Kathleen Hanna’s memoir couldn’t be more necessary

In her first memoir, Rebel Girl, Kathleen Hanna talks about many of the personal experiences that have driven her songs for Bikini Kill, Julie Ruin, and Le Tigre. As I write in my New York Times review, “Given recent court decisions sending America back to the Dark Ages, her story, along with Bikini Kill’s upcoming tour, couldn’t feel more necessary.”

The Boogie Couple

The second article in my series Bodies of Water ran in Random Lengths News last month. It’s about Rick and Melody Bunce. I’ve been calling Rick the Boogie Man after seeing him for years out at Cabrillo Beach on his bodyboard. His wife Melody has joined him in his band Goosewing, whose album The Miracle of Tape was released by Shrimper Records in April. Third article coming soon!

A message to student journalists

I posted highlights of LMU’s two commencement speeches on social media this weekend. Now I’m sharing the comments that I wrote for the LMU Journalism department’s senior awards party. I didn’t actually look at my notes when I spoke, so this is not exactly what came out of my mouth, but it is the gist of it. This was the evening of May 2, the day after four student journalists were assaulted several miles up the 405 from us at UCLA.

“I look out at you and I see a dark present and a bright future. I think I speak for all of us faculty when I say my heart has been heavy the last few weeks, as students like you across the United States have been stripped of their constitutional rights, sometimes violently. On May 1 at almost 3:30 in the morning, four student journalists at UCLA were assaulted by counter-protestors while they were in the act of doing their job: reporting. Two student journalists at Dartmouth were arrested by police while exercising their first amendment rights. You, the class of 2024, know better than anyone that we live in dangerous times. You have been through it all: Covid, Black Lives Matter, January 6, climate change, and now this. We adults have failed you. I feel this as a teacher and a parent. I recently hosted a forum about the imperative and future of journalism. The imperative – the need for voices reporting from the frontlines, voices of students like those at Columbia’s radio station, which the authorities tried to shut down, because they were daring to report what is actually going on – has never been clearer. Student journalists are under fire because you hold the keys to our democracy. No one knows more than you what a mess we have made of the world, and as the past month has proven, no one is more committed to fixing it. The minute the force of the world turns against you, that is the minute you know you are winning. Keep reporting and telling the truth. Build networks with your peers across the country, because you know what is happening. You are the future of journalism.”

Rock Hall’s 2024 Hits, and Misses

They should be inducting Sinéad. It’s bad enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters did not choose the nominated global groundbreaker and instead elected, gulp, Foreigner. (And Peter Frampton. And the Dave Matthews Band. And …) The committee that selects the musical excellence and influence awards could have made an end run around the voting body’s systemic sexism to give Sinéad O’Connor an award for excellence, as they are doing for Jimmy Buffett and the MC5. Clearly the hall chose those acts now because Buffett and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 died in the past year. Those were good, honorable choices. But they make the omission of the iconic and historic Irish singer and songwriter in this year when her death rocked so many fans’ worlds even more fucked up. O’Connor’s music and activism changed people’s lives, and will continue to do so for decades if not centuries. Without dissing other choices, O’Connor should have been the slam-dunk pick of 2024. Actually she should have been the slam dunk pick for the last 13 years, since she has been eligible. To not induct Sinéad says a lot about the hall’s endemic female trouble. This year’s class will bring the overall percentage of female inductees to a whopping 8.83, incremental progress since I first started keeping track in 2019.

Sinéad was a revolutionary. The Rock Hall is a conservative institution.

That major caveat aside, I am overall impressed with the class of 2024 – especially some of the interesting and smart choices of the board, especially especially Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Dionne Warwick. These pioneers have been too long passed over by the hall, and the fact that they are both being inducted this year gives me hope that the Cleveland institution is serious in its efforts to diversify. Same for the induction of Suzanne de Passe, the multitalented executive who is being given the Ahmet Ertegun Award (unfortunately named for a rock hall founder with a reputation for shitty behavior towards women).

While they are still dragging their hooves when it comes to gender, the hall has reversed its decline in people of color: this year’s class is 53 percent BIPOC. Still, the omission of Eric B & Rakim strikes me as the biggest disappointment after Sinéad. At least A Tribe Called Quest and Mary J. Blige are in; they had my vote. The hall is playing a delicate balancing act, trying to please fans of classic rock, hip-hop, country, blues, pop, disco, funk, etc. But why do the women always get the short end of the stick? The percentage of women in this year’s class hits double digits, barely: 11.63. Interestingly, there are no white women in the class of 2024. They remain the most underrepresented group in terms of male/female and BIPOC/white: 3.88 percent of total inductees.

Sorry, Sinéad.

(Thanks to my research assistants Athena Cheris and Tyler Roland for help with this year’s number crunching and visualizations.)

Forum on the future of journalism today!

Bodies of Water

As some of you may know, I’m a water baby. I swim in the ocean regularly (like Sza!), kayak, body surf, etc. Water is my element, where I feel most like myself. 

I’ve decided to start writing more about the environment, with a new column called Bodies of Water for Random Lengths News. As I write in today’s debut, “I’m interested in exploring the human relationship to water through profiles of individuals who have compelling and diverse connections to it. We must explore our relationship to bodies of water in order to save them, and ourselves. ” 

RLN is an alt-media survivor, covering the Los Angeles harbor area for more than 40 years. What better place to dive into the most compelling issue of our times: the health of our planet. 

Check out my first column — in which I travel to New Orleans for the Ocean Sciences Meeting — at the link here.

Fear of a Female Planet

What is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame afraid of?

The 2024 nominations for popular music’s most famous, and infamous, hall were announced this morning. There are some excellent choices: Cher, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, A Tribe Called Quest, Sade, Eric B. & Rakim, Kool & the Gang, and most of all Sinéad O’Connor. And there are some appalling choices, which I won’t be churlish enough to name here, but I’m guessing you can guess.

My team and I are still counting and calculating, but the racial diversity looks good: 10 of 15 acts have at least one person of color; that’s 66.6 percent. Good. Five have at least one woman: 33.3 percent. Not bad. In terms of individual nominees – which means people who, if inducted, get to vote and have this on their resume for the rest of their lives and in their obituary – there are five women, 47 men. Females account for 9.62 percent of the nominees.

That’s a shade better than the 8 percent figure that the total number of inductees has hovered around since I began counting the individuals in 2019. But it’s still pretty shady.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is afraid of girl power. I said it in 2019, and it’s still evident: They are terrified of women banding together. They repeatedly ignore all-female, or mostly female bands, never nominating, let alone inducting, Labelle, Fanny, TLC, Destiny’s Child, Bikini Kill, Salt-N-Pepa, the Shangri-Las (RIP Mary Weiss), Hole, L7, etc. Yet they love them a collection of mediocre male classic rockers. Okay, I’ll say it: I’m looking at you Foreigner. (Full disclosure: I was a young teen when Double Vision came out and “Hot Blooded” was my jam, but I have moved on.)

It’s a classic technique: Divide and conquer. Honor the individuals, not the collective. It’s also very much a male-gaze thing: It’s easy to objectify a woman alone on stage, much scarier to see a group of women enjoying each other’s support and egging each other on. Jann Wenner may be gone, but the Rock Hall is still led by men, the nominating committee is majority male, and they are still following the same old tired Master narrative.

Once again, no Willie Mae Thornton? After Lynnee Denise’s book and Doja Cat’s song?! And no hailing Queen Latifah?! Rock Hall, do better.

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Eric B. & Rakim, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Jane’s Addiction, Kool & the Gang, Lenny Kravitz, Oasis, Sinéad O’Connor, Ozzy Osbourne, Sade and A Tribe Called Quest

This post has been corrected from an earlier version.