Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We have been reading our January Get Lit with All Of It book club selection, and tonight, it is time to discuss. I will be in conversation with author Richard Price about his novel, Lazarus Man. The event starts at 6:00 PM at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. That's a branch of the New York Public Library.

We have an update on our musical guest. Lakecia Benjamin was scheduled to be with us, but she had to bow out due to illness. Feel better soon, Lakecia. We are lucky enough to have gotten another amazing jazz musician to join us, Anthony Hervey. He'll be performing live at our conversation with Richard Price. The event starts at 6:00 PM and we've just released a few more tickets, so head to WNYC.org/getlit to get yours.

Of course, everyone can watch our live stream. For details on all the information you need, again, check out WNYC.org/getlit. That's in just a few hours. Now let's get this hour started and I'll set the mood with a little music.

[MUSIC - Belly: Feed The Tree]

Alison Stewart: That was a band, Belly, fronted by my guest, Tanya Donelly, one of the myriad of women featured in the new book Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the 1990s by my other guest, Tanya Pearson. In the book, Pearson argues that the early '90s was the best time ever for alternative rock women. She lists the artists that released records from '93 to '95, including The Breeders, who released The Last Splash. Belly had their debut. Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville with this anthem.

[MUSIC - Liz Phair: Never Said]

Alison Stewart: There was Mazzy Star, Juliana Hatfield, Elastica, Hole, PJ Harvey, The Cranberries. Veruca Salt hit big with their LP, American Thighs, with this banger.

[MUSIC - Veruca Salt: Seether]

Alison Stewart: Alanis, PJ Harvey, Garbage, and the list goes on. [unintelligible 00:03:19] and Luscious Jackson, who did our show's theme musics, were big in the '90s, so what happened? Aren't all these women in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Not quite. Joining me now are the author of the book Pretend We're Dead, Tanya Pearson. Nice to meet you, Tanya.

Tanya Pearson: Nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: And musician, Tanya Donelly. It is nice to speak with you, Tanya.

Tanya Donelly: It's nice to see you again, speak with you again.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, this one's for you. Who was your favorite female band of the '90s and why? What did female artists mean to you at this time in your life? Do you have a favorite song you'd like to shout out? Our phone lines are wide open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air or, or you can text to us. Tanya, the title of your book is from an L7 song. Why did that seem like the right title?

Tanya Pearson: Well, I thought it really spoke to the fact that this was a moment sort of historically, but also just in music, where women really did make space for themselves, not just in the underground, where women have always participated, but in the mainstream. Somehow, retrospectively, they get forgotten. It's almost like they're dead. Erasing women from sort of historical memory, I believe, is a form of violence actually.

Alison Stewart: You originally started this project called Women in Rock Oral History Project. You can watch some of them on YouTube. What was your original goal with that project?

Tanya Pearson: My original goal was just to basically create the sort of repository of really deep and lengthy interviews that I wished had existed when I was a teenager. All these women were on the covers of magazines and I'd spend all my money on CDs and records, but at the sort of turn, the transition to the digital age, I noticed that I couldn't find a lot of the stuff online, and so I'm just kind of insane and was like, "Well, maybe I'll just ask Veruca Salt for an interview." They were the first people I asked and they said yes, and then I was like, "Oh, shoot, how do I get to LA?" That was the start.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Tanya Donelly, when you thought about it, when you were contacted to be part of the Women in Rock Oral History, what did you think?

Tanya Donelly: I said yes pretty much immediately, also. A lot of that had to do with how Tanya pitched it, and the focus of it. I fully agree with her regarding this sort of history of corporate curation of female voices in the arts in general, but very much in music. It just appealed to me. I also like the fact that it was a really comprehensive history that she was looking for, also personal history as well as the concept of the project.

Alison Stewart: What was something, Tanya Donelly, that you were-- I'm just going to call you Tanya Donelly through this.

Tanya Donelly: That's fine.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Okay. Tanya Donelly, what was something that you were really dying to talk about, like no one had ever asked you, and here comes Tanya and she comes to you, and you're like, "I want to talk about this."

Tanya Donelly: I wanted to talk, very specifically, and this kind of speaks to what I just said, about the language that was used in the music business at the time. This is sort of like my touch point, sort of example of what happened daily at the time. I talked to Tanya Pearson about this in our interview. I actually sat in a music director's office and he said to me, "Well, we have too many female voices right now, so we're going to have to push your single back because we already have like--" it was something like four or five voices.

Then sort of tried to gentle this news with me by saying, "But it's your sister and two of your closest friends, so that's great." This like moment where I was just like-- He felt like he was being very frank and very just full disclosure with me. I just remembered sitting there saying, "Wait a minute, so what is it about the tone of our voices or the message?" Just feeling like is it too strident or is it just annoying to hear a few female voices in a row on the radio? That's just one example of many. I'm laughing. It's not funny. I'm laughing at the absurdity of it.

Alison Stewart: The absurdity of it all.

Tanya Donelly: I think it's a hilarious anecdote. That was just sort of part of our daily business, and I'm going to say-- because I know a lot of young female artists who are still struggling with it, and maybe in some ways more so because there was this moment where the door opened and a big rogue wave of us kind of poured through. I do think it's more carefully organized now maybe, again.

Alison Stewart: Tanya, when you were sat down to talk to these women and you include their pieces of their interview in your book, what were some of the questions that you wanted answered?

Tanya Pearson: Well, the thing about oral history is that it's different from journalism. I go in there, I ask really open-ended questions, and it just sort of starts with childhood and then work up to present day. "What are you doing now?" Like I learned that Tanya had become a doula, which I had no idea, so they're really open-ended. Then the fun thing about that for me is that's basically how I got the topic from this book. Like I try not-- Tanya and I, the whole interview was up and it's basically us having this crazy conversation and going off on tangents because I was having such a good time just talking to her. I would say that some of the other ones, when I'm more nervous or less comfortable, people have an allotted time slot, I'll ask maybe some more pointed questions.

What's great is that within these open-ended questions, these topics just come up naturally about sexism in the industry. Stories like the one that Tanya Donelly-- I just refer to myself as other Tanya because I feel like Tanya-- so I can just be other Tanya.

Tanya Donelly: I am other Tanya.

Tanya Pearson: Yes, so they're open ended. I don't go in there with any kind of plan. Luckily for me, these women oftentimes share things. Like Shirley Manson, when I interviewed her in 2018, basically like gave me the topic for this book because I was always wondering, I wanted this to be a public repository of interviews because these histories don't really exist in the digital realm and I wanted people to use them in stories and magazines.

It's not my thing. It's like you can use them and write a book. Yes, just Shirley Manson's comment about 9/11 and then going back and listening to the other interviews and sort of incorporating Tanya's experience with record label management and the gender quota. There's topics that I can pull out of these interviews to focus on, but I don't go in with any plan really.

Alison Stewart: Tanya, you were in Throwing Muses, which you started with your stepsister Kristin Hersh. When you first started out. What did you hope for the band?

Tanya Donelly: That's an excellent question. I feel like we, at that point, just wanted to get the music out there. Kristin was very much the engine at that time and it was just sort of now we're moving to Boston, now we're going to do this. What can we do to make sure we get the music out? There was, and I say this in all honesty, no ultimate goal, I don't think. Like there was no five year plan. I feel like every step of the way, we were surprised. Like now we're going to get signed, now we're on the radio. Everything was just sort of a happy surprise to us at that time, so I can't say that there wasn't-- we were sort of just barreling along in the early years.

Alison Stewart: Well, you went on to be in The Breeders and then formed Belly. What did each group afford you as a musician, creatively?

Tanya Pearson: I feel like I learned how to play lead guitar with Throwing Muses, and that was kind of furthered in The Breeders. I also, in the Breeders, really learned how to be a good bandmate in some ways, in terms of just listening and supporting because both of those women, Kristin and Kim, are both visionaries. They know exactly what they want. If you plug into that, in a funny way, it gives you more space to just sort of slot in.

They both are such different songwriters that I learned so much about guitar very differently from both of them. Learned a lot about backup vocals from Kim and Kelly, actually both. I feel like by the time I got into Belly, I knew how to give other people space to do their thing. It felt good because I had been given space by those two women that I knew what space to give and I wasn't as grasping maybe as I might have been otherwise in a [unintelligible 00:14:10].

Alison Stewart: My guests are Tanya Pearson and Tanya Donelly. We're talking about the women who made rock in the 1990s, what their legacy is. The name of the book is Pretend We're Dead. Who was your favorite band in the 1990s and why? What did female artists mean to you at this time in your life? What favorite song that you want to shout out? Our numbers, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's talk to Nia, calling in from Maywood, New Jersey. Hi, Nia, you're on the air.

Nia: Hi, how are you? It's so nice to be on the phone with idols from my teenage years. You, the musician, and I'm definitely getting this book. Too many songs to narrow down to one, it really is. I was just lamenting the other day about how we're missing strong female music today for our girls, and so I guess I want to shout out like Luscious Jackson. I forget the exact name of the song. I think it's Strongman, but it was very feminist, strong for me in high school. [unintelligible 00:15:21] you're not going to rape me.

The song that I think is most relevant today, my young four-year-old daughter even gets the emotion from it, is Cranberries, Zombie. Just with war stuff. She actually asked me what a bomb was after listening to that song.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in, Nia. This text says, "Kathleen Hanna, amazing woman in punk. She would tell the men to move to the back of the audience, have women come forward, creating a place where women could enjoy punk." Let's see. "PJ Harvey, Stories from the City album was the soundtrack of my early 20s, and the mess we're in, it still gives me chills every time I listen to it." "10,000 Maniacs and then Natalie Merchant's solo work were the backdrop of my teens. Unique sound and thought provoking lyrics still stir my soul." You can call or text us at 212-433-9692. Tanya, in the book, you write about how grunge came around, but then the riot grrrl movement began in Seattle. What was that in response to?

Tanya Pearson: Well, I guess from what I gather, and I deliberately like wanted to separate this sort of group of mainstream, alternative, non-conformist rock women from the riot grrrl movement. I've read Kathleen Hanna's memoir. I've read-- there's a great book, Girls to the Front, and that was in response to sexism in the scene in Seattle. What I understand is Kathleen Hanna was equally as inspired by '70s punk, and they just sort of started their own-- not a separatist scene, but like the person who wrote in, girls to the front, so created physical space for women to participate in punk scenes.

It was like Kurt Cobain. I talk about him a lot because everyone that I've interviewed mentioned his feminism and his allyship really made it acceptable and, fortunately or unfortunately, marketable to the sort of corporate overlords. They were like, "Oh, women actually can make money. Like people actually want to hear this. Kurt Cobain thinks it's cool."

Then, on the flip side, Kurt Cobain was friends with Kathleen Hanna, so learned about feminism from being involved in the Olympia scene and in the riot grrrl scene. I made a really clear distinction in this book that retrospectively, again, riot grrrl has become unfortunately this like feminized category that all alternative women have been lumped into, whether or not they were riot grrrl.

I've seen like Belly on riot grrrl lists and it's ahistorical. It's not accurate. Not all women were like best friends with each other. They didn't all live in the same area. I really wanted to differentiate that. That there was this other sort of thing that was happening outside of riot grrrl.

Alison Stewart: Tanya Donelly, did you consider yourself a feminist? Did you feel like you had to write feminist music, or was it just who you were?

Tanya Donelly: I've always felt like a feminist. Absolutely. My music doesn't always directly reflect that, but my life in music does.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Tanya Donelly: I want to say to Tanya Pearson, just the way the lens collapses and we're all put into one category with time, this is why a project and a book like this is so important because it felt like the bandwidth was so wide at the time. The woman that called in talking about-- or everyone that called in actually. Think about all those names, from Natalie to Courtney. That's how it felt at the time, that everybody's got a spot, and so I love Tanya that you said that because that's something I think about all the time, how everything is just tightening up in a way that is inaccurate and historically untrue.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the women who made rock in the 1990s and what their legacy is with Tanya Pearson, author of Pretend We're Dead, and musician, Tanya Donelly. If you want to call in and tell us what your favorite 1990s band and what female artists meant the most to you at this time, our phone lines are open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll meet you right back here after a quick break.

[MUSIC]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Tanya Pearson, author of Pretend We're Dead, and musician, Tanya Donelly, you know her from Throwing Muses, Breeders, and Belly. We are talking about women who made rock in the 1990s. We're getting a lot of good texts. This one says, "My favorite '90s female band singer, I'd have to say is Björk. I loved how unique of a musician she was in both instrumentation and vocals. There was nothing to compare to her then." "My favorite female band of the '90s was 7 Years Bitch. I saw them at SantaCon in Portland, and they were so strong and powerful that I carry them with me to this day. Badasses."

Tanya Pearson: Me too.

Tanya Donelly: Yep.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk a little bit about the fall. That's the second part of your book. It's the rise. We talked about the fall. The Telecommunication Act of 1996 affected radio. Tanya, what did it let big corporations do and what impact did that have on how women would be heard on the radio?

Tanya Pearson: Oh, boy. Yes, so I mean we're experiencing similar things today, right? The deregulation of industries, that has just historically-- Women have written about this. Susan Faludi, Naomi Klein, political correspondents and journalists. It always negatively impacts women and minorities. What happened when Clinton signed that telecommunications act, was it allowed Clear Channel-- and people, my students, I'm a professor too, and they're like, "What's Clear Channel?" I say, well, now you might know that it's iHeartRadio because they just rebranded, but it allowed them to go from owning something like 30 stations to over a thousand stations in less than a month.

That really negatively impacted college radio, like city radio stations. I was living in Providence, Rhode Island at the time. I feel like that sort of coincided or sped up the implementation of that gender quota that Tanya Donelly, the best Tanya, was talking about earlier. When you have less space, then there's less room for people, especially women and minorities.

Black-centered radio stations were a victim of that legislation, women-centered stations. I think most importantly in terms of the alternative phenomenon was that college radio had been like the springboard from underground to national radio to major record labels, and so college radio stations were negatively affected as well.

Alison Stewart: The book really takes the press to task. Tanya Donelly, how did you feel about the way the coverage of your band, especially Belly, was handled?

Tanya Donelly: I mean, it was a constant struggle at the time to maintain control over our image. It was every photo shoot, every press release, just we tried to filter everything as best we could. I think we were punished for it, frankly. I mean, especially with our American label. We were signed to 4AD in Europe and England and worldwide, other than the United States. It was really here that we struggled the most because we had a relationship that was very human with 4AD. Every decision was conversational and we were included.

We were given directives here in a way that was-- and let me also just sort of step to the side to say I had a lot of people on our American label that I loved and who were absolutely going to bat for us, especially our PR woman, Deborah Nadini, who was kind of our lifeline at the time. It was just a constant sort of-- We started to feel the shift. I will say it was at the Grammys that we really started to feel the shift where there was this very sudden-- there were the alternative people in the room and there was this new sort of-- I don't want to sound-- There's no judgment in what I'm about to say, but there were the very handled people who were in full regalia and had an entourage.

It was just sort of this moment where we felt this new wind, and it kind of explained everything that the past year had felt like to us, where we're like, "Oh, there's a new thing coming, and it's going to be more about the system again. It's going to feel more systemic again and less this breath of freedom that has been the case for a few years."

Alison Stewart: This interesting text. "I don't hear any female rock voices in the mainstream at all. I hear female voices and there are pop singers in R&B, and even then, there seem to be significantly less female voices all the way around in pop, hiphop, R&B, and especially rock." I might say that's a little bit different recently given the Billie Eilish of it all. The Olivia Rodrigo, Haim, Muna, all of these bands, and we've had them on the air and they've all really sort of hearkened back to the '90s. I think it was Kristin Gavin of Muna said that the Lilith Fair influenced her highly. Olivia Rodrigo had Alanis Morissette on stage. Tanya, what do you think these artists are doing right? Because I get a sense that you can do okay as a woman now.

Tanya Donelly: Which Tanya?

Alison Stewart: Tanya Pearson.

[laughter]

Tanya Pearson: I know that sometimes this is my opinion, and it might be a little unpopular, but I think that there are obviously tons of women and I am a huge fan of pop music. Like Madonna was my archetype growing up. I still love pop. I think Chappell Roan, I loved her stance on Palestine and how she sort of refused to be bullied into endorsing one or the other political candidates.

However, I think that what we were talking about earlier, the sort of angry instrumentalists, sort of like various forms, aesthetically different kinds of femininity-- In the '90s, you had Courtney Love screaming in a baby doll dress. You had Tanya Donelly not wearing pants in a Gap ad, which I had that on VHS. I recorded commercials. I recorded late night television shows. Alanis Morissette--

Tanya Donelly: My idea, by the way.

Tanya Pearson: Yes, which is great. You have all these different types and I think that there is a similarity in production quality, in sort of lyrical content. Like you can say feminism, but you're not going to say the things that like [crosstalk] Courtney Love's Pretty on the Inside. I don't mean that as a diss. It's really much less about individuals who work in the industry and individuals as creatives and as artists. It's more about this is the result of record label consolidation. Record labels work with a handful of producers.

You have to have some money or some capital or some connection to even get to that point to be heard by those people. That's where, again, I love pop music, but I don't think that we're seeing a lot of diversity in rock and alternative categories, which is what I wanted to focus on in this book. I think Foo Fighters have been nominated-- it's like best rock album, Foo Fighters. Like, there's no one else?

Alison Stewart: There's nobody out there. There's nobody.

Tanya Pearson: There's no one else?

Tanya Donelly: They didn't even put an album out this year and we're still going to nominate them.

[crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: This is a good text. "My 18-year-old daughter's a huge fan of a Veruca Salt. Can't wait to get this book." The book is Pretend We're Dead. Tanya Pearson and Tanya Donelly, thanks so much for joining me.

Tanya Pearson: Thank you so much, an honor.

Tanya Donelly: Thanks for having us and nice to see you again.

Alison Stewart: Nice to see you.