| “STEPHEN M. DEUSNER: I want to start by asking...

17th Jun 2015

“STEPHEN M. DEUSNER: I want to start by asking about the title. At what point in the process did the momentousness of the project occur to you?

JESSICA HOPPER: I knew from the beginning, both as someone who pays attention to criticism and who started talking to people in the book world. I was told there was no precedent for it. I was actually discouraged from doing an anthology. They said I wasn’t canonical. Ellen Willis was enough. There were all these excuses: Feminism doesn’t sell, rock criticism doesn’t sell. What about Chuck Klosterman? They said he’s a special case. Okay, what about Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield? Well, that’s those guys. I’m not dumb. I understood what they meant. There’s no formal precedent for women in this arena. People would say that nobody had done that before, and I would say that I have a couple of books on my shelves that I think qualify as having paved the way for what I’ve done. So the title was a fuck-you to that idea. It’s a lot of agendas rolled into one. I’m forever pushing multiple agendas.”

An interview with music critic JESSICA HOPPER, author of THE FIRST COLLECTION OF CRITICISM BY A LIVING FEMALE ROCK CRITIC.