At these shows, women screamed their adulation for the very stars hurling invective at them. They climbed the shoulders of their male companions and waved to the throng waiting to grope them. The women seemed to be reviving the role of the old-fashioned rock chick, who gained the right to be sexually expressive by running a gantlet of degradation and scorn. And the men were all too ready to debase them.

This is happening during the summer of yet another "year of the woman" in pop, when the music business is congratulating itself for the gains it has made.

     -- Ann Powers, "A Surge of Sexism on the Rock Scene," New York Times, Aug. 2, 1999.

When I first read Ann Power's article in the New York Times about the "return" of sexism in rock I immediately thought of Lawrence Grossberg's recent musings on the state of popular music studies. On the surface, the two have little to do with each other. One is a reasoned reaction to the events at Woodstock '99, albeit tempered by so-called "journalistic objectivity. The other is, on my reading, a challenge to those of us who practice popular music studies to do it better. To me, both articles struck a similar chord, that of "business as usual."

My initial reaction to Power's article was to snort "like sexism in rock ever went away?" Multiple "years of the women" in the 1990s could not bring female performers in from the margins to the center of so-called "rock," musically, discursively, or any other way. Now, I'm not saying that women do not have a greater and more legitimated presence in the formations of popular music generally and in the music called rock specifically. But I am saying that women have carved out their own spaces on the margins if not entirely outside of the discourses, formations, and apparatuses of rock. I point to Lilith Fair or the fate of Alanis Morrisette and the other "angry young women" of the mid-1990s to illustrate my point. As soon as that term was invented and deployed, women's marginality to rock was reinscribed and reaffirmed. Lilith Fair was, in my opinion, a case of getting out while the going was good; that is, carving out a space for female performers on the margins of rock before they were forced back there.

Therefore, I was not surprised when Powers pointed out something that was already clear to me. Nor was I surprised when I read Grossberg's "Reflections of a Disappointed Popular Music Scholar." In my opinion, much of the theoretical work about popular music generally and rock music specifically reiterates and reinforces the same sexist and raced biases of popular music criticism. This is understandable, given that the primary models for our relatively new field were the ideas generated by young white male critics in the mid-1960s about what rock was, what it meant, and who it was really for. More importantly and to the point for my purposes here, this body of writing has contributed to the hierarchization of popular music, with rock achieving primacy over all. One of the first binaries that emerged from this hierarchization was the rock/pop split. This was in many ways a raced and gendered division, with rock, of course, being the province of white males and pop being that of non-whites and women. I acknowledge that this is a simplified, and possibly simpleminded, version of a very complex argument, but it is essential to the theoretical agenda that I am happily pursuing here.

One particularly troubling aspect of much popular music theory is the way that it glosses over the at times abhorrent gender and racial politics within the apparatuses, discourses, effectivities and so on of popular music in general and rock in particular. Another related problem for me is the assumption that popular youth music has, or at least had, the capacity to effect some sort of lasting social and political change. The two problems are related, in that the latent utopianism of the second is dependent upon the worldview that is naturalized in how we think about, write about and possibly even perform popular music. That worldview, I submit, is that of the white, usually heterosexual male. It is one that, despite appearances and the increasing heterogeneity of all aspects of popular music, still defines our objects of study, our affective reactions and responses to popular music, and our senses of who we are or can be within it. It is this worldview, for example, that makes the sexism in rock described by Ann Powers so wily and so resilient.

We cannot, therefore, continue to ignore the power dynamics within the apparatuses of popular music themselves. For example, the gender-neutral use of "his and her" within popular music theory is inappropriate, in that it presumes a parity within the apparatus that does not exist. Therefore, we cannot speak of "his or her" commitment to and within the rock apparatus, because he is much more likely to be allowed to make such commitments than she is. Access to the ability to make and have commitments, and to act upon and with them, is what is key here, and that access is not distributed equally. Gender-neutrality in our theoretical language serves to sustain gender-inequality in popular music discourses and formations. The ruse of gender-neutrality in popular music discourses and formations, particularly those concerned with rock, may be one of the major factors behind the so-called return of sexism in rock that Powers describes. In the age of "I'm not a feminist" feminism, thinking that women are equal to men in the apparatuses of rock may be one of the reasons why they are not. Recognition by some that women are not equal to men in rock, and that they may never be, may be one of the reasons for Lilith Fair and the genre of female singer-songwriters that have come to be associated with it.

The implicit power dynamics within the apparatuses of rock may also be one of the reasons why people do not care as much about it as we critics and theorists like to think they do. Our studies and theories need to acknowledge that perhaps rock has never been an appropriate "organizing site if not force of resistance and alternative possibilities," as Grossberg puts it, perhaps because the boundaries around just who could be in and out of its center were so boldly drawn. "Rock and roll" is now an adjective, trotted out to describe everything from fashion to Los Angeles hotel design. It's been that way for longer than any of us would care to admit. "Rock and roll" describes an increasingly commodified spirit or aesthetic with very little connection to an affective, or any, relationship to the music itself. For example, how does rock's internal power dynamics affect the widespread use of popular music as aural wallpaper, there to create a mood rather than to produce an affective response? A good example here is "soft rock," which we theorists and critics would be apt to place under the category "music that sucks." Not coincidentally, this is a highly feminized and devalued form of popular music with ties to rock.

The rock/pop split, or gendering, highlights another thorny issue for those of us in the Cultural Studies camp especially, but may be recognizable to those who work on music in general. Aesthetics, or more loosely taste, has a great influence what we study, even if we do not every dare to divulge ours. The result of this "absent presence" is a not-so-subtle elitism in our work. I am led to this statement by the recent discussion on the world-wide IASPM listserver about so-called "music that sucks." Now, in less charitable moments, I would describe that as most of the mainstream popular music, and especially rock music, out there in radio and internet-land. Most of the examples given that should be obvious -- Celine Dion and Kenny G, among others -- are artists from the feminized, pop side of the spectrum. I'm the first to admit that I'm not about to pursue a study of "music that sucks." I've internalized much of the inherent and gendered elitism of academic and popular rock criticism into my own taste to be able to listen to what I would be studying. To try to study it with these biases on hand would do the music a disservice. At the same time, we cannot condemn the popularity of Celine Dion or Kenny G as symptomatic of a mass epidemic of bad taste. It may have more to do with a point made previously, that perhaps music just doesn't matter as much as we theorists and critics think it does. How can we, can we, or should we develop critical tools and theories that do not reflect our conscious or unconscious elitism? First, we have to get at the gendered, raced, classed or other roots of our biases.

As a side note, I've been referring to gender in this essay, but I also strongly believe that critical attention must be paid to racial politics and dynamics within the discourses of rock and other popular musics. For example, I am intrigued by the fact that rap, tarred incorrectly as a whole as an extremely misogynist form of culture, has spawned the strongest, most positive environment for female artists. The subtle dynamics and interweavings of gender and race in both the rock and rap formations must be unpacked and studied before we can even begin to understand this.

These are some of the reasons why I believe that we, as popular music scholars, must continue to study rock and all popular music in a messy, interdisciplinary, and not especially systematic fashion. I see the need for some semblance of a common vocabulary -- for example, many of us, myself most definitely included, are almost as promiscuous with our use of the term "rock" to stand in for all popular music as is VH1. I've wrestled with how to refer to what I'm talking about throughout this essay. Do I call what I'm talking about rock or popular music? I decided to leave it messy, but it wasn't an easy decision.

But I also believe that rock, or popular music, or what have you, is a much more difficult site of analysis than film or television, for example. Film and television have very strong visually iconic aspects that tend toward certain readings, methods of analysis, and theoretical vocabularies. Popular music is a much harder nut to crack in that there is a strong subjective element to its reception, despite anyplace where music videos may tend to lead reception. Popular music is much more threaded through everyday life than film or television. As we all know, it's hard to escape it. And because of the identification of popular music with youth culture, it is hard to pass through the teenage years without cultivating some relationship to it or coming under its influence in some way. It is somewhat easier to avoid film or television. For example, although I've been railing against rock's gender politics in this essay, rock has been important and integral to my life for 30 years, despite my awareness almost from the start that I was an outsider to it. Rock music may indeed be the only form of popular culture that has as many outsiders as insiders who love it.

That is why I am not in favor of developing a theory of popular music -- yet. On a mundane level, I believe that the field is too young. What is more compelling for me, however, is that popular music is a good target for all types of theoretical approaches. Implicit in this essay is a call for throwing more gender theory, or so-called "poststructural feminism" at it. We could also approach American popular music from a postcolonial perspective. We must continue musicological inquiries. And we must . . . name your favorite approach here. And yes, we should get a good idea of how popular music's various apparatuses work and interact with each other. To the end of increasing our understanding of how rock and all popular music works, then, I say let's continue to let a thousand flowers bloom. Let's keep our own theoretical agendas coming. Let's not create theories and ways of analyzing rock that foreclose other ways of doing so, or that continue to muffle voices on its margins.