"It hasn't always been easy being a woman in this industry," writes Megan Jasper, CEO of indie-rock record label Sub Pop. Her essay, "Losers," is one of 16 offerings collected by writer Sinéad Gleeson and musician Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth in This Woman's Work: Essays on Music. Substitute "the arts" for "this industry" in Jasper's statement, and her conclusion sums up pretty much any of the pieces in this fearsome and eclectic anthology.
Apart from Gordon's interview with Japanese musician Yoshimi Yokota and Juliana Huxtable's "praise poem" for singer Linda Sharrock, This Woman's Work gathers critical, biographical and autobiographical music-themed essays by women. There's strong work throughout the collection, but the most reverberant pieces tend to take the form of emotions-front girl-on-girl tributes: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson, Maggie Nelson on Lhasa de Sela and, heartrendingly, Margo Jefferson on Ella Fitzgerald, whose tendency to perspire mid-performance unsettles the writer. As Jefferson--who, like Fitzgerald, is Black--writes in "Diaphoresis": "even as she swings, scats and soars, Ella Fitzgerald's sweat threatens to drag her back into the maw of working-class Black female labor."
This Woman's Work is richer for the fact that Gleeson (Constellations: Reflections from Life) and Gordon (Girl in a Band) have sought out contributors who see the politics in making art. As Fatima Bhutto writes in "Songs of Exile" of music's capacity to galvanize the disenfranchised, "Tyrants hate music because no matter their force and their power, they will never, not ever, be able to control what is beautiful." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer