Jessica Hopper is a music critic, producer, and author based in Chicago. In a career spanning more than 20 years, Jessica Hopper has earned acclaim as a provocative, fearless music journalist. She's the author of the book The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic, which we're going to talk about today, and also Night Moves. Her writing has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the Chicago Reader, among other outlets.

Jill Riley: I want to talk about the book: The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic. This is a new edition of the book. And when I read, you know, "a living female rock critic," you're you're kind of a unicorn, you're a rarity in the business.

Jessica Hopper: You know, when when I started out writing, you know, 15-16 in Minneapolis and doing my fanzines, I was reading Terri Sutton in City Pages every week. And you know, this being a pre-internet time, I thought, well, every city must have a feminist rock critic at their alt-weekly, and had the sort of blessedly mistaken idea that there were a lot of us. As I've gotten older, I've been able to tap in a lot more to that lineage that I'm part of; but also, there's a lot more folks writing these days. And there's a lot more diverse opinions and perspectives in music criticism, which I'm really thankful for.

Yeah, and that's a good thing. But I imagined that the birth of like the blogosphere, you know, what was the effect of that on music journalism?

I think in a lot of ways it brought a lot of people in: just being a fan of things and being able to express yourself whether you necessarily had a journalism degree or some sort of pedigree, you still had a way in. For me, that was a really valuable space. That time and space was really where I started to develop as a critic, but then also people found me and started employing me as as a writer. That's how I came to the Chicago Reader, which is really America's longest-running alt-weekly. That's still publishing. That was a place I learned how to write. They came to me because I was in some online forum, making fun of some old guys for how much they love Jackson Browne. I turned it into a career.

How do you organize a collection like this? What do you pick, what do you leave out?

With the first collection, first edition that came out, very fortunately it got a wonderful reception, and I got to literally travel the world. I went to four continents and seven countries and dozens and dozens of speaking gigs — and I got to encounter a lot of my readership, which was a lot of young folks and women who were really finding life in music and shared with me a lot of what resonated in the book, the reasons why they sought out my writing. And so I got to remake this book in some ways, with many of them in mind, and also with their critiques of it in mind. I really wanted to just make a book that was more reflective of my overall body of work; for me, that meant a lot of more historically-facing pieces and a lot of pieces about women in particular. For me, I just had a different editorial rubric, I had a different confidence, a better idea of what I wanted to bring to my audience and readership what I wanted to share with them, what history I wanted to connect them with.

As I've been looking through this book, there are a couple pieces that have connected with me. When you write about Lana Del Rey, there's just something that really brought me back to when we started playing Lana Del Rey here on The Current. Quite frankly, I couldn't wrap my head around the criticism of her right off the bat, but the more I dug into the piece in your book, "Deconstructing Lana Del Rey," I thought, oh, yeah, people couldn't accept that maybe she was just a talented artists, and they wanted to know, "What is the driving force? Who is holding the puppet strings? What is she all about? She's a fake. She has a fake name." And it's like, do you know how many people have personas and brands and stage names in this business? I was just recalling all of those feelings, reading that piece.

She's someone who, particularly in her early career, was very fascinating for me. I used a feminist lens to come at the criticism of her, because I thought it was incredibly gendered. She's someone who's just sort of confounded people continually, you know, for all sorts of reasons, and people like that — women like that, in particular, who have an image that toys with some of our sort of culturally held notions of what a woman is supposed to be, what an artist is supposed to be — you know, those are the subjects that are really fascinating to me. So there's a reason why she's one of the few folks where there's two different pieces that I've written about her in the book.

Yeah, I was happy to see a piece on Joni Mitchell. I didn't come in to a lot of knowledge about Joni Mitchell until later; you know, I knew that Counting Crows had covered one of her songs, like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young covered one of her songs...but that was it, real surface-y for me. So the 50th anniversary of Blue really made me want to dig into that album and learn more about what her world was like during that time. And you know, her peers, these male singer-songwriters were trying to tell her that she was doing something wrong when she was absolutely doing something right.

She's been someone who we know, particularly in the '70s, was just absolutely at the vanguard of what she was doing. My next book is actually primarily about Joni Mitchell. It's called No God But Herself, and it's about women in popular music in 1975. In my 20s, Blue was a huge record for me, but the record that really has held the most interest for me was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the 1975 record where she really veers away from pop and truly comes into...I mean, she's just shooting for the stratosphere. And part of the reason she's doing that is because so many people credited her genius to, as she said, whatever man happened to be in the room with her and she wanted to put all doubt out of their minds. I really see that release being sort of totemic to her, and the struggles of a lot of women who were in that space in the '70s and really trying to figure out how to communicate their biggest ideas and dreams for themselves at a time when our ideas of what artistry and womanhood were really shifting.

For folks who are listening whose dream is to be a writer: when it comes to being a music critic and a music journalist, what's the distinction there? Is there one anymore?

Yeah. You know, criticism has become a fairly fraught space. And in the last few years in particular, you know, I've seen a lot of people really wind up retreating from the internet, because they have a critical take about Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, or, you know, in the case of Ann Powers, who's an absolute icon, she had a couple critical lines in a Lana Del Rey review, and Lana clapped back and it was music news for a week. So I think criticism is definitely a bit more fraught, and so that's, to me, the big difference, but criticism is really about unpacking a work of art, putting it in context, helping it be in dialogue with culture and, and kind of distilling out its meaning. Music journalism is usually more just, you know, interviewing a band or for something that's just a little bit more basic explanation: who, what, where, why, and when. That's sort of how I sort of chopped those two apart.

Well, I wish that we could talk for hours because I'd love to pick your brain about some more of this stuff. Because, you know, I've been in the radio biz for a while; I've been at The Current for a great number of years. And there are things that I think I've experienced in the radio business that I'm quite sure that that you've experienced in the world of music journalism and criticism and all of it. You're writing about a lot of women in the music industry, those barriers that have to be crossed and those doors that have to be kicked down, and I love that you do include an article here about lack of women represented in country music because while I work for an indie and alternative station, I really have a lot of interest in Nashville and country music.

Unfortunately, I think that's what we're seeing that change constantly — and a lot of lot of women artists who are really just saying, I'm done with playing this game, I'm going to make my own community, I'm not going to jump through the hoops, and this isn't going to be a sort of "how high" thing. You know, we see Margo Price, whose memoir I'm editing right now, and it's fantastic...but also Alison Russell and other folks who are coming to this and really cracking it open. I loved reporting that story in Nashville, and this whole group of young women who are 18, 19, 20, 21, who were really inspired by #MeToo and #TimesUp to just say, "We're going to make our own thing, and we're going to really band together."

I love hearing that you're editing Margo Price's memoir. That's incredible. I can't wait to read that.

It's it's one of my favorite music books, period. It should be out in 2022.

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Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Thursday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

July 15: Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story by Stephen Davis; and 33⅓: Duran Duran's Rio by Annie Zaleski

July 22: You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music by Lesley Chow

July 29: Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie

August 5: Shine Bright: A Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith