world; it was boring, depleting, unjust, and assumed teenage girls were stupid. Punk music introduced me to awe I had not known." (From the Afterword.)
From her interview with an up-and-coming Chance The Rapper in Chicago, to a short brief piece about Lady Gaga stuck at TSA; to her conversation with Jim DeRogatis about R. Kelly, to driving to Gary, Indiana the night MJ died; to the Rumours box set, to the Joni Mitchell studio albums collection, to the Nevermind 20th anniversary box set to Fiona Apple to Kendrick; to so much Dinosaur Jr. it makes me question: am I listening to enough Dinosaur Jr.? I know Hopper's answer: I'm not. (I'm definitely not.) She has it all. Hopper interviews Bjork effortlessly and graciously, as if she's not even there. (Bjork!!)
The best part about this book, or one of them, is Hopper sees music and music criticism through the feminist lens. She talks about femininity and power, the body, how its seen or ignored, she talks about Joanna Newsom's Ys, about Nicki Minaj, Liz Phair, Sleater-Kinney, Janelle Monae, and "The Year Of The Woman." She takes readers across genres and through time as if they aren't really there to dissect everything she loves (and hates) about the cruel world of music, the music industry, and the "boy kings" who always wanted her to play by their rules. "They didn't want to help me," she writes, "they just wanted me to want what they had." She takes on the Pazz & Jop poll for its misogyny from within her Pazz & Jop poll essays. She quotes Ellen Willis, Sylvia Plath, Sasha Geffen, Rimbaud, Deborah Levy, Angela Davis, and so many more, and calls social media what it is: surveillance capitalism (!!!!!).
I will read Hopper all day every day. She inspires me to stick to what I want to write about and stick to what I know is right--in sound, on the page, with women, and in staying away from men's expectations because fuck men's expectations. This collection is dedicated to me because I am a female rock writer. Of course not to her stature but I am here because of her, because she tells me to keep going and to ignore what people say about my writing. That is an ethos I learned long ago watching her take over Pitchfork, as editor, then at MTV news; and now she edits the Music Series at the University Texas Press, one day I will pitch my high-concept music book, I promise. She's been fighting for this collection for over a decade and rightly so. This is cannon and its just the beginning and we owe it to her hard work to continue in every form we know how.
May all women and young people find Jessica Hopper and write about whatever they want, however they want, no matter how femme or feminine, or loud or crazy or hardcore or how hard it can get (and is). I've never been a working music critic; I do it for fun online, I write for an independent site; I've been doing it over a decade and have never been paid. But putting words in order around music, to maybe capture its magic, is fulfilling as it is complicated. Hopper knows this. Her life's work has been and will continue to be (based on what I'm reading here): keep going: keep inspiring women and young people to pivot to zines, to organize, to protest, to call out those men, and speak up. You have a voice, she screams; we all do.
Let these pages inspire you. Let them fall off your shelf onto the nightstand and use them as a reference guide. Hopper is here to stay and I can't wait to see what's next in the cannon.
edit: This book is not just for women!! Any person studying music, music writing, and music journalism should read this book and have it in their library!
The range of her writing, and the range of music she covers in these pages, is impressive. Her prose is simple and elegant. It does the job. Many of these pieces are short, as Hopper explains, because she wrote for City Pages in Chicago, Punk Planet, The Village Voice, and many underground zines and alt weeklys to pay her bills over the years. That is how you get the chops. There are no excerpts from her own zine, Hit It Or Quit It, but I wish there was a big anthology of those writings too. She is hard to study because she makes it look so easy. These reviews and interviews are effortless because Hopper is so comfortable arranging them. It's all she's ever done since she was fifteen.
"When I was fifteen, I was furious at the world; it was boring, depleting, unjust, and assumed teenage girls were stupid. Punk music introduced me to awe I had not known." (From the Afterword.)
From her interview with an up-and-coming Chance The Rapper in Chicago, to a short brief piece about Lady Gaga stuck at TSA; to her conversation with Jim DeRogatis about R. Kelly, to driving to Gary, Indiana the night MJ died; to the Rumours box set, to the Joni Mitchell studio albums collection, to the Nevermind 20th anniversary box set to Fiona Apple to Kendrick; to so much Dinosaur Jr. it makes me question: am I listening to enough Dinosaur Jr.? I know Hopper's answer: I'm not. (I'm definitely not.) She has it all. Hopper interviews Bjork effortlessly and graciously, as if she's not even there. (Bjork!!)
The best part about this book, or one of them, is Hopper sees music and music criticism through the feminist lens. She talks about femininity and power, the body, how its seen or ignored, she talks about Joanna Newsom's Ys, about Nicki Minaj, Liz Phair, Sleater-Kinney, Janelle Monae, and "The Year Of The Woman." She takes readers across genres and through time as if they aren't really there to dissect everything she loves (and hates) about the cruel world of music, the music industry, and the "boy kings" who always wanted her to play by their rules. "They didn't want to help me," she writes, "they just wanted me to want what they had." She takes on the Pazz & Jop poll for its misogyny from within her Pazz & Jop poll essays. She quotes Ellen Willis, Sylvia Plath, Sasha Geffen, Rimbaud, Deborah Levy, Angela Davis, and so many more, and calls social media what it is: surveillance capitalism (!!!!!).
I will read Hopper all day every day. She inspires me to stick to what I want to write about and stick to what I know is right--in sound, on the page, with women, and in staying away from men's expectations because fuck men's expectations. This collection is dedicated to me because I am a female rock writer. Of course not to her stature but I am here because of her, because she tells me to keep going and to ignore what people say about my writing. That is an ethos I learned long ago watching her take over Pitchfork, as editor, then at MTV news; and now she edits the Music Series at the University Texas Press, one day I will pitch my high-concept music book, I promise. She's been fighting for this collection for over a decade and rightly so. This is cannon and its just the beginning and we owe it to her hard work to continue in every form we know how.
May all women and young people find Jessica Hopper and write about whatever they want, however they want, no matter how femme or feminine, or loud or crazy or hardcore or how hard it can get (and is). I've never been a working music critic; I do it for fun online, I write for an independent site; I've been doing it over a decade and have never been paid. But putting words in order around music, to maybe capture its magic, is fulfilling as it is complicated. Hopper knows this. Her life's work has been and will continue to be (based on what I'm reading here): keep going: keep inspiring women and young people to pivot to zines, to organize, to protest, to call out those men, and speak up. You have a voice, she screams; we all do.
Let these pages inspire you. Let them fall off your shelf onto the nightstand and use them as a reference guide. Hopper is here to stay and I can't wait to see what's next in the cannon.
edit: This book is not just for women!! Any person studying music, music writing, and music journalism should read this book and have it in their library!
August 12, 2023
Wonderful collection of criticism. Jessica Hopper’s writing is stunning for both its breadth and depth.
May 30, 2024
When the chasm of human experience tels unbrideal, and the past is keeping you like the stocks, and there o no absolution to be had, no forgiveness to salve you, and the world feels too much in its infinite newness, and its midnight and people are screaming, when all you seeis difference and a long string of your own unqualifed fail-ures, there is Van singing, "Lay me down... to be born again." There is so much wanting in "Astral Weeks," but it's not desperation, it's all vessel; it's faith enough to cover anyone listening.
September 27, 2022
Jessica Hopper is a pioneer and keen observer of the landscape of the music industry. I first became a fan of hers while attending college in her native Chicago, but this collection only cemented my appreciation. She is a woman in a male dominated field who is absolutely fearless in her writing, which is eloquent and thought provoking. I felt a kinship with Hopper, she's a punk rock riot girl and, while I wouldn't call myself one, I totally identify with that music scene and I understand where she's coming from.
In fact, the first essay after the intro, "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" spoke to me, because I totally understood it. Emo music was such a huge part of my cultural identity as a teenager and I remember acknowledging that there were so few women in the subculture. More-so, most of the songs are by men, about having been wronged by women in some regard. While I'm no longer a teenager, I will always have a soft spot for Emo, though I was always left wanting more because I didn't have many female fronted bands, let alone all female bands to rely on.
Jessica Hopper feels like who I wanted to be at thirteen and, after reading her book, I think she's still who I want to be now! She's totally authentic and badass and she has cemented my fandom.
Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC!
In fact, the first essay after the intro, "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" spoke to me, because I totally understood it. Emo music was such a huge part of my cultural identity as a teenager and I remember acknowledging that there were so few women in the subculture. More-so, most of the songs are by men, about having been wronged by women in some regard. While I'm no longer a teenager, I will always have a soft spot for Emo, though I was always left wanting more because I didn't have many female fronted bands, let alone all female bands to rely on.
Jessica Hopper feels like who I wanted to be at thirteen and, after reading her book, I think she's still who I want to be now! She's totally authentic and badass and she has cemented my fandom.
Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC!
August 18, 2015
I will be the first to admit that I know close to nothing about music (The other day I asked my coworker if Billy Joel was a country singer), so as much as I'd love to say I would even be able to identify a Nirvana song if it came on the radio, the few singers I had heard of that were featured in this collection were basically Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. So I'm just working with the idea that Jessica Hopper knows what she is talking about, and she does. She proves her credibility in each piece not just as one of the major female music critics but one of the major critics period. I love the feminist message she delivers: that women, especially young women, have been present in punk rock since the beginning. And not just as groupies flashing the bad-boy musicians, but as active participants who are there for the music itself. We get little glimpses of how Hopper became involved with music and her dedication to the genre is really admirable. I'd love to work my way through this collection and listen to all the bands and singers mentioned; I feel like it would be a good introduction to punk rock.
July 3, 2019
Ugh Jessica Hopper is the woman I want to be! My entire adolescence, music felt like my bloodline, yet my taste always felt caught up in some boy I was trying to impress. I felt as though my own opinions were merely shadows of the real critics - the Soft Boys who really knew what was up, whose voices I read as truth on Pitchfork and r/Indiehead.
Jessica Hopper was the first voice in music criticism that resonates with me in a pure and authentic and feminine way. She is bad ass and knows her shit and won’t be put down by anyone who would suggest otherwise. Yet she is decidedly unpretentious in the decidedly pretentious world of Indie Rock. Each essay in this book is beautiful. Hopper gave me a new lens to the music I love, and made me fall in love with artists I’ve never even heard of. She is vulnerable and generous in the sharing of her own experiences, with love and heartbreak, the devastating world we sometimes feel we’re living in, and the hope and songs that fill in the cracks. Reading her words, and listening to the songs with the new lens she gave me, I feel for the first time empowered and entitled in my own opinions and voice, and no soft boy can tell me otherwise!!
Jessica Hopper was the first voice in music criticism that resonates with me in a pure and authentic and feminine way. She is bad ass and knows her shit and won’t be put down by anyone who would suggest otherwise. Yet she is decidedly unpretentious in the decidedly pretentious world of Indie Rock. Each essay in this book is beautiful. Hopper gave me a new lens to the music I love, and made me fall in love with artists I’ve never even heard of. She is vulnerable and generous in the sharing of her own experiences, with love and heartbreak, the devastating world we sometimes feel we’re living in, and the hope and songs that fill in the cracks. Reading her words, and listening to the songs with the new lens she gave me, I feel for the first time empowered and entitled in my own opinions and voice, and no soft boy can tell me otherwise!!
March 20, 2021
Jessica Hopper is at her best when she’s weaving a meta-narrative through a piece of criticism—and thankfully, that means she’s at her best on almost every page of this book. The tight writing, quilt of references and unabashed stance-taking is a reminder of why cultural writing matters and why criticism matters. The only times Hopper wavers is when she doesn’t let herself have the last word in a piece or lets her subject drive the narrative (thankfully that only really happens four or five times across 100+ page). In particular, her piece on a Lady Gaga paparazzi shot, her piece on why basement shows are better than music festivals, her take on Warped Tour and her shining tribute to The Raincoats are articles in this collection that’ll rattle around your brain long after the book returns to its shelf.
We don’t just need women in rock, we need women writing about it too—and really, this book reminds the reader why we need Hoppers’ voice as a strong anchor in that chorus.
We don’t just need women in rock, we need women writing about it too—and really, this book reminds the reader why we need Hoppers’ voice as a strong anchor in that chorus.
May 8, 2021
I grew up in the world of punk music that Hopper talks about, listening to some of the same bands and longing for the same festivals that grace the pages of this book. But her voice is so refreshing, providing a fresh—read woman's—point of view that is sorely missing from music criticism. But please please please don't think the book's value lies only in her gender. Rather, it's her ability to turn a phrase, to see the world cynically but somehow with hope for the way it could be, and to be fearless with the ideas she's presenting. It's an amazing collection, chronicling the culture of the time, always giving context and a different way of looking at it.
Hopper's articles on women in emo music, Warped Tour and the profile of Frida Hyvönen stand out in the mind, but there are few moments that aren't brilliant.
Hopper's articles on women in emo music, Warped Tour and the profile of Frida Hyvönen stand out in the mind, but there are few moments that aren't brilliant.
April 14, 2019
A great read. The collected articles vary in lenght but never in quality. Jessica Hopper's writing style is playful and witty yet also profound when we look back at the artists, bands and scenes through her eyes.
The only thing that I didn't like so much is that it features quite a few non-rock centered articles like Rap and Pop. Not that I don't like to read about those once in a while, too, but I felt like they took up space that could have been filled with other topics revolving around rock music, especially its fringers and subgenres.
Also: this is perfect for your daily commute.
The only thing that I didn't like so much is that it features quite a few non-rock centered articles like Rap and Pop. Not that I don't like to read about those once in a while, too, but I felt like they took up space that could have been filled with other topics revolving around rock music, especially its fringers and subgenres.
Also: this is perfect for your daily commute.
December 31, 2015
Jessica Hopper's criticism was integral to my development as a (former) music critic and zinester. Punk Planet forever. Hit It or Quit It too. tinyluckygenius the old good friend I've never met. I love Hopper's style and her bite, her intersectional punk feminism. Yep. A fine collection. Highlights for me are the essays on Lana del Rey and Miley Cyrus, and her interview with Jim DeRogatis on his coverage of R. Kelly's sexual predation of young Black women.
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February 1, 2021Access is rarely given away without a fight. But that's [the] thing about Hopper, no one gave her anything, she fucking took it, and she wrote beautifully about that taking, and there's a reason this is The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, there's nothing quite else like it, not yet, but that doesn't mean there won't be more.
April 26, 2015
Excellent. Easily one of the, if not THE, best collections of music criticism to come out this year, and maybe in the last few years.
January 4, 2016
"Because there is a void in my guts which can only be filled by songs."
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