Pretend We're Dead: by Tanya Pierson

Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s by Tanya Pearson

Hachette Books | 256 pages | published Jan. 28, 2025

Modern pop culture mostly remembers the ’90s rock scene for grunge or riot grrl. But many other women rockers clawed their way into the mainstream during that decade, only to get left out in the cold soon after. Journalist Tanya Pearson taps the voices and stories of these women artists to explore an often-ignored part of rock’s history.

Women rockers frequently graced the covers of Rolling Stone, Spin, and other American music magazines throughout the 1990s — Liz Phair, Courtney Love and Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole, Tanya Donelly of Belly, Kim Deal of The Pixies and The Breeders, Ani DiFranco, Shirley Manson of Garbage, all of L7, the list goes on. They snarled, crooned, belted, warbled, serenaded, and harmonized out of boombox speakers and car radios as alternative and college stations put them on constant rotation. And then, as if someone yanked out an amp power cord, they were … gone. Not gone, gone. Many of them were still writing and recording music and playing shows. And a few did continue to get some radio play in the years to come. But almost as quickly as record labels and the alternative scene decided it was finally the age of women in rock, they dropped most of the badass ladies making music in favour of things like nu-metal, emo, and anything made by men, men, men.

What happened? How did these women get the microphone only to have it ripped away so soon after? And, more than a quarter of a century later, why do so many of them also get written out of much of the mainstream ’90s music narrative? These are some of the main questions Tanya Pearson raises in her captivating new book, Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s. Pearson is a journalist who has been documenting the rock-n-roll stories of women for the past decade through her Women of Rock Oral History Project.

It was a statement Shirley Manson made during one of these interviews that got Pearson thinking about what became this book: “It’s a blanket fact that after September 11th, nonconformist women were taken off the radio.” Pearson, herself a budding rocker in the ’90s, had many pivotal memories of the nonconformist women who entertained and inspired her. She wondered why she didn’t hear about them much after the early 2000s. And why a decade that seemingly embraced women wielding guitars and drum kits as part of the mainstream seemed to be remembered later only for its male-dominated grunge. To be fair, Riot Grrrl has lived on and been well-documented, mainly due to its widespread zine culture at the time and people like Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill keeping the ethos going. But many of the women Pearson remembers rocking out to weren’t part of the riot grrl movement, and weren’t exactly part of grunge, either. She wondered why their story wasn’t told with the same fervour.

Pearson went straight to many of these women to find out how they got into rock in the first place, what their trajectory looked like in the ’90s, and why they thought the mainstream turned its back on femme rockers in the following decade. Her subjects are many of the heavy hitters of that time, including Manson, Auf der Maur, Donelly, Phair, Kate Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson and the Beastie Boys, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, Tracy Bonham, and Donita Sparks of L7.

Many of the women shared similar stories about record labels suddenly wanting to sign them in the mid-’90s after Kurt Cobain and others in the grunge movement made feminism “cool” among alternative fans. At the same time, those companies’ desire to cash in on the women-in-rock trend only went so far. The phrase “we’ve already got our woman artist” was commonly heard by aspiring musicians as an excuse for why labels wouldn’t sign them. Pearson posits multiple theories about why the trend seemed to “die” so suddenly and quickly. One ties directly back to Manson’s comment about Sept. 11. Not long after that day, Clear Channel Communications (the precursor to today’s iHeartRadio) “strongly encouraged” their radio stations not to play certain songs that they deemed “lyrically questionable” in light of the attacks. Songs that dealt with death, airplanes, war, or violence, for example.

As Manson suggests, and Pearson agrees, this type of pro-patriotism sensitivity approach to which songs get airplay and which don’t may also have crept into decisions about whether to still provide the mic to “nonconformist women.” On a positive note, as the final part of this book’s subtitle suggests, some of the women of ’90s rock have been “resurrected” in the past several years. Garbage and Alanis Morisette, for example, can be heard regularly on American alternative radio again. Those two artists recently teamed up for several tours that sold out venues across the U.S. Pearson seems hopeful that more recent events such as these will lead to many women rockers of that era getting the respect they deserve. Her book goes a long way toward filling in this often-ignored part of music history while homing in on some of the cultural barriers that all too frequently keep women behind their male counterparts. Pearson and her interview subjects also fuel a different hope: that if women in the ’90s were able to use their talents to gain such high levels of popularity and respect, maybe there’s a chance that today’s newer crop of women rockers can do it again.

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Sarah Evans is an Oregon writer who played Belly’s King album on repeat throughout 1995. She has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Pacific University.