MOLI VIEW™

You've been at that dinner party. Maybe it was a family gathering, maybe a business schmooze. The conversation turned to music, and suddenly all the guys in the room started talking about their favorite records with the sort of picayune intensity with which they'd been discussing baseball stats minutes before. "That's the Wooly Wombats track on which Dude Ranchero from the Squats played foot organ with his elbow," some dude in an ironic Starsky and Hutch T-shirt enthuses. You get excited too: "I have that on the Que Smells Seventies Smiles compilation as well as the original Boner Records 45!"

I admit: I love this kind of talk. I'm a sucker for rock trivia and, ever the tomboy, I like to hold forth with the guys (that's kind of why I became a rock critic). If the women convene to the kitchen, I'll stay in the living room and dig through the host's CD collection. I'm geeked that way.

Still, many years ago, the way that some men use arcane knowledge to claim authority/ownership over music fandom began to irritate me. Ever since I traded 45s with my best girlfriends in 4th grade, it's been apparent to me that female consumerism is a driving engine of pop history (even if I didn't use those big words back then). Where would Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, and Britney Spears have been without the little girls understanding?

Yet at dinner parties and in the trade magazines, distaff voices tend to get shut out of the dialogue about music. That's why I co-edited Rock She Wrote. It's also why, in the early ‘90s, I started the All Girls Listening Party, inventing (I believe) what we now call a music club.

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