Feminists We're Calling You, Please Report to the Internets

Tonight one of my friends called me, and she was telling me about a band named Grizzly Bear. "I wasn't even gonna buy their album, because there was, you know, so much hype," she told me, and she said 'hype' with a lot of contempt. "Because, you know," she explained, "whenever EVERYONE says that an album is great, and I get excited about it, I buy it and listen to it and I end up hating it. Like, I'm just not impressed."

"Well, it's hard," I said. "You've got so many self-appointed tastemakers, or whatever, like, people who have blogs, and they're all telling you what you should be listening to, and it's hard to sort through everything and figure out who's a real, legitimate music critic, and who isn't." I said this with zero irony, well-aware that I am one of those many music bloggers, even if I don't consider myself a tastemaker, or tell people what to listen to.

My friend's story has a happy ending, I'm glad to report, she read some print reviews of Grizzly Bear's record, listened to it, didn't like it at first, and then tried it again and ended up loving it. And that's great, but after I got off the phone with her, I found myself wondering, who are all these music bloggers? Because I'm a bleeding heart feminist, I'm going to assume that the majority of them aren't women writers. And of the ones who do happen to be female, I'm sure only a small portion of them are self-identified feminists, and that an even smaller portion are applying their gendered experience to their album and concert reviews.

The two women music bloggers I read on a regular basis are Trish Bendix, who writes about music over at Afterellen.com, and Carrie Brownstein, who writes for NPR's website. Who else is there? And how do we find these other unknown lady music bloggers? There are tons of live blogs out there, and as far as I know, there still isn't an efficient way to search blogs.

I started this blog because I didn't think there was anyone else out there writing about the ways in which women and gender have influenced punk and hardcore. But it's my experience that every field that has a limited number of visible women has a lot more unseen women than any of us realize.

So, readers, help me out here, and tell me: who else do you read? What other women bloggers are talking about music and art, making you think, and entertaining you? And lady music bloggers, if you're out there, we're calling you! Please report to the Rock and the Single Girl front desk, or at the very least, leave a comment and a link!