The guitar goddesses who are playing the men off the stage
One is an all-electric rock prodigy, the other picks the meanest acoustic you ever saw
Sunday, 15 June 2008
Rocking the establishment: Kaki King was named by Rolling Stone as its first female Guitar God © Annie Collinge
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Who are the greatest guitarists of all time? It's an old debate, but one that always features the same players: Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and BB King inevitably crop up – or maybe you're more inclined towards Jack White, Frank Zappa or Eric Clapton. Either way, ever since inventor George Beauchamp first plugged in his guitar in the early 1930s, the axe-hero club has been almost exclusively male.
Plenty of women play the guitar, some brilliantly, some not so: the unthreatening folk-girl armed with an acoustic, as patented by Joan Baez, is a type that lives on to this day in the figures of Laura Marling and Emmy the Great. But when it comes to bona fide guitar goddesses, the sad fact remains that few – if any – women could challenge the prowess of Hendrix and Page. While I'm friends with lots of great male guitarists, I've never had a female friend who could really play. Could it be that women are just not that good at the guitar?
One could equally ask whether women make mediocre engineers or mechanics – two other fields in which we're vastly outnumbered – and the answer would be just as complex. Brilliant female guitarists are few and far between, but that is not to say that they don't exist. Joni Mitchell was no Hendrix, but her tunings were the stuff of legend. Gospel singer and prodigal guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe inspired a generation of 1950s rock'n'roll stars (Elvis was a fan), while Michael Jackson's big-haired sidekick Jennifer Batten was out of this world, if horrendously uncool.
In the class of 2008, the names on everyone's lips are Kaki King and Marnie Stern, two American musicians who are blowing the competition out of the water with their very distinctive playing styles: King specialises in intricate, mainly instrumental acoustic pieces, while Stern is an all-singing, all-shredding electric prodigy. It would be an understatement to say that they don't fit in with the mainstream's female pop star moulds du jour.
King – who was recently christened by Rolling Stone as their first female "Guitar God" – has a theory about why women rarely make the grade. "Women seem to cover all the areas more frequently than men," she says. "PJ Harvey is an incredible guitar player, but because she's such a phenomenal songwriter, that's what she's known for."
King herself is a formidable multi-tasker. "Even though I'm a guitar player, I have to play drums; I have always wanted to not be doing what I was doing at the time. Maybe that's a female characteristic – enjoying having your brain sorted out into many different categories."
She also recognises the most important factor in cock-rock culture: little girls simply aren't encouraged to be rock gods. "I became the guitar player that I am because I had big support from my family," she says. "It didn't bother them that I was spending all my time in my room with my guitar, trading bootleg tapes over the internet, sneaking into shows. It's fine for a guy to be a loner and single-minded about one particular goal, but women are discouraged from it – they're supposed to see their friends and have lots of activities. But to be good at what you do, you need a lot of dedication, solitude and discipline."
At the same time, there are brilliant female violinists and pianists who have dedicated equal time and energy to their classical instruments as King and Stern did to their guitars; so the dearth of female guitarists is as much a social as a musical phenomenon.
Feminist critic Camille Paglia has gone as far as to say that rock is a male form. "Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an intimate conversation. Boys can't do that," she explains. "The guitar for a boy speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can't share, even with other members of the band. It's a combination of rage and reserve and ego."
The statistics back Paglia's theory. The University of London's Institute of Education recently undertook a study into how instruments are divided along gender lines in British schools; they found that the most "gendered" instruments are the harp (90 per cent female) and the electric and bass guitar (81 per cent male). Other popular instruments for girls include the flute, the piccolo and the voice, while boys favour tubas, drums and trombones. "Ideas about what is suitable for children to play have been around for so long we have internalised it," says Professor Sue Hallam, who co-wrote the report. "It's so ingrained in us that we don't realise we're doing it."
Rock might be a male form, but women have always had a place in the pantheon – not as the godlike OCD sufferers who shred their way to the Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame, but as singers or, more commonly, as the girls who lurk backstage, hoping for a notch on their bed posts. Who, after all, are we more encouraged to emulate: Janis Joplin or Marianne Faithful? PJ Harvey or Kate Moss? Although the posts have shifted in the past 40 years, the dynamic remains essentially the same: the "band aides" still hang around the backstage door and the likes of Joplin and Harvey are exceptions, not the rule.
In King's view, rock iconography should take the brunt of the blame. "I don't look at the canon of male guitarists and think, 'That's what I want to look like,'" she says. "I was so turned off by the posing, the guitar face – I can't do a guitar face to save my life." Marnie Stern agrees: "That rock stereotype is a cliché, but I don't think it's even true."
Even so, both King and Stern have had to cope with constant "It's a girl!" reactions. "Some people get vehemently angry," says Stern. "One kid once said to me, 'Three out of four of my roommates can play guitar better than you can!' I thought that was so funny, because I never once thought about my gender. Not once. And then my first record was released and people started asking me about it." King agrees: "It was an honour to be on that [Rolling Stone] list, but not just because I'm a girl. I didn't try to be a girl. I didn't have an option; I didn't have a choice. But I've really tried to be a good guitar player, so when I get lauded for that, I'm happy."
One can only applaud – and envy – their gender-blindness. On the way home from meeting King, I flicked through a women's magazine and was assaulted by its 1950s dream of femininity: all puff-pastry dresses, killer heels and ludicrous diet tips. They might not know it, but against this pervasive, retrograde cultural backdrop, Kaki King and Marnie Stern are pioneers of a sort. As for my opening question – who are the greatest guitarists of all time? It doesn't matter one jot; after all, lists are for boys.
Kaki King's album, 'Dreaming Of Revenge' (Cooking Vinyl), is out on 30 June.
Little Miss Riff: Four more plucky women
Joni Mitchell
The folk queen of Laurel Canyon outshone her male contemporaries in more ways than one and is as accomplished a guitarist as she is a songwriter. Shying away from rock pyrotechnics, she's composed songs in 50 different tunings
Jessie Mae Hemphill
One of the great lost blues singers, Hemphill grew up in Mississippi. She took up the guitar aged seven but didn't release an album until her sixties. She is now regarded as an electric guitar pioneer
PJ Harvey
The Dorset-born rocker is one of our most acclaimed singer-songwriters and underrated guitarists. "I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business," she says. "It just seems a waste of time"
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Born in Arkankas in 1915, Tharpe was performing in church as "Little Sister Nubin, the singing and guitar-playing miracle" aged four. Gospel's first superstar, she was revered as much for her jazz-inflected guitar-playing as her voice
