THE READING ROOM: ‘Pretend We’re Dead’ Recalls Women Who Rocked and Changed American Music

In the 1990s, numerous women rockers emerged on the popular music scene, flooding the airwaves of college and independent radio stations with alternative feminist rock and momentarily elevating these women in the rock pantheon. As Tanya Pearson, founder of the Women in Rock Oral History Project, illustrates in her buoyant oral history, Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ‘90s (Da Capo, January 28, 2025), though, these women artists’ careers fell almost as quickly as they rose and, by the early 2000s, many of these bands had disappeared from the scene.

Pearson admits that she started the book, in part, because women rockers of the 1990s were her archetype: “my main motivation was to be a drinking, smoking, drug-taking rock star.” By the time she had graduated from high school, she excelled at the first two but she had not climbed to the pinnacle of “rock stardom.” At the same time, though, she noticed that the wave of women rockers that had crested so high in the 1990s had crashed, and in its wake were tidal pools filled with “misogynist male rock stars, nu metal, teen pop stars, and boy bands.”

Drawing on interviews with artists including Liz Phair, Shirley Manson,  Kristin Hersh, Tracy Bonham, and Tanya Donelly, Pearson explores the backgrounds of these musicians, the ways they developed their musical styles, their emergence as a cultural force through their label signings and participation in festivals, and the political and social activism they encouraged in and through their music and their concerts. She points out in her introduction that “women in rock in the 1990s were socially conscious storytellers, aware of gendered embodiment. Because they emerged from such diverse backgrounds geographically, socioeconomically, and because their influences were so broad, the music and lyrical styles were multitudinous.”

According to Pearson, “Women in rock lived all over the United States, contributed to various regional scenes and subcultural communities, and their influences ran the gamut. None of them knew one another—there was not some global girls’ club—and most made their way to mainstream success through hard work, sacrifice, and persistence, a pattern that seems to naturally apply to men.”

The women rockers share with Pearson the stories about how they got started in music, in various locations around the US. Patty Schemel, the drummer for Hole and Upset, grew up outside of Seattle. “I was in a band called the Milkbones in the early ’80s,” she says. “We were in high school, and there were two guys at my school who were also into punk rock. Once I discovered punk, I felt at home because there were freaks like me in punk. And I saw more women playing punk rock music than I did playing rock music on MTV. I started writing songs and playing drums in the Milkbones, and we played at our high school and at parties, and that’s how it began. . .Being a good drummer was such an esteem builder, and it became my entire identity. I was Patty Schemel, the drummer.”

Liz Phair tells Pearson that recording on a cassette helped her evolve as a songwriter and a musician. “I was not inclined toward technology at all, but I recorded songs to cassette on a four-track TASCAM from the ’70s and ’80s. It just seemed approachable. I could quietly, at home, record against myself vocally to do harmonies, backing vocals. And I could also layer the guitar part. I would just repeat the same part. And it turns out, I learned later, once I was doing this professionally, I’m very consistent when I write a guitar part.”

Women artists and bands flourished by embracing artistic freedom and benefitted from being played on college and signing with independent record labels that provided tour support. College radio stations were particularly important, for when those stations played local band, often unsigned bands, the airplay attracted the attention of indie labels who’d sign up the artists. Eventually, Pearson points out, many of these women artists developed their following, sold records, and were signed to major labels. The bands “quickly went from playing clubs and touring in minivans to traveling in tour buses and receiving weekly allowances, massive recording advances, and major label distribution. The process by which women achieved mainstream visibility was really that simple.”

During the 1990s, as Pearson points out, “women were active participants, and their catalogs contained multitudes. It remains a golden age in music and an era of artistic, creative control. The media had a difficult time corralling and categorizing the feminisms of ’90s rock women in real time, and history has had a similar problem looking back. Part of what made the ’90s so unique is the breadth and diversity of the artists within the genre, but also the breadth, diversity, and nuance of its feminism as it emerged in the music and in performance. The mainstream visibility of these trailblazing women created an inclusive context for women and girls in the future to reference and emulate.”

By 1999, however, events such as Woodstock ’99, which included only three women performers, epitomized the cultural shift away from the diversity and nuances of feminism that women rockers of the 1990s embraced and shared with their audiences. At the end of the decade, misogyny had reared its ugly head again in the metal bands of the new century. While the music of women rockers flowed over the airwaves in the 1990s, the number of women artists getting airplay even now is but a fraction of the number of male artists getting airplay. As Pearson writes, “The institutional and political conservatism that generated backlash against women’s progress—in the late ’90s and again during the Trump era—is reflected in the lack of diversity in mainstream rock and alternative categories today. There is a direct correlation between media consolidation, privatization, and conservatism, and the negative impacts on women—and in terms of the music industry—on their creative reproduction.”

Pearson concludes that “The wave of women in rock and alternative music in the 1990s was a hugely important moment in music history and also in the history of the United States as a whole. The mainstream supported dissenting women who disrupted convention, and the industry discovered that anti-sexism was commercially viable. It was a great moment for young people.”

Pearson’s stirring blend of oral history and cultural insights into this chapter in music history in Pretend We’re Dead stands as a valuable contribution to other discussions of women in rock such as Evelyn McDonnell’s and Ann Powers’ anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap and Alison Fensterstock’s How Women Made Music.