| The note doesn't say it's male or female. The note is either good or bad. |
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 | | Living proof, because apparently some people still need it, that women rock: Nita Strauss at the Ritz, San Jose, Calif., Nov. 22, 2021. | | (Steve Jennings/WireImage/Getty Images) | | |
| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
She Will Rock You
Open letter to anyone who works in commercial rock radio: Can you explain how it's possible that a woman could tweet this in 2022 and not be joking (which she isn't)?
Everybody else: Meet NITA STRAUSS, guitar-shredding descendant of Romantic composer JOHANN STRAUSS. She's been playing professionally since she was 15. She would have loved to more directly honor her familial heritage but it turns out, she says, "the waltz doesn't really sound good on the guitar." So instead she joined a metal tribute band called the IRON MAIDENS, which is where the hard rock world first discovered her. She's been widely recorded, and admired, since then. She's appeared with some frequency on the cover of GUITAR WORLD as a major force in hard rock, and inside the same magazine as a columnist. She's performed frequently at WWE events. For the past several years, she's been touring with ALICE COOPER, who hired her because "she can play anything.
In November, Nita Strauss became the first solo female artist in 26 years to be the lead artist on a song in the top 10 of BILLBOARD's Mainstream Rock Airplay Chart. The song is "DEAD INSIDE," and features DISTURBED's DAVID DRAIMAN on guest vocals (and Strauss, whose solo work has generally been instrumental, on lead guitar). It's currently #3 on that chart, and this week it shredded a glass ceiling on another one, MEDIABASE's Active Rock Airplay chart, where it became the first song by a solo female artist to hit #1, ever.
Which is amazing. And insane.
There is a radio format where until this week a woman couldn't have the #1 song as measured by Mediabase, and where until recently she couldn't even have a top 10 record as charted by Billboard (which gets its radio play info from Mediabase competitor BDS).
There are, it should be noted, a bunch of rock formats and not all of them are quite as unwelcoming to this particular half of the world's population. But not all of them aren't. And even one such format is one too many.
So back to my open letter: How did this come to be? Why do you still propagate this? Why does nearly every programmer at nearly every such radio station continue to play along? Is there something essentially different about what happens when a woman plugs her guitar into an amp vs. when a man plugs his into an amp? Is it the way they dress? Something about their voices? (It's hard not to notice that it took a song with a male voice to finally scale the charts in late 2021 and early 2022.) (Then again, you play GRETA VAN FLEET, so maybe not.) Do not enough women make rock music in the first place? Or do they just not bother promoting it to you because they know what you're going to do? Why do chartkeepers continue to chart this as if it was something that made perfect sense?
I know you've heard every one of these questions a million times. I know there are other formats with not dissimilar issues. But this is about this format and how you think about these questions today, in 2022. Or, better, how you rethink them. What would you tell a 15-year-old girl who's part of the growing population of female guitar players and who wants to rock as hard as Nita Strauss, or VOLBEAT, or KORN? What would you show her, or play for her, to convince her it's worth doing? What would make her believe you?
And may you keep on rocking, Nita Strauss.
Knowledge Is King
KOOL MOE DEE grades rappers of the late '80s (A-pluses for MELLE MEL, GRANDMASTER CAZ and, um, himself; C for the BEASTIE BOYS) and late '90s (BIGGIE and LAURYN HILL: A-plus; JAY-Z: B; MASTER P: C-plus.) H/T THAT DAMN NNATE for the amazing find... An important story by MOSI REEVES, meanwhile, on issues facing the archivists trying to preserve the music and documents of early hip-hop, from handwritten rhymes in danger of literally disappearing ("Nobody told me to keep that in a plastic bag and cover the sheets up so the paper wouldn't deteriorate") to the risks of curating anything on a platform as unstable as the internet (which doesn't fit in a plastic bag).
Rest in Peace
Los Angeles rapper EARL SWAVEY... Nigerian juju singer/guitarist DAYO KUJORE... JANE ALSOBROOK, music publicist turned film exec behind movies including "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars."
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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| what we're into |
|  | | Video of the day | | "The Girls in the Band" | | Judy Chaikin | | And one more genre (you are shocked, shocked) where woman haven't always been welcome. A documentary about female jazz and big-band instrumentalists of the 1930s and '40s. | | |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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