Tanya Pearson’s Pretend We’re Dead, about women in rock music, wears its heart on its flannel sleeve. As one of her University of Texas Press mates – her book on Marianne Faithfull inspired me to write one on Alanis Morissette – I might be biased, but I’m also happy to say Pearson’s work is both deeply serious and a raucous good time. Her scholarship manages to be thoroughly enjoyable even as it probes darker realities.
Pretend We’re Dead’s assessment of the world of women in rock music during the 1990s includes Pearson’s characteristic mix of wit and unflinching honesty, making even the grittiest aspects of the industry feel alive and engaging. While it’s an often necessarily depressing history lesson, the author’s voice ensures it’s never a slog. The book brims with her humor and clarity.
If anything, the raw truths Pearson unearths only amplify the sheer audacity of these women’s accomplishments. It’s an impressive balancing act, turning tough truths about the rock music industry into something empowering. If you’ve ever blasted Hole or Garbage while screaming into a hairbrush, Pretend We’re Dead was made for you.
Oral histories are an ideal format for exploring music scenes and subcultures. Pearson uses this method masterfully because she’s been devoted to the format for a long time. As Director of the Women of Rock Oral History Project, Pearson has been interviewing about the precise concerns of this book for over a decade. Although she has a wider range of interviews on the site, Pretend We’re Dead is, in many ways, the culmination of the site’s endeavors, and this book fills a gap in music history in a supremely timely way.
There’s a long tradition of oral histories as definitive chronicles of music movements, especially for punks and other outside subcultures that were never adequately covered by mainstream media. Pearson’s project sits nicely on the same shelf as books like 1996’s iconic Please Kill Me, documentaries like Sarah Price’s L7: Pretend We’re Dead (2016), and Jessica Hopper’s Courtney Love’s Women BBC podcast series.
Pearson adds to that legacy of women in rock music while making it her own. She doesn’t just assemble interviews; she weaves them together with commentary that’s equal parts incisive and hilarious. Her bluntness is a breath of fresh air, and her interviewees are clearly charmed by it because they tell her the whole ugly truth in return. Witness her first move into analyzing Woodstock 1999: “Let me preface what I’m about to say by announcing that I fucking hate Limp Bizkit, in case that isn’t clear.” No reason is given—and none is needed. Or her more subtle pop-culture winks, like opening a paragraph with “Dig, if you will, this picture,” riffing on Prince while setting the tone for a serious discussion.
Pearson’s ability to mix humor, deep knowledge, and sharp critique makes her approach so engaging. Pearson’s opinionated narrative pulls you in and keeps you there even if you don’t get every reference. Knocks at nu metal or boy bands aside, most of her strongest jabs are reserved for self-deprecation. Pearson is a self-described late bloomer and a suburban dork who barely graduated high school in 1999 and then spent eight years being high, drunk, and unemployable. Now she’s Dr. Pearson, a highly respected feminist scholar gainfully employed full-time at a big Midwestern state school. The kid made good, thanks partly to the musical influences with whom she now gets to chat.
Pretend We’re Dead’s interviewees are a who’s who of ’90s alternative rock royalty: Garbage’s Shirley Manson, solo artists Liz Phair and Tracy Bonham, Veruca Salt co-founders Nina Gordon and Louise Post, Throwing Muses co-founders Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh, L7 co-founder Donita Sparks, Hole’s bassists Melissa Auf der Maur and Jill Emery plus drummer Patty Schemel, Kate Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Zia McCabe of The Dandy Warhols, and Josephine Wiggs of the Breeders. Each has their perspective and grit.
Patty Schemel keeps it raw, just as she does in her 2017 memoir Hit So Hard. Courtney Love’s voice is absent, but her presence is felt on over half Pretend We’re Dead’s pages. Melissa Auf der Maur stands out with her account of joining Hole: “I listened to it [Live Through This] all the way to Seattle, and I thought, Oh, these are pretty easy songs… My first show with Hole was August 1994, at the Reading Festival in front of sixty-five thousand people. That was the ninth concert of my life.” The understated absurdity of that is pure gold.
Indeed, these women in rock music have lived many lives—some as artists, some as mothers, and all as survivors. What sets this book apart from other history of rock music books is how it avoids the clichés of a sex-and-drugs exposé. Instead, it focuses on what it genuinely meant to be a woman in the music industry during the ’90s.
A key strength of Pretend We’re Dead is its clear sense of focus. Pearson’s choice to exclude the Riot Grrrls might initially seem surprising, but her several reasons are compelling. Riot Grrrls, she notes, have already documented their history thoroughly and intentionally avoided mainstream platforms. Pearson also admits that their “club or clique” aesthetic triggered a fight-or-flight response in her. Instead, “having been born and reared in a trailer park, [she] connected more with the blue-collar, working-class feminism of L7 and Hole.” This personal connection gives the book its edge, situating Pearson as a historian and someone who lived and breathed this music. She started her first band in 1997. The result of her experience is a grounded and authentic narrative, even as it tackles the broader and darker cultural forces at play.
Pretend We’re Dead‘s central argument is bold: Third-wave feminism was piped into suburban homes in the ’90s thanks to women in rock music who broke into the mainstream. Through MTV, radio airplay, and widely available magazines like SPIN and Rolling Stone, they brought feminist ideas to kids who might never have encountered them otherwise. Pearson also credits Kurt Cobain as an ally, using his grunge stardom to amplify women’s voices in rock music.
This golden age in rock music, however, wasn’t built to last. Pearson links 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror to a resurgence of toxic masculinity, where powerful women were seen as threats to national identity. The fate of the [Dixie] Chicks illustrates this perfectly. Natalie Maines spoke out against President George Bush, and the cultural backlash was brutal, even though male musicians like Neil Young, Willie Nelson, and Kanye West faced little consequence for similar critiques. The double standard was loud and clear: there was no room for outspoken women in post-9/11 America’s cultural landscape.
Pearson’s conclusion is both hopeful and challenging. She writes, “We can use music as a lens to investigate the history of feminism in the United States. We can use the subjective experiences of women in rock music in the 1990s to think beyond parity in an inherently patriarchal institution. We can build something new, collectively. It’s my hope that by looking back at this revolutionary moment, we’ll be emboldened to think again about how we might embody real change.” It’s an inspiring call to action, but it doesn’t entirely surmount my instinctive Gen X skepticism.
As a historian, an interviewer, and a writer, Pearson is golden. When applying her analytical chops to speculation about the future, however, maybe I’ve read too much Robin James, and she’s convinced me that pretty much every “successful” musician ultimately gets sucked up into the system’s version of the narrative. Or maybe I’m not persuaded—yet?—that Olivia Rodrigo or Miley Cyrus have the same will to power as Courtney Love. Still, Pearson’s optimism is more infectious than naïve, and the “resurrection” in her subtitle isn’t just a nod to the past. It’s a reminder that these women have been knocked down and risen before.
If nothing else, Pretend We’re Dead proves that the spirit of 1990s women in rock music is still alive and fighting. Here’s hoping that the oldsters celebrating their ‘90s nostalgia and the youngsters trying to make it new keep turning up the volume. I want to keep reading those future histories through Tanya Pearson’s lens.