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How the light gets in: sexual misconduct and disclosure in America's music industries

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How the light gets in: sexual misconduct and disclosure in America's music industries

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HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN:

SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AND DISCLOSURE IN AMERICA’S MUSIC INDUSTRIES

by

Perry Berne Johnson, MA, MCG

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
COMMUNICATION

December 2021

Copyright 2021 Perry B. Johnson

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The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
They're going to hear from me

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

You can add up the parts
But you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
1

1
Cohen, L. (1992). Anthem [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-anthem-lyrics

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Dedication

For Rosemary, for Vicki, for Janie, for Martie, and for Mommabird. How very grateful I am to
come from you all.

And for every woman who hasn’t been able to just do her job.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Anthem”……………………………………………………………………………………..ii

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………… iii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….vi

Prologue: Are You Excited About Cher?……………………………………………...…….vii

Introduction: Stopped in Her Tracks………………………………………………………….1
I Stand Before You As a Doormat………………………………………………………..1
Cracks in the Façade……………………………………………………………………..11
Are Women Here Yet? ………………………………………………………………….16
Significance……………………………………………………………………...……....18
Preview of Chapters……………………………………………………………………...19

Chapter 1: What Music Industry?……………………………………………………………28
There Is No Music Industry……………………………………………………………...21
You Are a Pirate in the Night……………………………………………………………26
Soundcheck: A Brief Literature Review…………………………………………………33
Method………………………………………………………………………………...…43
Limitations……………………………………………………………………………….52

Chapter 2: The Lost Girls……………………………………………………………………67
The Runaway: Jackie Fuchs……………………………………………………………..66
Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n’ Roll…………………………………………………………….81
Legends, Myths, and Lore……………………………………………………………….98
Good Girl Gone Bad………………………………………………...………………….104

Chapter 3: On the Record ……………………………………………………………….…111
Gurus, Godfathers, and Gatekeepers……………………………………………...……111
Tellability, the Traumatised Voice, and the Hierarchy of Credibility…………………..116
The Godfather of Hip-Hop: Russell Simmons…………………………………………123
Antonio “L.A.” Reid……………………………………………………………………132
The Price of Admission……………………………………………………...…………146
Sympathy for the Devil…………………………………………………………………151
Choose Your Own Adventure…………………………………………………………..156

Chapter 4: The New New ………………………………………………………………….171
The Circle Game………………………………………………………………………..171
A Convex Mirror………………………………………………………………...……..179
“Who Gives a Fuck About a Goddamn Grammy” …………………………………….181
Disquiet…………………………………………………………………………………195
Can You Hear Us……………………………………………………………………….198
A Technicality…………………………………………………………………………..203

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Epilogue: Do You Believe in Life After Love?…………………………………………….206

References………………………………………………………………………………..…212

Appendix A: Spotify Playlist: How the Light Gets In…………...…………………………269

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Abstract
“How the Light Gets In: Sexual Misconduct and Disclosure in America’s Music
Industries,” examines the historical and enduring prevalence of sexism and sexual misconduct in
America’s popular music industries, focusing on the pathways and platforms by which women
come forward, the consequences women and their perpetrators face for such disclosures, and
how women’s voices have been framed by mainstream media. I explore sexism and sexual
misconduct as constitutive components of the music industries, arguing that they comprise the
foundation upon which the music industries were built and the axis around which they have
turned since their inception. Drawing from a variety of primary sources and archival texts,
including memoirs, artist biographies, music histories, documentaries, podcasts, traditional and
social media, lyrics, and award show acceptance speeches, I argue that the contemporary
moment—marked by the resurgence of the #MeToo campaign and global social justice
movement—is not simply witnessing an increase in sexism and sexual misconduct, but rather
that the avenues for disclosure and the professional and personal consequences women face for
coming forward have changed. I examine the media narrativization and framing of these events,
considering how America’s popular music industries’ historically grim collages of sexism are
structurally, institutionally, and ideologically produced via traditional and social media
reportage. I also show how incidents of sexism and sexual misconduct, often disclosed decades
after they occur, are frequently covered as anecdotal exceptions, rather than as imbricated in
historical, systemic, and institutional injustices within and across the sectors of America’s
mainstream music industries.
Keywords: American music industries, popular music, sexism, sexual misconduct, disclosure

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Are You Excited About Cher?
February 3, 2000. Just four weeks into the new millennium and it was my eleventh
birthday. I asked for one thing that year: I wanted to go see Cher.
It was the final leg of her Believe Tour, which took over the then still-new Staples Center
in Downtown Los Angeles and eleven-year-old me was in birthday heaven. Glittering layers of
computer tones washing over us into a rhythmic pulse. It was peak Cher—come as you are and
dance yourself free.
I can’t remember when I first heard Cher or what drew me to her, but she has always
been there, in rotation on my personal playlist. That night brought her to me in real life in all her
Bob Mackie glory. I took a friend. We’d planned our outfits carefully. A splurge at tween retail
haven Limited Too found us donning a luxe-yet-much-too-hot black velvet skirt and shirt set
bedazzled with silver stars.
That was the first time I felt like I was at church. The only church I wanted to believe in
and belong to. Like I had found something that allowed me to be present—more present than I’d
ever been—and took me outside of my body all at the same time.
I now teach the title track from that album, “Believe,” to undergraduate students in my
courses on popular American music. It was the first time the then-still covert autotune
technology had been turned up intentionally, no longer hiding a tool that had been used to
disguise voices when they’d gone off-key. “Believe” reimagined what a voice could be. What it
could say. And how hearing all those gliding, shimmering notes might just make us listen in a
little differently. This wasn’t artifice. This was art. A sonic provocation.
This dissertation is about power. It is about belonging. And it is about identity. Together,
I explore these through an examination of disclosure; the moments when a voice is reimagined,

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turned up intentionally, to say something that hasn’t been said before. It is my hope that the
voices included in the pages that follow will help us to listen in a little differently, too.

1
Introduction: Stopped in Her Tracks
"People want to, like, rape and kill you. It’s… part of the job."
2

- Grimes, Canadian music artist, engineer, producer, and songwriter

I Stand Before You as A Doormat
3

In a December 2014 interview with long-time radio personality Howard Stern, pop icon
Lady Gaga disclosed that she was raped when she was 19 by a record producer twice her age
(Stern, 2014). The song “Swine” from her 2013 album Artpop, she shared, was written about this
assault. “I know you want me/ You're just a pig inside a human body/ Squealer, squealer, squeal
out, you're so disgusting,” Gaga sings in the chorus, “You're just a pig inside/ Do ya? I know, I
know, I know you want me/ You're just a pig inside a human body…You're just a pig inside/
Swine, swine” (Zisis et al., 2013). At Stern’s prompting, Gaga recalled her controversial 2013
performance of “Swine” at the annual South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) in Austin,
Texas, during which Gaga straddled an electric bull onstage while English performance artist
Millie Brown vomited green and black paint onto Gaga’s body:
The song is about rape, the song is about demoralization, the song is about rage and fury
and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release. And I said to myself, I want
to sing this song while I'm ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a
mechanical bull—which is probably one of the most, like, demoralizing things that you
could put a female on, you know, in her underwear—and I want this chick to throw up on
me in front of the world, so that I can tell them, “You know what? You could never ever
degrade me as much as I can degrade myself and look how beautiful it is when I do.
(Stern, 2014)

In 2015, Gaga released “‘Til It Happens to You,” a single co-written with Diane Warren
for The Hunting Ground, a documentary examining the prevalence of sexual assault on college

2
Vincent, P. (2015, July 30). Grimes: Rape and death threats ‘part of the job’ for female
musicians. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/grimes-rape-
and-death-threats-part-of-the-job-for-female-musicians-20150730-ginmr0.html
3
This line is taken from the opening of Madonna’s 2016 acceptance speech for her “Woman of the Year”
recognition awarded by Billboard magazine.

2
campuses, and a song that similarly drew from the rape Gaga endured as a young artist (Spanos,
2016). Warren, one of the most acclaimed songwriters in popular American music—and one of
the very few women to be inducted into the prestigious Songwriters Hall of Fame—is herself a
victim of sexual misconduct at the hands of music industry professionals, including one studio
session as a young songwriter during which an “engineer openly masturbated in front of her”
(Ulaby, 2016). Singing alongside emotive orchestral instrumentation that gives way to a
percussive rock track, Gaga sings: “You tell me it gets better, it gets better in time/ You say I'll
pull myself together, pull it together, you'll be fine/ Tell me, what the hell do you know?...Tell
me how the hell could you know?...'Til It happens to you, you don't know how it feels” (Warren
& Gaga, 2015). Gaga and Warren’s shared history of sexual misconduct, Warren told NPR, is
one of the reasons that brought the duo together. “‘Til It Happens to You” was a familiar anthem
in 2015; it was a GRAMMY nominee, a contender for the Academy Awards’ coveted Song of
the Year, and it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart through a series of DJ
remixes that brought the ballad to clubs around the world. In addition to Gaga’s lauded Oscar
appearance, she also performed “‘Til It Happens to You” at Billboard magazine’s 10
th
annual
Women in Music luncheon, where she was honored as “Woman of the Year.” “It is really hard
sometimes for women in music,” Gaga stated in her acceptance speech, “It’s like a fuckin’ boys
club that we just can’t get into… I tried for so long. I just really wanted to be taken seriously as a
musician for my intelligence more than my body ever in this business” (Sullivan, 2015).
The following year, Madonna stood on the same stage as the awards’ 2016 honoree:
Billboard’s “Woman of the Year.” Recounting decades of sexism and ageism, as well as her own
survival of rape as a young artist in New York City, Madonna shared her experience as a woman
in the music industry: “I stand before you as a doormat,” her acceptance speech began, “Oh, I

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mean, as a female entertainer. Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my career for
34 years in the face of blatant sexism and misogyny and constant bullying and relentless abuse”
(“Madonna’s full acceptance,” 2016). Also on hand at Billboard’s 2016 Women in Music
luncheon was pop singer Kesha, honored with the ceremony’s Trailblazer Award, who urged
attendees to not “let anyone else take [their] happiness” (Platon, 2016). At the time, Kesha was
embroiled in a series of legal battles with in-demand music producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke”
Gottwald against whom she filed suit in 2014, alleging that over the course of a decade he had
not only drugged and raped her, but that he had also subjected her to ongoing sexual and
emotional abuse. The morning after the alleged 2005 rape, Kesha called her mother, Pebe Sebert,
who later disclosed in an affidavit that Kesha exclaimed: “Mom, I just want to sing. I don’t want
to be a rape-case victim. I just want to get my music out” (Lockett, 2017).
Kesha filed suit against Dr. Luke in 2014 in an effort to be released from her contract
with Luke’s Kemosabe Records, a subsidiary label of Sony Music, to which she was signed at 18
(Gilbert, 2014). As Rolling Stone reports, Kesha’s “suit claims that over the 10 years leading up
to its filing, Dr. Luke had ‘sexually, physically, verbally, and emotionally abused [her] to the
point where [she] nearly lost her life,’ all in the service of his being able to ‘maintain complete
control over her life and career’” (Johnston, 2016). In April 2017, Sony separated from Dr. Luke,
removing him from his role as head of Kemosabe amid the ongoing legal battles—a move
largely attributed to Sony’s calculated PR strategies in the company’s attempt to preserve its
image and reassure investor interests, rather than a move made in solidarity with its artist, Kesha.
In fact, Sony’s dismissal of Luke from Kemosabe did little to free Kesha from her contractual
obligations to the label; as Sony’s lawyer told The New York Times in 2016, the company “is ‘not
in a position to terminate the contractual relationship between Luke and Kesha’ because she

4
entered into agreements with Dr. Luke’s company Kasz Money, and not Sony itself” (Johnston,
2016). Thus, Kesha was stuck in limbo, left unable to record for, or work with, any other label or
producer, and with her career essentially on hold until the court could rule on the pending case.
In February 2016, Kesha lost her preliminary suit seeking release from her contract when a New
York judge ruled that “there has been no showing of irreparable harm” (Lockett, 2017). In April
2016, Kesha shared on Instagram she had since been offered an opportunity to be released from
the contract if she agreed to recant her accusations and issue a public apology. “I would rather let
the truth ruin my career than lie for a monster ever again” she wrote (Lockett, 2017).
On July 6, 2017, nearly four years after the initial suit was filed, Kesha released a new
single, “Praying.” “Well, you almost had me fooled/ Told me that I was nothing without you…/
‘Cause you brought the flames and you put me through hell…And we both know all the truth I
could tell,” Kesha sings, “I'll just say this is I wish you farewell/ I'm proud of who I am/ No more
monsters, I can breathe again/ And you said that I was done…When I’m finished, they won't
even know your name” (Castelli & Lewis, 2017). In a self-authored article published on The
Lenny Letter (the former Lena Dunham co-created online feminist newsletter), Kesha
contextualized the release:
This song is about coming to feel empathy for someone else even if they hurt you or
scare you…. There were so many days, months even, when I didn't want to get out of
bed…. But I dragged myself out of bed and took my emotions to the studio and made art
out of them. (Kesha, 2017)

“Praying” debuted in the top 20 on the sought-after Billboard Hot 100 music chart and preceded
the release of her third studio album Rainbow (her first since 2012’s Warrior), which debuted at
No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. As with Lady Gaga’s 2013 “Swine,” Kesha’s
“Praying” calls out her assaulter (although not explicitly by name). But unlike Gaga’s “Swine,”
“Praying” also expresses leniency—forgiveness as an act of self-reclamation in an effort to

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“retake her happiness.” Long-time writer and music critic Ann Powers (2017a) spoke to this in a
public Facebook post upon the release: “The song is both an expression of compassion from a
victim to her predator, and a cry for revenge….This feminine position. Always complicated.”
Indeed, as the Los Angeles Times’ Jose Coscarelli (2017a) reported, Kesha remained “under the
same extensive recording and music publishing contracts with Dr. Luke…[and] the album [was]
released by Kemosabe Records.” What’s more: even though Sony relieved Dr. Luke of his
Kemosabe leadership position, the success and sales of albums released via the label benefit him
financially. Following the release of Rainbow to positive acclaim, Kesha released her fourth
studio album High Road in January 2020, again via Kemosabe, which debuted at no. 7 on the
Billboard 200.
Kesha’s success continues to be marred by her yet-to-be-resolved legal battles with Dr.
Luke. She remains contractually obligated to release one more album through the label and Dr.
Luke’s defamation suit against Kesha has been gaining traction from recent court wins with a
Manhattan judge “reject[ing] Kesha’s legal team’s defense assertion that [Dr. Luke] is a ‘public
figure,’” and elaborating that “the only reason [Dr. Luke] has any public connection to the issues
raised in this lawsuit is because they were raised in this lawsuit” (Maddus, 2020). The suggestion
that Dr. Luke is not a “public figure,” however, seems contradictory to music industry data that
find him repeatedly among top music producer charts and a household name in popular music
industries, calling into question larger considerations of visibility and credibility. Furthermore, to
suggest that his naming in Kesha’s lawsuit is not reason enough to connect him to allegations of
sexual misconduct seems to place undue favor on Dr. Luke as the alleged perpetrator, as if to
suggest that because he wasn’t previously connected to or with other allegations of sexual
misconduct, Kesha’s lawsuit does not have sufficient grounds on which her allegations can

6
stand.
In 2019, it was country/pop star Taylor Swift who stood upon Billboard’s Women in
Music luncheon award stage as the first-ever “Woman of the Decade” honoree. “What does it
mean to be the woman of this decade?” she asked in her acceptance speech, it means:
As a female in this industry, some people will always have slight reservations about you.
Whether you deserve to be there, whether your male producer or co-writer is the reason
for your success, or whether it was a savvy record label…that people love to explain
away a woman's success in the music industry. [It means that] women in
music, on stage or behind the scenes, are not allowed to coast. We are held at a higher,
sometimes impossible-feeling standard. (Schiller, 2019)

Like Gaga, Madonna, and Kesha before, Swift had weathered her own experiences of sexual
misconduct at the hands of an industry professional. In August 2017, Swift was awarded $1.00
by an eight-person Denver, Colorado jury in a case stemming from a June 2013 meet-and-greet
incident that took place at the city’s Pepsi Center as part of Swift’s Red concert tour. At the
backstage event, Swift posed for photos with attendees, including two members of the local
KYGO Denver radio station, DJ and radio host David Mueller and his then-girlfriend and fellow
KYGO employee, Shannon Melcher. While posing for a photo, Swift disclosed, “Mueller put his
hand up her dress and grabbed her bottom” (Bryson, 2017a). Testifying in 2017, Swift
recounted: “It was a definite grab…. A very long grab. He grabbed my a[ss] underneath my
skirt” (Schmidt and Watts, 2017).
4
While Swift did not confront Mueller personally about the

4
In a nearly identical incident, country singer Katie Armiger came forward in 2017 detailing an incident that took
place when she was fifteen in which she “was at a radio station in Texas and was taking a promo photo with one of
the on-air DJs after doing [her] performances and he grabbed [her] butt during the photo…and at the same time he
was whispering in hear ear, ‘When are you going to be legal?’” (Swenson, 2017). Furthermore, Armiger emphasizes
that after disclosing the incident at the time, her allegations resulted in no action being taken against the DJ. Armiger
recalls, “I was told that’s how it was and if I wanted to be in music, I’d have to get over it” (Swenson, 2017). What’s
more, for disclosing this incident and calling out the lack of support she received at the time of the incident in a later
interview with Fox News, Armiger was sued by her former record company for “a breach of a non-disparagement
agreement” (Swenson, 2017). However, in response to Armiger’s comments, the label’s owner, Peter O’Heeron
seemingly doubled-down on this lack of support in his attempts to minimize Armiger’s accusations. Upon Armiger
declaring “I’m not going to flirt relentlessly to get my music played…I have integrity and I’m going to believe that
you can be a sincere person with great music and still make it,” O’Heeron offers a revealing retort: “It’s not ‘losing’

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incident, she did report it to her mother and on-hand team, prompting them to confront Mueller
and to escort him and Melcher out of Swift’s concert that evening. The following day, it is
reported Swift’s manager recounted the incident to a KYGO vice president; Mueller was
immediately placed on unpaid leave, then fired the following day “on the grounds of him
violating a ‘morality clause’ in his contract” (Finkelstein, 2017).
In 2015, two years after the incident took place, Mueller filed suit against Swift, seeking
upwards of $3 million dollars in damages, alleging Swift had cost him both his career and future
professional opportunities. Swift countersued, alleging assault and battery, and seeking a single
dollar in damages as a symbolic measure (Bryson, 2017). Swift won the dollar, along with the
case against Mueller, with the jury finding him guilty of groping the star at the 2013 meet-and-
greet. The case made headlines over the course of the trial, with some outlets calling attention to
the uncustomary “spectacle” the case created for a pop star who has remained largely scandal-
free for her decade-plus career. Other outlets took this opportunity to situate Swift’s case in a
longer history of sexism and sexual misconduct in America’s music industries. Given the public
nature of the trial, fans were able to attend, and, while many came in the hopes of catching a
glimpse of the star, others came specifically because of the nature of Swift’s case. As The New
York Times reports, one father brought his ten-year-old daughter from out of town to help her
learn about her agency and the prevalent threat of sexual assault against women: “‘I tell her:
‘You’re an alpha. I want you to know how to pull the claws out when you need them. Because

your integrity…it’s ‘playing’ a role…you need to ‘get over’ that!” (as cited in Swenson, 2017). Here the disciplinary
power the label holds over Armiger manifests both through O’Heeron’s admonishments and is compounded by the
interdisciplinary relationship between artist and label owner (O’Heeron is also a relative of Armiger’s father), which
becomes further complicated by the lawsuits and contractual obligations, which together interlock to leave little
space for Armiger’s disclosure to be “heard,” even after she comes forward—first within her network and then
publicly via Fox News. Armiger bears the brunt of this experience—as victim and contractually-bound artist. “I’ve
had my days/ When I just want to stay in bed/ Shut out the world/ And put a pillow over my head/ Sometimes I feel
like giving up/ I just think I’ve had enough/ ‘Cause it’s a hard road everywhere you turn/ With lots of choices and
bridges not to burn,” Armiger sings in her 2007 single, “Hard Road.”

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you’re going to need them’” (Bryson, 2017a).
In the country heartland, reporters Brad Schmitt and Cindy Watts’ Tennessean article,
“Taylor Swift Groping Unsettling? Country Music Biz has Mistreated Women for Decades”
spoke directly to a longer history of sexism, interviewing a series of fellow country artists about
their experiences as women in the music scene. One dominant narrative emerged from these
interviews: Fear of the power and control men hold over women’s careers, which leads to a
culture of silence around incidents of sexism and sexual misconduct. Furthermore, the role of
men in radio is of particular significance to Country artists, as one of the few mainstream
American genres that relies on radio for visibility and support from the market. As Country star
Kacey Musgraves clarifies, “Every measure of success in country music is based on whether
you’re getting support from country radio. Critical acclaim, Grammys, even the quality of
music—none of it matters. What matters is how much radio play you’re getting” (Robinson,
2020, p. 172). Country singer-songwriter Lari White shares: “Most of these [radio] programmers
are powerful and control the chart. They know a label and artist have to come back to them over
and over again for that favor or weekly add if they want their single to go up on the chart”
(Schmitt and Watts, 2017).
Similarly, almost verbatim to Swift, White recounted an incident in which a radio
director told a “joke about gang rape and how much the female subject of the joke was enjoying
it”; observing the male members of her team who were present and played along with the joke,
White asserts, “the head of my record label and my manager were standing there chuckling
nervously...knowing ‘I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but this guy controls my next 150 adds.’
They were victims, too [emphasis added]…” (Schmitt and Watts, 2017). Former UMG Senior
Vice President Beverly Keel acknowledged, “I hope [Swift’s actions will] encourage other

9
women to come forward. It’s not about naming names, it’s about describing a situation that
exists. So that going forward, men will know it’s not ok, and they will get in trouble if it
happens.” However, Keel goes on to further articulate what I identify as one of the key problems
in disclosing and reporting instances of sexual misconduct, claiming: “Unfortunately, there are a
few bad eggs who use their influence and power to exploit women” (Schmitt and Watts, 2017).
Keel in this way at once acknowledges the structural and systemic nature of sexism in America’s
mainstream music industries, while also seemingly writing it off as the problem of individual
men—the “few bad eggs.”
Four additional points are important to highlight in the Swift case: First, Swift only filed
suit against Mueller after he sued her for damages, which, as Swift’s lawyer Douglas Baldridge
questioned in court: “Will aggressors like David Mueller be allowed to victimize the victim?”
(Bryson, 2017b). Second, given the photographic nature of the encounter with Mueller,
suggestive photographic evidence exists, showing Mueller’s hand placed in a position that aligns
with Swift’s account (although it is taken from the front and thus doesn’t expose the actual ass-
grab). Third, the 27-year-old artist has been named to Forbes annual list of “America’s Richest
Self-Made Women,” with an estimated net worth of $280 million. Thus, she is in a unique and
extremely privileged financial position, which allowed her to personally eat the cost of fighting
Mueller in court, without seeking further financial gain (Greenburg, 2017). This move, while
indeed symbolic for fellow women and victims of sexual assault, is also significantly strategic—
it removes doubt with respect to Swift’s motivation for filing the countersuit, and thus positions
her as a “better” victim. However, and fourth, Swift’s professionalism became a go-to point of
interrogation for Mueller’s lawyer, Gabe McFarland, who “said her actions during and after the
photo session were not consistent with someone who had been assaulted” [emphasis added]—

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referring to Swift’s decision “not [to create] a scene in front of fans” (Bryson, 2017b). This begs
the question: How does an assault victim behave? What makes an assault victim believable? If
Swift, a darling of music fans around the world—in part—because of her clean and scandal-less
reputation, did not behave correctly upon being assaulted, what are the stakes for women without
the same privileges of race, class, education, visibility, and image that Swift encompasses? To
wit, as Noisey’s Sarah MacDonald reported in response to a New York court’s rejection of
Kesha’s initial suit against Dr. Luke:
Kesha failed in being the right kind of victim. The right kind of victim—a problematic
term to begin with—is usually one who produces precise evidence (photos of assault at
the time, texts, for example) of the crime committed from the time it happened, which, in
sexual assault or emotionally abusive situations, is rarely ever timely. (2017)

The consequences of Kesha’s “failure” continue to unfold and irrevocably change the trajectory
of her career. As long-time music journalist Lisa Robinson writes of this case, “the recording
may be over, but the melody lingers on” (2020, p. 62). Swift similarly acknowledges the issues
of “believability” in a spoken interlude included in her Reputation World Tour, which she
includes as a featured incident in her 2019 Netflix documentary Miss Americana. Addressing the
audience while seated at the piano on the one-year anniversary of the court finding in her favor,
Swift shares emotionally:
This day a year ago was the day that the jury decided in my favor and said that they
believed me. [And] I guess I just think about all the people that weren’t believed, or that
haven’t been believed, or the people who are afraid to speak up, because they think they
won’t be believed, because…and I just want to say I’m sorry to anyone that wasn’t
believed, because I don’t know what turn my life would have taken if…people didn’t
believe me when I said that something had happened to me. (Wilson, 2020)

Swift then launches into an acoustic version of her song “Clean”: “The rain came pouring
down/When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe/ and by morning gone was any
trace of you/ I think I am finally clean” (Heap & Swift, 2104). A heartbreaking sisterhood thus

11
begins to (re)emerge—one connecting women as victims through their shared experiences of
sexual misconduct perpetrated by the very men who continue to comprise the American music
industries’ omnipresent boys club and who casually toss around “who you know and who you
blow” as a maxim of professional success (Smith, 2016).
5

Cracks in the Façade
This dissertation argues that sexual misconduct is baked into America’s mainstream
music industries and that it is one of the most dominant axes around which the industries turn. I
argue that moments and instances of disclosure provide key entry points for examining the
channels through which, and platforms by which, women can and do come forward to reveal
experiences of sexism and sexual misconduct. This research articulates a partial history of
disclosure in the music industries, examining the institutional structures—the “scaffolding”—
that confine and define how and when women disclose and share these stories, as well as
identifying the consequences and ramifications women face, professionally or otherwise, when
they do come forward. To be clear, my argument is not that all women in the music industry are
victims of sexual misconduct, that all men in the music industry are sexist or perpetrators of
misconduct, nor that those who experience sexism and sexual assault do so in the same ways or
to the same extent. What this project argues, however, is that there is a pattern of exploitation,
abuse, control, and erasure within the music industries, and this violence—whether economic,
professional, psychological, or physical—has disproportionately been experienced by women.
6

5
As Dorothy Carvello writes in her memoir, Anything for a Hit, “One [Atlantic] executive walked past my office
every day and said, ‘Blow me,’ I hadn’t even met him” (2018, p. 19).
6
In this way, this dissertation parallels existing scholarship that examines how particular bodies in the music
industry have historically been categorized and policed—notably historian Karl Haustrum Miller, whose 2010
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow details the centrality of the Jim Crow
South and racial color lines to the constitution of a “musical color line,” which he argues is inseparable from the
constitution and commercialization of America’s popular music industry.

12
This dissertation likewise investigates how media coverage of select case studies has at once
provided important visibility to specific incidents of sexual misconduct, while at the same time
absolving the music industries at large from any responsibility—excusing away such incidents as
anecdotal exceptions, in which “bad apple” arguments demonize individuals, rather than
critically confronting systemic and institutional injustices through a close examination of the
interlocking domains of power that are constitutive of these industries and differently privilege
individuals on the basis of identity.
7
In this way, this dissertation examines key case studies in an
effort to more fully flush out the structural and institutional frameworks that foster the music
industries’ cultures of sexism and sexual misconduct—connecting the dots between these cases,
as well as positioning America’s music industries within larger historical and cultural
landscapes.
Given the history shared by the key honorees at Billboard’s “Women in Music” awards
over the past several years—Lady Gaga, Madonna, Kesha, and Taylor Swift (among others)—
one could easily misinterpret the annual ceremony’s awards as recognitions bestowed upon
victims of sexual assault, rather than a recognition of women artists for their enduring musical
successes and contributions to American music. Herein lies a key problem: these identities are
not mutually exclusive. Too often being a woman in music comes at the cost of the exploitation
and the abuse of one’s body, career, or both. These patterns seemingly fall into the problematic
logic of “boys will be boys,” communicating to women and girls (if indirectly) that success and
longevity in the music industry is contingent upon women enduring—and overcoming and/or
overlooking—sexism and sexual misconduct, or that it is the “price of admission,” that the
rebellious, anti-establishment ideologies that undergird the spaces and institutions of popular

7
This understanding is informed by recent work by feminist scholars, journalists, and activists pertaining to “call
out culture” and practices of public shaming (for example, see Ahmad, 2015; Ronson, 2015).

13
American music are necessarily liberated from the same constraints and policies of other
commercial and corporate institutions in America.
This hypothetical misinterpretation, however, is not really a hypothetical at all. If
anything, these artists have been elevated via the luncheon, in part, because of the currency they
afford Billboard in what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) theorizes as an economy of visibility.
Moreover, Herman Gray offers a particularly useful lens through which award shows, such as
Billboard’s Women in Music luncheon can be examined in “Subject(ed) to Recognition”:
In recognizing and celebrating members of variously marginalized communities…the
programs produce emotionally charged trajectories of cultural familiarity and personal
identification…[they] embody virtue. They model social uplift and display (often
emotionally) the rewards of achievement, in the process of instructing audiences in the
moral lessons and rewards of personal transformation and responsibility. (2013, p. 787)

In this way, the luncheon, itself a media event, also becomes an avenue for neoliberal repair. It
is, as French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault might suggest via his conception of
“confession,” a neoliberal confessional in and through which the “obligation to confess” is
activated toward liberation. As Foucault articulates,
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply
ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us;
on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands”
only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the
violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a
kind of liberation. (1990, p. 55)

These artists are thus framed as doubly-wounded, they are women in an industry that constantly
reminds them they do not belong—which the luncheon, in fact, then reinforces by relegating
women to a separate award space altogether—and they are victims. The “emotional charge” thus
becomes an easy target, tapping into these wounds to then celebrate the public performance of
healing—the act of confession—together. In this way, we might instead read into Billboard’s
decision to honor these women not by “coincidence,” but by design because of this shared

14
history of victimization. (Importantly, none of these artists were disclosing the sexual harassment
or misconduct they had endured on this stage for the first time.)
Lady Gaga articulated a sentiment shared by many women in the music industry when
she stated in her “Woman of the Year” acceptance speech that she wanted “to be taken seriously
as a musician for [her] intelligence more than [for her] body” (Sullivan, 2015). Gaga elaborates
further on this point in a moment of reflection captured in her 2017 documentary, Gaga: Five
Foot Two:
When producers…start to act like…“you’d be nothing without me,” for women
especially—since those men have so much power that they can have women in a way that
no other men can: whenever they want, whatever they want. The cocaine, the money, the
champagne. The hottest girls you’ve ever seen. And then I walk in the room, and it’s like
eight times out of ten, I’m put in that category. And they expect from me what those girls
have to offer when that’s just not at all what I have to offer in any way. That’s not why I
am here. I am not a receptacle for your pain…I’m not just a place for you to put it.
(Moukarbel, 2017)

This refrain is common among women in America’s music industries. Mariah Carey shared in an
interview in 1990, “I want to be taken seriously. I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh, Mariah Carey, doesn’t
her body look great in this shot?’ I want it to be, ‘Did you listen to this song? Doesn’t her voice
sound good?’” (Robinson, 2020, p. 26). This desire is worth revisiting briefly: First, it hints at
the enduring prevalence of problematic gendered-binaries that constitute normative conceptions
of gender expression, beauty, and objectification in opposition to knowledge and talent,
suggesting a mutual exclusivity that is socially constructed and the troubling consequences of
which we can find across history and throughout society—not just in popular music and the
entertainment industries.
Second, it hints at a larger problem with respect to the exorbitant rate at which sexual
harassment and sexual misconduct go under-reported (Gonzalez, 2013). Within America’s music
industries, the disclosure of sexual misconduct and harassment has historically cast shadows

15
upon the careers of women in a way that is not the case for men; all-too-often male perpetrators
of violence against women proceed to enjoy fairly-uninterrupted careers marked by both musical
and financial success. This uninterrupted path paints a disturbingly different picture than that
afforded to a woman like Kesha, who remained for years unable to work and is now still severely
constrained within a contract dictating how she can work, all because she disclosed publicly, she
was the victim of such an assault. All-the-while, Dr. Luke remains, as a recent Annenberg
Inclusion Initiative report details, one of the eleven men controlling most of the songs released in
the popular American industry (Smith et al., 2019). Importantly, in the case of Kesha, her
inability to work had little to do with the interpersonal or disciplinary domains of power
following these incidents or with the physical and psychological toll that necessarily resulted
from surviving the abuses she alleges were perpetrated by Dr. Luke (which, for Kesha, was not
insignificant and included a period in rehab for an eating disorder spurred by the weight-related
shaming she endured). Rather, Kesha’s inability to work, has been most strongly intertwined
with the structural domain of power constituted and reinforced via contractual business
agreements held by a music company that to-this-day refuses to give the artist back her
professional and creative autonomy (Lockett, 2017).
The significance of public disclosures pertaining to sexism and sexual misconduct in
America’s music industries made by celebrated music icons like Lady Gaga, Madonna, Kesha,
and Swift cannot be underestimated—they are, after all, a cohort of the most professionally
successful and financially stable white women in the music industry. Apart from Kesha, all also
sit in the top twenty of the top-grossing touring female artists of all time. Madonna and Swift
remain in the top twenty of all time for all touring artists, men and women combined. To-date
Madonna holds the title for highest-grossing touring artist, with sales grossing in excess of 1.2

16
billion dollars for her Sticky & Sweet, MDNA, Confession, and Rebel Heart World Tours; Swift
grossed more than 770 million dollars for her Red, 1989, and Reputation World Tours, and Lady
Gaga with a combined total of 459 million dollars for her The Monster Ball and Born This Way
World Tours (Manh, 2020). These women hold power in a way that so many do not, and yet,
each still finds herself with a story of harassment, abuse, or misconduct that stains the trajectory
of their careers.
This success and visibility make their stories all-the-more important for women artists
around the world working to navigate these tumultuous landscapes and highlights the lack of
protections or power afforded to women in spaces throughout the music industries more
generally, particularly for women of color. What these examples do suggest, however, is a larger
pattern of violence enacted against, and endured by, women, largely—if not entirely—on the
basis of gender. Moreover, while the heightened visibility and coverage afforded to these stories
through both social and traditional media suggests a shifting socio-cultural landscape in which
sexual harassment and misconduct are no longer overlooked or underplayed to the extent of
previous eras, these recent disclosures are imbricated in a long and violent history of sexism and
misogyny in the dominant American music industries.
Are Women Here Yet?
It is “the year of the woman…again,” long-time music journalist Jessica Hopper writes in
the byline of her 2019 article “Pazz & Jop: So, Are Women Here Yet?” published in The Village
Voice in response to the publication of the annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, an anticipated fixture
since 1974 for music fans and industry folk alike. Asked with more side-eye than sincerity,
Hopper’s query—are women here yet—is, in part, a reflection on that year’s poll, which in 2019
featured more women in the coveted Top 10 position than any year prior; it is also a rhetorical

17
quip, “yet” the key giveaway. Why? Because too many times throughout the history of popular
American music, women have “arrived.” In fact, they keep arriving, every few years, here they
are again, the women, arriving, and yet, still somehow never quite “here”—at least not with any
state of visible permanence that would eliminate the need for more arrival announcements. In
1968, Hopper notes, “Women Finally H[ad] Arrived.” Two decades later, here they are arriving
again. “That’s a long-ass insurgency,” Hopper writes, “Fifty years of perpetual arrival.” So, why
is this a question worth asking? And perhaps more importantly, why are we asking it over, and
over again? What is it about women that makes their arrival so elusive? Surely this is not music
journalism’s sad attempt at a joke about women’s inability to follow directions. Are men
arriving, too? No?
These articles, these headlines, these histories of “perpetual arrival,” are about belonging.
They are about power. And they are about identity. To always be arriving insinuates that women
are not permanent fixtures in the places to which they are showing up, that they are traveling in
from somewhere else out there. As Hopper articulates, “To suggest women have arrived
erases the fact that they have, in fact, always been here. As with any group marginalized within
music culture, their being continually situated as breaking through has reinforced their exteriority
to structural power, framing their successes as an illegitimate seizure of that power” (2019). Such
headlines themselves become constitutive of the cultural domain of power, creating a circuitous
loop in which the question becomes part of the answer—women are still arriving, in part,
because they continue to be marginalized via cultural messaging that says they do not belong to
this space and deems reportage of their “arrival” as significant to mark a shift that reinforces how
far we have not yet moved toward “progress” in America’s music industries. As long-time music
journalist Lisa Robinson notes in her aptly titled reflection on her four-plus decade career

18
reporting on nearly every major fixture in popular American music, Nobody Ever Asked Me
About the Girls, “Women didn’t really count in this world…for the most part, women were
dismissed” (2020, p. 1).
This dissertation is one attempt to interrogate why. Why have women—time and again—
been relegated to the exteriority of that power? And, how? How has that structural power been
constructed, maintained, and reinforced to exclude women historically? Gender is thus the
guiding analytic in this analysis, attending to the gendered binary framing through which identity
is constructed and policed historically in America’s music industries. Incidents of disclosure are
taken up as the entry points to and by which these questions can be both attended and informed.
Guided by the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, et al. (1980), I argue that disclosure is a
“social phenomenon,” a “relation” (p. viii); as such, it is situated in relationship to specific socio-
historical and spatio-temporal moments—conjunctures—which must be unpacked with nuance
and care. Understanding social phenomena “not as a fact but as a relation,” Hall et al. argue, “the
conventional wisdoms…fall apart in your hands…[and] the whole terrain of the problem changes
in character” (1980).
Significance
As a review of existing literature suggests, there remains a gap in scholarship pertaining
to American music industries’ histories of sexism and sexual misconduct, as well as of the
processes by which women disclose and come forward with these experiences. More
specifically, there remains a gap in in-depth structural and intersectional analyses that consider
how the music industries’ historically grim collages of sexism and sexual misconduct have been
and are actively (re)produced. The scarcity of scholarly work pertaining to analyses of the
American music industries’ multidimensional scaffolding presents a generative opportunity for

19
more closely examining how the dominant discursive and ideological frameworks and
interlocking domains of power disproportionately impact women in America’s music
industries—while also examining how, and the extent to which, these impacts differently affect
women on the basis of race and age. This dissertation expands upon existing bodies of work to
push forward critical historical and intersectional examinations of how power operates through
the analytic of gender to maintain the systems of misogyny and sexism that continue to
characterize and constitute the professional and commercial sectors of popular American music.
Preview of Chapters
“How the Light Gets In: Sexual Misconduct and Disclosure in America’s Music
Industries,” examines the historical and enduring prevalence of sexism and sexual misconduct in
America’s popular music industries, focusing on the pathways and platforms by which women
come forward, the consequences women and their perpetrators face for such disclosures, and
how women’s voices have been framed by mainstream and social media.
In the first chapter, “Is Your Boyfriend in the Band?,” I provide the theoretical
groundwork and an overview of existing literature to set the project’s scholarly framework and
offer a more in-depth engagement with critical understandings that inform and are referenced
throughout the dissertation. This overview is divided into five key sections: The music industry;
the scope of the project; gender and music; the spectrum of sexual misconduct; and victims and
survivors. I also provide details on the method and limitations for this project.
In the second chapter, “The Lost Girls,” I examine one central case study, the allegations
of rape raised by The Runaways’ Jackie Fuchs (neé Jackie Fox) against the band’s former
manager, Kim Fowley. Through a close examination of her disclosure, the media’s reception to
her revelation, and an historical analysis of Fowley’s image and perception within the music

20
industry, I explore how the conjuncture of her alleged assault informed both reactions to and the
timing of her disclosure. I also attend to three key themes revealed via this central case study,
and via engagement with other relevant examples: Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll; Legends, Myths,
and Lore; and Good Girl Gone Bad.
The third chapter, “On The Record” takes the form of two examinations to further
interrogate the domains of power that together constitute a particular iteration of the music
industries’ scaffolding in a new conjuncture. The first half explores allegations levied against
music executive Russell Simmons, which are considered alongside related accusations lodged
against fellow music executive L.A. Reid. In the second half, I explore two additional case
studies where collective mobilizations of disclosure were facilitated and enabled via social
media, first by music journalist Jessica Hopper on Twitter, and later via the establishment of The
Industry Ain’t Safe blog on Tumblr. I explore how women come forward, the consequences they
have faced for those disclosures, how the media has framed these incidents, and how different
media platforms have allowed for different kinds of reportage. I also attend to three key themes
revealed via these central case studies, and via engagement with other relevant examples: The
Price of Admission; Choose Your Own Adventure, and Sympathy for the Devil.
The final chapter, “The New New,” concludes with a reflection upon the historical cases
included herein, connecting the dots outlined in the previous chapters, and pulling forward
historical moments of disclosure to the #MeToo conjuncture. I also briefly examine current
efforts and initiatives that are working to address some of the issues this dissertation has
identified.

21
Chapter 1: What Music Industry?
“Why was I held back from my dreams?”
“What did you expect?…You’re a woman”
- Ahmet Ertegun, Founder of Atlantic Records to A&R executive Dorothy Carvello (2018, p. 4)

“Music! What a splendid art but what a sad profession!”
- Georges Bizet
8

There Is No Music Industry
9

As this dissertation details, women inhabit a precarious, at times powerless, position in
America’s music industries. This is true not only of the highly-visible artists that we come to
know as popstars and celebrities, but also of the often-invisible women who are employed within
the industries’ numerous sectors. These include records label employees, songwriters, producers,
sound engineers, managers, publicists, booking agents, radio DJs, music journalists, session
musicians, tour managers, and “roadies”—not to mention the ever-expanding domain of digital
distribution channels that include such music-streaming and music video-hosting platforms as
Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, Tidal, and Vevo.
10
Los Angeles Times’ music columnist Randall
Roberts has coined this the “Music-Industrial Complex” (2014). A not-so-subtle nod to its sister
conceptions—the “prison-industrial complex” and the “military-industrial complex”—the music-
industrial complex highlights both the rapid expansion of industry from the mid-twentieth
century through the present and hints at the disproportion of power and privilege that circulates
within, and still commands, its many divisions.
Cultural scholar Jonathan Sterne, in his aptly titled article “There Is No Music Industry,”
proposes another conception: “music industries” (2014). Arguing that the notion of a singular
music industry is more than just outdated or misleading, Sterne asserts that, instead of “looking

8
Scheckel, R. (1960). The world of Carnegie Hall. Messner.
9
Sterne, J. (2014). There is no music industry. Media Industries Journal, 1(1), 50 – 55.
10
Oftentimes, fans and music consumers are included in larger considerations of the “music industry,” however, for
the reasons outlined above, these figures are outside the scope of this project.

22
for unity inside a music industry, we should...assume a polymorphous set of relations among
radically different industries and concerns” (2014, p. 53). Central to Sterne’s argument is the
complex history of commercialization and commodification necessarily intertwined with the
emergence and distribution of popular music over the course of the twentieth century. A singular
conception of the music industry, Sterne contends, “privileges ‘the work’ as the most important
aspect of musical activity, as the work is the thing that is given monetary value and is the basis of
exchange” (p. 51).
What gets lost in this formulation is the individual—the music is considered in place of,
rather than in conjunction with, the artist. As such, the decision to develop, support, or dispose of
an artist relies disproportionately—almost entirely—on the commercial success of their music (a
measure that is itself in question today, as traditional distribution channels, like brick-and-mortar
record stores, are replaced by subscription-based and free music streaming services). Is it any
wonder, then, that the bodies of women like Kesha are so often objectified and exploited by these
industries—industries that view artists through profit-driven goggles, and frame their worth only
with respect to the financial successes or potentials of their music, and that, likewise, set as a key
marketing platform strategic efforts to ensure women appear “fuckable?”
11

Both the “music-industrial complex” and the “music industries” theorizations are
undergirded by a shared acknowledgment of the problematic power relationships it/they continue
to foster. In this way, a multi-armed monstrous vision of the music industry is perhaps not too far
off, metaphorically, from the many abuses enacted under its weight. At the same time, however,

11
Taken from Roseanne Cash’s tweet in response to Jessica Hopper’s Twitter call for women to share experiences
with sexism in the industry, which is detailed in Chapter 3.
Elsewhere, this same assertion has also been made. King Princess observes, “if you’re a woman, after years
and years of the same shit, the label only knows how to deal with you in one way: they want to see marketable and
packageable” (as cited in Robinson, p. 182).

23
the music industry has long been hailed as a liberating, expressive, and nonconformist space—a
space that serves as an escape from the very systems of oppression and hierarchies of power
individuals confront in their day-to-day lives. This tension has been, and remains, at the very
core of the music industries: It is both exploitative and liberating; both conformist and a space
for rebellion; both democratizing and dictatorial; both mainstream and countercultural; both the
place where identities are expressed and formed and where bodies are rendered invisible. For
whom it is these things, and under what conditions, however, is often and historically unequal.
Veteran music journalist and author Ann Powers, in her extensively researched Good Booty:
Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music, highlights this tension with
respect to the music itself: “American popular music...is made of our best impulses toward
freedom, community and self-realization, and our worst legacies of racial oppression and sexual
hypocrisy” (2017c, loc. 364). This duality is compounded by the political economy and demands
of capitalist markets that foreground commodification—the commodification of musical content
as well as of artists, today both circulating in global entertainment markets as consumable goods.
In this way, this dissertation applies a conception of “popular music” defined by music scholars
Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman (2010):
Music that is mass-reproduced and disseminated via the mass media; that has at various
times been listened to by large numbers of Americans; and that typically draws upon a
variety of preexisting musical traditions…. Popular music must be seen in relation to a
broader musical landscape, in which various styles, audiences, and institutions interact in
complex ways. (p. 2)

To this end, my usage of “popular” American music throughout this dissertation refers to the
dominant, mainstream classification of the artists and music I examine, rather than the market
category or genre of “Pop” music specifically. Indeed, the categorization of specific genres
within the umbrella category of popular American music has historically been defined by a

24
problematic-yet-active and ongoing process of (re)negotiation—a process by which seemingly-
distinctive musical forms intersect with the politics of identity in particular conjunctures. Race
and gender, for example, have been instrumental in defining, naming, and segregating music
genres.
12

The well-documented upheaval of the music industry—from its fast and powerful rise in
the twentieth century to its near-dismantling at the turn of the twenty-first with the emergence of
the Internet and digital technological advancements—has similarly destabilized the careers of
those who continue to make the music machine work. And this music machine, though at times
unsteady, remains an economic powerhouse. As the 50 States of Music project reports,
America’s music industries contribute $170 billion dollars to the country’s GDP, supporting 2.47
million jobs, 236,269 music establishments, 206,248 royalty recipients, and 1.45 million
songwriters (US impact, 2021). In this way, who “counts” as a formal member in the music
industries can be a tricky classification, particularly given the rise of neoliberalism and
employment practices that encourage contract labor (in addition to the already-complicated
business and often precarious nature of record label contracts). Informed by the conceptions of
contemporary political and economic theorists, I follow the definition of Wendy Brown, who
articulates neoliberalism in the following terms: “The repudiation of Keynesian welfare state

12
In one example, Angela Y. Davis, in her important examination of pioneering Black women blues artists, Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, articulates how such
definitions have been deployed to differently marginalize/center particular identities within the parameters of
particular genres, detailing in-depth how Black women dominated the commercial landscape of early blues
recordings before then being relegated to the margins as the genre and identities of blues artists shifted toward men:
Black women were the first to record the blues….That women were given priority over men as recording
artists attests to the reductive marketing strategies of the then-embryonic recording industry, strategies we
still see reflected today in the industry’s efforts to categorize—or, in effect, to segregate culturally—
different genres of music that in fact claim an increasingly diverse listening public…However, when male
country blues caught on in 1926, their growing popularity initiated a pattern that eventually marginalized
women blues singers. (1998, xii-xiii)

25
economics and the ascendance of...a radically free market: maximized competition and free trade
achieved through economic de-regulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and
social policies favorable to business and indifferent toward poverty, social deracination, cultural
decimation, long term resource depletion and environmental destruction….it involves extending
and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (2003, para. 2, 7).
The late musician, music educator, and author Christopher Small, offers a helpful
theorization for how one might conceive of membership in the music industries and inclusively
account for these shifts—a conception rooted in active participation and engagement with music:
“Musicking” (1998). “The fundamental nature and meaning of music,” Small contends, “lie not
in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action and what people do” (1998, p. 8). In this
way, Small’s theorization counters Sterne’s assessment of the contemporary music industries, in
which the musical unit, not the artist, is the most important entity. However, this counter-point is
less a contention between the two scholars, than a difference of analytic objective—Sterne offers
an economic analysis pertaining to the evaluation of musical units, and Small offers an analysis
of music as a meaning-making process.
13
Musicking encompasses this active process:
To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by
performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for
performance (what is called composition), or by dancing. We might at times even extend
its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men
who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out
the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. (Small, 1998,
p. 9)

Informed by these conceptions, this dissertation takes “formal” membership America’s music
industries to be understood as “on the payroll”—that is, someone who is employed by and

13
Indeed, like Sterne, Small contends that, “our powers of making music for ourselves have been hijacked and the
majority of people robbed of the musicality that is theirs by birth, while a few stars, and their handlers, grow rich
and famous through selling us what we have been led to believe we lack” (1998, p. 8).

26
actively engaged on some professional level—even if independently, and contract-based—with
the production and maintenance of the music industries. Following Small, both the roadie on the
tour bus and the superstar on stage are included within these parameters.
You Are A Pirate in the Night
14

As the opening examples suggest, numerous incidents of sexual misconduct perpetrated
by men in the music industry have come to light over the years—often decades after the
incidents first occurred, and—especially prior to #MeToo—often dissociated from similar
episodes, aside from occasional “listicles” that aggregate musical predators and circulate online
(Murphy, 2016). Allegations of statutory rape against men have colored (though often not
significantly impacted) the careers of artists like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page or David Bowie,
who both were involved in incidents of statutory rape with then-14-year-old Sunset Strip
“groupie” Lori Mattix in the 1970s (Williams, 2016). In more severe cases, women have been
killed by men in the industries, including by still-celebrated figures like the Sex Pistol’s Sid
Vicious, who was charged with the stabbing death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978
(Tippins, 2013), and “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector, who passed away from
complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 while in prison serving a nineteen-
year sentence for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson (Grimes, 2021; Glaister, 2009).
15

Domestic abuse within music industry marriages and relationships, from John Lennon
and Cynthia Powell (Sheff, 1981), to Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown (Lee, 2012), Ike and
Tina Turner (Turner & Loder, 2010; Higgins, 2016; Lindsay & Martin, 2021), Nina Simone and

14
This header is taken from the beginning lyric of Canadian singer-songwriter Kinley Dowling’s song “I’ve Got a
Microphone,” which details her rape.
15
In a strange convergence of music and misogyny, Spector was contacted while at the Corcoran Substance Abuse
and Treatment Facility by apparently still-aspiring music hopeful and incarcerated neighbor Charles Manson who
wanted to collaborate on music behind bars (Kreps, 2009).

27
Andrew Stroud (Garbus, 2015), Miles and Betty Davis (Cox, 2020); Bette Midler and Aaron
Russo (Robinson, 2020); Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola (Carey, 2020), and Rihanna and
Chris Brown (Goldstein, 2009; Seabrook, 2015; Robinson, 2020) have similarly clouded the
industries’ notorious history of violence against women—and this cloud has been further
complicated by particular conjunctures, socio-historical periods, musical genres, artists’ race and
age, and the ways in which media have narrativized these occurrences and responded to their
aftermath.
16
(I provide a brief examination of Brown’s assault of Rihanna in further detail in
Chapter 2.) So common were issues of domestic assault in long-time music executive L.A.
Reid’s early career as a musician, for example, that his bandmates assigned a special name to
these incidents: “We used a word among ourselves—‘does’—to stand for ‘domestic problems.’
‘LA is having does,’ he said. ‘He has blood’” (2016, p. 39).
People often overlook or “forget” about the membership of artists like John Lennon and
David Bowie on this infamous roster of musicians—a convenient erasure that seems to serve
label interests and fans’ conceptions of their musical icons, upholding romanticized myths in and
of the industry, as well as larger socio-historical attitudes toward race, age, and sexuality,
allowing them to forgive these “transgressions” by pointing to the turns artists’ lives and careers
take in later years as indicative of some larger acknowledgement of wrongdoing or self-inflicted
retribution. Music scholars Catherine Strong and Emma Rush (2017) offer a useful paradigm for
considering why these practices of forgetting or misremembering persist, which often further
(re)structure cultural memory more broadly around musicians with troubling histories of
violence and misconduct against women:
Our failure to centre [sic] these stories in discussions of music has two sources. One is

16
“Every day married to [Miles] was a day I earned the name Davis” Betty Davis recounts in Phil Cox’s 2020
documentary, Betty: They Say I’m Different.

28
the general social tendency to frame violence against women as not important. The other
is more specific: we often connect to music because we identify with something about it,
and therefore with the people who create it. To acknowledge their misdeeds can detract
from our enjoyment of music.
Indeed, for all the times Lennon’s revered “Imagine” has served as the inspiring musical
backdrop to conversations about world peace, something is lost musically when this information
about his violent past is gained. Or is it? The persisting dilemma of whether one can or should
support the musical work of artists who have done terrible things is a familiar one for music
scholars, journalists, and fans. Can you be a feminist and listen to the music of an artist who has
committed sexual assault? Does it make a difference whether you are listening to the music
versus purchasing tickets to see these artists perform live? Is there a line between
compartmentalizing and enjoying musical talent and endorsing a rapist? In Chapter 4, I return to
this dilemma, reflecting on how #MeToo has impacted critical considerations of this persisting
question.
Importantly, however, a critical lens is blurred when incidents of sexism and sexual
misconduct endured by women in the music industry are collapsed with those perpetrated by
men in the music industry against women who are formally outside this space. This is
particularly the case with respect to female fans, most notably “groupies” and “band-aides,” like
Lori Mattix mentioned above, whose sexual experiences often challenge contemporary notions
of consent and are glorified in nostalgic cultural remembrances of the 1960s and 1970s mantra of
“free love” (e.g., Cameron Crowe’s 2000 Oscar-winning Almost Famous). As former music
executive Julie Gordon articulates:
It’s one thing to be a groupie who wants to sleep with rock stars; it’s quite another to be
climbing the executive ladder in a business rife with male executives who feel that

29
women who want to be successful need to pay their sexual dues. (2017)

This is not to say that groupies cannot also be victims of sexual assault, indeed many of them
were, but their relationship to the artists with which they associate can be complicated. To this
point, in a 2015 exclusive with Thrillist aptly titled “I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie:
Confessions of a ‘70s Groupie,” Mattix fondly recalls her “encounter” with the Thin White
Duke: “the way it happened was so beautiful. I remember him looking like God and having me
over a table” (Kaplan, 2015).
17
Consent is further muddied in examples where parental
permission is involved, as was the case with sixteen-year-old Julia Holcomb, whose mother
signed over her parental guardian rights to Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, then in his late
twenties, so Holcomb could legally travel with Tyler on tour (Carmon, 2011); even muddier still
are examples like the 1958 marriage between Rock ‘n’ Roll man Jerry Lee Lewis, then 23, and
his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Brown (Powers, 2017).
This analytical space becomes messier still when considering women in the music
industry who have been assaulted by men who are formally outside this space. For example, Tori
Amos, whose critically acclaimed 1992 album Little Earthquakes featured the single “Me and a
Gun,” which recounts her rape at the hands of a male fan after a performance (Powers, 2017); or,
Canadian singer-songwriter Kinley Dowling, whose 2016 debut album Letters Never Sent
includes the particularly poignant “I’ve Got a Microphone,” which details her own rape as a
fifteen-year-old-girl after her high school prom (Fraser, 2016); or, American Idol-winner and

17
To this point, conversations regarding age of consent and statutory rape in the music industry have circulated in
recent years, pertaining this time to Kylie Jenner and rapper Tyga, whose relationship went public when she was 16
and he was 25 (Blay, 2015). Fittingly, in Mattix’s Thrillist exclusive, she points directly to the Kardashians as a
modern reincarnation and commodification of her 70s groupie experience and identity: “Things haven’t really
changed. Look at the Kylie and Kendall Jenners, the Gigi Hadids. They are the modern-day versions of teenage
groupies. The only difference is that the Internet blows them up in a way that allows them to make a fortune”
(Kaplan, 2015). Lana Del Rey’s single “Groupie Love,” released on her Lust For Life album in 2017, has likewise
brought the groupie identity back into popular conversations, romanticizing it in a way that distances the term from
the pejorative framing it previously insinuated.

30
recording artist Fantasia Barinno’s 2005 memoir, Life is Not a Fairy Tale, in which she details
her rape at the hands of a classmate as a freshman in high school. Madonna’s at-the-time
groundbreaking tour documentary, Truth or Dare, which closely follows the artist on her 1990
Blonde Ambition World Tour, captures the experiences of her makeup artist, Sharon “Mama
Makeup” Gault, who was drugged and raped while out one night on the tour (Keshishian, 199).
18

Artist and activist Kathleen Hanna shares her own experience of being date-raped as a sixteen-
year-old in the documentary The Punk Singer, which opens with Hanna reciting spoken word
poetry about the incident (Anderson, 2013). More recently, Demi Lovato, following a near-death
overdose, discloses in her Dancing with the Devil documentary that she was raped at the age of
fifteen by a co-star on one of the movies she did as part of her tenure at Disney; she shares that
she disclosed the incident at the time to individuals in power, but the perpetrator was not
removed from the film or held accountable (Ratner, 2021). Lovato also shares she was raped in
2018 by the dealer who supplied her with the drugs on which she overdosed (Ratner, 2021).
Lovato performed again for the first time in 2020 at the 62
nd
Annual GRAMMY Awards, where
she debuted her then-new single, “Anyone,” which she had originally recorded days prior to her
overdose in 2018 (Kornhaber, 2020):
I tried to talk to my piano/ I tried to talk to my guitar/ Talked to my imagination/ confided
into alcohol/ I tried and tried and tried some more/ Told secrets ‘til my voice was sore/
Tired of empty conversation/ ‘Cause no one hears me anymore/ A hundred million
stories/ And a hundred million songs/ I feel stupid when I sing/ Nobody’s listening to
me…/ Anyone, please send me anyone/ Lord, is there anyone?/ I need someone. (Moon
et al., 2018)

Over the past several years, media have indiscriminately centered musical spaces—from
music festivals to music-oriented nightclubs—in larger considerations of sexism and sexual

18
Madonna’s reaction to hearing of Gault’s assault has been the topic of controversy and criticism, as Madonna
suggests that Gault was likely drugged and raped, because she had shared that she was part of Madonna’s tour,
insinuating that this would make Gault an appealing target for assault, and thus blaming the victim in this incident.

31
assault across America’s music industries. These cases have ranged from misogynistic fashion
choices, like one Coachella attendee’s unabashed “Eat Sleep Rape Repeat” shirt (Lhooq, 2015a),
to one female concert-goers ritual of sharing “Sunday morning war stories” and her concession
“that wearing trousers to a club was a far safer bet when trying to avoid the idiots…[whose]
roaming hands...feel entitled to grope or molest” (Fiddy, 2015). Spaces have likewise been
centered in social media campaigns, like #saferspaceatfestivals, which appeared in May 2017
when a series of European music festivals took advantage of social media’s wide-reaching
connectivity to shed light on the ongoing problem of sexual assault against women and to stand
in virtual solidarity with those who have been harmed in these musical spaces (Ellis-Petersen,
2017). Architects lead singer Sam Carter was celebrated in 2017 for stopping mid-concert to call
out a male audience member for groping a fellow female attendee as she crowd-surfed (Madani,
2017). This particular act of musical participation has been disproportionately problematic for
women, as hip-hop artist Iggy Azalea disclosed in an interview with New York’s Hot 97 radio,
she had to quit crowd surfing after repeated assaults by fans at her own concerts: “They think
I’m real slutty, like ‘Oh, she got a song called ‘Pu$$y,’ I know what she wants. She wants these
two fingers,’” Azalea explained, “Why would I want a stranger to ever finger me?” (Kornowski,
2014).
This practice of recognizing sexism has been mirrored in nightclubs and concert venues
through material declarations, such as prominently mounted “Safe Space” signs (Lhooq, 2015b).
Other efforts not aimed at addressing gender inequality have also become—if unintentionally—
digital archives of the sexism women face in the music industry, including the crowd-sourced
Tumblr blog and now book project, No Breasts No Requests (2015), which documents the
messages DJs receive during live sets, and the contents of which, when not directed at specific

32
song requests, often suggest larger cultural beliefs surrounding belonging and masculine claims
to musical space: “Girls shouldn’t DJ, BUT you are actually good. U can have my phone
number!! :).” As I allude to above, efforts like “Safe Space” signage, while well-intended and
important structural and cultural elements of specific spaces, do little to actually get at the heart
of endemic sexism or sexual assault—or the ways in which women’s bodies are differently
affected on the basis of age, race, etc.—failing to address why safety in these spaces is not
already a given or to distinguish who and what makes these spaces unsafe. However, over the
past five years, there have been advancements in these practices and safety-related policies.
Before the #MeToo moment, many of these efforts failed to provide women with resources to
facilitate disclosure when instances of sexual assault inevitably occurred, instead, relying on
problematic legal channels that have done little historically to address the under-reportage of
sexual assault or the exorbitant backlog of untested rape kits that remain idle in evidence storage
(Campbell, Feeney, Fehler-Cabral, Shaw, & Horsford, 2015). To address these oversights, new
resources have been introduced across music spaces, including Shawna Potter’s 2019 guide,
Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and
Gather.
Together, these examples comprise a historically grim collage of sexism and sexual
misconduct. As I articulate above, however, incidents in which the victims or perpetrators are not
formally connected to the music industry better serve efforts to investigate the predominance of
rape culture and patriarchal structures of power in society at large, rather than to reveal patterns
of sexism and sexual misconduct in America’s music industries specifically—or the channels
through which women have historically come forward. As such, these examples are outside the
scope of this project. I briefly highlight them here, however, for two reasons: First, to define the

33
parameters of this dissertation more clearly; and second, to briefly attend to the ways in which
such incidents are never entirely removed from the mainstream music industries, specifically, or
socio-cultural contexts at large. They exist at the periphery of and in conversation with artists
and members of the music community who continually move in and out of these spaces and are
shaped by the cultural frameworks in which they reside.
To be clear: This dissertation does not simply map together incidents of sexual
harassment and misconduct to present a more detailed image of this grim collage. Rather, it is a
study of how this collage has been produced, and how this collage is situated in and connected
across key conjunctural moments in the history of popular American music and culture,
investigating its production both as an historical event in the past, and as an historical event that
continues in the present. Key to this study is an examination of how this living tradition of sexual
misconduct and gender-based inequality remains at the center of music’s industrial existence in
the United States.
Soundcheck: A Brief Literature Review
Gender and Music
A healthy body of literature exists that examines the representation and role of gender in
different facets of America’s music industries—ranging from lyrical content to inclusion in
industry-related charts and accolades, to visual representation in music videos. These studies
have employed both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and often relied on content
analysis, statistical analysis, textual analysis, ideological analysis, as well as media effects
studies conducted through focus groups and participant observations. Many scholars have turned
to such music industry staples as the Billboard music charts and American Top 40 chart, for
example, to examine more specific research questions pertaining to gender-related trends. For

34
example, songs distinguished by artist gender on Billboard’s Top 40 charts have served as key
data for research (Weisbard, 2014; Lafrance, Worcester, & Burns, 2011; Wells, 2001). Over the
past several decades, scholars have also used this data to investigate lyrical representations,
which--while considered by some to be the “low-hanging fruit” of available data--provide
important insight into the discursive and ideological frameworks that undergird particular socio-
cultural moments. To this point, existing literature focuses more specifically on issues of gender,
considering, for example, the distinction between male and female roles in popular music lyrics
(Freudiger & Almquist, 1978; Rey & Meehan, 1993; Click & Kramer, 2007; Kreyer, 2015), as
well as how pain and pleasure are represented in pop songs through masculine and feminine
frameworks (Dukes et al., 2003).
Existing studies further examine sexualization in pop lyrics (Hall, West, & Hill, 2012), as
well as the impact of sexually aggressive lyrics on listeners (Fischer, & Greitemeyer, 2006).
Other studies focus on specific musical genres, investigating misogyny (Barongan & Nagayama
Hall, 1995) and derogatory gender-based representations in rap lyrics (Monk-Turner &
Sylertooth, 2008). Furthermore, current scholarship highlights the representation of femininity
and the practice of feminist analysis in popular music (Bretthauer, Zimmerman, & Banning,
2007), including generative examinations of how femininity is represented in popular music
generally (Dibben, 1999), as well as in girl-groups, specifically (Dibben, 2002; Warwick, 2007).
Additionally, a number of texts have addressed the role of women in specific genres, particularly
those that have historically been male-dominated, such as rock (for example, see Wald, 2007;
Rhodes, 2005; Katz, 1978; Orloff, 1974); Jazz (Placksin, 1982); and Country (McCusker and
Pecknold, 2004; Dew, 1977; Gleason, 2017).
Over the past several years, catalyzed by the emergence of the #MeToo and #TimesUp

35
campaigns and related social justice movements, stories pertaining to sexism and sexual
misconduct in the music industry have appeared in the media to an extent and in a volume not
previously seen, with women from all corners of America’s music industries coming forward.
However, it remains through the popular press and via social media that many of these
disclosures have been revealed and historical incidents detailed. Much of what is included here
pulls from the popular press, as this is precisely where these conversations are most prominently
being held and circulated. Such reports are often framed through the familiar refrain of “We need
to talk about...” and call for more engaged discussions surrounding sexism in the music industry
(for example, see: Fiddy, 2015; Schroeder, 2015; Noisey staff, 2016; MacDonald, 2016; Garland,
2015; Almeida, 2015); while other articles draw attention to the persistent silence surrounding
these patterns of assault and harassment (for example, see: Kornhaber, 2016; Goodman, 2015;
Fraser, 2016).
However, even in the midst of the groundswell of stories that have emerged in this
conjunctural moment, many with knowledge and experience across popular American music
have also reflected on how few stories and disclosures have come out about sexual harassment
and sexual misconduct in America’s music industries, situating the new publications and releases
relative to other industries that have also seen a significant increase in coverage, for example
Hollywood and the film and television industries (for example, Anonymous, 2017; Arceneaux,
2018; Leah, 2018; McDermott, 2018; Abdurraqib, 2018; Brown, 2018; Garland, 2015). That
said, important new books and documentaries have come out providing new historical accounts
and scholarship thinking through gender specifically in popular American music, including long-
time A&R executive Dorothy Carvello’s (2018) memoir, Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s
Story of Surviving the Music Industry, which was instrumental to this research. Four explosive

36
documentaries have likewise expanded existing work offering critical interrogations of particular
perpetrators and incidents of sexual harassment and misconduct, each of which also provide
important context via in-depth interviews with victims. Of note: Leaving Neverland (Reed,
2019), which details Michael Jackson’s history of predatory behavior of young boys; Surviving
R. Kelly (2019), a disturbing documentary-series that delves into Kelly’s long history of
allegations of sexual harassment and assault, as well as statutory rape of underage girls that he
brought on as mentees; Tina (Lindsay & Martin, 2021), a documentary exploring the life and
career of Tina Turner, which offers a revealing and tragic look at the artist’s life and professional
partnership with Ike Turner; and On the Record (Dick & Ziering, 2020), which details the
accusations of sexual harassment and rape that have been lodged against Def Jam Recordings co-
founder Russell Simmons and is central to my examinations of disclosure in Chapter 3.
The popular press is deeply intertwined with the history and development of the
American music industry, and it has been culture and music journalists who have offered key
interventions into existing bodies of literature pertaining to sexism and sexual misconduct. More
recently, publications by music journalists, like long-time rock journalist Lisa Robinson’s (2020)
book Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music, and Fame, and, as well as veteran
writers and critics Ann Powers (2017) and Jessica Hopper (2015d), have provided important
critical histories and edited collections, respectively, that examine women in the music industry.
These publications stand on the shoulders of prior works by journalists who have similarly
attended to gender over the years, including journalists Sue Steward and Sheryl Garratt (1984),
whose Signed Sealed and Delivered: True Life Stories of Women in Pop interweaves anecdotal
histories with analyses of gendered power dynamics within the music industry; Simon Reynolds
and Joy Press, whose 1995 The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll dedicates a

37
large portion to analyzing “rebel misogynies”; Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell’s co-edited
1999 Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap;
19
and Steve Jones’ important
edited 2002 collection, Pop Music and the Press, which likewise attends to issues of gender,
among other central considerations, through a selection of journalistic articles and case study
examinations.
Given the media’s detailed—if fragmented—documentation of sexism and sexual
misconduct in America’s music industries, it is surprising to note that research has revealed little
scholarship pertaining specifically to this study’s central considerations. Indeed, scholarly
searches pertaining to rape in the music industry, aside from the popular press articles that have
emerged amid #MeToo, result in studies that largely investigate not the sexual violation of
bodies, but instead offer critical examinations of music piracy, bootlegging, and copyright
infringement, on one hand, and, on the other, articles offering content and discursive analyses of
misogyny and sexism in lyrics. “Rape,” in this first usage, is interchangeable with stealing and
constructed through an economic framework that foregrounds and seeks to protect units of
music, rather than musical bodies (for example, see Lee, 2005). Rape, in the latter usage, is
examined through analyses that look at specific lyrics—as I’ve outlined above—particularly
those in hip-hop and rap, which, scholars argue, suggest, encourage, or condone sexual violence
against women. Similarly, scholarly searches pertaining to sexism and the music industry
produce several results focused on lyrical content, again highlighting hip-hop and rap, as well as
rock music, and analyzing sexist representations in music videos. While a limited body of work

19
Jessica Hopper references Powers and McDonnell’s edited collection as a key text in her own development as a
music journalist and writer: “part of the reason I wanted to write [The First Collection of Criticism from a Female
Rock Critic] and was inspired to do this and thought that I could do this, is because when I was fifteen my
mom...brought me a galley, Rock She Wrote, edited by Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell... the fact that I was
fifteen and being able to read a book, I could see that there was twenty years precedent before me” (Blair, 2015).

38
pertains to singular case studies that do consider sexism and sexual assault in the music industry,
few of the above scholarly pieces attend to these issues as the central focus of their analysis, or
as imbricated in larger historical patterns of gender-based violence against women in the music
industry (and those that do [e.g., Steward & Garratt, 1984], are often decades old). Karin Pendle
and Melinda Boyd’s extensive guide, Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide,
which indexes research pertaining explicitly to women in music, while rich with resources that
foreground gender, includes only a handful of publications specifically addressing sexism in the
music industry, and these texts offer more singular artist-centered case studies, rather than in-
depth systemic examinations (2012).
Over the past few decades scholars such as Gayle Wald (1994; 1997; 2002), Sheila
Whiteley (2000), Lisa L. Rhodes (2005), and Jacqueline Warwick (2007) have published
important interdisciplinary examinations of women in the music industry—ranging from
groupies to teenybopper fans, to punk artists, rock queens, and girl groups. Expanding upon and
engaging with important work by such cultural theorists and sociologists as Simon Frith (1990;
1996), Angela McRobbie (1990; 1999; 2014), and George Lipsitz (1994; 2007), this body of
work helps to bring relevant analyses through to the contemporary moment. While many of these
texts deal more directly with questions of sexuality, sexualization, identity, subjectivity, and
place/space, this body of literature informs the guiding research questions and objectives of this
dissertation.
Sexual Misconduct: A Spectrum
Sexism manifests in a vast array of forms—both physically and verbally, and across a
range of severity, from offensive comments to violent rape. These forms should not be collapsed
together; the dynamics of power, inflicted traumas, and experiences of victims are much too

39
nuanced. To address violent rape, for example, with the same consequences as offensive
comments would construct a system of accountability that is not proportionate to the conduct of
a perpetrator or harm inflicted upon a victim. In this way, I am informed by the work of Kathleen
Reardon, whose Spectrum of Sexual Misconduct at Work (SSMW) addresses the nuances of
sexual misconduct by distinguishing acts of sexual misconduct along a spectrum—ranging from
“Generally non-offensive” to “Egregious Sexual Misconduct.” This spectrum provides the
framework through which I examine the cases included in this dissertation. As a spectrum, it
attends to the ways in which—regardless of severity—this misconduct is connected to larger
systems of power rooted in sexism and misogyny, while also providing a blueprint for how to
draw the line to distinguish different instances of misconduct. Following Reardon, I employ the
term “sexual misconduct” throughout my analysis to speak to this spectrum of experiences for
women in America’s music industries. At the same time, for each specific case study, I attend to
the specifics of each incident, clarifying the allegations raised via the disclosures and the
influence of power in those instances of misconduct. As Reardon articulates, “Decisions about
which category a behavior falls into depend on the situation, history of the relationship, tone of
delivery, and nonverbal behaviors” (2018). As two examples of how I came to select “sexual
misconduct” as the guiding term, we can turn to Tina Turner and long-time music journalist Lisa
Robinson: In Tina Turner’s memoir, I, Tina, this line between interactions that are classified as
“sex” and those that would, through contemporary understandings be stipulated as “rape,” is
blurry throughout. In this example, this is compounded by the dynamics of Ike and Tina Turner’s
relationship, first as bandmates, later as husband and wife. In the following excerpt Tina elects to
use the word “sex” to describe an incident that, by today’s standards and understandings would
be classified as (marital) “rape”:

40
When [Ike] got the record deal, I went to talk to him. First, he told me how it was going to be
from then on: He would pay my rent, but basically keep all the money for himself. I told him
I didn’t want to get involved any further with him. And that was the first time he beat me up.
With a shoe stretcher…and after that he made me go to bed, and he had sex [emphasis added]
with me. (Turner & Loder, 2010, pp. 78-79)

Similarly, when reflecting upon her experience witnessing and hearing about sexual
interactions in the era of 1970s Rock ’n’ Roll, music journalist Lisa Robinson reflects upon the
blurry lines between sexual interactions and sexual misconduct that distinguished this cultural
moment. She recounts, “this was all considered consensual sex. It was the ‘culture’ of the time”
(p. 67). While both examples speak to the conjuncture in which these incidents occurred, they
also speak to the complications I faced as a researcher in working to attend to the specificity of
incidents. Sexual misconduct thus allows for the ambivalence of particular interactions to be
considered broadly, while also ensuring that they are not collapsed within the language of
(consensual) sex.
Victims and Survivors
Recently, critical considerations of the “survivor” identity and notions of “victimhood”
have been troubled by scholars and journalists, alike (for example, see Kornhaber, 2015 & 2016).
These works point to the complexities that come with public disclosures of sexual harassment
and misconduct, as well as the problematic insinuations that emerge when the media frame
individuals as “survivors.” Of particular relevance to the study at hand, in an urgent and
thoughtful piece inspired by Lady Gaga’s performance of “‘Til It Happens to You” at the 2016
Academy Awards, New York Times’ Senior Editor Parul Seghal (2016) interrogates the shift
from previously-identifying individuals who experience sexual assault as “victims,” to today’s
commonly-used “survivor”—a shift she calls “the forced heroism of the ‘survivor.’” Worth
sharing at length, Seghal (2016) considers:

41
The survivor—or pop culture’s fantasy of her—now cuts a distinctive silhouette: She’s
damaged, but never so much as to be a figure of pity or revulsion; her wound makes her
interesting, even alluring. Where the victim was abject, a figure of shame and isolation,
the survivor is lithe and frequently well-armed. She is a little scary and a little sexy, and
her rage feels divinely sanctioned.… A word that was conceived to free women from
stigma now feels, to some, prescriptive. ‘Compulsory survivorship depoliticizes our
understanding of violence and its effects…. It places the burden of healing on the
individual, while comfortably erasing the systems and structures that make surviving
hard, harder for some than for others.’ It centers the person and not the event—which is
crucial…. Everything can be projected upon them, it seems—everything but the powers
and vulnerabilities of ordinary personhood.

Seghal’s articulation offers a conception of survivorship deeply intertwined with ideological
underpinnings that point to the influence/interrelation between postfeminism and neoliberalism.
It highlights the burden that becomes the survivor’s to survive and calls out how this personal
acknowledgment of survival removes society, and the industries in which such misconduct
occurs, from having to claim any responsibility or accountability for the systems and
infrastructures that uphold and enable such violence.
Likewise, it hints at how patterns of sexism and gender-based violence have not only
persisted but thrived in America’s music industries—it has created the perfect cocktail of “boys
will be boys” arguments, victim-blaming logic, and the commodification and objectification of
bodies to poison the waters for women so diligently working to swim upstream. I am both
disturbed and inspired by these insights, for they ask us to consider the practice of labeling, as
well as to reflect critically upon the ideologies and institutional structures that confine and define
their meaning. In this way, I am similarly informed by musician and harassment/safe space
educator Shawna Potter, who, in her book Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment
the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and Gather, clarifies:
Not everyone who experiences violence considers themselves a victim. The word
“victim” can feel loaded. For some, it seems too serious a designation to describe what
they went through, while others don’t want to risk being pitied or be seen as helpless.
Self-identifying as a “survivor” is a valid way to assert you’ve come out the other side of

42
a traumatic event, but...there is no shame in being a victim. It just means something
happened to you that is not your fault. (2019, p. 6)

Seghal’s assertion is not that the notion of a survivor is itself problematic—to the contrary, it
comes from a history of reclamation by feminists and survivors to reframe their lives post-
trauma. In this way, Potter’s reflection clarifies that self-identifying as a “survivor” can be
empowering as a way to distance oneself from the harm they endured, the label of identification
being incorporated into healing from or processing trauma. Together, however, they do point to
the urgency of questioning who benefits from these labels. To this point, Stuart Hall, et al. (1980)
articulate:
The significance of using a public idiom with which to “set the agenda” is that it inserts
the language of everyday communication back into the consensus…the continual process
of translating formal official definitions into the terms of ordinary conversation
reinforces, at the same time as it disguises, the links between two discourses. That is, the
media “take” the language of the public and, on each occasion, return it to them inflicted
with dominant and consensual connotations.” (p. 65)

I am informed by these cautious conceptions, which urge for critical considerations of the
language used to define and identify moments in which trauma is central. Likewise, given the
inconsistency of usage, with different terms used, at times, for traditional and social media
versus legal arguments and debates, I am cognizant of the weight such terms carry. Guided by
Seghal’s, Potter’s, and Hall, et al.’s observations, I elect to use “victim” throughout this
dissertation to identify those who disclose allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct, unless
individuals have self-identified via different terms (e.g., Drew Dixon has chosen the term
“warrior”; Tina Turner shares in her memoir, “I have survived” [Turner & Loder, 2010, p. 10]).
“Victim,” while as Seghal notes has been eschewed more recently for “survivor,” is still
meaningful for the experiences of being the subject of harm that it communicates. In other
words, “victim” contains within it the haunting presence of a perpetrator or perpetrators; I argue

43
it likewise communicates that the victim did not deserve the harm done to them, is not
responsible for the trauma they endured, or for their victimhood because of a perpetrator’s
actions. Victim, unlike “survivor,” connects an individual to the structures of power imbricated
in their abuse or mistreatment.
Method
“The [music] industry’s always got something to hide.”
- Robin A. Smith, orchestral arranger for Cher’s “Believe”
20

This dissertation offers a critical examination of disclosures within and related to
America’s music industries to explore the enduring prevalence of sexism, sexual harassment, and
sexual misconduct through the analytic of gender. I identify disclosures as an instance of
disruption in which otherwise-imbricated forces of power rupture—even if only momentarily—
revealing in greater detail the stitching that sutures such forces together. As Sarah Banet-Weiser
argues, “Historical moments map transitions…in a longer history of culture, economy and the
construction of subjectivity within the capitalist epistle. It is often…in the moments of
transition…that tensions around meanings of identities become especially visible (2012, p. 21).
In this way, I look to moments of disclosure as well as adjacent divulgences that may not always
be regarded as such—for example song lyrics and performances that present or allude to
narratives of misconduct dissociated from named incidents, perpetrators, or victims—to offer a
critical reading of how discourses about and around disclosures both qualify and condemn
instances of misconduct and abuse. To do so, I conduct a multi-method qualitative analysis, in
addition to archival research.
As auditory revelations, my analysis of disclosure is informed, in part, by existing
literature in sound studies that provides useful frameworks through which gender, silence, and

20
Winter, D. (Director). (2019). Cher: life in the spotlight. [Film]. Entertain Me Publishing Ltd.

44
vocality may be examined. As Amanda Weidman suggests, “sonic and material experiences of
voice are never independent of the cultural meanings attributed to sound, to the body, and
particularly to the voice itself” (2015, p. 232). As an archival project, my research draws from a
variety of primary sources and archival texts, including memoirs, artist and band biographies,
documentaries and biographical film dramas, podcasts, traditional and social media (e.g., The
New York Times, Los Angeles Times; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr), trade outlets and
publications (e.g., Billboard, Rolling Stone, Variety), lyrics, and award show acceptance
speeches. At the same time, as an historical aggregation of incidents of sexual harassment and
misconduct, this dissertation also offers the beginnings of a new archive. An archive in which the
verbal and physical manifestations of misogyny in America’s music industries are curated
through a critical lens to offer an alternative history—one that is both a partial corrective to
existing histories that overlook and or obfuscate such evidence, as well as a complement to
contextualize and expand upon those that may document fragments of the disclosures explored
herein. In this way, I take up a model of critical research informed significantly by cultural
theorist Stuart Hall, who, as Ben Carrington reminds us, asserts that, as researchers, “we must
recognize that we are ‘the beneficiaries of people who have struggled with thinking difficult
things for the first time’ but that we are also obliged to still think anew, and, where necessary, to
move beyond the established conceptual frameworks even as they are part of our own intellectual
formations” (2019, p. 251).
Any archive, like any history or any truth, is partial; when partial histories are compiled
through partial archives, stories and figures will undoubtedly be left out. As Lawrence Grossberg
suggests, “every research practice unavoidably takes place in a particular historical situation, and
is therefore in principle of a partial nature” (1983, p. 16). In this way, I acknowledge both the

45
boundaries and limitations of the work I present here and am cognizant that this effort is, itself,
an act of critical interrogation that necessarily draws parameters around what should and should
not be included; moreover, that it is assessed through my own interpretive lens in re-articulating
and situating the texts I examine throughout this work. To this end, I work to attend to the
discursive frameworks constructed by and included in the sources I explore. I look both for shifts
in those frames, as well as the ideological continuities that provide the foundations upon which
those discursive shifts occur. Informed by the work of French theorist and philosopher Michel
Foucault, I also conduct a discourse analysis in my examination of the narrativization of
disclosures, particularly in media coverage and social media, investigating not only how
incidents of disclosure are framed, but also examining how and when shifts occur in the
discursive frameworks pertaining to this mediated framing. As Foucault articulates with respect
to his conception of “regimes of practices,” the truths constructed via discursive knowledge are
different in different historical junctures:
It is a question of analyzing a ‘regime of practices’—practices being understood here as
places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned
and the taken-for-granted meet and interconnect. To analyze ‘regimes of practices’ means
to analyze programs of conduct that have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be
done…and codifying effects regarding what is to be known. (Foucault, 1994, p. 225)

Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace (1993) similarly clarify that, “history is differentiated and
fragmented into particular discourses, and…each fragment (each discourse) has a threshold, a
process of birth and an equally complex process of disappearance which can be analysed [sic]
and described” (1993, p. 51). At the same time, I conduct an ideological analysis, focusing not
only on the moments where discursive frameworks shift, but also on the ideological frameworks
that underpin different socio-historical contexts in which disclosures are made and reported.
History is central to these examinations, both for the connective tissues that persist across

46
different conjunctures, as well as for the distinctions that are marked by shifts, or ruptures, in
particular moments.
I am similarly informed by the work of cultural studies scholar Ien Ang, who articulates
that interpretive analyses “can never be ‘neutral’ and merely ‘descriptive’…it is only through the
interpretive framework constructed by the researcher that understandings of the ‘empirical’ come
about” (2013, p. 45). This dissertation is thus strongly informed by the work and methods of
cultural studies scholars who at once acknowledge these limitations while also providing
theoretical frameworks and investigative models through which rigorous, critical interrogations
might still provide generative insight into that which we come to know as “culture.” To this end,
I am again informed by the work of Hall, who by provocation and by example, continues to
challenge scholars to attend with rigor to the particularity and nuance of cultural research. In
particular, Hall’s theorizations afford space for ambivalence, to attend to specificity and
relationality without seeking or requiring resolution—space for both/and interrogations in which
the constraints of imbricated forces of power do not foreclose agency within the systems and
structures of America’s music industries. Key to this approach is Hall’s theorization of “the
conjuncture,” and, moreover, of the application of conjunctural analysis as put forward in the
seminal publication, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, an important
early contribution to the theory and methods of cultural studies, which Hall first published
alongside Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts in 1978. As Jeremy
Gilbert synthesizes, the conjuncture, as conceived by Hall et al., emphasizes “The importance of
mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking
out for political threats and opportunities” (2019, p. 5). As method, conjunctural analysis is
informed by the central understanding that “convergent and divergent tendencies shap[e] the

47
totality of power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time,” and it is
to these disparate tendencies and spatio-temporal moments that we should attend in and through
critical cultural studies work.
To this end, I work to attend to and identify both the particularity and relationally of the
cases I explore. I situate my analyses within specific socio-cultural and historical conjunctures
that, while never dissociated fully from those that precede or follow, are considered with and for
the attributes that make them distinctive. In particular, in my examination of news media and
trade outlets, I take up Hall et al.’s assertion that “‘news’ is the end-product of a complex process
which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially
constructed set of categories” (1980, p. 56). Following the model Hall et al. (1980) implemented
in their examination of “mugging” as a “social phenomenon,” I am interested in disclosure,
broadly, and particular incidents of disclosure, specifically, as social phenomena. Put another
way, I conduct a conjunctural analysis of disclosure in order to understand the social forces and
historical tendencies that enable and or constrain disclosure in particular historical moments, as
well as to interrogate how mediated narratives about such disclosures are framed in order to
more fully unpack the interlocking domains of power relevant to a critical examination of sexism
and sexual misconduct in America’s music industries.
Disclosure, as I explore throughout these chapters, is a moment of rupture—a crack that
can be read as indicative of a “crisis,” as conceived by Hall et al.’s model (1980). As such,
disclosure “serve[s] as the articulator of the crisis, as its ideological conductor” (1980, viii). This
application of the conjuncture, likewise, becomes key when exploring disclosure as interrelated
to the 2017 emergence and rise of the #MeToo movement—itself a separate conjuncture. The
shared and differentiating characteristics of these conjunctures is thus also central to my analysis.

48
As Trevor Herbert articulates in The Cultural Study of Music, “musical practices are usually
dependent on social, economic, and cultural interactions traversing a wider terrain than is
immediately occupied by the music makers” (2003, p. 154). Here, I again am informed by Ang,
who instructs, “It is not the search for (object, scientific) Truth in which the researcher is
engaged, but the construction of interpretations, of certain ways of understanding the world,
always historically located, subjective and relative” (2013, p. 450). This interpretive work, as
Ang articulates, is active and relational. Thus, while I employ a critical interrogation and a
critical analysis of the case studies and archival examples through which I have developed this
dissertation’s guiding arguments, I employ a particular understanding and application of critical
as both a concept and as an active standard for rigorous research.
bell hooks argues in Teaching Critical Thinking that “critical thinking is an interactive
process…that requires discernment” (2010, p. 9). Central to the practice and praxis of critical
thinking is a commitment of what hooks articulates as “radical openness”—“keeping an open
mind is an essential requirement of critical thinking,” she argues, “the shape of knowledge is
constantly changing” (p. 10). As such, we must reject rigidity of thought or practice in a way that
forecloses the opportunity for inquiry, observation, and new revelations to thoughtfully shift the
directions and foci of critical research. To this end, I am likewise informed by the model of
critical cultural research, which Ang proposes, that allows for, indeed requires, flexibility in
examinations of media and cultural texts—a flexibility that is not a step away from, but instead a
step toward rigor, so that we can attend to the nuance and particularity of each object, text, and
relationship. As Ang clarifies, this distinction proposes, “an open and contextual definition of
‘critical’ research, one that does not allow itself to rest easily on pre-existent epistemological
foundations but, on the contrary, is reassessed continuously according to the ways in which it

49
contributes to our understanding of the world” (2013, p. 444). Likewise, I again follow
Grossberg (1987), who similarly articulates, “the goal of [critical research] is to offer not a
polished representation of the truth, but simply a little help in our efforts to understand the
world” (p. 89). It is from this understanding that I apply a critical cultural analysis of disclosure
in the chapters that follow. May this dissertation be one push further toward helping us all
understand the world a bit better.
Intersectionality
This dissertation is, above all else, about power. Within America’s music industries, the
conditions of gender are the result of relationships of power and how those complex relationships
interact upon and through particular identities. As such, an intersectional analysis is integral to
this research and a useful analytical complement to Hall et al.’s (1980) conjuncture. As Ange-
Marie Hancock Alfaro articulates, intersectionality provides an “interpretive framework that
reconstitutes how we analyze puzzles of injustice” (2016, p. 80). An intersectional analysis, like
critical cultural analysis, provides space for examining both relationality and ambivalence
without requiring a resolution; put another way, it attends to power and privilege as actively and
differently constituted—depending on the specific topic of analysis—while also emphasizing
that relationships of power are not mutually exclusive. This provides space for agency and
oppression or exploitation to co-exist. As Hancock-Alfaro further clarifies, “one is neither purely
an oppressor nor purely oppressed” (2016, p. 82).
Moreover, intersectionality allows for a more robust interrogation of how domains of
power are not simply present simultaneously in a particular conjuncture or situation, but that they
are “interlocking” and co-constitutive (Hancock-Alfaro, 2016, p. 82). Building upon Hancock-
Alfaro’s assertions, my use of intersectionality as method is also informed by Patricia Hill

50
Collins and Sirma Bilge’s (2016) instructive breakdown of what they identify to be the “six core
ideas that appear and reappear when people use intersectionality as an analytic tool: inequality,
relationality, power, social context, complexity, and social justice” (2016, p. 25). In tandem with
these core ideas, they identify four domains of power critical to any intersectional analysis:
“interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural” (p. 7). The interpersonal domain pertains to
relationships between individuals, “power relations are about people’s lives,” they clarify, “how
people relate to one another, and who is advantaged or disadvantaged within social interactions”
(2016, p. 7). The disciplinary domain of power, “operates by disciplining people in ways that put
people’s lives on paths that make some options seem viable and others out of reach” (2016, p. 8).
Given the hierarchical relationship between many of the victims and alleged perpetrators
examined in this dissertation, the disciplinary domain is applicable to such relationships as
manager/artist (Kim Fowley/Jackie Fuchs), or artist/producer (Kesha/Dr. Luke), in which the
power disparity in particular professional working relationships places artists in positions of
precarity. The cultural domain, as conceived by Collins and Bilge, “helps manufacture messages
that playing fields are level, that all competitions are fair, and that any resulting patterns of
winners and losers have been fairly accomplished” (2016, p. 10). This domain becomes a
generative point of analysis for examining texts that attend to how individuals have navigated,
and/or have been able to participate in various sectors of America’s music industries (e.g.,
memoirs and trade magazine articles). Lastly, the structural domain of power speaks to the
structures themselves, “because intersectionality embraces complexity,” they argue, “it questions
how intersecting power relations of class, gender, race, and nation shape the institutionalization
and organization of [a particular structure]” (2016, p. 11). In this way, the structural domain of
power can be examined with respect to the specific spaces and sectors of America’s music

51
industries in which sexual harassment and misconduct occur—from record labels to recording
studios.
While the domains of power and core ideas are present across all cases that I explore, not
all domains are present in the same ways nor at the same times. As Collins and Bilge further
articulate: “these ideas are neither always present in a particular project, nor do they appear in
projects in the same way. Instead, they provide guideposts for thinking through intersectionality”
(2016, p. 25). In my analysis, I have worked to provide sign-posts, highlighting which domains
of power are being interrogated at different moments. While gender is the primary category of
difference to which I attend, guided by the historical dominance and framing of the gender
binary in America’s music industries, I also consider the following categories of difference at
different points in my analysis: age, race, professional standing/role (of perpetrators and
victims), time (when incident occurred versus when disclosure became public), and
consequences for the misconduct (for both victims and perpetrators).
Case Studies
I examine a range of case studies throughout this dissertation; each of which interrogates
a separate incident of public disclosure. Three primary case studies guide this work—the public
disclosure of allegations against The Runaways’ manager Kim Fowley, Def Jam Recordings co-
founder Russell Simons, and long-time music executive Antonio “L.A.” Reid. Each case is put
into conversation with other incidents of disclosure, highlighting the through-lines and key
patterns that emerge across cases, across genres, and across relevant conjunctures. Each case
represents a moment in which disclosure became public. The allegations raised in the disclosures
I examine refer to events of sexual harassment or misconduct that span more than five decades,
from 1975 to 2016. However, the moment of disclosure at which these allegations became

52
public, in nearly all cases, took place over the past decade. I select the case studies included
throughout this dissertation in order to present a range—across decades; across genres (Rock,
Hip-Hop, Pop, Country, Indie, R&B); across sectors and professional roles, with respect to both
victims (artist, A&R executive, music journalist) and alleged perpetrators (manager, label
president, producer, publicist); across a spectrum of sexual misconduct (from harassment to
rape); and from both before and in the midst of the #MeToo movement. With this range of cases,
I work to clarify both how and why sexism and sexual misconduct are endemic to America’s
music industries, and to make clear that such incidents are not reserved for any particular sector,
space, or genre, but pervasive through and across the broad and treacherous landscape that
comprises popular American music. The first case I explore interrogates The Runaways’ Jackie
Fuchs’s allegations of rape against the band’s manager, Kim Fowley, which took place in 1975.
The conjuncture of this incident coincides with the court case of Barnes v Train (1974), which is
commonly accepted as the first lawsuit filed in response to sexual harassment in the workplace
(Strickland, 1995).
Limitations
Second Wounds
This dissertation is an examination of power—about how interlocking structures of
power constrain and delimit women in America’s music industries. My route to investigate
power takes place in and through a close examination of public disclosures—the moments at
which an incident of harassment or misconduct is brought to light. Trauma research is hard.
Sitting with the stories and wounds of the women whose disclosures I investigate throughout
these chapters requires careful, patient, and rigorous attention. While I have dedicated much of
my academic career and research to interrogating questions of identity, power, and belonging,

53
which often intersect with questions of violence, exploitation, and abuse, I was unprepared for
the magnitude of weight these disclosures would bring to bear on my process and practice
throughout this research. The case studies included here represent just a small fraction of the
stories I learned and sat with over the course of this project. I have tried, as relevant and
appropriate, to bring in the voices and disclosures of others via footnotes to expand the platforms
through which these voices and disclosures may be heard. Two factors further compounded my
research over the course of this work. In learning about my research and the focus of this
dissertation, friends and family opened up to me with their own stories of harassment and
misconduct—some incidents from the past, some current and ongoing, and some pronounced
even more as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on personal and domestic
relationships. The proximity and intimacy of these disclosures was, at times, difficult to navigate
alongside the critical analytical lens I worked to maintain in my research. At the same time, over
the course of this project, allegations against George Tyndall, a gynecologist at the University of
Southern California, came to light, which had an immediate and direct impact on the scholarly
community of which I am a part. Together, these factors complicated the course and pace of this
research. At the same time, these disclosures reminded me to refocus on the work I want my
work to do and made ever-clearer why interrogations of power are so important.
Breaking News
On October 4, 2017, the prospectus for this dissertation was presented and approved by
the five members of my doctoral qualifying exams committee with whom I have been so
fortunate to work over the course of my seven years in the USC Annenberg doctoral program
and to whom I present this dissertation nearly four years later. The culmination of three years of
doctoral course work and a series of critical explorations investigating power, identity, and

54
belonging in popular American music through the guiding analytic of gender, my prospectus
imagined and designed a project to examine what I then-identified as one of the most significant
barriers to access, mobility, power, and representation for women in America’s mainstream
music industries: The historical pervasiveness of sexism and sexual misconduct. Time and
again—from research on the representation of women on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart, to a
critical examination of the disproportionate number of women in the Songwriters Hall of Fame,
to an interrogation of the widespread representations of violence against women in mainstream
music videos, and to an exploration of the stakes and stereotypes women performers confront in
the wake of motherhood—the connecting through-line that continued to emerge in my research
was that sexism and sexual misconduct are constitutive variables in how and the extent to which
women’s careers and ambitions have been historically curtailed in America’s music industries.
The “lack” of women in certain sectors of these industries is not the result of too few
skilled women for particular positions, or a lack of interest by women and girls to participate in
certain music spaces. This void of women, and contrastingly the disproportionate presence of
men, is, I then-posited, the symptomatic manifestation of a much more severe entanglement in
which a multi-dimensional intersection of power—what Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge
(2016) distinguish as the interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural domains of power—
operates, in large part, in and through the logic of patriarchy and misogyny to not only allow for
such gender-based transgressions and abuses to occur, but to actively and knowingly facilitate
and enable this behavior. Such intersections operate in and through what cultural theorist Stuart
Hall conceives as the “conjuncture,” specific spatio-temporal moments in which dominant
ideologies and discursive frameworks inform and maintain these entanglements, and thus impact
their representation and manifestation externally. What’s more, such markers of identity as race,

55
class, age, sexuality, and socio-economic status compound the weight of this intersection for
women and girls. I asserted in my prospectus that this dissertation would proceed as an empirical
study and critical exploration that would provide historical and archival evidence to
substantiate—and/or potentially undermine—what my preliminary research had shown to-date:
The problem was not “too few women,” or the failure of individual women to “lean in” via grit
and ambition to attain particular statuses and positions within the American music industries’
broad and eclectic sectors. Nor was the problem, my initial research suggested, simply “too
many men,” or too many men in specific positions of power. The problem I identified and that
most informed the design and direction of this dissertation, is in some ways not a “problem” at
all; the infrastructure and what I call “scaffolding” that undergirds, upholds, and informs
America’s music industries is operating by design.
Incidents of sexism and assault were/are not enigmas, they are not offshoots from a
system that is otherwise safe, accessible, and welcoming to women and other marginalized folks.
Sexism, rather, is “baked in” to the cultural and commercial ideologies of these spaces and it is
from this foundational point that such incidents transpire and to which this dissertation sought—
and ultimately did—attend. To do so, I identified moments of public disclosure pertaining to
sexism and sexual misconduct as the most generative entry points for interrogating how these
four domains of power together operate to uphold the American music industries’ patriarchal
infrastructures, baking sexism right in. As a moment of rupture, public disclosures reveal cracks
in the façade, fissures in the active and ongoing construction and maintenance of the industries’
scaffolding, which allow for the light to get in. Guided by committee feedback from my
prospectus defense, one of the first steps in establishing this argument we agreed would be to
substantiate and articulate that incidents of sexism and sexual misconduct are endemic and

56
widespread—both within America’s music industries and within the broader socio-cultural
context and history of America’s dominant patriarchal culture in which the industries are
situated—countering historical reportage and popular discourses that frame such incidents as the
result of a few singular bad actors doing a few singular bad things, rather than illuminating the
ubiquity and structural and systemic manifestations of sexism.
Within twenty-four hours of my defense, on October 5, 2017, The New York Times
published its alarming exposé on long-time Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The article
pulled from extensive research and interviews with a number of women, many coming forward
for the first time publicly, with scathing allegations and disclosures detailing decades of sexism,
sexual misconduct, and abuse at the hands of the then-lauded movie executive. (As a relevant
aside, prior to his decades of decorated success at Miramax, Weinstein was an aspiring music
man; he dropped out of college to co-found Harvey and Corky Present, a music promotion and
concert organizing company that brought acts like Jethro Tull, Chuck Berry, The Police, and The
Rolling Stones to his hometown of Buffalo, New York [Johnson & Galloway, 2018].) Led by
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the Times, this revealing report was followed within days by
another detailed report by Ronan Farrow published in The New Yorker, elevating and extending
this scandal beyond the scope of entertainment news and sparking what has come to be one of
the key conjunctures of the twenty-first century: The re-emergence of #MeToo as a defining
social media campaign and evolution into a global social justice movement against sexual
harassment and abuse.
21
This hashtag is crucial to the conjuncture. As Hall et al. (1980) suggest:

21
Before it was a hash-tagged proclamation connecting experiences of sexual harassment and misconduct across
social media platforms around the world, MeToo was a movement founded by activist and sexual misconduct
advocate Tarana Burke. In 2017, following the explosive exposé on Weinstein, the phrase launched back into
circulation after Actress Alyssa Milano, via Twitter, asked her followers: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or
assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet’” (Garcia, 2017).
#MeToo has since been taken up around the world through culturally-specific iterations: “#YoTambien in

57
Labels are important, especially when applied to dramatic public events. They not only
place and identify those events; they assign events to a context. Thereafter the use of the
label is likely to mobilise [sic] this whole referential context, with all its associated
meanings and connotations. (p. 19)

These initial two articles marked what would become a rigorous and robust body of media
reportage published over the course of this dissertation research, and situated The New York
Times alongside The New Yorker as recipients of The 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. The
Award’s description provides a snapshot of the socio-cultural impact of this event at this
conjuncture:
For explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators,
including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing
them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim
silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women. (The
Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2018)

The timeliness of this exposé and the gravity of the international social justice movement that
has emerged in its wake was both fortuitous and destabilizing with respect to the progress of this
dissertation research. While on one hand, the magnitude of reportage published over the past four
years has provided substantial evidentiary support speaking to the historical and enduring
prevalence of sexism and sexual misconduct across American industries and organizations for
women and men (although disproportionately)—from Hollywood (Kantor & Twohey, 2017) to
mainstream news media (Steel, 2017; Gabler et al., 2017; Barker & Gabler, 2017), to politics and
the American military and armed forces (Frye, 2018; Philipps, 2019; Farrow, 2021), to K-12 and
higher education (Green, 2019; Dick, 2015; Hamilton & Ryan, 2021; Rohan, 2012; Hauser &
Astor, 2018), to Silicon Valley (Benner, 2017)—this groundswell also introduced a new and
unforeseen challenge in navigating this research.
22
This resulted in moments of “analysis

Spanish, #BalanceTonPorc (‘expose your pig’) in French and #quellavoltache (‘that time when’) in Italian”
(Bennett, 2018).
22
While not contemporaneous with the #MeToo “moment,” I want to acknowledge that one of the biggest

58
paralysis,” followed by shifting strategies regarding how to integrate and address contemporary
revelations unfolding throughout the research and how to carefully (re)define the parameters of
this research. At the same time, the heightened moment of visibility afforded swaths of women
with a new historical conjuncture primed for disclosure in a way heretofore unseen in American
history.

revelations with respect to sexual harassment and misconduct in the twenty-first century was published by The
Boston Globe in 2002 with an explosive exposé detailing rampant and enduring misconduct by priests against young
boys and parishioners that was knowingly and actively covered up by the Catholic Church for decades (Carroll et al,
2002). The #MeToo movement that surged in the wake of the Weinstein scandal expands upon the groundwork
outlined by the Globe with respect to the prevalence, and structural facilitation and protection, of these abuses.

59
Chapter 2: The Lost Girls
“There are people who speak and are believed, and the consequence is that they disappear.”
23

- Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

I like when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent,
and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you.
It looks as though your eyes had flown away
and it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth…
I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent.
Distant and painful as if you had died.
- Pablo Neruda, I Like When You Are Quiet
24

Foreclosing Disclosure
The history of disclosure in the American music industry can be understood, perhaps
paradoxically, as a history of silence—of keeping silent, of being silenced, of working to break
silences, of what Anna María Ochoa Gautier articulates as “unsilencing” (2015). Yet this history
of silence does not denote absence; it is, rather, a sonic manifestation of consistent and perpetual
abuses of power and complex networks within the structure of an industry built on sound, which
enable, facilitate, and perpetuate this auditory void. In this way, silence is relational and a matter
of degree. It is never neutral. To extend an assertion articulated by philosopher and activist Susan
Sontag in her influential 1969 article, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “there is no neutral surface,
no neutral discourse, no neutral theme, no neutral form. Something is neutral only with respect to
something else” (2002, p. 10). She continues: “‘silence’ never ceases to imply its opposite and to
demand on its presence” (p. 11). Silence can thus be understood as a demarcation of power
operating by and through the sonic—determining who and what is worthy of being heard. As
seminal sound theorist, composer, and artist John Cage long asserted, “there is no such thing as
silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound” (as cited in Sontag, 2002, p. 10).

23
Solnit, R. (2017). The mother of all questions. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
24
Neruda, P. “I Like When You Are Quiet.” (1924). Retrieved from http://thue.stanford.edu/jacquie/callas.html.
This poem was first brought to my attention during an interview with Chilean popstar and activist, Francisca
Valenzuela in 2020 for The New New, a podcast I co-executive produced as part of this research and my fellowship
with the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Popular Music Project.

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That “something” can be unpacked beyond audible frequencies and sonic vibrations in the
strictly acoustical sense and extended to more broadly denote forces that constrain and facilitate
who and what can be heard—and when—within America’s music industries. It is from this
understanding that Sontag similarly argues, “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in
many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue” (2002, p. 11).
Silence can also be conceived as a central component of any acoustical paradigm—what
pioneering sound scholar, composer, and environmentalist R. Murray Schaffer historically
conceived as a “Soundscape”—“any acoustic field of study” (1994, p. 7)—or alternatively, what
sound scholar and artist Brandon LaBelle (2010) has more recently theorized as an “acoustic
territory.” These paradigms situate silence within a framework of auditory knowledge that
conceives the audible as a crucial entry point for interrogating the co-constitutive dynamics of
sound, space, and place and further for problematizing the imbricated forces of power and
ideology that inform and characterize particular “territories.” I am interested in what constitutes
the soundscape and the acoustic territories of America’s music industries, and, more specifically,
how we might conceive of a soundscape or acoustic territory of disclosure. Both Schaffer’s
theorization of the soundscape and LaBelle’s notion of acoustic territories interrogate the
intimate relationship between sound and context, tracing the evolution of sonic relationships
within both natural and built environments subject to the ever-changing, reorienting (and often
destructive) forces of humanity, from industrialization to globalization. LaBelle (2010) argues,
“an entire history and culture can be found within a single sound; from its source to its
destination sound is generative of a diverse range of experiences, as well as remaining
specifically tied to a given context, as a deeper expressive and prolonged figure of culture” (p.
xvi). Furthermore, he asserts:

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Auditory knowledge is a radical epistemological thrust that unfolds as a spatio-temporal
event: sound opens up a field of interaction, to become a channel, a fluid, a flux of voice
and urgency, or play and drama, of mutuality and sharing, to ultimately carve out a
micro-geography of the moment, while always already disappearing, as a distributive and
sensitive propagation. (2010, p. xvii)

At the same time, and of particular relevance to this project, Schaffer attends to music as one
specific manifestation of sound within his theorization of the soundscape, clarifying, “music is
an indicator of the age, revealing, for those who know how to read its symptomatic messages, a
means of fixing social and even political events” (1994, p. 7). Together, Schaffer and LaBelle
offer a generative and intersecting framework for critically examining how structures inform and
enable particular experiences and afford a broader reading of disclosure, extending the definition
of disclosure beyond that of a simple revelation, the sharing of a secret, to a more inclusive
conception that necessarily attends to the environmental and structural circumstances in which
such moments of divulgence occur—regardless of whether disclosures take the form of highly-
orchestrated media events or impromptu declarations.
My interrogation of disclosure is similarly informed by French theorist and philosopher
Michel Foucault’s conception of “confession,” which he theorizes in his seminal text, The
History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (1978, 1990). In a detailed examination of the
religious practices and rituals of the medieval Christian church, Foucault explicates how the act
of confession at once operates as an affirming practice of religious participation—one’s
performance of being a “good Christian”—as well as the activation of a self-constructing
subject/subjecthood. In other words, Foucault argues that subjecthood is altered through the
confessional act, which is situated in and understood through the dominant discursive
frameworks surrounding understandings of the body—the “flesh”—and, in particular, of the role
of chastity and virginity as conceived via dominant Western religious practices. At the same

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time, confession, for Foucault, is about power—about how the confession itself, as a specific act
of revelation and disclosure, is both constitutive of and constituted by the governing truths in a
particular conjuncture. “Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the
confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth,” he argues (1990, p.
53). In this way, while rooted in religious practice, the confession extends beyond the spaces of
the church into society where it is taken up as an integral activation of the self-constructing
subject.
Confession thus becomes ritualized as a practice of revealing truths both about the self
and the society in which the self is situated—the process and practice of confession as a key
activation of that revelation and truth telling as one manifestation of truth. Confession is, as
Foucault conceives, “The infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself…a truth which
the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (1990, p. 54). In this way,
while confession for Foucault is closely tied to the body through confessions of sex, the act of
confession—of extracting truth from the depths of oneself—is also about attaining a higher self
as conceived via consciousness and one’s soul. As Foucault articulates, the confession is about
“seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not simply in oneself…but in the self examination
that yields, through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic certainties of consciousness”
(pp. 54-55). In this way, Foucault’s conception of confession is, like Sontag’s notion of silence,
relational and meaningful. Confession is situated as a practice by which individuals come to
perform and to know themselves. At the same time, as a practice taken up en masse, confession
at once becomes an act of liberation—of achieving a higher state of consciousness—while also a
tactic of control through and by which the act of confession, more than the content of the
confession itself, becomes the stipulation for acceptance and participation.

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Informed in this way by the theoretical contributions of Foucault, existing sound studies
scholarship, literature in popular music and music industry studies, and the interdisciplinary body
of work upon which this dissertation expands, I argue that one can invite Sterne’s (2014) earlier-
introduced conception of American music industries into conversation with Schaffer’s notion of
the soundscape and LaBelle’s theorization of acoustic territories to examine incidents of
disclosure—or confession—within the music industries and to situate those incidents within
spatio-temporal structures rooted in specific conjunctures in which a myriad of “micro-
geographies” operate and intersect. With this understanding, we must listen closely and
intentionally to the acoustic territories of the American music industries—to both the sounds and
silences of this soundscape—to better understand what such auditory knowledge might reveal
about the interlocking domains of power, conditions, and barriers experienced by the inhabitants
of the industries’ spaces on the ground.
As one methodological approach to this work, and in-line with Schaffer’s assertion that
we must “know how to read the symptomatic messages” of music, I follow the call of sound
theorist Pauline Oliveros who advocates for “deep listening” in any critical examination of an
acoustic terrain—a practice that carefully disentangles “hearing” from “listening” to foreground
the active and engaged work necessary to attend to the information constructed, communicated,
and (re)presented via sound. “What is heard is changed by listening,” Oliveros asserts, “and
changes the listener” (1999, p. 1). Indeed, as Oliveros argues, “listening is directing attention to
what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action” (1999, p. 1). Silence is
not a simple matter of soundlessness; a close reading of public disclosures presents a generative
entry point, foregrounding moments of rupture, that allow for a renewed critical listening of what
hasn’t heretofore been audible or is now audible in new ways in order to better understand the

64
hierarchical scaffolding and interlocking domains of power that together construct, inform, and
uphold America’s dominant music industries.
This scaffolding is circuitous in its formation, deformation, and reformation of the
industries’ structures and can be interrogated through an application of French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu’s notion of the “habitus” “not only [as] a structuring structure…but also a structured
structure” (1979, 1984 p. 170). That is, the scaffolding of the American music industries is both
foundational and reinforcing. Sexism and sexual misconduct are not just endemic to this
structure, they are, to borrow a phrase from digital media scholar Safiya Noble (2018), “baked
in” to the very infrastructures that gives the industries their forms and undergirds contemporary
conceptions of the “music industrial complex.” Public disclosures provide a unique opportunity
to interrogate the power and fissures of these structures, and it is thus to select moments of
disclosure that I turn, exploring what they reveal about experiences of violence and abuse and
about the framing of those experiences as constructed and (re)circulated via media and public
texts. I explore these case studies while working to articulate recurring themes as revealed by
women from across decades and genres of American music in order to situate and explore the
historical conjunctures of these moments, and to articulate key patterns that speak to the structure
of the industries’ scaffolding. These findings are then put into conversation with a close
interrogation of the systemic “failures” of the music industries in protecting key actors and in
preventing the perpetuation of abuse.
Informed by the aforementioned theorizations of silence, I am interested in moments
when disclosure becomes public—that is, in moments when individuals break their silence to
disclose experiences of misconduct or abuse with audiences beyond and outside the micro-
geographies of America’s music industries. I work to differentiate moments of disclosure around

65
particular incidents, distinguishing, as possible, when victims disclosed moments of misconduct
or abuse internally from when victims share information externally with broader public
audiences via memoirs, documentaries, and mainstream and social media. To further clarify, my
focus here is not simply to identify and recount the first moment of disclosure for a given
incident or allegation, but rather to examine the first public moments of disclosure—the
moments when information about an incident or incidents is no longer confined within the
professional and personal, formal and informal networks of the American music industries. As
Sontag argues, “The exemplary modern artist’s choice of silence isn’t often carried to this point
of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking,
but in a manner that his audience can’t hear” (2002, p. 3).
This chapter takes up the assertions of this formative work in sound studies and applies
Oliveros’s practice of deep listening to closely examine incidents of disclosure pertaining to one
incident of sexual misconduct—a moment in which silence is ruptured and rearranged—to
contextualize and challenge the narratives that have historically been presented and,
consequently, have delimited access, parity, and power. Engaging with Cage’s assertion that
silence is always meaningful, I also listen deeply for what silences say and to what audiences at
times “can’t hear,” problematizing “can’t” through a close examination of the structural,
ideological, cultural, and socio-historical barriers to disclosure that constrain individuals’
abilities to come forward. I unpack who is able to speak to and of these silences and work to
identify how silences are gendered and brought to the fore through disclosure, investigating the
ways in which particular histories, incidents, and patterns of misconduct have necessarily been
enabled by the complex scaffolding that upholds America’s music industries.

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The Runaway: Jackie Fuchs
In July 2015, Huffington Post reporter Jason Cherkis’s article “The Lost Girls” revealed
that Jackie Fox (née Jackie Fuchs) of The Runaways was raped at the age of fifteen by the band’s
manager, Kim Fowley. The disclosure came six months after Fowley’s death at the age of 75.
Cherkis’s article quickly went viral. The 1975 incident, Fuchs discloses, occurred in a room full
of people, none of whom came to her aid; among those present, Fuchs alleges, were bandmates
Joan Jett and Cherie Currie (Cherkis, 2015). Fuchs sought out Cherkis via social media to tell her
story, he revealed to long-time music journalist Jessica Hopper in an interview after the piece ran
(2015a). Fuchs’s decision to contact Cherkis was twofold: He is not a music reporter, which she
believed would allow for the story to be told without Cherkis getting caught up in “Runaways
trivia”; and Fuchs was drawn to Cherkis’s record of bringing social scientific insight into his
writing, which could help to examine and explain just why no one in the room had come to
Fuchs’ aid that night (Hopper, 2015a). As Cherkis explained to Hopper (2015a):
By the time I talked to [Fuchs], she had a lot of anger towards the other band members
and the other people in the room. Many of the people in the room she had no idea were
there, but she had already come to an understanding that they were victims, too, that they
had gone through something as well-being witnesses and not acting.

This understanding of bystanders as “victims” is a central component of what feminist media
scholar Carrie A. Rentschler (2011) theorizes as “second wounds.” “Witnessing,” Rentschler
argues, “is a form of participation...in others’ suffering” (2004, p. 297). Cherkis’s public
identification of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie in the article led to each being questioned about their
alleged inaction. In turn, both artists took to social media to respond to Fuchs’s accusations via
Facebook. Jett and Currie denied witnessing Fuchs’s rape, with Jett “wish[ing] her peace and
healing,” while Currie, more incensed, wrote: “I will prove I am telling the truth. I will not allow
anyone to throw me under the bus and accuse me of such a foul act,” and further adding she

67
would arrange a polygraph test to confirm her account (Lodi, 2015).
Rentschler offers two important theoretical frameworks that inform examinations of
sexual assault and misconduct, speaking directly to the media’s framing of victims, survivors,
and witnesses of trauma. Examining mediated moments specifically to consider how both
victims and witnesses of trauma are (re)presented, Rentschler theorizes “an urban physiognomy”
that addresses the “bystander effect” and the constitution of “failed witnesses”—a conception
developed through an in-depth examination of the infamous Kitty Genovese murder that
occurred in 1964 in New York City. “Truths lie not in the veracity of the witnesses themselves,”
Rentschler contends, “but in the ability of news and police photography to spectate the crime
scene and murder victim for readers” (2011, p. 310). Furthermore—and in parallel to the
assertion made by New York Times’ Senior Editor Parul Sehgal regarding the recent linguistic
shift from “victims” to “survivors” that I explore in Chapter 1—the media’s coverage of this
event centers not on the incident itself, nor on the victim and/or perpetrator of the crime, but
instead on the “failed witnesses,” those present who did not intervene. As Rentschler details, “the
‘crime’ the news covered around the Genovese assault was not murder but the fearing and fearful
White urban populace that became apathetic in the face of danger it perceived in the streets”
(2011, p. 313). In this way, whose story matters—and what aspects of a story are important—are
significantly framed by the media’s reportage.
Similarly, in an examination of highly-mediated political moments, like 9/11, Rentschler
contends that “built into the act of bearing witness...is the political distinction between victims
whose suffering matters, and those who does not” (2004, p. 296). We must thus always ask, who
is the author of these stories? Who stands to benefit from disclosure and from stories being told?
Why do silences around incidents of sexual misconduct and assault persist and what is at stake

68
that keeps survivors from coming forward? And, perhaps most importantly, who is missing from
the stories all-together—whose voices have been overlooked or erased away? Toward what end?
and who is most harmed by these silences?
While the Kitty Genovese case has become a common reference point in considerations
of the “bystander effect,” Rentschler importantly details the role gender likely played in the
inaction of witnesses (and auditors) to the trauma, articulating, “some of the neighbors may have
ignored the sounds of [the] assault precisely because it sounded like an act of male violence
against women” (2011, p. 324). Additionally, Rentschler’s 2011 book Second Wounds: Victims’
Rights and the Media in the U.S. introduces a theory of “covictim” and “second wounds,” which
expands upon the aforementioned concepts to further consider how victimization and the role of
the “victim” serves larger political and ideological goals. As Rentschler articulates: “the concepts
of covictim and...second wounds...depict victimization as connective and vicarious, as
transportable and transposable experiences that mark mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, and
brothers as the victims of crime” (2011, loc. 300). In this way, the notion of the “failed witness”
and “second wounds” together provide a useful theoretical framework for interrogating incidents
of sexism and sexual misconduct—particularly those that occurred in public and/or in the midst
of others, like that Fuchs claims to have endured.
One could argue that whether Jett and/or Currie witnessed Fowley’s alleged attack of
Fuchs is of secondary importance to the primary actions of Fowley in the assault. Regardless, the
media coverage of their respective responses is worthy of further investigation for its framing of
the central disclosure at hand. By shifting the focus away from the assault Fuchs endured and
zooming in on Jett and Currie as alleged witnesses of the attack, the story becomes concerned
not with Fowley’s perpetration of sexual assault, the unequal power dynamics between Fowley

69
and Fuchs via their professional manager-artists relationship, the discrepancy of age between
then-fifteen-year-old Fuchs and then-thirty-six-year-old Fowley, or with the systemic and
cultural failings that allowed a public act of sexual violence to go unchallenged. Instead, the
narrativized disclosure becomes a story about Jett and Currie as “failed witnesses,” bystanders to
an alleged event who must in the wake of Fuchs’s disclosure respond to a demanding and
scandal-hungry public. In the absence of evidentiary support—photographic or otherwise—
Fuchs’s story is in this way (re)narrativized through the media’s subsequent examination of those
who failed to intervene—shifting the focus and frame from her disclosure of the incident to the
spectacle and accusations roused by its telling. Oliveros’s (1999) call for deep listening again
proves useful in this examination, as the mediated account of this disclosure and the resultant
coverage shifts the takeaway from this moment—what is “heard” from this disclosure is shaped
by reporters and thus audiences are directed to listen in to Currie and Jett’s defense, relegating
Fuchs into the shadows of her own disclosure.
This mediated shift, away from Fowley and Fuchs and toward Jett and Currie, reveals
another point of contention to which critical attention should be paid: the question of “truth,” of
fact, of what actually happened. The moment in which disclosure becomes public, the incidents
and actors involved are exposed to the “court of public opinion,” a historically inadequate
tribunal that, while potentially impactful in mobilizing pressure toward justice and at-times loud
in calls for accountability, is also quick to indict, often inconsistent with America’s judicial and
legal systems, and has become ever-more powerful in the context of what Manuel Castells (2004,
2009) has theorized as today’s “network society.” I explore some of these networks as a site of
struggle in further detail in Chapter 3. To this end, it is important to clarify here that this
dissertation does not claim, nor attempt, to confirm or disprove the truths about the events I

70
explore. To do so would be a foolish undertaking compounded by evidentiary gaps, the often-
significant passage of time, conflicting accounts, and fragmented memories. However, if, as
Rentschler contends, “Truths lie not in the veracity of the witnesses themselves, but in the ability
of news and police photography to spectate the crime scene and murder victim for readers”
(2011, p. 310), we can extend this understanding in analyses of disclosure to instead focus on the
discursive knowledge revealed through the mediation of these events and the patterns that
emerge from public disclosures to more fully disentangle the structural and cultural forces that
facilitate and enable the perpetuation of abuse unimpeded by the unknowable truths of particular
incidents. “Truth becomes a function of what can be said, written or thought,” Alec McHoul and
Wendy Grace clarify with respect to Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis. In this way, [the]
project becomes one of exposing the historical specificity…of what we seem to know today with
such certainty” (1993, p. 33).
Similarly, in his seminal essay, “Encoding/decoding,” Stuart Hall (1980) laid the
groundwork for the critical media analysis that informs one key methodological approach in this
dissertation, asserting:
Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language:
and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse. Discursive
‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language
but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions. (p. 132)

The discursive narratives that inform and undergird the mediatization of events intersect with the
socio-cultural frameworks and dominant ideologies that constitute and are constituted by specific
historical conjunctures. Here, the “veracity” to which Rentschler alludes, the “truth” Foucault
interrogates, and the “reality” Hall conceives together problematize how public audiences come
to know events and thus impact the consequences individuals and industries confront, or avoid,
in the face of public disclosures. The narrativization of disclosure and key moments in the telling

71
and retelling of historical acts of misconduct and abuse within America’s music industries are
framed through discursive knowledge that is actively and socially constructed. As such, shifts in
context and in the ideologies that inform discursive knowledge are themselves unstable, subject
to (d)evolution and marked by moments of rupture in which discursive thresholds become
illuminated—it is often in these moments of rupture that the systems of values and beliefs
underpinning discursive frameworks are both concretized and transformed. As I addressed in the
introduction, the Harvey Weinstein scandal and re-emergence of the #MeToo movement marks
one such threshold, which has rapidly resulted in a shift of discursive frameworks deployed and
employed in the framing, mediation, and reportage of incidents of sexual harassment, abuse, and
misconduct, particularly with respect to American entertainment industries. However, while this
contemporary threshold may mark a moment of renewed visibility in the patriarchal structures
that foster such a broad ubiquity of gender-based violence, the path from public visibility to
structural and systemic reform—and from personal accountability to transformative justice—
remains labyrinthian at best.
Sex in Shiny Packets
25

The mediation of “reality” is further complicated with respect to America’s music
industries—treacherous territories that traffic in spectacle and myth and the objectification of
women. As renowned music journalist Lisa Robinson articulates in Nobody Ever Asked Me
About the Girls, the thoughtful reflection on her colorful career as a prolific rock journalist who
was for decades one of the few women dominating this space, “Label executives want their
female stars to be sexualized. they still think that all women should want to be her, and the men
should want to fuck her” (2020, p. 166). America’s popular music industries have been pointedly

25
Hoggart, R. (2009). The full rich life & the newer mass art: Sex in shiny packets. In J. Storey (ed.) Cultural
theory and popular culture: A reader (4
th
ed.). Routledge.

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molded through the propagation and accentuation of folklore that romanticizes the landscape’s
rocky and uneven terrain, glorifying the antics of performers and music professionals as central
dramatic elements that constitute the industries’ glittery façades. The mythologization of
America’s music industries is key to understanding and contextualizing moments of disclosure as
fissures in this façade. As New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan
Twohey (2019) articulate, “in each industry, harassment ha[s] its own particular sociology” (p.
51). To this end, I situate Fuchs’s disclosure in relation to the historical context of 1970s
Hollywood and the principle actors named in her account to attend, in part, to the question of
why her silence around this incident prevailed for four decades—what were, to borrow a phrase
from feminist scholar Judith Butler (1992), the “contingent foundations” of this silence—and to
identify key through-lines between the structure and characteristics of this incident in relation to
America’s music industries’ ideological and cultural constitutions more broadly.
Legendary Prick
26

Infamy and notoriety typify accounts of The Runaways’ manager Kim Fowley. In
memoirs, music histories, documentaries, and trade articles published across his nearly six-
decade career, Fowley is characterized as a caricature of the obscene—the epitome of a
shameless business dealer enigmatic of all the contrived and flamboyant tendencies that the
lifestyle of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll” is rumored to entail. These characterizations were
further cemented following his death from bladder cancer in 2015 in the groundswell of
remembrances that emerged across traditional and social media. Fowley is identified in such
overt terms as: a “master myth-maker and…puppeteer,” “a dirty old man” (McDonnell, 2013, p.
4, 45); “the king of hype” (Ford, 2016, p. 24); “one of [rock ’n’ roll Hollywood’s] most

26
McDonnell, E (2013). Queens of noise: The real story of The Runaways. Da Capo Press.

73
notorious antiheroes,” “The Sunset Strip Svengali” (McDonnell, 2015); a “rock ’n’ roll monster”
(Murphy, 2005); a “male chauvinist pig” (Parker & Rowley, 1972); or, as one article round-up
exclaims, Fowley was an “irascible impresario,” the, “lord of garbage, king of noise, thorn in the
side of Laurel Canyon, smart, slinger of shlock nuggetry, [and a] cranky contrarian” (Mapes,
2015); another characterization describes Fowley as “the self-mythologizing musician-writer-
producer who epitomized Hollywood music biz hucksterism” (Morris, 2015).
27
Or, as Fowley
describes himself in the tentative title of an unreleased autobiography, a “Legendary Prick”
(McDonnell, 2013), which follows his similarly titled 2012 autobiography, the Lord of Garbage,
a memoir in which the book’s inside flap reads: “Kim Fowley Hollywood’s sleaziest slimeball”
(2012).
At the same time, and often in the same descriptive paragraphs, Fowley is honored for his
musical legacy and contributions, and wide-ranging career, which included collaborations with a
diverse roster of artists, from John Lennon to Beyoncé.
28
Through this frame, he is distinguished
as a “music impresario” (Morris, 2015); memorialized as the “road to the stars” (Starr as cited in
McDonnell, 2013, p. 59); lionized as a “rock icon” (Grow, 2015); or, as music historian Harvey
Kubernick asserts, “He was the iron man of music, indefatigable” (Kubernick as cited in Ratliff,
2015). While the duality of these characterizations suggests a complex figure, and the occasion
of his passing heightens both the romanticization of his persona and glorification of his musical

27
In line with critical considerations of veracity and truth in the historical examination of Fuchs’s allegations, one
telling practice revealed by The Runaways’ guitarist Lita Ford in her 2016 memoir Living Like A Runaway recounts
Fowley’s business practice as one marked by persistence and persuasion—in line with the “indefatigable”
characterization similarly put forth by historian Harvey Kubernick. “Because he said it over and over again,” Ford
recounts, “[Fowley] truly believed it and he made everyone else believe it too. Then, because everyone believed it, it
started to come true” (2016, p. 49). In this way, “truth” for Fowley is presented as conquest, as salesmanship, not as
the representation of or a commitment to fact.
28
In a perhaps unintentionally fitting appearance, Fowley has a cameo in the 2014 music video for Beyoncé’s
“Haunted,” which gestures to the aesthetics and antics of Rock ’n’ Roll glam in its audiovisual narrative and creative
direction.

74
contributions, these seemingly contradictory distinctions offer a useful entry point for
disentangling key through-lines in the mythology and infrastructure of America’s music
industries that incubate and foster a polarizing figure like Kim Fowley. Put another way, I do not
intend here to assert an excoriation of Fowley’s person, persona, or alleged actions, but rather to
interrogate the socio-historical and ideological frameworks that informed his role professionally,
as The Runaways’ manager, and personally, as the perpetrator named in Fuchs’s disclosure, to
make sense of the imbricated forces of power operating at the moment of assault and those forces
further revealed via Fuchs’s disclosure forty years later.
Four Decades of Silence
The timing of Fuchs’s disclosure following Fowley’s death in 2015 is not insignificant.
However, as Sontag (2002) argues, silence is relational; as such, the rupture in Fuchs’s silence
following Fowley’s passing must be examined as just one factor in an entangled web of variables
that constrain disclosure. Fuchs’s silence persisted alongside and in tandem with the publication
of a series of public texts through which her disclosure might have earlier been specifically
disclosed, such as memoirs published by fellow bandmates and close colleagues like those
named directly in her allegations, including Fowley’s (2012) aforementioned memoir Lord of
Garbage and singer Cherie Currie’s (2010) Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway. While neither
of these speak to Fuchs’s assault directly, both speak in detail to Fowley’s infamous antics and
the laissez faire atmosphere of the 1970s Hollywood music scene that enabled commonplace
debauchery to often-blur into highly questionable and problematic moments of agency and
consent. As Fowley declares in the dedication to his book, “Rock and roll is driven by revenge
and sex…[this memoir] will tell you why I was born to make you cry.” Currie’s memoir also
served as the basis for the 2010 Netflix-released biographical film drama The Runaways, which

75
was co-produced by Jett and that similarly did not include any reference to the assault Fuchs
disclosed. The Runaways’ guitarist Lita Ford’s since-published 2016 memoir Like A Runaway
likewise refrains from addressing this incident—arguably a more strategic and conscientious
decision given that, unlike the preceding texts, its publication followed both Fowley’s passing
and Fuchs’s disclosure.
In 2017, when questioned about the alleged rape, Ford told reporter Kate Hutchinson of
The Guardian she was unaware of the incident until the publication of Cherkis’s article,
clarifying, “my memories [of The Runaways] weren’t tainted by rape. There were other things
that went on that I just disconnect myself from.” This claim of disconnection offers a subtle yet
poignant insight that, while indirectly related to Fowley’s alleged assault of Fuchs, speaks to a
compartmentalization of experiences and memories that emerges as a common pattern among
women in America’s music industries, and furthermore speaks to the expanded understanding of
trauma that Rentschler’s (2011) theorization offers—the opacity of “disconnection” affords
deniability and serves as a potential coping mechanism in the wake of the “second wounds”
endured by those witness to or present at the time of others’ alleged assaults. While tensions
between The Runaways band members is well-documented—both contemporaneous with their
four-year tenure as a group, and in the several decades since—intra-group conflicts are not
unique to this band, nor are they justification for why truth might be or have been withheld or
obfuscated intentionally. In this way, I have included here only the information as reported and
shared via the primary sources, rather than reading into these discrepancies specific intentions
where none may exist.
Historical biographies of The Runaways, like pioneering music journalist Evelyn
McDonnell’s highly-detailed 2013 book Queens of Noise: The Real Story of The Runaways,

76
similarly make no specific mention of Fowley’s alleged 1975 assault of Fuchs. The absence of
any mention of this particular assault, however, is not indicative of shoddy research or a strategic
omission, but rather an additional layer to the silence Fuchs maintained with respect to this
incident. Indeed, McDonnell’s comprehensive history foregrounds the voices and input of key
actors in The Runaway’s dynamic circuit, including Fuchs, pulling from a wealth of interviews
alongside archival research in a nuanced re-telling of the band’s origins, evolution, and musical
legacy. In an important admission early in the text, McDonnell clarifies:
Getting most people to talk was the easy part of writing Queens of Noise. Perhaps
because no one wants to grant five teenage girls their own autonomy, everyone—
producers, fans, friends, competitors—wants to claim responsibility for the Runaways’
success. (Few accept responsibility for their failure.) The hard part was getting people to
stop talking….Fowley is the king of these monologists. (2013, p. 4-5)

In this way, McDonnell highlights the uneven terrain on which the retelling of The Runaways’
story is situated—a history narrativized, in particular, though certainly not exclusively, by
Fowley, the “master myth-maker” and “king of hype,” and a history dominated notably by the
voices of men, most of whom, with the exception of Fowley, were and are adjacent to The
Runaways’ story.
29
In this way, the cultural domain of power, manifest through the gendered
soundscape of 1975, is at risk of being pulled forward—at once recounting a specific conjuncture
while further cementing that history in a text intended for contemporary audiences. This risk is
one McDonnell acknowledges and works to counteract; however, it coexists with a dynamic
archive of reportage that elevates Fowley as rock hero as much as antihero.
McDonnell questions both Fowley and Fuchs directly about sexual “relationships”—
between members of The Runaways, between band members and Fowley, and with those who

29
McDonnell clarifies: “With the important exception of the late Michelle Myers, [Fowley’s] omnipresent personal
assistant, most of the Runaway’s support team were men,” elaborating, “this, of course, was typical of the music
biz” (p. 131).

77
rotated through The Runaways’ larger orbit over the course of the band’s short yet tumultuous
four-year tenure.
30
Fowley adamantly assures McDonnell no sexual interactions transpired
between him and members of the band:
Fowley says he never “had sex” with anyone in the band or with anyone who was under
age during the time he worked with the Runaways. “They can talk about it until the cows
come home but, in my mind, I didn’t make love to anybody in the Runaways nor did they
make love to me,” he says. (2013, p. 133)

Layers of qualification emerge from Fowley’s assertion; of note, his choice of “in my mind” to
defend his memory of events alongside a romanticized framing of sexual interactions through the
language of “making love.” At the same time, McDonnell’s decision to frame “had sex” through
scare quotes serves to call into question the veracity of Fowley’s account and his classification of
the events that may or may not have transpired. These signals, when read alongside Fowley’s
complicated persona, situate Fuchs’s rape within a frame of plausibility.
Importantly, Fowley’s assertion follows questions from McDonnell who confronts the
manager about an incident detailed in Currie’s memoir Neon Angel wherein Currie recounts a
moment of violent exhibition in which “under the guise of teaching Cherie and Sandy [West]
how to have sex, Fowley performed oral sex on a very inebriated young woman and masturbated
her with the handle of a hairbrush” (p. 133). Giving the woman the pseudonym “Marcie,” Currie
(2010) recounts:
Marcie was not herself. She got up and tried to walk over to us at one point,
wobbled and then fell back onto the bed. Nobody asked her what was wrong; we were
content to watch her make a fool of herself. She was acting like a total mess. I started to
wonder if someone had slipped her a mickey. (p. 132)
31

30
Several sources point to the complicated web of sexual relationships between Joan Jett and Cherie Currie and Jett
and West.
31
This incident is complicated by Currie’s elaboration of the event, articulating “The only thing that was keeping us
from rushing Kim and ripping him off of Marcie was that she was actually encouraging it! She seemed to want it”
(2010, p. 136). This reflection comes, however, after Currie has offered thorough detail of the ways in which Marcie
appeared to have been drugged, thus the issue of consent should be foregrounded here, as should a reminder that
Currie and West were themselves young teenage girls witnessing—what would by all accounts today be

78
This incident was orchestrated by Fowley but enabled and encouraged by rock musician Rick
Derringer and Scott Anderson, who were both present and witness to this incident. Anderson was
The Runaways’ personal manager brought in by Fowley to help oversee the day-to-day
operations for the band, and, as Currie recalls, locked West and Currie in the room, actively
preventing Currie from leaving in her initial attempts. In this way, Anderson and Fowley’s
behavior are demonstrative of the magnitude of both the disciplinary and interpersonal domains
of power at play in this dynamic.
This graphic scene becomes key in contextualizing Fuchs’s disclosure. McDonnell’s
book was published in 2013. Fuchs’s allegations were made public via Cherkis’s article in 2015,
following Fowley’s death. In an interview with Salon, McDonnell points to Fuchs’ disclosure as,
more-or-less confirming that she was, in fact, the “Marcie” central to this moment as recounted
in the book. While this identification may be unsurprising, it nonetheless points to the
complicated dynamics between The Runaways and Fowley, as well as between Fuchs and
Currie, who acknowledges outright that she selects “Marcie” as a pseudonym to share this
incident in her own memoir. Moreover, it becomes an instance in which the cultural domain can
be examined via the shift in messaging that this new information affords.
To further compound the transgressive professional dynamics amongst these principle
actors, Anderson slept with most, if not all members of The Runaways, aside from Fuchs; his
liaisons with Currie resulted in a pregnancy that she was left to abort and handle on her own
(Currie, 2010; Ford, 2016).
32, 33
By today’s standards, these dalliances would be much more

characterized again as—a rape.
32
As Ford (2016) recounts, “According to Cherie, during the break in the tour, her father scraped together every last
dime he had to give to Cherie for an abortion. Scott refused to acknowledge that he had gotten an underage girl
pregnant” (p. 51).
33
McDonnell cites accounts that similarly qualify Anderson’s oversight of the band with The Runaway’s road
manager Kent Smythe sharing: “[Anderson’s] whole thing was just fucking Cherie and being fabulous…I didn’t

79
sharply framed and defined as statutory rape, given the girls’ underage status—not to mention
the questionable ethical status given Anderson’s position of disciplinary power over the band as
the day-to-day manager—but such behavior, though illegal, was characteristic of the Hollywood
music scene of the era. While Anderson’s sexual interactions with members of The Runaways
and Currie, in particular, are not shared through disclosures as incidents of sexual misconduct in
the way Fuchs’s alleges in the disclosure of her alleged rape at the hands of Fowley, these
anecdotes together offer a sordid picture of The Runaways’ experiences within the internal
structure of the Rock ’n’ Roll machine that comprised a key terrain of America’s musical
landscape at this conjuncture.
34

Yet while McDonnell takes care in calling attention to Fowley’s exaggerated spin doctor
persona in particular and works to contextualize his accounts with input from a range of principle
figures, she offers an at-times contradictory reading of the power dynamics operating in and
through these relationships. In Queens of Noise McDonnell asserts, “the Runaways were not
innocent victims of an evil Svengali. That widespread narrative denies the women agency in
their own life-story and simplistically demonizes Fowley, a complex figure…without whom
there would have been no Runaways” (2013, p. 5). At the same time, upon Fowley’s passing in
2015, McDonnell prefaces an excerpted chapter from Queens of Noise that circulated online via
Cuepoint by introducing Fowley as “The Sunset Strip Svengali.” The Svengali characterization
is one that emerges again and again in accounts and historical examinations of power within
America’s music industries. McDonnell’s inconsistent characterization of Fowley points to the

find him to be a good influence. He was only interested in having a sixteen-year-old blonde blow him” (2013, p.
132).
34
For a more in-depth examination of this historical conjuncture within Los Angeles, the relevant geography to this
case study, Ronald Brownstein’s (2021) Rock Me On the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies,
Music, Television and Politics provides a rich and detailed cultural history.

80
complex dynamics and ambivalence that constitutes many artist-manager relationships. Put
another way, this highlights a both/and conditionality—the members of The Runaways had
agency, but that agency operated within the infrastructure of an industry dominated by men, the
disciplinary and structural power at work, particularly Fowley in their day-to-day orbit, and
within a conjuncture undergirded by patriarchal structures of power in which women’s voices
were less powerful, and thus less audible, then men’s.
In another disquieting moment, another young girl in The Runaways orbit, Denise Lisa,
recounts to McDonnell that she recalls witnessing Fowley publicly assault an incoherent young
girl: “‘We all watched,’ Lisa says. ‘We were all high. It’s that haze and not knowing what to do.
It was all about drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and sex back then’” (p. 2013, p. 134-135).
35
When
questioned by McDonnell, Fuchs, similar to Ford, chooses to frame her experiences as a
Runaway through language that creates distance between the assault she later disclosed and
interactions with the men ever-present in the band’s orbit and to contextualize the ethos of the
Hollywood music industry in this era. Speaking about Fowley, Fuchs shares, “‘I suspect a lot of
things happened I don’t know about…. There was this world of things, especially where Kim
was involved, that no one talked about. We just pretended this stuff wasn’t happening”
(McDonnell, 2013, p. 135). Re-reading this passage in the wake of Fuchs’s disclosure, this
statement now hints at more than a fragmented memory or intentional obfuscation of events,
pointing more directly to a haunting experience that Fuchs would only later decide it was time to
talk about, no longer willing to pretend. This “world of things” to which Fuchs refers likewise

35
In both of these accounts, the violent assaults aren’t framed via the language of “rape.” To accurately reflect the
sources referenced here, I have opted to use the language included in the primary texts. However, through the
framing and distinction of sexual misconduct at the time of this writing in 2021 and following the formalized
definitions outlined in Chapter 1, both instances would otherwise be characterized as rape, given the lack of consent
for those victimized by Fowley in these moments and due, in particular, to the state of incoherence or inebriation
detailed in each account.

81
offers another instance where the prevailing ethos of “Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n’ Roll” contributed
to the context in which these experiences were situated.
36
Again and again “Sex, Drugs, & Rock
‘n’ Roll” specifically, and its central tenets more broadly, is deployed as justification, excuse,
and absolution for prevalent sexism and sexual misconduct in America’s music industries.
I interrogate Fuchs’s disclosure not as representative of all disclosures, nor with the intent
of excoriating Fowley’s alleged actions, but instead to make sense of the imbricated forces of
power and discursive and ideological frameworks that constituted the conjuncture in which the
alleged assault occurred and that inform the reportage and mediated responses that emerged in
the wake of Fuchs’s disclosure. As a historical incident made visible in the contemporary
moment, a confluence of platforms and archives become part of this story—from traditional to
social media, documentary-dramas to historical biographies—the examination of which helps to
situate the current #MeToo movement in a history of American music shaped by sexism, sexual
harassment, and sexual misconduct.
Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n’ Roll
“Under my thumb/ the squirming dog who’s just had her day
Under my thumb/ A girl who has just changed her ways
It’s down to me, west it is/ The way she does just what she’s told
Under my thumb…/she’s the sweetest pet in the world
Under my thumb/ Her eyes are just kept to herself…well I, I can still look at someone else”
- The Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb”
37

Popularized by DJ Alan Freed in the 1950s, the phrase “Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n’ Roll”
(SDRR) has over the decades become unremarkable in its ubiquity in discourses of American
popular music and American popular culture
38
(Weinraub, 1999). A tagline that denotes a

36
Providing another side of this dynamic, Fuchs similarly speaks to the presence of The Runaway’s day-to-day
manager Scott Anderson, recounting, “‘We never thought of it as, ‘Oh, he just slept with four teenage girls’… ‘It
wasn’t unusual then; you have to have that context’” (McDonnell, 2013, p. 161).
37
Jagger, M., & Richards, K. (1966). Under my thumb [Lyrics]. Genius. Retrieved from https://genius.com/The-
rolling-stones-under-my-thumb-lyrics#song-info
38
Of note: In his pre-Runaways career, Kim Fowley work for Freed, who he regarded as a key mentor in exposing

82
confluence of pleasure, play, performance and revolt, this triad is a constitutive tenet of the
ideological framework underpinning many facets of America’s popular music industries, even if
it persists as much as myth as “reality” in contemporary music sectors. What has become a
catchall for substance-fueled debauchery, laissez-faire attitudes toward sex, and active disregard
for the establishment politics, Victorian traditions, and puritan ideals that typified dominant
American values prior to the socio-cultural upheaval of mid-twentieth-century America, SDRR
is a masculinist through-line in the discursive knowledges and cultural messaging that inform
and have been reinforced by America’s music industries, and remains, arguably, one of
America’s most powerful exports.
39

“That old cliché of sex and drugs and rock and roll was the draw that made the music
world such a temptation in the 1960s,” Robinson articulates, “but for most of two decades, it

him to the ropes of the music industry.
⁠ This intersection is less coincidental than it is an indication of the music
industries’ entangled structures and of the guiding doctrine absorbed into the formal and informal foundations
through which music industry figures are educated and professionalized. Fowley honors Freed in memoriam in his
2012 memoir, Lord of Garbage: “Alan Freed who understood my need to learn and be great.” On a similar note,
McDonnell details that “Fowley modeled himself after brilliant, weird producer Phil Spector and shrewd but
overbearing Elvis Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker [BUT] mostly, he’s the American equivalent of Malcolm
McLaren, the dapper but abrasive London fashion impresario who managed…the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, and
Bow Wow Wow” (2013, p. 52). Worthy of a study unto itself this network of men hints at just how pervasive such
behavior was: Parker was key in facilitating Elvis’s courtship with the at-the-time underage Priscilla Wagner who
would later become his wife; Parker further claims that much of his music management acumen came from his time
working in the circus (Dickerson, 2001). Phil Spector, remembered as one of the most important producers in
popular music, and in particular for his pioneering “Wall of Sound,” is also infamously known for murdering Lana
Clarkson, an actress and nightclub hostess, after they had left a concert at the House of Blues in Los Angeles 2003
(Grimes, 2021). And McClaren is accused by his long-time personal and professional partner Vivienne Westwood in
her recent memoir of ongoing abuse (Westwood, 2016). To entangle the overlaps of shoddy figures and questionable
business practices further, Alan Freed would get caught up in a major payola scandal in the 1950s (alongside Dick
Clark), which would land Freed with criminal charges and cost him his job at WABC in 1962 (Carvello, 2018;
Weinraub, 1999).
39
Countless texts have revisited this period of socio-cultural upheaval in the United States, attending to the
simultaneous transformations occurring across America and around the world, from the impact of the Civil Rights
and Feminist movements, to Anti-Vietnam war efforts, student walkouts calling for education reform, and global
rise of American popular music, including Charles Kaiser’s (1988) detailed history, 1968 in America: Music,
Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation and Ronald Brownstein’s (2021), Rock Me on the
Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. As an export, the
influence and afterlives of this paradigm continue to echo around the world today. For a localized account that looks
at these transformations via music, see Barney Hoskyns detailed history, Waiting for the Sun: A Rock ‘n’ Roll
History of Los Angeles. On music as a key American export, see (Pacheco, 2016; Goldstein, 1969).

83
was, of course, limited to men” (2020, p. 112). While sutured closely to the mainstream hyper-
masculine genre of rock ‘n’ roll music that took hold of much of the popular American musical
and cultural landscape across the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the ethos of SDRR traverses the confines
of market genres, transposing in and through the evolution of popular American music.
40

Furthermore, while integrated into popular American lexicon via dominant cultural messaging
and made visible via its cooptation and appropriation by primarily white male American and
British Rock ‘n’ Roll artists and audiences, the history of “rock ‘n’ roll” evolves importantly out
of Black American artists, spaces, and experiences, particularly Rhythm and Blues—including
from key influences by such women musicians as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Mama
Thornton.
41
More specifically, the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll” emerged as a euphemism for sex, an
active verb that signified the rocking and rolling of bodies together. This transition, from
interaction to aesthetic, from intimate activation to the diluted categorization of a product
signifies what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka has poignantly formulated as the shift from “verb to
noun”—a repeating pattern of appropriation and extraction by which Black American music,

40
SDRR has been further cemented in America’s socio-cultural landscape through such historical and contemporary
media representations as biography drama films like The Runaways eponymous depiction (Sigismondi, 2010) and
Motley Crüe’s brazen doc-drama The Dirt (Tremaine, 2019), comedy-drama films like Almost Famous (Crowe,
2000) and Rock Star (Herek, 2001), and parodic takes like This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984) and Wayne’s World
(Spheeris, 1992).
41
For more on the influence of Sharpe and Thornton, and this historical manifestation of Baraka’s verb-to-noun
formulation, see Gayle Wald’s (2007) Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister
Rosetta Tharpe and Michael Spörke’s (2014) Big Mama Thornton: The Life and Music. An oft-cited example of this
cooptation is Elvis Presley’s success with “Hound Dog,” which rose to No. 1 on the Rhythm and Blues, Pop and
Country music charts in 1956, and remains one of the most commercially successful singles in the history of popular
American music. The song, however, was originally performed and recorded by blues singer Big Mama Thornton in
1952: “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog/ Crying all the time/ You ain’t nothing but a hound dog/ Crying all the
time/ Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit/ And you ain’t no friend of mine” (Lieber & Stoller, 1952). Alice Walker
(2003) offers another insightful, historically-informed yet fictionalized account of the Big Mama Thornton/Elvis
“Hound Dog” history in “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” the first short story included in her collection You Can’t Keep A
Good Woman Down. Likewise, hip-hop duo Public Enemy reference the “Hound Dog” case in their 1989 hit “Fight
the Power,” recorded for Spike Lee’s feature film Do the Right Thing:
Elvis was a hero to most, but he/ Never meant shit to me, you see, straight out/Racist—that sucker was
simple and plain/ Motherfuck him and John Wayne! ‘Cause I’m Black and/ I’m proud, I’m ready, I’m
hyped, plus I’m amped/ Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps/ Sample a look back; you look and
find nothing/ But rednecks for 400 years. (Flav et al., 1952)

84
artists, and art forms have historically been coopted, commercialized, and made visible to and
via white artists and audiences—and strategically ensured by the socio-political economy and
structural domains of mainstream American music industries. Jones clarifies: “Rhythm & blues,
the urban contemporary expression of blues, was the source of the new popular revitalization;
rock ‘n’ roll is its product” (1999, p. 222).
42

As a guiding tenet taken up by a youthful American counterculture, the principles of
SDRR historically afford a license for unrestrained hedonism—one that glorifies excess and
foregrounds the transgression of social and cultural norms as a rite of passage in the colorful
membership of music’s (in)famous glitterati. Fowley’s tenure in the music business is a SDRR
saga in and of itself; he remains a poster boy for rock hedonism: “If you can’t get cunt, you want
to be a rock ‘n’ roll something so you can get it, and when you have it you throw it out onto the
street. Then you get better versions of it…The reason I’m in the record business is to fuck young
cunt,” he shared during an interview with Howard Parker and Chris Rowley for the International
Times in 1972. Or, as Fowley’s character, portrayed by Michael Shannon in The Runaways
Netflix film drama adaptation, exclaims: “Rock ’n’ roll is a blood sport. It is a sport of
men….This isn’t about women’s lib, kiddos. This is about women’s libido” (Sigismondi, 2010).
Robinson similarly reflects: “promiscuous sexual behavior by male rock stars was always
considered one of the rock star perks” (2020, p. 113).
A cunt with an outasight voice
43

Rock as genre and the foregrounded musical category inscribed within the SDRR

42
A deep dive into historical and socio-cultural contributions of Black music and performance in America include
Tricia Rose’s (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Nelson George’s (2003)
The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Jeff Chang’s (2005) Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s (2021) A
Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.
43
(Rhodes, 2005, p. 212).

85
paradigm, centered masculinity and served as a didactic means by which new identities and
expressions of sexuality—through that (often visibly white) cis-gendered and heterosexual
lens—were embodied and explored. As Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie articulate in their
important early scholarship on rock music, “Rock’s sexual ideology [is] of collective male
activity and individual female passivity” (1990, p. 376). This oppositional framing situates sex as
both a form of expression and a means of control and it is within this conjuncture that Fowley’s
assault of Fuchs is alleged to have occurred. As this highlights, the 1960s and 70s emerged as a
conjuncture in which new cultural dynamics surrounding identity, sexuality, and agency were
actively—and often publicly—worked out. As a site of struggle this historical moment was
characterized by, among other things, the women’s liberation movement, which was rooted in
part in a new expression of sexual freedom and agency that both intersected with and progressed
parallel to the SDRR ethos of the era, offering new understandings about women’s bodies
informed new socio-cultural norms around sex and sexuality.
44

Shifting norms played out differently, however, for men and women—a shift in the
conjuncture in which dominant ideals surrounding the gender binary and sexual double standards
were constituted and reinforced at the same time as they were being challenged by and through
popular culture. “Liberation” was not equally experienced as Robinson details, “more often than
not, the bad stories are women’s stories” (2020, p. 175). In one anecdote that Rhian Jones and Eli
Davies capture in their edited collection, Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the
Women Who Love Them (2017), Arlene Brown observes the following after attending a Grateful

44
Seminal texts of this era that offered important interventions into women’s understandings of their bodies and
sexual pleasure include the groundbreaking Boston Women’s Health Clinic’s (1971) Our Bodies, Ourselves and
articles like Anne Koedt’s 1970 article “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” which, as Rhodes articulates, worked to
contradict the medically accepted “fallacy…that women were sexually and psychologically dysfunctional” (2005, p.
13).

86
Dead performance in 1970:
Something inside me went boom. There I was digging this beautiful voice, beautiful
guitar, but with words about some woman’s box…I felt pretty sullen for the rest of the
concert…I think that rock music has changed a lot of things, released a lot of energy,
created some good images for young people, emphasized enjoyment, sensual pleasure,
relaxation, freaking out, looking weird, turning on, etc. But I also think as far as the male-
female relationship goes, as far as women’s liberation goes, and the image a woman
should have of herself, it is totally reactionary, and must be changed.

Scholar and musician Lisa L. Rhodes (2005) in her critical interrogation of women and rock
culture, Electric Ladyland, details how, even for one of the key female rock stars of the era, Janis
Joplin, who would pave the way for female rock artists like The Runaways to come, this double
standard confined and defined her agency and image within the framework and spaces of SDRR.
“Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man? Yeah/ An’ didn’t I give you nearly
everything that a woman possibly can?/ Honey, you know I did…/I’m gonna, gonna show you
baby, that a woman can be tough/ I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take
it” she wails in her signature bluesy rock rasp on “Piece of My Heart” (Rogovoy & Burns, 1968).
“As a singer, Joplin’s body was her instrument,” Rhodes argues, “a fact that made her more
exploitable in the rock world, one that subscribed so completely to the sexual double standard”;
furthermore, “male musicians could have multiple sex partners with impunity while women stars
were not afforded the same privilege, whether they wanted them or not” (p. 212).
45
As writer and
feminist activist Germaine Greer articulates, “A woman’s body is the battlefield where she fights
for liberation. It is through her body that oppression works, reifying her, sexualizing her,
victimizing her, disabling her” (1989, p. 30).
46
Susan Hiwatt similarly writes in her 1971 article

45
Alice Echol’s (2000) detailed Joplin biography Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin and
Amy Berg’s 2015 documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue offer important context and history to Joplin’s musical legacy
and evolution as an artist, exploring in greater detail this double standard of sexuality.
46
This double standard is of course magnified and intensified for women of color, contending with the
intersectional structures of power delimiting access and opportunity within the spaces of the music industries.

87
“Cock Rock”:
It is not surprising that Janis became an incredible sex object and was related to as a cunt

with an outasight [sic] voice. Almost everyone even vaguely connected to rock heard
malicious stories about how easy she was to fuck. This became part of her legend, and no
level of stardom could protect her because when you get down to it, she was just a
woman. (as cited in Rhodes, 2005, p. 212)

In another example, Robinson recounts, “Joplin was the first real female rock and roll star
without any sort of conventional female beauty…she was once called ‘the world’s ugliest man’
and was compared to a dog” (2020, p. 20).
47

For women of color, this precarity was—and remains—more severe. In one example,
music critic Vernon Gibbs recalls the consequences for pioneering funk and soul singer Betty
Davis, whose tantalizing and provocative music and on-stage persona broke through the barriers
of the dominant respectability politics that governed much of America, particularly Black
America in the 1960s and 70s, claiming space for women’s sexual agency, “She basically
sacrificed herself to pave the way” (Cox, 2020). “For a few short years in the 1970s, no one
made funk as raw as Betty Davis did,” The New York Times emphasizes, “she sang bluntly about
sex on her own terms, demanding satisfaction with feral yowls and rasps, her voice slicing across
the grooves that she wrote and honed as her own bandleader and producer” (Parles, 2018). “You
said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you” Davis growls in
1975’s thumping funk-rock ballad “Nasty Gal.” For her uninhibited sexuality and unapologetic
vocalization of female lust, desire, and power—something for which her male rock counterparts
where being actively and avidly celebrated—Davis was dropped from her contract and
essentially banned and blackballed from commercial radio—disappeared from music and public

47
Fowley often referred to the members of The Runaways as “dogs”—a pejorative that is highly-visible in Netflix’s
2010 docudrama about the band and based on Currie’s 2010 memoir, Neon Angel.

88
visibility all-together, amounting to a structural enforcement of power that ensured a commercial
and economic silencing. Davis’ voice transgressed the limits of the appropriate for women of the
time. “I thought that the time had come that we were really all liberated,” Gibbs reflects, “but she
showed that really, we weren’t.” Winona Williams, a close friend of Davis, similarly recalls the
stakes for Davis’ artistic honesty in the 1970s in Phil Cox’s 2020 insightful documentary made
with the cooperation of Davis, Betty: They Say I’m Different:
What Betty did as a performer, every woman would love to do. What she wanted to say
in her performance there were no other women doing it. When you’re ahead of your
times, it can also mean that you are ahead of your country. And they’re just not ready or
willing to accept who you are. And [as a Black woman]…she started off the race from
behind the rest.

Thus while this conjuncture in popular American music was marked by progress in women’s
sexual agency and rejection of puritan ideals, the confines of the gender binary, compounded by
the constraints of race, remained very much at play as constitutive tenets of SDRR—particularly
surrounding expectations of gender identity and femininity—the echoes of which continue to
resonate today.
48
At the same time, Davis and Joplin entered the American popular music
landscape standing on the shoulders of such artists as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, two
pioneering Black blues artists, who first occupied this space of sexual agency and tension in the
cultural landscape that would open up to jazz, then to rhythm & blues, and later to rock ‘n’ roll.
As Angela Y. Davis details:
What gives blues such fascinating possibilities of sustaining emergent feminist
consciousness is the way they often construct seemingly antagonistic relationships as
noncontradictory oppositions. A female narrator in a women’s blues song who represents
herself as entirely subservient to male desire might simultaneously express autonomous
desire and a refusal to allow her mistreating lover to drive her to psychic despair. (1998,

48
In Lisa Robinson’s insightful reflection on her four-plus decade career as a music journalist, Nobody Ever Asked
Me About the Girls: Women, Music and Fame (2020), she dedicates an entire chapter to “Hair & Makeup” exploring
how image operates through the gendered binary for women in a way that reinscribes traditional gendered norms
and dominant standards of beauty, which operate to confine expressions of identity while at once being required
elements of the popular American music industry, sutured closely to industry-ideals about success and support.

89
p. xv)

Banet-Weiser’s theorization of economies of visibility provides a critical model for how to read
and interrogate the seemingly ambivalent and contradictory positionality of Joplin and Davis in
this conjuncture. As women—gendered subjects—they were at once upheld as evidence of
progress in an otherwise-male-dominated space, while at the same time being excluded from the
affordances of that space that were attributed male artists who embodied the SDRR ethos.
49

Fuchs’s position as a Runaway within the male dominated space of rock ‘n’ roll music
situates her within a multi-dimensional bind that pulls forward these larger histories. As a white
woman, she is expected to be a passive sexual object, to adhere to dominant social and cultural
norms surrounding femininity and gender expression. As a rock musician, she is expected to
embody the hyper-sexualized bravado of a rock star, to project a rebellious attitude that eschews
traditional norms and rules and takes up the transgression that is celebrated in and co-constitutive
of this musical geography and ethos. As a member of an all-girl rock band, Fuchs is burdened
with the added pressure of being a pioneer—part of an all-girl teenage rock band in the company
of countless adult male bands that occupied and defined this space—expected to “take one for

49
Both Davis and Joplin were directly influenced by a rich legacy of such Black women artists and performers as
Aida Overton Walker, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton,
Josephine Baker, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ida Cox, and others who centered sexual agency and women’s desires in
their lyrics and performances. As Bessie Smith sings:
I need a little sugar in my bowl/ I need a little hot dog on my roll/ I can stand a bit of lovin’, oh so bad/ I
feel so funny, I feel so sad/ I need a little steam-heat on my floor/ Maybe I can fix things up so they’ll go/
What’s the matter hard pap/ Come on and save your mama’s soul. (Williams & Small, 1931)
Important texts detailing these women and their crucial historical and musical contributions include Angela Y.
Davis’ (1998) Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; Gayle
Wald’s (2007) Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Jayna
Brown’s (2008) Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern; Daphne Brooks’ (2006)
Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, as well as Brook’s (2021) Liner Notes for the
Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound; and Philana E. Payton’s (2020) informative doctoral
dissertation “Celestial Bodies: Black Women, Hollywood, and the Fallacy of Stardom.” In addition, Hive’s new
Longreads “series about women and the music that has influenced them” adds important contributions to this rich
and expansive body of literature, centering voices, artists and histories, that have largely been overlooked or
relegated to the margins of popular American music histories (Jackson, 2020).

90
the team” (women) and pave the way for others to follow in her footsteps. At each turn, Fuchs is
constrained with respect to disclosure. By disclosing her rape publicly, Fuchs fails in the
normative standards and expectations of femininity and passivity: “as women we are (usually)
told all our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways to be quiet in public,” Rhodes asserts, “or at
least more quiet than the men around us” (2005, p. xiv). At the same time, Fuchs fails as a
sexualized object of desire. If she is the victim of a rape, her desirability—even if only in
nostalgic retrospect—becomes tarnished; she is marred by an act of violence done to her (rather
than the perpetrator who should carry the burden and consequences of the rape).
50
Furthermore,
her disclosure bursts the fantasy bubble of the SDRR ethos, taking the “fun” out of a
romanticized and glorified paradigm celebrated for its rebellious qualities by humanizing and
taking down one of the reigning gods of SDRR mythology. Fowley becomes the tragic hero to
whom many rise in his defense. This is compounded by the framing of Fuchs as a failed victim,
the veracity of her disclosure called into question alongside suggestions that she is responsible, at
least in part, for the assault she endured.
51
Add to this the aforementioned re-centering of Jett and
Currie as “failed witnesses” in reportage following Fuchs’s disclosure and we find ourselves
quickly turning attention to everything that everyone but Fowley did wrong to lead to, allow for,
or bring on Fowley’s rape of Fuchs. To revisit Pauline Oliveros’s call for active and engaged
“deep listening,” none of these shifts in framing allow for Fuchs to be “heard” dissociated from

50
This theme of needing to preserve the image as an object of desire appears across gendered analyses of women in
American popular music. Within her own orbit, this issue is raised with respect to Joan Jett’s sexuality, which she
has consistently avoided addressing explicitly in the media. This avoidance is both a strategy of privacy and of
reputation management. As McDonnell explains, “[Jett] doesn’t want to alienate any possible fans by removing
herself as a potential object of desire” (2013, p. 77).
51
As I explore in Chapter 1, this framing fits into the logic of victim blaming, which places the burden of
responsibility on women for their behaviors in instances where they are victim to misconduct and assaults. This
points to gendered ideologies that reinscribe the oppositional framework of the public-private sphere—women
belong at home, men are allowed to be in public, thus by being out in public Fuchs’s knowingly and willingly placed
herself in danger, the logic would extend.

91
the contingencies maintained through socio-cultural ideologies—and the interlocking domains of
interpersonal, disciplinary, structural and cultural power—undergirding normative standards of
femininity, rock ‘n’ roll, or victimhood. The stakes for coming forward are intensified as this
bind tightens yet further: Fuchs’s identity, and subsequently her musical legacy and reputation, is
now sutured to her disclosure, a pattern that plays out over and over again in the historicization
and framing of women who disclose incidents of sexual misconduct in the music industry—from
Tina Turner to Rihanna to music executive Drew Dixon, whose case I explore in the chapter that
follows.
52

Under my thumb
53

I attend to Fowley not as representative of all managers or men within American popular
music or as the benchmark for “bad” SDRR behavior. Likewise, my decision to focus in-depth
on this singular figure is not to argue that his actions or perspective can be broadly generalized.
Rather, I explore his role with respect to The Runaways—and, in particular Jackie Fuchs—as the
epitome of the SDRR antihero, a flamboyant persona demonstrative of the SDRR lifestyle that
intersects importantly and violently with a pattern and history of sexual harassment and
misconduct in America’s music industries. Furthermore, this case exemplifies how SDRR,
rooted in a sexual double standard that upheld/upholds misogynistic conceptions of gender and
the gender binary as mutually exclusive and oppositional, manifests within the spaces of popular
music. “Context is crucial,” writes Em Smith in her article “It Was a Different Time: Negotiating

52
Both Tina Turner and Rihanna have been victim to violent assaults at the hands of colleagues in the music
industry. However, I do not collapse those experiences with Fuchs’s disclosure in this examination. The dynamics of
these incidents are tricky; both Turner and Rihanna were victimized by domestic partners—Ike Turner and Chris
Brown, respectively. However, Turner and Brown’s positions as professional musicians and artists themselves
places them within the bounds of this research. This complicated dynamic—partner and colleague—typifies an
entanglement not uncommon in the music industry. Manager-artist relationships, for example, are common across
genres and throughout America’s popular music history.
53
Jagger, M., & Richards, K. (1966). Under my thumb [Lyrics]. Genius. Retrieved from https://genius.com/The-
rolling-stones-under-my-thumb-lyrics#song-info

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With the Misogyny of Heroes,” “but the context simply hasn’t changed. Women were often
treated like dirt and they make up the dirt that these men are allowed to stand on, their lives and
experiences deemed inconsequential and paling in comparison to genius” (2017). As one female
rock artist similarly articulates in Stephanie Clattenburg’s 2016 documentary Play Your
Gender—an in-depth look at gender disparities in contemporary American music through
interviews with women writers and producers:
Women’s place in music still seems like a struggle now, especially if you are doing rock
‘n’ roll. There is a saying that “men get on stage and sing about what they want to do to
you [women] and women get on stage and talk about what has been done to them” and
it’s so true…for a long time…women have felt like it’s [only] safe to be a victim onstage.

To add to this point, Robinson (2020) argues, “[SDRR] was the ‘culture’ of the time. In some
circles it’s still the ‘culture’” (p. 67); these historical moments are thus not simply case studies of
a bygone era, but disjunctions in the labyrinth that constitutes the infrastructure of America’s
popular music industries. Fowley’s status in musical histories as a pioneering rock impresario is
useful in the richness it offers for a close interrogation of the forces of power and characteristics
of the internal industry structures that not only allowed for, but celebrated—and in several cases,
continue to celebrate—this complicated figure today.
At the same time, Fowley is by no means an exception in the “Wild West” of SDRR
topography of popular American music. Mediated accounts of rock bands from Led Zeppelin to
Van Halen follow strikingly parallel tracks.
54
“Sexual harassment in one walk of life is merely

54
(K. Keyes, personal communication, July 6, 2021); Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osborne, Van Halen, Keith Richards, Guns
‘n’ Roses, The Who, among others, are often also included in historical accounts and listicles that round-up the most
extreme examples of this behavior, elevating these figures within the larger ethos of the SDRR paradigm, for
example, SPIN Magazine’s (2000) special issue, “100 Sleaziest Moments in Rock.” These mediated narratives often
point to events that border “truth” and sit as questionable in their facticity; yet incidents are often framed to be all-
the-more alluring due to the questionable nature of their occurrence—drug overdoses, rampant and exhibitionist sex
acts, destruction of property, pyrotechnics, and wild animals become familiar points of attention in these narratives.
Of note, these features do include some women—from The Go-Gos to Madonna to Courtney Love—however, the
narrativization of these artists and mediation of their “sleazy” behavior is generally framed through a male gaze that
situates women’s and girl’s behavior within the masculine paradigm that constitutes SDRR. As the front cover to

93
harmless banter in the world of rock,” writes Noel Monk and Joe Layden in the opening pages to
their Van Halen history, Runnin’ With the Devil (2017). Robinson further recounts KISS lead
singer Gene Simmons archiving “numbered polaroids of the girls he bedded on his tours” (p.
202, p. 67). In another iteration of this pervasive narrative, music journalist Stephen Davis paints
a graphic chapter in popular music pseudohistory in his 1985 New York Times bestselling—
though unofficial—Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods. The book’s overture opens to
dramatic effect, detailing a series of highly-circulated rumors pertaining to the band in its
mythologized Rock heyday:
Led Zeppelin sustained itself on the road by drinking vaginal secretions direct from
the source…eating women and throwing the bones out the window…tumescent girls
immersed in tubs of warm baked beans before coitus…girls staggered out of the Sunset
Strip hotels by first light of the morning and carried preposterous lore back…of the
beating of women, of sex magic and endless orgies. They talked about the drunken girl in
the seaside hotel in Seattle who let Led Zeppelin drub her with a dead shark. (pp. 3 - 4)

While these accounts straddle outlandish fantasy and just-realistic-enough to potentially be true,
their veracity is undoubtedly questionable. Davis’s book contributes to the discursive framework
upon which SDRR is thus reconstituted, adding legitimacy to myth, shaky history to rumors, as
if it is the colorful culmination of a long, sordid and hazy game of telephone made more extreme
with each telling. What’s more, it becomes fodder for a cycle of mediated narratives and cultural
messaging that keep such accounts in circulation and frames women—whether music
professionals or fans—through a “groupie” lens, marginalizing and minimizing them as sexual

SPIN’s special issue, which features Van Halen singer David Lee Roth in an unbuttoned shirt and thong,
foregrounding a woman bent over, advertises: “Teen groupies! Indecent exposure! Mind control! Stolen sex tapes!
Evil clowns! Graverobbing! Assault with lunch meat!” Furthermore, while women in these historical accounts might
have shown agency and consent in some of the more extreme and performative acts, as women in the male-
dominated space of the music industry (and America) they were not immune from being victimized or subjects to
rampant and recurrent sexism in the ways afforded to male counterparts, particularly white male artists, and were
often subjected to sexist treatment that placed them in the company of “groupies,” rather than their professional
male artists counterparts. For a deeper dive into just a small sampling of some of these histories, see (Neil & Kent,
2009); (Lee, Neil, Mars, Sixx, & Strauss, 2002); (Sixx, 2008); (Kiedis, 2005); and (Trynka, 2008).

94
objects, ornaments for male artists in the SDRR lifestyle.
55
More than three decades after
Hammer of the Gods was published, for example, preeminent music trade magazine Rolling
Stone dedicated an article to verifying many of the accounts highlighted by Davis with journalist
Andy Greene’s roundup of “The 10 Wildest Led Zeppelin Legends, Fact-Checked”—one of
which was the notorious shark assault (2019).
This archive of narratives is further reinforced when we consider that many music
biographies have been written by the same journalists whose coverage graces the pages of
mainstream trade magazines (McDonnell, 2013; Bangs, 1980); add to this the high percentage of
“official” memoirs that are ghostwritten or co-written by journalists (Reid & Selvin, 2016; Lee &
Bozza, 2005; Amos & Powers, 2005). This narrative loop shrinks yet again when these same
voices bring fictionalized or pseudo-historical accounts to life via other multimedia forms (for
example the 2000 film Almost Famous, written and directed by Cameron Crowe as a semi-
autobiographical account of his own maturation as a music journalist for Rolling Stone in the
1970s). “The world of music criticism is Mafia-like in its consolidations and exertions of
influence,” argues The New York Times’ Dwight Garner (2021). This network of writers and
journalists is precisely what Fuchs’s wanted to avoid and a key reason behind her selection of
Cherkis in telling her story—as a non-music journalist, there would be less risk in his being
caught up in the mythology or “trivia” of Fuchs’s rock star identity.
Regardless of the facticity pertaining to the incidents and events involved in such
accounts like Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, such narrativization of popular music histories adds
to the mythologization, glorification, and perverse romanticization of the incidents and contexts

55
In this way, while I do not focus on groupies or fans in this project, their hyper-visibility and centered positioning
in histories and narratives surrounding popular American music are important to note for the gendered influence this
framing has on women artists, music professionals, etc. who are not fans in these music spaces. Women and girls are
positioned as fans—regardless of professional status—in a way and to an extent that men historically are not.

95
that comprised key spaces in the popular music industries and constructed the foundation upon
which Fuchs’s alleges her assault occurred. Taken alone, such narratives portray an image of
liberation and rebellion that is tempting in its appeal, luring interest and curiosity precisely
because of their outlandishness and brazen disregard for rules. There is little mind for
consequences—real or potential—for the episodes that comprise these tall tales; at the same
time, such narratives often straddle a line of believability in which incidents, rumors, and
accounts are just plausible enough to appear within the grasp of those who are or aspire to be
part of the SDRR lifestyle and ethos. They become pseudohistorical accounts repackaged and
repurposed as advertising for SDRR where more is more and no means yes. As Robinson
similarly recounts: “Everyone went into rock and roll for similar reasons: sex, attention, the love
of the music, money and plenty of drugs. Drugs that made them feel free, uninhibited, have great
sex, be liberated, reckless, do crazy things” (2020, p. 124). In this way, advertising and
promotional rhetoric becomes another useful frame through which the discursive frameworks
and SDRR ideology can be examined. Regina Bendix argues (2002): “any advertisement is
ultimately a quick story, offering just enough imagery and text for the viewer or reader to insert
themselves as potential buyers” (pp. 474-475). Taken together, however, such narratives
illuminate the discursive knowledge informing both the contexts and histories of the popular
American music industries, which impact not only how these spaces are regulated and perceived
but further delimit how individuals move in and across these spaces. Such mythologies, while at
once tantalizing and spectacularized through media and personal accounts, are both fun-house
representations of reality and reckless when situated in the precarious structures of America’s
popular music industries.
The frames through which these histories are articulated and recirculated further

96
construct a discursive framework that relies upon a gendered rhetoric of myth; the excessive and
fantastical nature of the SDRR lifestyle and aesthetic serving as an active Petri dish for theatrical
retellings, which embolden a feedback loop that enables and standardizes transgressive behavior,
particularly as it pertains to the objectification, sexualization, violation, and exploitation of
women. “The total disregard and disrespect for women is constant in the rock world and has no
exceptions” argues Rhodes (2005, p. 212). As I’ve detailed, central to the discursive framework
that undergirds SDRR—what some have coined the “that holy trinity of hedonism”—is an
investment in revolt and provocation. The parameters that governed and dominated mainstream
ideals of middle-class white America are eschewed in favor of performative rebellion (Fear,
2013; Raga, 2016; Scott, 2017). Nonconformity reigns supreme.
56
In this way, The Runaways
was a fitting name and persona for the band Fowley orchestrated and oversaw. Indeed, countless
examples point to Fowley’s vision in forming The Runaways as “jailbait”—a classification that
points to the dynamics of gender, age, and genre that the Runaways would come to embody. It’s
also a framing that positions Fuchs and her bandmates through a lens of criminality—a state of
precarity in which they are bait for others to transgress boundaries. In her memoir, Lita Ford
shares how she was first invited by Fowley to join the band, which he pitched to her as: “An all-
girl teenage band of rebellious jailbait rock-and-roll bitches” (2016, p. 21). Hoskyns similarly
writes, “The Runaways was the perfect name for this jailbait combo, a typically Fowleyan tribute
to the endless female strays who annually poured into Hollywood in pursuit of love and fame”
(2009, p. 291).

56
The publicness of such transgressions becomes part of the mythological maintenance—retellings of these
incidents adds to the lore, elevates the myth, and provides those “performing” in these spaces an audience, even if
the specific actors or details become blurred and convoluted over time. At the same time, “investigative” stories
attempting to get at the “truth” of these incidents results in a separate line of cultural messaging and interrogation—
fashioned more like a scavenger hunt than critical investigative journalism. For example, see (Williams, 2019;
Bleier, 209; Hughes, 2016).

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My argument in highlighting and detailing the SDRR trinity is not to assert that the ethos
of SDRR that emerged as a dominant discursive framework in mid-twentieth century America
shaped the popular music industries into breeding grounds for sexism and sexual misconduct, but
rather that the already-undergirding patriarchal structures upon which the commercial music
industry was founded, and the misogynistic axis around which it has turned since its inception,
together provided a warm and welcoming incubator for SDRR to evolve into a pervasive
framework—the afterlives of which continue to echo across music industry spaces today,
regardless of genre or whether the same exhibitionist tactics of this trinity remain as overtly on
display as they did during the late 1960s and 1970s. “Everyone still uses the words ‘rock star’ to
describe someone who apparently has the most charisma and is the best at what they do—
whether it’s Mick Jagger or Oprah Winfrey…Barack Obama or LeBron James,” Robinson
argues, “And, as long as we glorify this…thing that has gone on now for almost sixty years that
was initially, and is still largely male, it reaffirms the misogyny” (2020, pp. 70 - 71). (I explore
this in greater detail with respect to hip-hop in the cases of Russell Simmons and L.A. Reid in
the chapter that follows.)
A constitutive component of this structural reinforcement and the discursive knowledge
that informs it is the pervasiveness of a folkloric rhetoric that traffics in fantasy and myth. Gods,
icons, heroes and stars populate the legends and lore of American popular music. “As with many
things,” Robinson argues, “the myth is often greater than the reality” (2020, p. 174). Multi-
hyphenate artist Bette Midler makes a similar reflection on her time in music: “real life is real.
And when you get caught up in the fantasy of it, it takes years—years and years—to realize that
you’ve been had. And that’s big. To realize that you feel for something that’s incorrect, that’s a
lie” (as cited in Robinson, 2020, pp. 4-5). Male perpetrators become protagonists, tragic heroes

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elevated and amplified as deities crusading for the SDRR cause.
57
Disclosure—like criminality,
accountability, and justice—becomes alternatively minimized as a killjoy of these epic sagas or
amplified as an antagonizing villain that must be overcome in order to protect the music
industries’ sordid fiefdoms. It is precisely the outlandish—often brazen, at times violent and
criminal—behavior that grants individuals membership into this line of mythology in American
popular music. Women, however, are often relegated to the position of victim and villain in the
narrativization of the historical chapters of these musical sagas. That is not to say, however, the
ethos and ideology of SDRR has not also been historically appealing to women—both as
participants and observers—and for some it has been a key motivating force in their desire to
work in America’s music industries. Long-time A&R executive Dorothy Carvello, the first
woman to hold the position at Atlantic Records, recounts in her memoir Anything for a Hit: An
A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry: “The music business seemed like it would
give me everything I wanted but couldn’t get: status, power, money, and the forbidden thrills of
sex and rock ’n’ roll (drugs didn’t interest me”; she continues, “I lusted for that world, yearned to
be considered worthy of it” (2018, pp. 13-14).
Legends, Myths, and Lore
“The Greatest Saga in Rock ’n’ Roll History” exclaims the back cover of Davis’s (1985)
Hammer of the Gods
58
in all capital red letters, continuing, “they were legends based on myths—
myths of fantasy, power, and black magic…The era of Led Zeppelin personified sex, drugs, and
rock ’n’ roll.” “Countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven,
talented indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with

57
As Led Zeppelin singer and frontman Robert Plant emphasizes in a blurb to an updated edition of Davis’s book,
“I want to believe Hammer of the Gods because it’s done us huge favors in terms of aura” (1997).
58
The title itself sets the tone as both a nod to mythology and a not-so-subtle phallic nod to the hyper sexuality and
sexualization of the band.

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an indisputable nobility” music journalist Paul Trynka (2008) writes in the prologue to his
comprehensive biography of The Stooge’s notorious frontman Iggy Pop, Open Up and Bleed
(2008, p. 8). In another example, VH1 News’s Jordan Runtagh invokes the language of myth in a
round-up detailing “The 15 Wildest Party Animals in Rock (And the Antics that made them
Legends)” (2014). The parenthetical here reminds us yet again that antics aren’t just
symptomatic of, but instead prerequisites for, initiation into the powerful circles of select music
legend circuits. These narratives constitute the cultural domain of power present across and
throughout the industries’ various sectors. Such rhetoric is not reserved for artists and bands;
Atlantic Records founder, Ahmet Ertegun is referred to by Carvello in these terms: “If the word
‘legend’ has any meaning, Ahmet is a legend” (2018, p. 1).
59
Awards and awards shows likewise
employ this language; for example, the Grammy Awards have since 1990 awarded an annual
Grammy Legend Award, the Billboard Music Awards and the American Music Awards both
recognize artists with Icon Awards, and Guitar Player magazine awards an annual Certified
Legend Award.
Narratives that traffic in the language of myth, Western religiosity, iconography and
nobility thus reconstruct a gendered hierarchy that further separates principal figures in
America’s popular music industries, positioning them as superior, as worthy of deference, if not
devotion—more hagiography than biography. A sense of immortality, of being untouchable, is
further re-inscribed when audiences and the broader music public are positioned in the media and
via industry promotional tactics as “worshippers” of these music gods.
60
The interpersonal
domain of power is magnified and complicated as fandom becomes entangled through the

59
To highlight the concentric circles that begin to form across the micro-geographies of the music industry, Ertegun
signed rock “gods” Led Zeppelin to Atlantic Records.
60
For example, see (North & Hargreaves, 2008).

100
language of religiosity and iconography—disciples and followers of key actors who hold
outsized power.
61
Rhodes details, “The whole rock scene (as opposed to rock music) depends on
our being there. Women are necessary at these places of worship [concerts] so that, in between
sets, the real audience (men) can be assured of getting that woman they’re supposed to like”
(2005, p. 212). As I articulated in the introduction, fans, fandom, and “groupies” or “band aids”
are situated outside the scope of this project, as the relationships of power are distinct between
those I consider “inside” and “outside” the formal structures of America’s popular music
industries.
62
However, the ways in which fans and commercial audiences are formulated and
framed as followers or worshippers—not simply consumers or lovers—of popular American
music further informs how narratives surrounding incidents of sexual harassment and
misconduct are framed via the media and how the cultural domain of power contributes to the
impact of this messaging. Indeed, long-time music writer Barney Hoskyns in his detailed history
of Los Angeles’s music scene, Waiting for the Sun: A Rock ’n’ Roll History of Los Angeles,
places The Runaways on a spectrum, connected to—yet on opposing sides from—the GTOs

61
In perhaps one of the most extreme examples of devotional relationships intersecting with popular American
music, infamous cult leader Charles Manson was an aspiring musician prior to forming the Manson Family, which
included an early friendship with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Manson has since become the subject of lyrics in songs
by such artists as Guns ’n’ Roses and Marilyn Mason (Garber-Paul, 2016).
62
For critical histories of groupies in popular music, see Lisa R. Rhodes (2005) Electric Ladyland: Women and
Rock Culture, archival collections of their mediated representation, such as Baron Wolman’s (2015) Groupies and
Other Electric Ladies. Several memoirs have also been published over the past two decades from key figures in
groupie circuits of the mid-twentieth 20th century: Bebe Beull’s (2001) Rebel Heart: An American Rock ’n’ Roll
Journey, Pamela De Barres’s (2005) I’m with the Band; Confessions of a Groupie, Pattie Boyd’s (2008) Wonderful
Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, or Bobbie Brown’s (2014) Dirty Rocker Boys: Love and Lust on
the Sunset Strip. Importantly, while once a pejorative, the characterization as a “groupie” has been revisited and
reclaimed in more recent years, in part through the publication of these memoirs and other articles providing public
platforms for women to share their experiences in the music industries and relationships with artists (Petrusich,
2015). While these accounts add nuance to questions of power, agency, identity, and sexuality in these historical
moments, these are further complicated when accounts are viewed through the lens of the contemporary conjuncture
in which sexual dalliances between adult men and underage fans, for example, would neither be accepted or
celebrated in the same ways they were during the heyday of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Additionally, Gayle Wald’s
(2002) “I Want it That Way”: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands provides an insightful and
instructive examination of how the gendered binary breaks down in the space of boy bands, teenage fandom, and
contemporary Pop music.

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(Girls Together Outrageously, which was a band comprised by some of the most well-known
“groupies” on LA’s Sunset Strip in the late 1960s and whose album Permanent Damage was
produced by Frank Zappa (2009, p. 269). The gendered line between artist and fan is thus further
blurred through these accounts. What’s more, this framing informs how incidents of misconduct
and abuse are made visible and adjudicated via the court of public option, which becomes ever-
more present at the turn of the twentieth-century alongside and in conjunction with the rise of
social media and digital technologies.
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The Runaways may be remembered and historicized as “The Queens of Noise”—a
reference to their 1977 sophomore album and single of the same name—yet their reign took a
decisive detour from that of their male counterparts. The power embodied by these figures is
often delimited and distinguished by gender. Whereas praise for Davis’s Hammer of the Gods
(1997) emphasizes “The Led Zeppelin Saga” as “one of rock’s greatest stories,” for example,
McDonnell’s Queens of Noise is written up as “a cautionary tale of what can happen to girls on
the cusp of womanhood who dare to put themselves in exciting but dangerous positions…of girls
raised to believe they could do what boys do, who then crashed into the wall of sexual
harassment and discrimination” (2005, p. 6). Though written prior to Fuchs’s disclosure, this
framing of The Runaways’ tenure as a “cautionary tale”—and the suggestion that these girls
placed themselves knowingly and intentionally in positions of “danger”—lays the groundwork
upon which this disclosure is later situated. (Let us also recall here the familiar framing of The
Runaways by Fowley and others as “jailbait.”) Indeed, the disclosure itself framed Jackie Fuchs
and The Runaways not as “Queens,” or even as rebellious teenagers “running away” from home,

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Nancy K. Baym’s (2018) Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection has
been a helpful source in thinking through the relationships between fans and artists, particularly as facilitated via
social media and new music technologies.

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but instead as “The Lost Girls”: “One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed”
reads the article byline (Cherkis, 2015). This is not to suggest that Fuchs and her Runaways
bandmates did not have agency, nor to suggest that their positionally in and through these
characterizations as queens, runaways, los girls, etc. cetera, is mutually exclusive. Rather, this
seemingly conflicting distinction highlights that the scaffolding of the America’s music
industries is multi-dimensional and widespread, and the community of music professionals
tasked with overseeing, protecting, and guiding these artists, who happened to be young girls,
through the complicated networks and layers of this scaffolding were complicit in, if not
facilitators, instigators, and/or perpetrators of precarious situations of danger, as I have outlined
above. Put differently, that the interlocking domains of interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and
structural power differently privileged the artists and individuals in this base via such markers of
identity as age and gender.
Svengalis, Mentors, and Puppeteers
Lisa Robinson asserts emphatically that “almost every successful female musician has
had a man initially help guide her career” (2020, p. 163). The “Svengali” is one narrativized
manifestation of that “helpful” man—a recurrent masculine figure in the popular entertainment
industry—and no place is this more apparent than in historical accounts and contemporary media
narrativization of the music industry.
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First introduced in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel,
Trilby, Svengali is a domineering character, who controls the novel’s angelic singer, Trilby.

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The Svengali characterization appears in media coverage of musical mentor figures—often those who have in
some ways abused their power or exploited their musical protégés. Just some of the many examples include:
American businessman Lou Perlman, who is responsible for discovering and forming both the Backstreet Boys and
*NSYNC (Barshad and Declan, 2016); British multi-hyphenate and One Direction (1D) and Fifth Harmony
mastermind Simon Cowell (Tannenbaum, 2016); Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren (Hunter-Tinely, 2010);
Mexican producer Sergio Andrade (Gurza, 2005); and Spice Girls manager and entrepreneur Simon Fuller (Clover,
1998); Motown record man, Berry Gordy and “wall of sound” producer, Phil Spector (O’Brien, 2012).

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Svengali transforms Trilby into an international singing phenomenon, but her musical career and
talent are completely under the disciplinary and interpersonal control of Svengali’s hypnotic
influence. Du Maurier writes:
He had but one virtue—his love of his art; or, rather, his love of himself as a master of his
art—the master; for he despised, or affected to despise, all other musicians, living or
dead—even those whose work he interpreted so divinely, and pitied them for not hearing
Svengali give utterance to their music, which of course they could not utter themselves.
(1894, loc. 668)

Today, the Svengali figure is manifest as a mentor—or “puppet master”—traditionally a male
figure who takes on a young protégé to mold their talent and teach them how to navigate the
music industry’s tumultuous and uncertain landscape. He is often a paternal and/or a mysterious
and enticing figure who promises success to aspiring and nascent artists—he is always dominant
and often manipulative; “before [Svengali] could teach [Trilby] anything,” du Maurier’s writes,
“he had to unteach her all she knew” (1894, loc. 717). However, the Svengali’s relationship with
his protégé is historically marked by a significant and dynamic change—a shift in interactions,
an artist’s realization of her/his exploitation. The disciplinary and interpersonal power are
pronounced in these narratives, the hierarchy of power and vulnerability or naiveté of the
promising artist necessary to the narrative that the Svengali characterization sells. As du Maurier
conceives, Svengali “set himself to teach [Trilby]—kindly and patiently at first, calling her sweet
little pet names...and promised her that she should be the queen of the nightingales…[but] he
grew harsh and impatient and coldly severe, and of course she loved him all the more” (loc. 715 -
723). As stated above, this title is frequently attributed to Kim Fowley for his relationship with
The Runaways—so too has it been used in characterizations of Dr. Luke and L.A. Reid (who I
examine in the next chapter), framing them as modern-day Svengalis, contemporary
reincarnations of du Maurier’s sinister nineteenth century figure.

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Good Girl Gone Bad
Easy for a good girl to go bad/ And once we’ve gone (Gone)
Best believe we’ve gone forever
Don’t be the reason, don’t be the reason
You better learn how to treat us right
‘Cause once a good girl goes bad, we gone forever
- Rihanna, “Good Girl Gone Bad”
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Language pertaining to danger can be further explored through a close examination of
how acts of transgression or “bad” behavior have been framed and gendered. Who gets to be bad,
who gets to get away with being bad, and how such acts/incidents become sutured to identity and
reputation, differs for men and women, boys and girls, in America’s music industries? This
disparity is not unique to Rock ’n’ Roll and can be explored in examples across mainstream
popular American music. Such transgressions are often framed through discourses pertaining to
“safety” and “appropriateness” and rooted to socially constructed norms surrounding gender,
age, and race at different historical conjunctures. Through this framework, safety more often
refers to adherence to dominant American norms and values than it does to actual physical safety
or mental health; it is little surprise, then, that women’s bodies and behaviors are actively and
aggressively regulated and confined to strict standards of femininity, while the overt prevalence
of men’s acts of harassment, abuse, and misconduct are shrugged off as the norm, as “boys being
boys,” or “just the way things are.”
Sarah Dougher (2016) explores a useful paradigm in thinking through the relationship
between gender and music and the question of safety, what she calls: “The limits of the
appropriate.” These limits—the boundaries around which a norm is preserved and across which
transgressions occur—dictate “How girls are supposed to act around music” (2016). As norms,
these limits and their significance is necessarily socially-constructed; in other words, in order to

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Eriksen, M. S., Hermansen, T. E., Ne-Yo, & The-Dream. (2007). Good girl gone bad [Lyrics].
https://genius.com/Rihanna-good-girl-gone-bad-lyrics#song-info

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remain dominant, the undergirding systems of values and beliefs that constitute gender-based
ideologies like sexism and misogyny must be actively constructed and maintained through
interlocking systems of power. “When girls play at being women by imitating people or media
around them,” Dougher argues, “they are both praised for appropriate or normative behavior, as
well as censured for inappropriate behavior (both by adults and by each other). Inappropriate
behavior can be directly correlated to the degree to which a girl matches the norm” (2016).
Safety is thus about protecting the patriarchal infrastructure that undergirds the music industry;
threats are not so much about women and girls in isolation, but about the preservation of the
misogyny that undergirds the systems of power that dominate America’s music industries, and
American culture more broadly. In Gayle Wald’s thorough examination of boy bands and
teenyboppers, “I Want it That Way”: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands,” she
explores the question of safety:
Although 'adult' voices more often fault contemporary rock for their misogyny and their
objectifying portrayals of women, it bears remembering that conceptions of what is
culturally 'safe' for girls may be no less deeply invested in patriarchal notions of female
sexuality and subjectivity, including notions of female domestic virtue. (p. 14)

One key pattern in this thread is the discursive and mediated framing, through the cultural
domain of power, of men's acts of transgression as opportunities for rebirth, renewal and
reinvention. Conversely, if women cross the boundaries and expectations stipulated in and
through their positionality and normative standards of gender expression, their acts of
transgression are framed as failures—if not commercial and professional death all-together. As
music journalist Jessica Hopper similarly articulates, “The failure of male genius is often written
off, and even celebrated as evidence of a calculated experiment from a risk-taking visionary”
(2019). Furthermore, to circle back to Catherine Strong and Emma Rush’s (2017) paradigm of
misremembering discussed in Chapter 1, this double standard is informed and enforced via

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mediated narratives and marketing efforts that reinforce patriarchal hierarchies and structures of
policing.
In one brief example, we can look at the public transgressions of two contemporary pop
stars: Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. Following Spears’s public mental health crisis in 2007,
which was highly-mediated and widely-circulated across entertainment and news platforms,
Spears received a groundswell of backlash. In response to the public bashing that followed this
moment of crisis for Spears, NME journalist Douglas Greenwood (2017) articulates the sexist
and oppositional frame through which Britney is presented:
In the music industry, a man's bad behaviour [sic] is seen as the perfect opportunity to
orchestrate his re-brand as an artist, such as Justin Bieber's scot-free transition from
saintly teenage heartthrob to serious, edgy musician. It's almost a reverse action for
women. Being embroiled in tabloid controversy spells career suicide, and they're
expected to redeem themselves in order to move on and make music again.

On cue, Billboard magazine’s March 2021 issue features a cover story on Justin Bieber.
Photographed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, white tank top, and a backwards black
baseball cap, neck tattoos peeking out from his nearly shoulder-length hair, Bieber bites gently
on the end of a daisy. This image is the embodiment of the frame to which Greenwood refers: the
“edgy musician” reconnecting with his “saintly teenage heartthrob” roots to complete the
cycle—he’s transgressed, but he’s now rebranded, and thus reborn as an artist. This progression
is one that Billboard celebrates with this feature: “Bieber in Bloom,” the front cover reads in
white and pink font, “Married. Centered. Responsible. How pop’s lost boy found himself.”
The language of being “lost” provides a generative contrast to Jackie Fuchs’s 2015
disclosure in The Huffington Post: “The Lost Girls: One Famous Band. One Huge Secret. Many
Lives Destroyed” (Cherkis, 2015). That which is lost for Fuchs carries a weight and magnitude
not present for Bieber, whose state of being “lost” instead reflects a young child who has

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mischievously run off his path only to return home. For Fuchs, what is lost is innocence, an
amicable relationship with Runaways bandmates, and a life not marked by the trauma and
tragedy of her assault:
Sometimes Jackie wonders how her life…would’ve been different had she never met
Fowley…But she tries not to dwell. She says she’s more interested in restoring what’s
been lost. “One of the things I’ve tried to do with every bystander is let them know it’s
not their fault…I also have to not blame myself for what happened to them” (Cherkis,
2015).

In another example, singer and Hole founder Courtney Love articulates the double-standard
women experience in spaces across the music industries. With respect to the behavior and
lifestyle of SDRR, Love recounts: “‘If I’d been a man, I’d have been considered a lovable
scoundrel’—instead of being called a drugged-up slut’” (as cited in Robinson, 2020, p. 114).
What’s more, this backlash appears both when women have agency in their public
“transgressions,” as well as when women’s boundaries are transgressed or violated by others
publicly. In other words, in moments of controversy, women often become the target of blame
via the cultural domain of power and mediated messages, even if they did not perpetrate the
transgression or the harm that may have befallen them.
At the same time, some perpetrators call upon a long history of rehabilitation—an
exploitative misuse of diagnostic language that frames men as ill, as sick or infected in a way
that requires medical and/or psychological treatment in order to return to proper health. This
becomes a common tactic in statements issued via the media and performed via publicly-
mediated apologies. As a strategy, this both provides recognition of bad behavior (when outright
denial is not an option), while also quickly reframing that behavior through the rhetoric of the
unwell, positioning men as worthy of sympathy for their transgressions because they are now
framed as suffering from a disease/condition/addition/etc. for which they cannot be held

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accountable. To be clear: addiction and other dependencies that have been historically deployed
in public apologies are serious conditions to which proper medical, psychological, and
psychiatric care should attend; my intent is not to minimize or question the severity of them, but
instead to highlight the way the language of these dependencies is coopted via publicists and
lawyers as a smoke and mirrors tactic to excuse away the behavior of perpetrators precisely
because it is sensitive and tricky ground to navigate. This tactic blurs the lines intentionally
between public acknowledgement and personal privacy in a way that circumvents systems of
justice and accountability in an attempt to let perpetrators off the hook. “The framing of [this]
problem as one to do with sex reflects no reckoning with the nature of the charges,” The
Atlantic’s James Hamblin (2017) writes in “The Audacity of Blaming ‘Sex Addiction,”
published in response to Harvey Weinstein’s claims of “sex addiction,” following the allegations
that first came out against him in October 2017.
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Importantly, there is often overt privilege in
this tactic, whereby “when others might go to prison, powerful people go to rehab” (Hamblin,
2017). At the same time, this narrative of addiction—to drugs, alcohol, and sex, in particular—is
primed for the landscape of America’s music industries. The SDRR ethos sets the stage for such
rhetorical tactics—this was simply an instance of a rocker rocking too hard, “he couldn’t help
himself.” As Robinson similarly recounts from her long tenure covering Rock music, “more
subtle forms of abuse [in America’s industries include]: the “locker room talk,” the “bad
behavior,” the “sex addiction,” the “mistakes,” the “boys will be boys” (2020, p. 61). He just

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An important point of elaboration regarding sex addiction, as Hamblin details: “The more glaring problem with
the narrative is the mischaracterization of the incidents as ‘sexual’—and an addiction to that sex. ‘Sex addiction’ is
not included in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, as the American psychiatric establishment chose to
regard sex differently from other addictive behaviors—largely in that there are no serious physical symptoms of
withdrawal. This is a consequential distinction. People can have problematic sex-related compulsions that interfere
with daily life, but that’s different. For example, in a very real sense, a person approaching the lethal stages of
alcohol withdrawal may rob a liquor store to save his life. This would not be the moral equivalent of raping a person
to stem an onset of “‘ex withdrawal. Even for the minority of mental-health experts who would characterize sex
addiction as a diagnosable condition, the fact remains that sex is simply not the issue at hand” (2018).

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needs to go to rehab and cool it on the drugs and sex for a while and he will come back
rehabilitated, a fresh new start free of his demons. This pattern repeats in instances of sexual
misconduct in America’s music industries; it appears again with Life and Death publicist
Heathcliff Berru, who I examine in greater detail in Chapter 3. “Many are stories about men with
power and fame attracting women and girls without either of those things and taking advantage
of the differential,” writes Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic, “They are not stories, generally,
about consequences for the men. In fact, it’s probably the expectation of no consequences that
enables many of these incidents. Sexist attitudes and simple lust may fuel some men’s desire to
become a sexual predator, but impunity allows them to act on that desire” (2016).
In this way, in incidents of harassment and misconduct, the harms endured by women are
remembered and foregrounded differently than they are for male perpetrators. Robinson explores
this in conversations with Rihanna, highlighting how victimization of women becomes forever-
attached to their identities and images as artists. With respect to Chris Brown’s highly-publicized
2009 attack of Rihanna in Los Angeles, where both artists were in town for the annual
GRAMMY Awards, Robinson shares: “I told [Rihanna] that this would follow her to her
eventual obituary; the first line would mention this incident, and she said she knew that she was
the poster child for domestic abuse. Every time there is a high-profile violence against famous
women, Rihanna is dragged into the story, brought up as an example of another victim. ‘It’s like
the victim gets punished over and over’” (2020, p. 75).
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Congruent to this assertion, music

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Rihanna’s experience mirrors that of other women whose public images and reputations have been attached to
scandals in which men have abused their power. The consequences for the men in these incidents is historically
different and disproportionate to that of women. For example, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill case introduced
earlier, as well as the President Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sex scandal that gripped news headlines in America
for much of 1998. While each of these cases—Brown, Thomas, and Clinton—has distinct differences, apparent
through-lines pertaining to gender emerge as well. Brown was charged with battery for his assault on Rihanna.
Clinton and Thomas faced different consequences: Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court, while President
Clinton resigned from the presidency in the wake of the scandal, but only after an attempt to impeach him failed.
Importantly, however, Clinton was pressured to resign due to obstruction of justice and perjury charges, rather than

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executive L.A. Reid—who I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3—recalls working with
Rihanna in 2007 on her third studio album Good Girl Gone Bad while he was an executive at
Def Jam Recordings: “When we heard the song ‘Good Girl Gone Bad,’ I knew I had found the
title for her album. I had no idea how ironic that would become” (2018, p. 302). Reid then
proceeds to dedicate three pages to recounting the Chris Brown incident alongside commentary
about the success of her GGGB album.

for ethics violations or for exploiting his power as the President over Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House
intern. Moreover, neither Clinton nor Lewinsky disclosed their relationship publicly, but were instead outed by a
colleague of Lewinsky’s in whom she had confided about the affair. While I am in no way equating the sexual
harassment Hill endured, or assault Rihanna experienced at the hands of brown, with the sexual relationship that
Lewinsky consented to engaging in with President Clinton, I highlight these cases here together to reference how
scandals surrounding sexual harassment and sexual encounters have framed women, often through the logic of
victim-blaming, in a way that sutures these cases to the names and reputations of women to an extent not
experienced by those men involved, as well as to suggest that in all instances the unequal dynamics of gendered
power contribute to the framing and historicization of these events. Of note, Bill Clinton has also been accused of
sexual harassment and rape (Peralta, 2016). As with Rihanna’s experience of being pulled into conversations
pertaining to high-profile domestic assault cases, Hill and Lewinsky’s names are likewise deployed as historical
reminders and frameworks with new instances of sexual harassment and sex scandals, respectively. Hill’s name was
everywhere throughout Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. Likewise, in the wake of the
Trump impeachment in January 2020, Monica Lewinsky took to Twitter to remind both media and public audiences
about how not to frame historical comparisons of these incidents: “A gentle reminder for ways other than using my
name re 1998. let’s not frame it by the woman + youngest, least powerful person involved”; offering alternatives,
Lewinsky followed-up: “The Starr Investigation; The 1998 Impeachment; The Scandal of 1998; The Clinton
Impeachment; That Crazy, F***ed Up 1998” (Lewinsky, 2020).

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Chapter 3: On the Record
Oh I'm the gatekeeper/ Spread your legs/
Open up/ You could be famous
If you come up anywhere else, I'll erase you…
You know we're holding the dreams that you're chasing
You know you're supposed to get drunk and get naked…
Girl, tie your hair up if you wanna be a star…
30 million people want a shot
How much would it take for you to spread those legs apart?…
Girl, on your knees/ Don't you know what your place is?
- Jessie Reyez, “Gatekeeper”
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Sometimes I feel like there is no reason for me to explain/
No matter how much we complain/You know it all stays the same/…
This is a story of a male female threat to society/
Why you wanna go and tell a lie on me?/
They're gonna believe/ His story over mine
His story will be his story and/ My story is a waste of time
- TLC, “His Story”
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Gurus, Godfathers, and Gatekeepers
As I detail in Chapter 2, the language of mythology, religion, iconography, and nobility
has become integrated into the rhetorical frames and discursive systems of knowledge that
(re)present and narrativize principal figures in the landscape of popular American music.

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Larsen, W. W., & Reyez, J. (2017). Gatekeeper [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Jessie-reyez-
gatekeeper-lyrics
In 2018, singer Jessie Reyez disclosed that producer Noel Fisher, known as “Detail,” was the inspiration
behind her song “Gatekeeper.” Released as a single in 2017, “Gatekeeper” details Reyez’s experiences of misogyny,
sexual harassment and misconduct in the music industry, framed via those in power who abuse their positions, in
part, via demands and expectations for sexual favors. Upon release, the song was also accompanied by a twelve-
minute video, Gatekeeper: A True Story, which narrativizes the night Detail harassed Reyez; recounting verbatim
what she experienced that night as a young and aspiring artist, the actor portraying Detail exclaims: “If you’re not
using your pussy, you ain’t serious about your fuckin’ dreams …You’re fucking up your chance right now.” While
Reyez released “Gatekeeper” as a single and video in 2017, she did not come forward to disclose Detail’s identity,
specifically, until two other women came forward with accusations of rape against Detail, which were first reported
via TMZ (Penrose, 2018; Bliss, 2017). Retweeting the TMZ report, Reyez commented: “One night, over 6 years ago
Noel ‘Detail’ Fisher tried this on me. I was lucky and I got out before it got to this. I didn’t know what to say or who
to tell. I was scared. Fear is a real thing. The girls that came out are brave as hell” (Reyez, 2018). There are parallels
to Reyez’s story that resonate outside of the United States, as the porous boundaries between the American-centric
mainstream industry ripples outward into international offices and subsidiaries of key music fixtures and labels. In
one example, British singer-songwriter Chlöe Howl details, “I know girls who’ve been raped, and it’s always a man
in power and a girl on the rise who needs as much support as possible, whose career hasn’t started yet—maybe this
is her first bi[g] shot” (Ingham, 2017b).
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Austin, D. (1992). His story [Lyrics]. Retrieved from
https://www.google.com/search?q=his+story+lyrics+tlc&oq=his+story+lyrics+tlc+&aqs=chrome..69i57.3537
j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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Together, they are constitutive of the cultural domain of power, comprising the key messages
and frames it affords particular artists and groups in specific conjunctures. While Sex, Drugs,
and Rock ’n’ Roll (SDRR) is interrelated to “Rock ’n’ Roll” as a musical category that was
instrumental in its formation as a cultural ideology in mid-twentieth century America, the
framework and ethos of SDRR has run parallel to and intersected with discourses that traffic in
paternalism across genres and eras. Where the 1960s and 1970s conceived The Runaways’
manager Kim Fowley as an “icon” and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant as a “god,” in the 1980s,
1990s, and 2000s, music executive and Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons
became knighted as the “godfather of hip-hop,” the “Forefather of hip-hop,” “the original and
eternal Hip-Hop mogul,” [emphasis added] and the “Hip Hop guru,” a title for which Simmons
has become known for his pattern of proselytizing, among other things, particular lifestyle
practices like yoga and veganism (Gross, 2005; Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017; Simmons, 2007;
Ashbrook, 2007).
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Here, we see the themes of oversight and immortality continue, similarly
gendered through language that both suggests and reinforces patriarchal power in and through
the spaces in which figures like Simmons reside and over which they preside. The grandiosity
and deference communicated via such titles is congruent with the influence and disciplinary
power held by top music executives and professionals across the industries’ many micro-
geographies. As such, learning how to contend with—and/or circumvent—the dynamics and
hierarchies of power in these spaces remains one of the biggest hurdles individuals must
overcome.

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In addition to being part of Simmons’s lifestyle practices, these themes are also common across Simmons’s
commercial enterprises, capitalizing on his platform and success, Simmons has published books on each of these
topics, from The Happy Vegan: A Guide to Living A Long, Healthy, and Successful Life (2015); Success Through
Stillness: Meditation Made Simple (2014); to The New York Times-bestselling Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All
(2011), which includes a glowing endorsement from Deepak Chopra.

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At the same time, the SDRR ideology resurfaces, sampled and remastered into an SDRR
remix fit for the turn of the millennium—one that moves beyond the dominant spaces and faces
of white masculinity that dominated the “reigning era” of Rock ’n’ Roll in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Simmons, in his aptly titled first book, Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God addresses this
directly:
Rock stars used to be notorious for getting into brawls and getting drunk…people like
Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page represented youthful rebellion…Now rap stars have taken
it all to another level….a rap star, however, is doing it because he has a serious reason—
discrimination, personal anger or ghetto conditions. And on top of all that, a rap star
wants to make money and enjoy success and is fearless in doing it. The result is the kind
of attitude of authentic rebellion that rock was always supposed to have.
(Simmons, p. 6)
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The ethos of rebellion, transgression, deviation and anti-establishment bridges this evolution
while at the same distinguishing against whom those rebellions are mobilizing and across what
boundaries individuals are transgressing. Whereas SDRR in the mid-twentieth century was about
sexual liberation and the rejection of normative Victorian ideals that dominated traditional
American values, Hip-Hop is driven by a rejection of socio-economic exploitation, of
disenfranchisement, of redlining and segregation, of the enduring legacies and active policies of
white supremacy, of the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs and central role in the explosion
and epidemic of crack cocaine, of the enduring brutality and increasing militarization of
American police forces against bodies of color, and of mass incarceration and the rise in the
prison industrial complex.
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The stakes are different and uniquely American.

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Here we again have Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin being referenced by
Simmons as the embodiments of SDRR. As with references made by Robinson (2020) and Carvello (2018),
situating these men as representative of SDRR recenter these figures in the canon of American Rock ’n’ Roll. This is
not to say that these figures were not instrumental in and to SDRR, but it re-inscribes particularly conceptions of
what SDRR was and could be.
Also of note: One of Def Jam Recordings key releases was the remake of Rock group Aerosmith’s “Walk
This Way” by Def Jam artists—and Simmons’s brother—Run-DMC, released in 1986. Recorded at the urging of
Simmons’s Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin and would land Run-DMC a hit and revitalize the career of Aerosmith.
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Key sources in these histories and conversations include Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass

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While #MeToo has shifted the narrative and discursive framework around sexual
harassment and misconduct in spaces likes America’s music industries, we have yet to see
aggressive policy change on a widespread scale to help prevent such misconduct from occurring
in the first place. This persists, in part, because the focus compartmentalizes the interlocking
domains of power, honing in, for example, on the cultural—those narratives and discursive
frameworks—while failing to also attend to the structural and disciplinary domains of power that
constrain/enable and define how particular identities are differently privileged and able to
navigate the many sectors of these industries. Moreover, disclosures are a response, they reveal
information about an incident/s that has already taken place. Thus, while, in the conjuncture of
the #MeToo movement, more women are coming forward to disclose experiences of misconduct,
a disproportionate number of these disclosures refer to incidents that are years, if not decades,
old. This passage of time must not be written off as an indicator alone that fewer instances of
harassment or misconduct are occurring today. As Shaila Dewan articulates, “Some of the most
commonly raised causes for doubt, like a long delay in reporting or a foggy recall of events, are
the very hallmark of sexual assault” (2018).
As numerous studies have found, delays in reporting sexual misconduct are not
uncommon, particularly in instances of rape. Contributing factors to delays include the age of
victims at the time of their assaults, with younger victims often taking longer to report
(Klemmer, Neill, & Jarvis, 2021; Ullman, 1996); the involvement of substances or foggy recall,
which make victims less confident in details and more hesitant to disclose (Dewan, 2018); as
well as fear related to, among other things, retaliation, harming perpetrators, invasions of
privacy, and a lack of confidence in police or formal systems to address incidents (The Criminal

Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing California, and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in America.

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Justice System, 2021). Importantly, another key contributing variable in delayed reporting of
sexual assaults is that victims at times maintain relationships with their perpetrators, particularly
in professional dynamics where a victim’s career or professional prospects depend on a working
relationship with a perpetrator (Dewan, 2018). The continuation of relationships in this way must
be examined via the interpersonal and disciplinary domains of power, as it complicates the
interlocking forces that would result in a victim “opting” to maintain contact and/or a working
relationship with her (or his/their) perpetrator. In this way, delays in disclosure must be
examined and considered via a trauma-informed approach.
This chapter takes the form of two examinations to further interrogate the domains of
power that together constitute a particular iteration of the music industries’ scaffolding in a new
conjuncture. The first half explores the sexual misconduct and assault allegations levied against
music executive Russell Simmons, which are considered alongside accusations lodged against
fellow music executive L.A. Reid, whose career and allegations of misconduct overlap directly
with those of Simmons. In the second half, I explore two additional case studies where disclosure
was mobilized via social media, Twitter and Tumblr, respectively. Throughout, I work to
consider these cases alongside, and in conversation with, other relevant archival examples to
highlight how these domains of power and thematic through-lines operate in and across the
micro-geographies of America’s music industries. I draw attention to patterns that emerge in
experiences shared by individuals across a range of texts, including memoirs and documentaries,
to further interrogate the discursive frameworks and cultural messages that emerge in reflections
and disclosures. I, likewise, explore how both victims who have come forward with allegations
against Simmons and Reid characterize their experiences, alongside a close reading of how
Simmons and Reid frame their own positions of power, interactions with subordinates, and

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professional roles as prominent gatekeepers in popular American music.
Tellability, the Traumatised Voice, and the Hierarchy of Credibility
Who knows who she used to be before it all went dark?
Was she like a streak of fire, a painted glass, a beating heart?
All the mirrors, all the smoke, she'll read a thousand times
Versions of the third degree; yours and hers and mine
Outside this waking dream/ She remembers everything
I don't know her now/ My bitter pill, my broken vow
This girl, this bird who sings
- Rosanne Cash, “She Remembers Everything”
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“People do not want to read about urination in their morning paper!” This was the
critique lodged emphatically to Jim DeRogatis by his editor, Michael Cooke, at the Chicago Sun-
Times in response to initial drafts of his coverage on what would come to be known infamously
as the “pee tape,” the VHS tape that was sent to DeRogatis anonymously that depicts R&B
singer and producer R. Kelly urinating on an underage girl (DeRogatis, 2019).
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While the

73
Cash, R., & Phillips, S. (2018). She remembers everything [Lyrics]. https://genius.com/Rosanne-cash-she-
remembers-everything-lyrics#song-info
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Grammy-winning R&B star R. Kelly’s history of predatory behavior toward adolescent girls and incidents of
statutory rape are now well-documented. In December 1994, Vibe magazine first broke the story of then-27-year-old
Kelly’s marriage to his 15-year-old protégé, budding R&B singer Aaliyah. Kelly was instrumental in producing and
writing Aaliyah’s debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number—the title of which has retroactively become a
telling omen for what was to come from Kelly. Having obtained a copy of the marriage certificate, which listed
Aaliyah’s age as 18 at the time, Vibe published a copy along with its cover story exposé, “R. Kelly: The Sex, The
Soul, The Sales—And the Scandalous Marriage to Teenage Superstar Aaliyah.” The marriage was later annulled.
Over the years, the documentation of Kelly’s many alleged sex crimes has largely been due to the tireless—and
persistent—work of one journalist, Chicago-based music writer, critic, and now-Columbia College professor Jim
DeRogatis. It is DeRogatis who in 2001 received the anonymous package containing video documentation of
Kelly’s now infamous 27-minute sexual encounter with a young girl, in which he urinated in her mouth; and it was
DeRogatis who handed the tape over to authorities, later breaking the story as the pop music critic for The Chicago
Sun Times (DeRogatis and Pallasch, 2000). DeRogatis’ reporting and the video evidence he supplied to authorities
led to Kelly’s indictment in 2003 on 21 counts of child pornography (2014). While authorities were not able to
identify the girl in the home video, and she has never come forward, it was determined she was 14 or 15-years-old at
the time the film was made (DeRogatis, 2014). Kelly was acquitted in 2008.
Later in 2001, it was also DeRogatis who obtained documentation of a lawsuit filed by a former intern at Epic
Records, who sued Kelly for sexual harassment, accusing him of “coercing her into receiving oral sex from a girl
[she] did not want to have sex with” (Leight, 2017). The lawsuit was later settled out of court for an undisclosed
amount. Through it all, DeRogatis has continued to write about Kelly, challenging journalists, the public, and the
music industry at large to hold this man accountable—a man that for years and in the midst of these ongoing
allegations has preceded to release commercially successful albums, be booked by mega-concert promoters for
headlining tours, and to remain largely unscathed professionally. In 2014, fourteen years since DeRogatis broke the
initial story and two decades after Kelly’s marriage to teenage Aaliyah came to light, DeRogatis penned an article in
response to the release of Kelly’s twelfth studio album, Black Panties, titled “Why Are People Finally Paying
Attention to R. Kelly’s Many Crimes?” In hindsight, however, it appears that the world wasn’t yet ready to pay

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harrowing history of Kelly’s predation on young girls and women is now well-known, one of the
key questions that circulated following the release of Surviving R. Kelly, the explosive six-part
dream hampton-produced series that aired on Lifetime in 2019, was why did it take so long for
Kelly to be held accountable. This exchange with his editor, which DeRogatis shares in his 2019
book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly, illuminates one instance in which what I have
elsewhere discussed as “the limits of the appropriate” (Dougher, 2015) are mapped onto the
language used to discuss an incident of what would come to be understood as statutory rape. A
judgement about the appropriateness of the narrativization of this story curtails the severity of the
incident from being captured in the article. As Hall et al. (1980) argue, the “process of ‘making

attention.
In July 2017, DeRogatis broke another horrific story on Buzzfeed News: “Inside the Pied Piper of R&B’s
‘Cult.’” The story paints a disturbingly familiar picture of allegations against Kelly, this time revealing that a
number of parents have gone to the police claiming, “R. Kelly is holding women against their will in [a] ‘cult’”
(DeRogatis, 2017). At the heart of the story is one family’s efforts to get their 19-year-old daughter, whom they
haven’t seen in more than a year, back from Kelly. According to individuals close to Kelly, DeRogatis reports: “six
women live in properties rented by Kelly...and he controls every aspect of their lives: dictating what they eat, how
they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he records”
(DeRogatis, 2017). Importantly, many of these young women are aspiring artists—singers who came into contact
with Kelly through music-related ambitions, seeking guidance and mentorship for how to navigate the music
industry’s tumultuous landscape. Faced with yet another series of accusations against Kelly, Slate reporter Josh
Levin (2017), echoed DeRogatis’ 2014 question: “Is R. Kelly Finally Having His Bill Cosby Moment?” But how
many times can we ask the same question? What suggests that this time things will be different? What is lost when
the media seemingly asks the same questions over and over again about a man with little change in his career? What
policies have or have not changed that might allow for this time to be different? All of these are important points of
consideration to which this study seeks to attend.
Lastly, upon publication of DeRogatis’ breaking story, fellow music writer Ann Powers took to Facebook to
reflect upon this latest allegation against Kelly, worth sharing in full, she writes:
Pop’s worst ongoing saga: parents with musically ambitious children are increasingly encouraged to sacrifice
their kids’ private lives, and the autonomy of their families, inside the fame machine. It’s hard to imagine
how a parent could fall for the idea that R. KELLY OF ALL PEOPLE is going to help their daughter. And
yet the entertainment industry has always relied on intimate paternalistic mentorship as a route to success.
The idea of a mentor has become even more glamorized in the American Idol/The Voice age—a close
relationship with a celebrity “coach” is held up as a great gift to young artists. Of course, 99 percent of these
sorts of mentor relationships are abov [sic] board and well-meant. But as a business model and an
ideologically fed dream, it still leaves room for predators. Some families fall for even the most obvious bad
gus [sic] because the lure of fame is so strong, and the path to it so unclear….there are structures in place
within the entertainment world that make the survival of R. Kelly—and others, there are certainly others—
possible. (2017c)
Mentorship in this way stands as a key structural domain in which precarious, nascent artists become situated
in power dynamics that the very systems of abuse on which the music industry has turned since its inception. The
enticement and dynamic of mentors-mentee relationships thus also presents a thematic frame through which
incidents of sexual misconduct and assault are framed in the media and referenced in moments of disclosure.

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an event intelligible’ is a social process—constituted by a number of specific journalistic
practices, which embody (often implicitly) crucial assumptions about what society is and how it
works” (p. 58). Appeasing morning readers is prioritized over providing a graphic, yet accurate
description of the events captured on the infamous tape. DeRogatis details, “the language had
become more discreet and less specific with each draft, but I argued that we had to include the
specific act…Cooke conceded, but the sentence ‘The sex acts include intercourse, fellatio, and
urination’ only appeared in the thirtieth of thirty-six paragraphs when the story ran” in 2002 (p.
122). We see in this instance how the cultural and disciplinary domains of power interlock
through editorial decisions about messaging and, as a result, can impact what is “tellable.”
To expand on this point, public disclosures can be examined via what interdisciplinary
scholar Sheila Bock (2014) conceives as “tellability,” the behavioral rules and practices dictated
by and through particular socio-cultural spaces that impact an individual’s capacity, comfort, and
dis/incentives, to share details about a specific event or context. Bock applies this concept to the
slogan “what happens here, stays here,” which has come to be widely known as the promotional
tagline for Las Vegas in tourism and advertising campaigns. I argue her theorization of
tellability, through which she engages with folklore and advertising scholarship to consider the
critical application of this campaign, is a useful framework through which disclosure can be
examined in a neoliberal economy of visibility. As a campaign that is about withholding
information, and about, as Bock (2014) argues, “stressing untellability,” Las Vegas presents a
useful parallel for the SDRR ideology that emphasizes a code of silence surrounding incidents of
harassment and misconduct. “The specific dramatizations of tourist experiences in the [Las
Vegas] ads themselves ultimately become a story of being a non-story [emphasis added], inviting
potential tourists to take part in a shared corpus of extraordinary experiences that simultaneously

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call for and resist narration” (p. 220).
As I explore in “The Price of Admission” below, the access women have to particular
spaces and experiences within America’s music industries has historically been contingent on
maintaining the infrastructure of patriarchal power as it stands. Often, this contingency manifests
as complicity—in going along with, but not disclosing or calling out, misconduct and other
abuses of power. For Bock, Vegas “becomes a liminal space in which [the] reality of everyday
life is temporarily suspended…tourists…become part of a community held together by both
shared experiences of excess and licentiousness” (p. 228). In much the same way, particular
spaces within the SDRR ethos of music have been historically characterized by these same
measures of excess. What’s more, “the emphasis on untellability has worked rhetorically to
reinforce…structural differences” (p. 226). Tellability thus maps generatively onto an
examination of the music industries whereby silence becomes both part of the cost of admission,
as well as part of the tactic of control in and through which misogynistic hierarchies are
reinforced via cultural messaging and interpersonal dynamics. To further problematize this
concept, Bock engages with linguist Neal R. Norrick (2005), who introduces a “two-sided notion
of tellability—one which encompasses both the familiar lower-bounding side of tellability as
sufficient to warrant listener interest and the [generally ignored] upper-boundary side where
tellability merges into the no longer tellable of impropriety” (p. 323). Tellability as conceived by
Bock, and informed by Norrick, presents a theoretical vocabulary by and through which the
limits of what is socially “appropriate” to reveal in particular conjunctures is dependent upon the
guiding ideologies and hierarchies of power delimiting practices of disclosure and vocality
within a given context—a socio-historical specificity that recalls Foucault’s articulation of
“regimes of practices,” which I outline in Chapter 1, and that Foucault conceives as the truths

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constructed via discursive knowledge, which are necessarily different in different historical
junctures (1994, p. 225).
With respect to disclosures related to the American music industries, there are multiple,
intersecting angles through which such revelations might be interrogated. Whereas tellability
gets at what may be said, at what is tellable in-line with the norms of a specific spatio-temporal
conjuncture, we must also examine how and the extent to which such disclosures are believed.
That is, disclosure is without guarantees. The revelatory act of disclosure, of telling, is one step
in a theoretical multi-step, non-linear process towards what we might conceive as justice or
accountability. In this way, what is knowable has little to do with fact, and is instead the result of
conditional legibility whereby that which can be known is delimited by the constraints of power
that constitute the subjecthood of disclosers. While several studies have interrogated the
reception and interpretation of disclosures through the analytic of “believability”—a process of
interpretation that, as referenced in Chapter 1, Hall (1980) has relatedly conceived as
“decoding”—I turn here to what sociologist Howard Spencer (1967) theorizes as a “hierarchy of
credibility.” As a hierarchy, Spencer’s conception provides a useful framework for examining
whether particular disclosures are deemed credible by attending to the socially-constructed
mores that actively govern and regulate what and who counts as believable in a given
conjuncture.
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In other words, whether particular disclosures can be or will be believed is
contingent upon how interlocking domains of power allow for particular disclosers to be read as
credible, as believable. In this way, we might also return to the argument outlined by Jodi Kantor
and Megan Twohey (2019), who, in their historical account of breaking the 2017 Harvey

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For select literature on “believability,” see (Acquaviva et al., 2021; Nason et al., 2019; Emmers-Sommer, 2017;
Yale, 2013; Horney & Spohn, 1996).

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Weinstein story in The New York Times articulate, “in each industry, harassment ha[s] its own
particular sociology” (p. 51).
Developed through a critical examination of “deviance,” Becker’s hierarchy of credibility
posits that “credibility and the right to be heard are differentially distributed through the ranks of
the system” (p. 241). Spencer elaborates “the question is not whether we should take sides since
we inevitably will, but rather whose side we are on” with respect to who is/is not credible (p.
239). In this way, the hierarchy of credibility allows for a critical interrogation of disclosure that
moves beyond the details of the disclosure itself to elucidate how identity and positionality
differently constrain or afford individuals legitimacy. In particular, Spencer’s conception attends
to the top-down distributions of power, which discipline individuals in society within and
through institutional structures. “The hierarchy of credibility is a feature of society whose
existence we cannot deny, even if we disagree with its injunction to believe the man at the top,”
Spencer clarifies; “matters of rank and status are contained in the mores, [a] belief [that] has a
moral quality. We are, if we are proper members of the group, morally bound to accept the
definition imposed on reality by a superordinate group in preference to the definitions espoused
by subordinates” (1967, p. 241).
To expand upon the theoretical affordances of tellability—what can be shared—and the
hierarchy of credibility—whether and how that disclosure is believed, I examine another angle
through which disclosures may be considered: the process and purpose of those revelations. Put
differently, how disclosures as social phenomena are posited to resolve the “crisis” of trauma for
those individuals who disclose experiences publicly in a neoliberal, postfeminist conjuncture.
Attending to the specificities of postfeminism and neoliberalism, Jilly Boyce Kay (2020)
articulates a conception of the “traumatised [sic] voice,” which she defines as how “women have

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come to be associated with the public expression of trauma relating to (different kinds of)
abuse…and how their disclosures of trauma are often construed as a form of empowerment…as
an example of communicative justice [emphasis added]” (p. 56). In this way, the traumatised
voice further complements the work of Banet-Weiser (2018) with respect to her notion of
economies of visibility and Herman Gray’s (2013) conception of an “incitement to visibility,”
which I explore in further detail below. Similarly, as a voice that has been traumatised and thus
needs healing, needs resolution, Kay’s conception can likewise be examined alongside and in
conversation with the “crisis” to which Hall et al. (1980) attend and in conversation with the act
of “confession” as conceived and theorized by Foucault—confession as a “shimmering mirage”
and confession as the “institutional incitement to speak” (1990, p. 54; p. 18).
The act of disclosure, for Kay, presents an opportunity for the self-constructing subject to
become empowered. As she articulates, through the act of disclosure, women “are both typically
represented as having expressed trauma and/or anger that was hitherto suppressed or hidden; and
in doing so, they are understood as having successfully overcome the shame surrounding the
abuses that they had suffered” (p. 56). The individual woman is thus both the wounded subject
and the regenerative healing resource. Her ability to move through trauma is catalyzed by the act
of disclosure, of confession, through which shame is released and left behind, a neoliberal
(mis)understanding of trauma in which the recognition of disclosure might resolve the tensions
previously festering in those wounds through a single act. Kay explains:
Through “breaking the silence,” mobilising [sic] a traumatized voice and speaking “on
their own terms,” these women are seen to be newly empowered—to have shifted the
discursive terrain with the sheer power of their individual voices, and to have gained the
recognition that was previously denied to them. (p. 56)

In this way, while the act of healing—of disclosure—may be a woman’s to mobilize, her
“healing” is co-dependent upon that act of recognition, of being seen for her trauma via mediated

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contexts. As Herman Gray similarly argues, the “cultural productions of threat take place in the
context of more, not less, visibility and recognition of difference” (2013, p. 774). The moment of
mediated disclosure can be read as one manifestation of the cultural production of threat to
which Gray refers. At the same time, Kay attends to the contradistinction of these acts—to the
tensions present in moments where silence is “broken” wherein disclosure can be both
empowering while also contributing to the structures and systems that silence women. As Kay
clarifies, “the promises of voice that are offered in contemporary media culture often function to
obscure a profound lack of the same” (p. 57). This paradox is useful when thinking through
disclosure in the contemporary conjuncture via an intersectional framework, for it reveals why
“progress” or “empowerment” are both contingent and insufficient; as acts that exist at the level
of visibility and recognition, they fail to fully articulate the interlocking systems of power in and
through which that visibility, and the woman as gendered and raced and sexed subject and
victim, is constituted.
The Godfather of Hip-Hop: Russell Simmons
The New York Times
In December 2017, The New York Times published a detailed exposé in which three
women—former A&R executive Drew Dixon, music journalist Toni Sallie, and singer Tina
Baker—each disclosed they had been raped by Russell Simmons, the long-time music executive
and co-founder of pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017).
While this exposé was revealing, it was not the first time allegations against Simmons had been
made public—actress and screenwriter Jenny Lumet wrote a guest column published in The
Hollywood Reporter detailing her assault one month prior to Times’s story, and model Keri
Claussen Khaligi came forward via the Los Angeles Times in November 2017. While all three

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women named in the Times’ exposé—Dixon, Sallie, and Baker—were assaulted by Simmons,
their relationships with him were different: Toni Sallie’s 1988 assault occurred under the guise of
an invitation to attend a party at Simmons’s Manhattan apartment supposedly co-hosted by his
girlfriend at the time. Sallie arrived to an empty apartment and no party: “He pushed me on the
bed and jumped on top of me, and physically attacked me…we were fighting. I said no”
(Coscarelli, 2017b).
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Simmons via his lawyer insists his behavior was never inappropriate,
“acknowledg[ing] that he dated Ms. Sallie but denied any nonconsensual sex” (Coscarelli &
Ryzik, 2017). Tina Baker was a singer who had released albums under the pseudonym Tina B.
and performed with such artists as Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. At the time of her assault,
Simmons was her manager. She was attacked at his apartment after being invited over to discuss
her career. His apartment was a common site for, what had until that night been, professional
meetings.
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Simmons response to Baker’s allegations: “he had ‘no recollection of ever having
any sexual relations with Ms. Baker’” (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017).
Drew Dixon was a highly-successful A&R executive, respected and decorated
particularly in hip-hop and at Def Jam Recordings.
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Her contact with Simmons as an A&R
executive for Def Jam was more consistent and frequent than that of Baker and Sallie. Dixon
recounts a pattern of immediate and “relentless” harassment and misconduct. So consistent was

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This assault was not a singular incident; as Sallie recounts, during an encounter at a music conference a year after
the assault, which she was attending as an employee of Warner Music, Simmons again attacked her, forcing her to
barricade herself in her room at the conference hotel in order to escape his violent advances: “he tried to lead her to
a dark beach, she resisted and he attacked her, grabbing her by the hair, she said, and even chasing her into the
women’s restroom before she escaped to her room.” (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017).
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As with Sallie, this incident was not isolated. Following the 1990/1991 rape, Sallie was subjected to ongoing
sexual harassment and lewd conduct by Simmons as she worked to move forward and navigate her professional
relationship with him as her manager (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017).
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Just prior to her assault, Dixon had helped to orchestrate, with Diddy, Mary J. Blige and Method Man’s 1994 hit
“I’ll Be There,” and had platinum albums already under her belt, including as the co-executive producer (with
Simmons) for The Show: The Soundtrack, the accompanying soundtrack for director Brian Robbins’s music
documentary of the same name (Robbins, 2015).

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Simmons’s misconduct at Def Jam, that Dixon enlisted a male colleague to hold onto an extra
key to her office and be prepared to interrupt her meetings with Simmons if she were to signal
that an intervention was needed. As Dixon clarified to Coscarelli and Ryzik (2017), she
instructed her colleague: “‘If I ever buzz you, don’t pick up, don’t call me back — just open my
door. That means Russell is in here and he whipped his’ penis out.” Unlike with Baker and
Sallie, Simmons did “acknowledged that he engaged in ‘inappropriate conduct’ with Ms. Dixon
while she worked at Def Jam,” although he “emphatically states that he did not have sex with
her” (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017).
Amid the ongoing harassment, Dixon continued at Def Jam, where Simmons’s
“relentless” advances continued. She stayed, because he was positioned as an extremely well-
regarded lifeline in a highly-competitive and precarious sector of the industry. Dixon details: “I
didn’t want to cut off my one conduit to having any hope of a career. I thought if I could survive
long enough to have a hit…I would move categories,” from sexual object to respected colleague
(Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017). Here, the interpersonal, disciplinary, and structural domains of
power interlock in a particular force against which Dixon is left little room to maneuver. Her
ability to proceed in a career she loves is contingent upon appeasing her perpetrator. However,
for Dixon, success did not equate to protection or respect. In line with a now-established pattern,
Simmons insisted Dixon come up to his apartment following a professional event close-by under
the guise of sharing the demo tape for a new artist, where she alleges he raped her (Coscarelli &
Ryzik, 2017; Dick & Ziering, 2020). Following the publication of Times article, Simmons
stepped down from his companies, and has since relocated to Bali. Together, this collective
public disclosure punctuates a pattern of misconduct and highlights that both networks and
colleagues at Def Jam were complicit in these abuses of power. Another “sisterhood” thus

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emerges from within America’s music industries.
While The Times’ 2017 exposé marks the moment of public disclosure for Dixon, Sallie,
and Baker, each had previously disclosed their assaults in their immediate aftermath, both to
close confidants, friends, and family, as well as to colleagues and fellow executives in the
industry. For Dixon, two key factors contributed to her public silence: Following her tenure at
Def Jam, she became embroiled in legal proceedings with Simmons over “business expenses,”
which resulted in a lawsuit and settlement (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017). Dixon clarifies her
decision to accept the settlement out of court, rather than pursuing legal or criminal routes: “I
[did] not want to be famous for being sexually harassed by Russell Simmons…I want to make
records and be famous for that.” In this way, the threat of the cultural domain of power, which
would likely manifest via a framing of Dixon that would wed her legacy and identity to her
assault, disincentivizes her from coming forward. This further intersects with the structural
forces of a settlement to which she was now contractually obligated to abide in the wake of her
departure from Def Jam.
On the Record
“Anger is directed, not toward the crime, nor the criminal, but toward those who failed to
halt the criminal’s actions.” This quote, taken from a 1964 article written by The Nation in
response to the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese, which I explore in Chapter 2, is presented as
the opening scene in the 2020 HBO film On the Record, which documents Dixon’s journey and
decision to publicly disclose her allegations against Simmons, which would be published as part
of The New York Times’s exposé.
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Chronicling early conversations with the Times reporters, Joe
Coscarelli and Melena Ryzik, On the Record provides context and history to Dixon’s allegations,

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Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the filmmaking team also responsible for The Hunting Ground for
which Lady Gaga and Diane Warren wrote and recorded “’Til it Happens to You’”

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bringing in additional details, including interviews with fellow accusers Sil Lai Abrams and
Sheri Sher, as well as capturing the reporting process—the construction of cultural messaging
around the allegations—and Dixon’s own reluctance to initially attach her name to her
disclosure.
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“When men do bad things to women,” Lisa Robinson reflects, “we women are never
surprised. We women are used to it. We women believe all of it. But keeping quiet about the
male boss—which means nearly every boss—has been the rule. Because the alternative—losing
your job, not getting another job, having your name smeared because maybe the way you were
dressed means you were ‘asking for it…we’ve all lived with this” (2020, p. 69). These
constraints manifest across victims’ personal and professional experiences. Women, in this way,
are situated historically via cultural messaging not as legitimate or credible victims or witnesses,
but as under suspicion from the start for their role in “enabling” or “enticing” their own
victimization. In other words, women must contend with gendered and sexist histories in which
they are positioned in opposition to men as emotional, hysterical, and irrational and, therefore,
are often situated in and through the irreconcilable—and frequently unverifiable—argumentative
logic of he said/she said. These stakes are heightened if victims opt to—and are able to—pursue
legal or criminal proceedings, as The New York Times’s Susan Chira asserts:
It’s a familiar and discomforting spectacle: A woman who alleges sexual assault is also
put on trial. She is grilled on the witness stand about why she continued to speak with a
famous man she now charges with abuse, someone who had the power to shape her
future. The man has to defend himself against the possibility of false accusations, and so
it’s open season on a woman’s credibility. (2017)

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Of note: The film does not address how Dixon was approached or asked to partake in the documentary,
particularly given that in the early stages of the film, Dixon has still not decided whether she is willing to be named
in the exposé, rather than having her disclosure anonymized. Given that Dixon is the central figure in the film, this
seems to be an oversight that should and could be addressed by Ziering and Dick.

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To interrogate this dynamic via sound studies theory, this historical pattern of silence and
silencing can be critically considered through an examination of what is articulable in these
moments of disclosure—moments situated within particular conjunctures. Amanda Weidman
clarifies, “the female voice has played a particularly important role in Western cultural
production as a vehicle for presenting inarticulate vocality”; “the female voice,” she continues,
“is repeatedly staged as an excessive but powerless vocality that is controlled by authorial male
voices” (2015, p. 234). In this way, the vocality of a disclosure may be mediated and narrativized
as a performance of that excess, transgressing beyond the bounds of secrets and silence. But that
vocality is both inarticulate—illegible via the patriarchal frameworks of discursive knowledge
that undergird America’s music industries—and void of power within the misogynistic
infrastructures invested in silencing women.
Importantly, for Dixon, Baker, Sallie, Abrams, and Sher, their identities as Black women,
and Simmons’ identity as a Black man compounds the impact of the interlocking domains of
power that both situated them in more precarious positions and contributed to their continued
silencing. In the conjuncture of #MeToo, On the Record contextualizes the gravity of such
disclosures for women of color in a movement that had initially foregrounded white women’s
stories. In both the Times exposé and On The Record, Dixon elaborates that her initial decision
not to come forward was also informed by the history of Black women being maligned via media
and via others in the Black community for speaking out against Black men—citing Anita Hill
and Desiree Washington, specifically.
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To this point, Angela Y. Davis argues, “the tendency to

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Desiree Washington became the center of a media storm following her public disclosure that, as an eighteen-year-
old college student and Miss Black America Contestant, she had been raped by professional boxer Mike Tyson
(Shipp, 1992). While Tyson was ultimately convicted and sentenced to six years in prison—he served three—for
this assault, Washington became the subject of racist and sexist coverage that characterized her through the logic of
victim-blaming. This was compounded by the bind that Black women in America confront specifically with respect
to allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Black men, which is connected to a long and violent

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construct women like Anita Hill as race traitors is a dramatic by-product of the recalcitrant idea
that black women who speak out against black men are following in the footsteps of white
feminists…examples of widespread views in black communities that race must always take
precedence, and that race is implicitly gendered as male” (1998, p. xix). This perception,
however, as Davis elaborates, is rooted importantly in America’s history of white supremacy—a
history in which false accusations of rape and sexual assault played /play a central role in
“justifying” violence against Black men.
Davis explores this history with respect to the absence of rape and sexual assault
narratives within early blues music—a contrast to the visible presence of lyrical narratives
pertaining to domestic abuse:
Black men were habitually represented as savage, sex-crazed rapists, bent on violating
the physical and spiritual purity of white womanhood. It may well be that the discourse
on rape was so thoroughly influenced by the prevailing racism that intraracial rape could
not be named. The difficult and delayed emergence of the beginnings of a collective
consciousness around sexual harassment [and] rape…is indicative of how hard it has
been to acknowledge abuse perpetrated by the abused. (1998, p. 34)

Sher, a founding member of the Mercedes Ladies and one of the accusers who raised allegations
against Simmons alongside Dixon in On The Record, speaks to this as well: “‘Russell is
considered a god in hip-hop. People were like, ‘I don’t think you should blow up Russell.' It’s
like, ‘How dare you come out and speak out on him and Black men’” (Olson, 2020). Coscarelli

history of Black men in America being hyper sexualized and wrongfully accused of misconduct by white women as
justification for race-based convictions and murder. Race and gender, while as Intersectionality theory helps us to
articulate are inseparable, are thus put into tension in cultural conversations and discursive frameworks employed
and recirculated via mainstream media. One of the prominent public figures to come to Tyson’s defense and shift
blame for assault onto Washington at the time was Donald Trump, who stated publicly: “You have a young woman
that was in his room, his hotel room late in the evening at her own will. You have a young woman who was seen
dancing for the beauty contest [the next day], dancing with a big smile on her face, looked happy as could be”
(Shortell & Marquez, 2016). Trump’s motivations in supporting Tyson were directly—if not solely—connected to
the money Trump had earned by hosting many of Tyson’s premiere fights at Trump-owned properties throughout
the 1980s: “Tyson was an investment worth protecting for Trump: The young fighter had won some of his biggest
victories at Trump-sponsored bouts in Atlantic City, N.J., earning the future Republican presidential nominee
millions” (Shortell & Marquez, 2016). (In 2015, Tyson came out publicly in support of then-candidate Donald
Trump’s bid for the presidency.)

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and Ryzik, likewise detail: “Black women, especially, felt powerless against Mr. Simmons and
his cohort in the small world of urban music, with several saying that misconduct against them
could go unchecked because their place in the industry was so tenuous. They feared being
ostracized, or worse” (2017).
In this way, the interpersonal dynamics Dixon and her fellow accusers navigated as Black
women interlocked with the cultural messaging that situated and upheld Simmons as a “god” in
the vernacular of America’s Black communities and hip-hop sectors of popular music, as well as
the historically-collective protection of Black men against false accusations of rape rooted
specifically in America’s historicy of white supremacy, which together raised the professional
stakes for Dixon et al. via threats of ostracization from the disciplinary domains in which their
professional hierarchies and networks were situated. At the same time, Dixon, Abrams and
Lumet reflect upon their privilege as “light-skinned, conventionally attractive” Black women in
On the Record, calling attention importantly to the heterogeneity of racial categories, as well as
the historical constraints and affordances of colorism, which leads to the disparate privileging
and regulation of bodies of color in proximity to whiteness. “The fact that our story has been told
is a privilege,” Abrams asserts, “It shouldn’t be a privilege. Every woman’s story deserves to be
heard” (Dick & Ziering, 2020). Dixon elaborates in this exchange: “Part of the reason I did speak
out is because I do have ‘light privilege,’ so I have to go ahead and stick my neck out and say,
‘me too’ for other Black women who are not safe.”
The personal and professional stakes are real; lack of stability and mobility are not
hypotheticals as these numerous examples make clear. Community and solidarity can thus be
motivating factors for women who would otherwise fear ostracization and isolation. In this way,
the collectivity, the bond of “sisterhood” formed through trauma, provides both a powerful

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incentive—facilitated in this instance via the careful investigative work of journalists—for
fellow victims to come forward with disclosures about an individual perpetrator, as well as to
process the secondary trauma that victims endure when they share their stories publicly, a
process that can be a conflicting and ambivalent experience of liberation and heightened
vulnerability. Once disclosed, one’s story is no longer entirely their own. “The aftermath of
coming forward is just…you can’t even begin to describe what it’s like,” Abrams explains, “but
someone else out there knows exactly what it is. And, to go through the first, the assault, and
then the coming forward… there’s a bond there” (Dick & Ziering, 2020). In this way, the
#MeToo conjuncture shifted the terrain outside of America’s music industries, providing a new
economy of visibility in which these disclosures could be made. As Dixon clarifies in On The
Record, her decision to eschew anonymity and come forward on the record was directly
influenced by the #MeToo movement and a new sense of shared responsibility to disclose her
assault in the wake of others, like Lumet, coming out publicly against Simmons.
Yet for Lumet, while her decision to come forward, on the one hand, paves the way for
Dixon and others to disclose their stories, the newly-acquired knowledge that she is part of a
sisterhood of Simmons’ victims becomes, for Lumet, on the other hand, a source of guilt and
regret. Lumet blames herself for the trauma Simmons’ other victims endured: “I wish I could
have gotten my shit together earlier, so he would have left everybody alone” (Dick & Ziering,
2020). Lumet’s comments suggest an internalization of “victim-blaming logic.” Rather than
finding solace in the knowledge that delays in disclosure are common and compounded by the
complications of trauma, Lumet perceives her delay in disclosure as a personal failure. She
situates herself through this neoliberal framing as a failed victim and failed sister, while also
taking on the burden of Simmons’ additional assaults. At the same time, the suggestion that if

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she had come forward sooner that Simmons’ assaults would have stopped situates his
perpetration as outside the larger historical patterns of sexism and sexual misconduct in
America’s music industries, while at once upholding disclosure as an effective deterrent from
and/or solution to stopping sexual misconduct. In either case, the music industries are let off the
hook, and the historical pattern of misconduct supplanted by the focus on Simmons’ case as an
anecdotal exception. This dissociation from the industries’ sordid histories of misconduct, in
effect, contributes to such incidents being framed as external from the infrastructure historically
(re)constituted via the interlocking domains of interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural and structural
power. As such, the individual—Simmons, on one hand, and his victims on the other—is
recentered as the focal point in coverage of these disclosures, absolving the industries from any
responsibility in the assaults.
Antonio “L.A.” Reid
L.A. at Epic
In May 2017, long-time music veteran, Antonio “L.A.” Reid resigned his position as
CEO of Epic Records.
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Reid’s departure came amid allegations of sexual harassment made
against him in March by a former female assistant. According to Billboard, a lawyer representing
the assistant sent a letter to Sony Music’s general counsel, Julie Swidler “alleg[ing] that Reid had
harassed his client on a daily basis over the course of a year, humiliating her with inappropriate
remarks about her appearance and icing her out when she rebuffed his advances” (Karp, 2017a).
The letter further alleges “other high-ranking Epic executives knew about Reid’s supposed
misconduct, with one of the assistant’s superiors warning her not to speak out. ‘Before you say

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Reid discloses in his memoir that he got his “L.A.” moniker from one of his Pure Essence bandmates in 1975
during a rehearsal in which he was wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey—L.A. for Los Angeles (2016, p. 28).
Suturing identity to one of the industries’ most important geographic hubs contributes further to the mythology and
lore explored in Chapter 2, a blurring of person and persona.

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anything, think about what that means for you’” (Karp, 2017a).
Lauded by many for a storied music career, which includes being the only African
American to head one of the “big three” music labels during his tenure at Epic, previously
heading both Island Def Jam and Arista, co-founding LaFace Records with Kenny “Babyface”
Edmonds, and discovering or developing such talent as TLC, Outkast, Usher, Rihanna, Justin
Bieber, P!nk, Meghan Trainor, Fifth Harmony, among many others, his departure was noted
across the industry. A subsidiary of Sony Music—the same parent company embroiled in
ongoing legal battles with Kesha over her Kemosabe contract—Epic investigated the allegations
and “found at least some of the assistant’s claims to be credible”; moreover, as Billboard reports,
“the March harassment claim wasn’t the first complaint made against Reid over the course of his
career...one of Reid’s former labels had resolved another claim by a female employee
‘successfully and quietly’” (Karp, 2017a). According to the New York Post, one Sony insider
claimed, “we are not allowing a culture like that in this company...no matter how much a person
brings to the bottom line” (Atkinson, 2017); however, in a separate comment published in
Variety, another Sony insider claimed, “Above all else, Sony Music ‘wanted to avoid another
Kesha situation’” (Halperin, 2017c).
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These claims are not mutually exclusive; indeed, “how
much a person brings to the bottom line,” is perhaps a secondary concern for a label when they
are at risk of losing money—or artists, or investors—because of a disreputable image. After all,
Dr. Luke has had continued success even since Sony decided to remove him as head of
Kemosabe. Furthermore, as several anonymous Epic employees told Variety in response to
Reid’s departure, “sexual harassment and treating women like objects is pervasive” at the label;

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Furthermore, the fact that this unnamed insider was unwilling to make the statement on the record, and as such we
cannot confirm that it was a Sony employee, speaks to the veil of silence that surrounds such allegations and further
contributes to the cultures of silence surrounding sexual harassment and assault in America’s music industries.

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others confirmed that “every major [label] has...secret slush funds earmarked specifically for
sexual harassment claims” (Halperin, 2017c). This revelation is key. It provides direct insight
into how the structural domain of power operates in spaces like record labels. To have a
dedicated “slush fund” for sexual harassment is itself an acknowledgment of the issue. It
communicates that such claims are not only possible but anticipated. It also shows that labels
enhance structural power by reserving resources to fight such claims. In August, Billboard
reported Sony had settled with the assistant for an undisclosed amount (Karp, 2017b). This
settlement operates through the structural domain of power as a tactic of silencing. It ensures,
beyond interpersonal or disciplinary consequences, that silence will be maintained, because the
risk is no longer limited to being blackballed from other professional opportunities or shunned in
professional social circuits but carries with it the added weight of financial and legal stakes.
In the wake of this information and Reid’s departure, a series of responses have emerged
across traditional and social media, addressing the allegations and reflecting upon the recurrent
pattern of sexism and sexual assault in the industry. In an op-ed for Variety, former music
executive Julie Gordon, pointed to a previous interview with Reid’s son Aaron, a former Epic
employee himself, who “offered a quote of advice he got from his father: ‘you gotta do what you
gotta do so you can do what you wanna do’” (2017). Gordon further elaborates on the culture of
silence that exists surrounding allegations of this sort, writing “when women in the music
business go to HR with complaints about male bosses or co-workers, they are often warned to
think very carefully before proceeding, since they are embarking on a path they will not be able
to reverse” (2017). This pattern mirrors the experience outlined in the letter sent to Sony by
Reid’s former assistant, who pointed not only to Reid but also to the surrounding label
executives who actively discouraged her from coming forward, a manifestation of disciplinary

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power in action. As Collins and Bilge (2016) explain, this “power operates by disciplining
people in ways that put people’s lives on paths that make some options seem viable and others
out of reach” (p. 8). “The cold reality is,” Gordon continues, “in a business where there are more
failures than successes, the pattern is to closely guard those who bring the hits at all costs”
(2017).
Reid’s career, however, while over at Epic, did not slow down. As Billboard reported at
the time, “despite the circumstances of his departure from Sony, some major-label executives
[had] discussed partnering with Reid in large part to keep him from being a competitor” (Karp,
2017b). In 2018, that company would be formalized with Reid co-founding Hitco Entertainment,
which represents artists like Jennifer Lopez—who followed Reid from Epic to Hitco—Saint
JHN, and Big Boi (Payne, 2019; Halperin, 2018). By naming these artists, I am not insinuating a
judgement with respect to those who chose to sign with and/or follow Reid. If anything, their
“loyalty” should be considered critically in relation to the precarity and instability of America’s
music industries. Through this frame, one might examine an artists’ decision to stay with Reid as
a strategic effort to remain aligned with an executive who has helped to launch, fuel or sustain an
artist’s career and who is able to maintain power even in the wake of allegations. At the same
time, as long-time music journalist Ann Powers observes, many artists—like fans—“take shelter
behind the value of complexity” (2019). In other words, given the he said/she said distinction of
so many sexual harassment and misconduct cases—and the low rate at which perpetrators are
held legally accountable via “guilty” verdicts and criminal convictions—the opacity of
allegations becomes the grounds on which individuals defend decisions to maintain professional
and personal relationships with figures, like Reid, who have been named by numerous women
with allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.

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As if knowingly foreshadowing his future success, or a boastful gesture toward the
relative impunity that men in power have been afforded in America’s music industries, the day
before news of his stepping down from Epic broke via entertainment trade magazine Variety,
Reid Tweeted a quote from The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald: “‘Never confuse a
single defeat with a final defeat…#BeEpic” (Reid, 2017). The Variety exclusive made no
mention of why Reid resigned as Epic’s CEO (Halperin, 2017a); this would be shared in a
separate article three days after the initial exclusive was published (Halperin, 2017b). In a
Variety exclusive that followed, covering the signing of Big Boi as Hitco’s first artist, Reid’s
Sony exit was addressed in the final line of the article: “[Reid’s] exit from Sony was acrimonious
as sexual misconduct allegations against him became public” (Halperin, 2018). While
acknowledging the reason for Reid’s departure, this concluding statement also highlights a key
distinction for how and when sexual harassment cases are handled; it is not when allegations
were made against Reid, but instead when those allegations became public that Sony’s
relationship with Reid tarnished. This framing suggests that the priority for Sony is with the
company’s reputation, which has been threatened by Reid’s behavior, rather than in seeking
justice for Reid’s multiple victims. The failure here is thus in keeping the allegations under
wraps—as if the “slush funds” this time were not effective—rather than prevention or
restructuring of power within Sony as an institution that enabled Reid’s behavior. Indeed, Sony
addressed Reid’s ouster with no details in the most concise statement: “L.A. Reid will be leaving
the company” (Halperin, 2017b; Ingham, 2017a).
L.A. at Arista
Within months of the May 2017 disclosure, Reid’s name was again raised in connection
with allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. In the same New York Times exposé in

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which Russell Simmons was named by Drew Dixon, Tonie Sallie, and Tina Baker, Dixon further
disclosed that following her departure from Def Jam Recordings, she attempted a second career
in music as an A&R executive. This time, working for lauded and widely-respected music man
Clive Davis. However, shortly after Dixon stepped into her new role at Arista, Davis was ousted
as the head of the label—a controversial move that has been detailed at length, including in
Reid’s memoir (2016; Davis, 2013). Reid replaced Davis, an organizational restructuring that
now positioned Dixon under Reid. At Arista, Dixon details she was subject to ongoing sexual
harassment and misconduct by Reid, marking another derailed chapter in her professional career
as an executive in the music industry because she is a woman.
As Dixon details, Reid, in disciplinary retaliation for Dixon’s refusal to accept his sexual
advances, intentionally blocked her ability to do her job. This retaliation also took the form of
refusing to audition or engage with new artists Dixon arranged for potential signings with the
label—among them Kanye West and John Legend (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017). Dixon further
specifies her allegations against Reid in On The Record: “Unless I sleep with L.A. Reid as a quid
pro quo…I am doomed. I mean, I can’t get John Legend or Kanye West signed? I am dead in the
water now. So, I give up. I give up. After a decade of working my way up from the bottom”
(Dick & Ziering, 2020). Dixon thus ultimately left Arista, giving up her professional dreams and
career in music altogether.
In his memoir, Sing to Me: My Story of Making Music, Finding Magic, and Searching for
Who’s Next, Reid offers a distinctly different account of the events with West:
Kanye quickly became my favorite artist on the label [Island Def Jam, where Reid moved
after Arista]. I had originally known him as a producer. We’d first met when I was the
president of Arista Records and he was producing an artist we’d signed named Lupe
Fiasco from Chicago…the A&R guy [emphasis added] who brought them told me that
Kanye was also looking for a record deal….it was clear he had talent, but I wasn’t sure he
was ready to step out in front of the mic. (2016, pp. 304-305)

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Dissociated from the details Dixon provides, this passage in Reid’s memoir is unremarkable.
Together, however, these texts illuminate how the gendered dynamics of power at play across the
music industries impact not only the musical legacies of particular individuals, executives, or
labels, but all-together alter the historical knowledges from which future iterations of American
music will emerge. To read Reid’s passage through the lens Dixon provides, the “A&R guy,” is,
in fact, Dixon. The reason Reid offers for failing to sign Kanye, who would go on to become one
of the most popular and successful artists in popular American music in the twenty-first century,
is through a mea culpa in his assessment of Kanye’s audition, rather than illuminated as
destructive and petty retribution against Dixon for her unwillingness to sleep with him as a
means to ensure success in her position and role as an A&R executive for Arista. Music scholar
and journalist Eric Weisbard argues that music is “a vitally important repository for collective
memory’” (2016, p. 18); the processes and practices by which such music comes into being is as
much a part of this historic archive as the music that comprises this repository. In this way,
sound studies scholar Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2015) similarly asserts that, “the dialectic
between the history of silencing and the need to recognize this history complicates the personal,
aesthetics, and legal values of sound” (2015, p. 188).
The difference in consequences for Dixon and Reid is severe. Reid, while no longer the
CEO at Epic as a result of the most recent round of allegations, suffered no consequences for his
behavior toward Dixon; although, importantly, she did not disclose the harassment she endured
publicly at the time. What’s more, even in the wake of the allegations raised by Dixon in The
New York Times’s exposé, and in the On the Record documentary that would follow, Reid
remains head of Hitco. The music machine keeps turning. Reid joins a robust roster of men
whose careers have proceeded with little interruption, despite allegations against them of sexual

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harassment and/or misconduct. In hindsight, perhaps we should have reflected differently upon
pop star P!nk’s 2002 hit single, “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” in which she sings: “L.A. told me,
‘you’ll be a pop star/ All you have to change is everything you are,’” in reference to Reid, who
signed the artist when she was seventeen.
In an official statement included in the 2017 Times exposé, Reid “did not address the
specific claims but apologized if his words were ‘misinterpreted.’” This statement falls in line
with carefully crafted public statements designed strategically and carefully to distance alleged
perpetrators from accusations of misconduct and abuse. This is not unique to Reid, nor is it
unique to America’s music industries. Such statements unsurprisingly employ rhetorical
strategies that are about protecting the image and reputation of alleged perpetrators, as well as
upholding conditions of innocence in accordance with potential legal ramifications. By using the
term “misinterpreted” Reid at once addresses the disclosure—if indirectly—while also
eschewing all accountability or blame for the incidents Dixon details in her accounts. While not
an explicit denial or rejection, “misinterpretation” places the blame on Dixon, insinuating that if
the alleged incidents did, in fact, take place, that she is responsible for misinterpreting,
misreading, and/or misunderstanding the interpersonal dynamics of the situation. This strategic
move is a secondary act of silencing; it calls into question the veracity of Dixon’s account while
also placing any pain, trauma, or consequence she endured as a result of Reid’s treatment as
accountable to her. It is an efficient and concise turn of phrase, yet it contributes to the cultural
and interpersonal domains of power that reify the hierarchies within such professional
relationships, and further sutures Dixon’s disclosure to larger histories of women’s voices being
silenced, called into question, and minimized in the wake of public disclosures.

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A Different Disclosure: Telling on Themselves
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In the analogs of books that have not aged well, in 2007 Simmons published Do You!: 12
Ways to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success, which includes a foreword
by Donald Trump.
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Part self-help empowerment guide and part manual for financial success, Do
You! also provides a revealing—yet highly-curated—behind-the-scenes look at Simmons’s
personal and professional practices. The book interweaves the disciplinary and individuating
logic of neoliberalism and empowerment with the selfless and self-reflective teachings of Eastern
philosophy to instruct readers on how to attain spiritual alignment and professional acumen
while adhering to a moralizing code that has, Simmons proposes, led to his distinct brand of

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This refrain—that individuals were revealing their misdeeds, either cryptically or overtly, has been raised in
reference to other artists against whom allegations of sexual misconduct have been lodged. Often, such reflections
point to song lyrics as a primary source for these revelations, which offer a more sinister reading of “disclosure.”
Aaliyah’s R. Kelly-produced debut 1994 album, Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number, and single of the same name, are
often highlighted in these conversations. Kelly had legal documents forged so that he could marry Aaliyah when she
was fifteen and he was 27 (Hong, 2019). In another example, singer Michael Milosh of Rhye was recently accused
via Instagram of assault by his ex-wife, who he first met when she was a minor and a fan of his music via MySpace.
In her allegations, she references his song “Major Minor Love” as written about their relationship (Harris, 2021).
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Donald Trump has a long and storied history with hip-hop music, artists, and executives. Particularly during the
1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, the Trump name was a common reference in rap lyrics, as was his appearance in a
number of hip-hop music videos. Trump’s image and brand were often spotlighted as a visible marker of shameless
self-promotion, capitalist greed, and embodiment of the whiteness of American wealth (Richards, 2019). In this
way, Trump represented both a benchmark for success in America through the lens of capitalism and a model for
aggressive business practices, as well as a metaphorical target for individuals of color to surpass as a challenge to
the systems of power that historically marginalized communities of color and restricted access to particular echelons
of wealth, power, ownership and visibility. Trump, likewise, made visible his relationship with key figures in hip-
hop, like Simmons, capitalizing on the socio-cultural capital of hip-hop as genre and lifestyle. This relationship,
though always complicated, became particularly soured throughout his presidency, with several artists referencing
Trump no longer as a measure of capitalist success alone, but now more often also as the embodiment of America’s
history of exploitation and white supremacy. The rise in popularity of songs like YG’s “FDT” (“Fuck Donald
Trump”), featuring Nipsey Hussle, and Eminem’s “Framed,” called out the racism and xenophobia that
distinguished much of Trump’s administration and characterized the rhetoric amplified by many of his supporters.
“FDT” became a frequent feature on soundtracks amplified at protests and direct-action mobilizations across the
country throughout Trump’s presidency (Leopold, 2019). As YG raps, “Me and my peoples, we always thought he
was straight/Influential mothafucka when it came to the business/But now, since we know how you really feel/This
is how we feel/Fuck Donald Trump/…Hey Donald, and everyone that follows/You gave us your reason to be
President, but we hate yours” (Ashgedom, 2016). On an additional note, as a result of their lyrical criticism, both
YG and Eminem were investigated by the secret service, and YG was threatened with having his album pulled from
commercial shelves (Platon, 2016; Leopold, 2019). This situates both artists in a long lineage of musicians and
artists who have been placed under by surveillance by the FBI, Secret Service and other political and legal forces in
America for outspoken criticism of political administrations, from Phil Ochs to John Lennon to N.W.A. (Larkin,
2018).

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success. Framing Simmons as a “master entrepreneur and visionary,” the book’s jacket
emphasizes that this book is a didactic guide, one that makes accessible to readers the secrets and
guiding tenets of Simmons’s approach to life, work, and spirituality. In this way, its messages
both construct and contribute to the cultural domain of power in and through which Simmons is
situated as “the king of Hip-Hop.” “Russell reveals a path that can be followed not only by those
looking to duplicate his professional success, but anyone struggling to realize their dreams” the
description promises (2007). In this way, Simmons positions himself as both the embodiment of
America’s elusive Horatio Alger myth—the everyman who “[rose] out of the New York City
streets” to become “known the world over as ‘The CEO of Hip-Hop’”—and as a spiritual leader
proselytizing to the uninitiated, his secrets rooted in a particularly neoliberal framing of Eastern
philosophy. Simmons as guru, C-Suite as ashram.
Simmons breaks down his secrets to success and happiness into twelve laws, which he
identifies as the necessary commandments one should follow in order to achieve and maintain
power and to, ultimately, form a “connection with [their] higher self.” The laws include: “Law
Number Two: Always Do You,” “Law Number Six: Surround Yourself With the Right People,”
“Law Number Seven: There Are No Failures, Only Quitters,” and “Law Number 12: Spit Truth
to Power.” Laws six and seven are further mirrored by Trump’s comments in the foreword:
“Russell and I might get the credit for our respective successes, but we also both know that we’d
never reach those heights without a strong home team”; “We both realize how important it is to
never quit…you can never, ever give up or even think in terms of giving up” (p. vii). Simmons
breaks down each of his twelve laws in greater detail, identifying and unpacking particular tenets
of their guiding principles and highlighting key junctures in his life and evolution from hip-hop
mogul to spiritual yogi, which include: “Don’t Hold On To Your Mistakes,” “there’s no value in

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an emotion like guilt,” Simmons asserts, “if you make what seems to be [emphasis added] a
mistake, say ‘my bad’ and move on. Don’t stay attached to what’s already happened” (p. 190; p.
187). Simmons similarly highlights the principle of “Rejecting NO”: “another phenomenon that
causes many people to quit hearing the word no,” Simmons asserts, then urging readers to “never
be self-conscious about being persistent. Because a real leader will see your persistence as a
strength, not as a weakness” (pp. 190-191).
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In a final example, Simmons highlights his hiring
philosophy (employing another reference that has not aged gracefully): “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a
Number.” “I can’t prove it, but it feels like my businesses run better when I’m working with
younger people,” Simmons posits, “But…ultimately, as the song says, ‘Age ain’t nothin’ but a
number’” (pp. 164-165).
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Read in isolation, the laws and tenets Simmons offers as guiding principles to put his

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This logic is commonly presented in memoirs and reflections of executives in the music industry, often framed as
good business acumen practice by the early pioneers and disrupters in popular American music. “Disruption,” like
“pioneer,” is a tricky classification. While it at times signifies innovative or creative solutions to nascent industries,
it is also loaded with the logic and weight of colonial rhetoric. Disruption, likewise, must always be read and
employed with caution. Who gets to “disrupt” and in what ways is inconsistent, and the consequences individuals,
groups, or organizations face for disruption—which has become an entrepreneurial framing of transgression—can
be severe for some, while nonexistent for others. Race and gender are often key variables in the disproportionate
readings of, and reactions to, such efforts. In recounting her experience working under, and later with, Atlantic
Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, Dorothy Carvello remembers: “That was the thing about Ahmet: he never heard
the word no” (2018, p 14). However, Carvello qualifies this account, “You had to give Ahmet credit, though—he’d
earned it. Gold records…lined the Atlantic hallways like wallpaper, a sight fit to impress a jaded industry veteran,
never mind a girl from Brooklyn” (p. 14). Carvello’s comments reveal the complicated domains of power coexisting
in these professional relationships and industry spaces. Carvello insinuates that Ertegun’s success is justification for
his refusal to accept “no” as an answer, an insight that speaks to the power success affords individuals in the
industry—a free pass to behave and operate by their own standards due to an impressive repertoire. At the same
time, the tenacity Carvello highlights here with respect to Ertegun’s unequivocal insistence is also a manifestation of
the SDRR ethos that is rooted in anti-establishment rebellion—even if these executives are now the closest
embodiment of “the establishment” as gatekeepers of music’s most coveted spaces and seats of power. No doubt
Ertegun’s legacy in the industry is impressive—objectively for the artists he signed and the commercial success of
his label—but success does not, or at least should not, relinquish individuals from accountability. These are not
mutually exclusive; yet, as Carvello makes clear, this logic undergirds the infrastructure of America’s popular music
industries, which is then further romanticized and glorified historically via discourses of mythology. What’s more,
Carvello’s clarification that Ertegun’s success is impressive, regardless of who is judging his accomplishments—and
industry veteran or girl from Brooklyn—serves to emphasize the magnitude of Ertegun’s accomplishments, but it
also implies a vulnerability, or added precarity, for those music professionals who are not in positions of power or
come into the industry with previous experience or exposure to these spaces.
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Here Simmons is referencing the R. Kelly-produced single, “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number,” from singer
Aaliyah’s 1994 debut album of the same name.

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readers on a path toward success are laden with neoliberal logic and capitalist credos, rooted in
empowerment, competition, accumulation, detachment and the rejection of regulation—the
rejection of rejection for that matter, too. In this same way, the messages Simmons outlines can
be examined via Collins’ and Bilge’s conception of the cultural domain of power: “when it
comes to the organization of power,” they articulate, “ideas matter in providing explanations for
social inequality and fair play” (2016, p. 10). Simmons, through his twelve laws, is articulating
his rules for the game—what counts as fair play by his standards. In the wake of the many
allegations made against Simmons that have been disclosed since the initial publication of this
book in 2007, however, Simmons’s twelve laws provide a telling and prescriptive roadmap for
the strategic logic that underpins his alleged abuses of power and misconduct.
At the same time, in relation to the details of the public allegations against him, some of
Simmons’ principles to success read as antithetical or hypocritical to the transgressions and
misconduct for which he has been accused.
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“The most important quality you can show me is a
commitment to giving,” Simmons argues, “I’m looking for people who give by being good
teammates” (pp. 156-157). He continues: “I try to reward people for telling the truth” (p. 164).
Likewise, he advises, “it is definitely in your best interest to empower your employees. I know
that when the people who work for me feel empowered, they become much more effective
employees” (p. 270). These inconsistencies point both to the ambivalence of the logic he
employs, collapsing together selfless and selfish acts as strategies for successful business, and
offering individuating and community-building tactics for fostering the “higher-self” he
packages as part of this book’s teachings. At the same time, the laws highlight how Simmons

88
While the constraints of private assaults and framing of allegations delimit accusations via “he said/she said”
binaries, there are several moments throughout Do You!, that call to mind Shakespeare’s now colloquial line “the
lady doth protest too much, methinks”; in other words, statements throughout

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thinks about and wields power. While the text, itself, is part of the cultural domain of power, the
laws he puts forth outline the disciplinary logic he employs as an executive and employer, as
well as his expectations for interpersonal relationships with others in music and beyond.
In one example, Dixon reveals an encounter with then-President of Def Jam Recordings,
Lyor Cohen, on her first day at the label (Dick & Ziering, 2020)
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:
On my first day, at some point [Lyor] called me into his office and he’s like, “I don’t
know who the fuck you are, but I don’t have time for any of Russell’s tall, skinny bitches.
So, this is what I want you to do. If you see me in the building, if you see me in the
hallway, find the nearest open office, the nearest open door, go into it and hide, because I
don’t want to see any skinny bitches who are friends with Russell. Got it? Got it, tall
skinny?

This interaction is at once a demonstration of disciplinary power at Def Jam, pointing to the
misogyny baked into this space, and confirms that Simmons had an identifiable pattern of
surrounding himself with young, beautiful women both inside and outside of work (something
Simmons has himself attested to in numerous interviews). Cohen’s comments also suggest a
tangible manifestation of Simmons’s sixth law: surround yourself with the right people. “Right”
becomes the operative qualifier—right for whom? And, toward what end? In a moment of what
can be perceived as strategic amnesia, Cohen—who now sits as the Global Head of Music at
YouTube—shared in his keynote address at the 2018 South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference
and Festival: “I never saw [Simmons] aggressive or violent with any women. It’s not the Russell
I knew…I’m deeply troubled with all the allegations, and there’s absolutely no room for this type
of behavior” (Gage, 2018). Yet to elaborate further on the telling revelations Simmons shares in
his book, he attributes some of his success to the lessons he learned early in his career as a then-
music promoter from a decades-long relationship with Billboard journalist Robert Ford.
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“Rob

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Cohen remains a key fixture in the mainstream music industries. In 2016, he was named as YouTube’s Global
Head of Music (Rys, 2016).
90
Ford, who passed away in 2020, was a pioneering Hip-hop journalist credited with writing the first mainstream

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taught me not only how to break into the game, but how to stay in the game by making honesty
and integrity the foundation on which you build any sort of marketing or development plan. In
other words,” Simmons emphasizes, “Rob taught me the value of selling the truth” (2007, p.
148). On one level, this lesson is about honesty and integrity. On another level, however, it is
about a particular visibility, about the appearance of honesty, about creative marketing—
messaging that becomes constitutive of the cultural domain of power—to package oneself as
honest by “selling the truth.”
Simmons similarly credits Ford with imparting knowledge early in his career about the
value of longevity—in careers, in relationships, and in approaching business decisions for the
long-term. “To this day,” Simmons writes, “I use Rob’s philosophy when I’m developing any
new brand, not just within the music industry: to invest in things that are lasting, honest, and
stable, instead of cheap and disposable” (p. 151). If Cohen’s comments are any indication,
women in Simmons’s orbit—both professionally and personally—were viewed as the latter:
disposable. Following this logic, Simmons’ comments no longer read as antithetical so much as
they present a through-line—these teachings apply, this logic applies, if you are a man. Or, more
specifically, if you are vested in upholding patriarchal structures and the enduring misogynistic
legacies of the SDRR ideology. It similarly recalls the candid assessment offered by The
Runaways’ manager Kim Fowley explored in Chapter 2: “If you can’t get cunt, you want to be a
rock ‘n’ roll something so you can get it, and when you have it you throw it out onto the street.
Then you get better versions of it…” (Parker & Rowley, 1972). In line with the critical
discursive reading I bring to this text, Simmons’s, himself, points directly to his books as

article on the then-emerging genre in 1978, “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something With Oldie
R&B Disks.” Ford left journalism to become a producer and songwriter, writing tracks for such seminal hip-hop
artists as Kurtis Blow. Ford was also responsible for bringing Nelson George into music journalism as an intern
(Caramanica, 2020; Eggertsen, 2020).

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evidentiary support for his innocence in his formal response to The New York Times about the
allegations made against him in the 2017 exposé:
What I will not accept is responsibility for what I have not done. I have conducted my life
with a message of peace and love. Although I have been candid about how I have lived in
books and interviews detailing my flaws [emphasis added], I will relentlessly fight against
any untruthful character assassination that paints me as a man of violence. (As cited in
Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017)

The Price of Admission
“The music industry is the most unprofessional professional industry in the world.”
- Kate Nash
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It's just the way it is
Maybe it's never gonna change
Show some skin, make him want you
'Cause God forbid you
Know your own way home
And ask yourself why it matters
Who it flatters
- Christina Aguilera, featuring Demi Lovato “Fall in Line”
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The “price of admission” into America’s music industries as a woman is not only
expensive, but also a cost that women quickly find to be a recurring charge—more a steep
subscription model than a one-time-purchase, and a subscription with a cost structure that
increases over time. The longer you stay, the more you pay. A woman’s admission is
contingent—it comes with an asterisk that reminds her she is paying for access to an
infrastructure that does not belong to her and to which she is reminded constantly she does not
belong. (Let us recall Jessica Hopper’s early question, referenced in the Introduction, Are women
here yet?) As the first female A&R executive for Atlantic Records, Dorothy Carvello recounts
that during her time at Atlantic—an experience she describes “as a circus mixed with an orgy”
(p. 22)— the recurring message from men was constant and clear: “Don’t get comfortable here;

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Nash, K. (2021, May 27). A Q&A with actor, singer & songwriter Kate Nash [Q&A panel]. The Creative
Industries Festival 2021: Gender and Sexism in the Creative Industries. Zoom.
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Simpson, J., Williams, M., Mae, A., Aguilera, C., Bellion, J., & Cubina, R. (2018). Fall in line [Lyrics].
https://genius.com/Christina-aguilera-fall-in-line-lyrics#song-info

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you aren’t important” (2018, p. 19). This is certainly the message Dixon got on her first day at
Def Jam from Lyor Cohen as detailed above. As a point of contrast to Carvello’s experience,
L.A. Reid details his early experiences working in music in his memoir:
Despite the talent in the room, being there felt natural to me. I felt like I belonged, and
even though I was young, the guys treated me as though I belonged there, too. That
meant a lot because validation is very important among musicians. You could tell it was a
world you needed to be invited to join. (2016, p. 13)

Countless sources, from memoirs to documentaries to social media posts and podcast interviews
point to how, for women, the price of admission has historically been normalized as just “the
way things are.” Many are hazed by men in power to believe they should be grateful to even
have access, as if the price they are asked to pay is inconsequential relative to the benefits of
admission to a space in which women have historically been marginalized, particularly from the
upper echelons of executive power. When women are tokenized as the first, or one of the first, in
their positions, this price is higher; the domains of power interlocking to place women, the
category of concern in this instance, in a precarious and unstable position that requires constant
navigation. Part of this precarity is due to the responsibility women often feel as the first in a
space, like Robinson or Carvello. Complicity is not as simple to address as it might appear.
Complicity is not just silence with respect to a particular incident, but sometimes also a
calculated decision in response to the question, what gets women closer to progress? Staying
quiet and proving (to men) that women can survive and succeed in a particular position and
perhaps opening a pathway for others to follow? Or, speaking up and risk likely being
blackballed from the industry? Who is to say which is the better option? This, again, is why such
issues need to be approached via an intersectional analysis that attends to this ambivalence, and,
more importantly, to understand that this is not the responsibility or the weight for one individual
to carry.

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This price of admission is deeply wedded to questions of power, identity, and belonging.
The tenuous nature of this access requires that women prove again and again why and how they
deserve to remain. Access itself does not set up a direct route to an interpersonal dynamic in
which those women who pay to be admitted are now on equal footing with their male colleagues.
This instability increases the disciplinary and interpersonal power within these spaces, which are
then compounded by little structural oversight of—or, often, direct structural involvement in
maintaining—these unequal structures of power (e.g., slush funds for sexual harassment cases).
This positionally is more precarious for young women and women of color. As Carvello writes,
“when you’re new at your job, especially as a woman, you don’t know if you can speak up. If
you let the first offense go, it becomes much harder to stop the second one from happening. I
didn’t know where to draw the line, and I didn’t even know that a line should or could be drawn.
It just seemed normal” (2018, p. 25).That hazing—the manifestations of interpersonal and
disciplinary power—that normalizes and initiates individuals into the cultural landscape of
America’s music industries occurs across a spectrum of ritualized misogyny within a broader
landscape of toxic masculinity.
Carvello, who worked her way up in Atlantic after starting out of college as founder
Ahmet Ertegun’s secretary, details one early initiation at Atlantic Records. Tasked with finding
Ertegun at Atlantic’s recording studio for his signature on label documents, she found:
Ahmet in the control room, pants and underwear down to the floor, getting a blow
job…He saw the papers in my hand and gave me a look I would come to know well. It
said, “Are you in?” I held his gaze, feeling the pressure. How badly do I want to roll with
Ahmet? What would I do to enter his world? I knew if I went along with this, there was
no turning back. I walked to him calmly and handed him the papers. He signed them,
mid-blow job, without a word. (2018, p. 21)

Lisa Robinson, who characterizes “The record business as [having] always been… one of the
sleaziest and more corrupt sides of show business” (p. 173), shares her own normalized

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experiences of sexual misconduct—in this instance, also with Ertegun—an illustration of the
interpersonal and disciplinary power interlocking to position Robinson in a contingent capacity
that required complicity in order for her to remain:
What happened often, was that…Ertegun, would just causally slip his hand under my
blouse while we were on the plane—or even at a press party—with the Stones or
Zeppelin. (I even saw him do it once to Yoko Ono.) I would laugh and brush his hand
away. It’s what we all did [emphasis added]. I heard rumors about women who went into
his office and saw him masturbating behind his desk, but luckily, I never saw anything
that disgusting. (2020, p. 68)
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The corruption of the record business to which Carvello and Robinson allude manifests in a pay-
to-play system in which women endure and/or are expected to participate in ongoing sexism and
sexual misconduct.
Carvello argues that “if personnel had actually enforced the rules, everyone in the
building would have been fired by lunch” (2018, p. 22). Carvello’s comments speak both to the
normalization of this context and the texture of the cultural space—just another day in the office.
At the same time, however, both Carvello and Robinson point to the shortcomings of any form of
legal infrastructure. Put differently, while human resources departments are disproportionately
absent across America’s music industries, even when present—as Carvello suggests with
Atlantic—they were largely ineffective, if not negligent. The office as “a circus mixed with an
orgy” atmosphere did not germinate in spite of personnel departments, but because of their
complicity in the larger music machine. “I didn’t question it. I wasn’t even shocked—that’s the
scary part. Right from the start, I enabled this behavior. The men called me ‘cunt,’ ‘cunty-poo,’
‘blow-job.’ It was against the rules, but again, no one enforced the rules. If you spoke up, you are
out. They could replace you in three seconds” (2018, p. 26).

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This rumor is verified by Carvello in her 2018 memoir, Anything for a Hit: “Classic Ahmet was the guy who
played with himself under his desk while dictating letters to his secretary” (p. 2).

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The normalization of this behavior typifies America’s music industries and is regulated
through disciplinary domains in which women, particularly those who were/are subordinate to
male bosses and executives or those located along horizontal tracks, like Robinson, are
positioned in precarious situation where expectations of conformity create extreme conditions of
pressure to tolerate and/or participate in misconduct. What’s more: few formal protections exist
for women as resources or official routes to report and/or prevent incidents that would otherwise
be regulated and policed by formal organizational departments. The lack of oversight bodies like
human resources departments is referenced frequently as a key absence throughout America’s
music industries (Nash, 2021; Warnick, 2021; Carvello, 2018). Again, even when formal
structural routes through which women might come forward do exist, they are often rendered
ineffective via interpersonal and disciplinary dynamics that discourage and/or disincentivize
women from disclosing their experiences or seeking redress:
I once went to a lawyer, who advised me that if I sued for harassment, I’d lose my job.
Worse than that, I knew I’d be blackballed from the entire business…I had no female role
model to look to for guidance. No woman had bucked the system and blazed the trail…I
needed the job too much to risk it. (Carvello, 2018, pp. 34-35)

In an interview with the Sunday Times upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of her celebrated 1995
album Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morrissette asserted, “Almost every woman in the music
industry has been assaulted, harassed, raped…It’s just so normalized” (Edwards, 2020). Sophie
Gilbert similarly writes in The Atlantic, in reference to the ongoing legal battle between Kesha
and Dr. Luke, “The saddest thing about the…lawsuit it’s how familiar it all is” (2014).
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the culture of silence that was variously
enforced via the intersection of interpersonal and disciplinary dynamics, undergirded by
messaging that encouraged silence, was made more severe by an increase in the now-pervasive
implementation of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), a strategic and effective structural tactic

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for silencing. A few key conjunctures are integral to this shift from the SDRR ideology that
governed behavior pertaining to what was sayable throughout America’s music industries to the
current conjuncture in which NDAs are common practice, including: the passage of the 1964
Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, and
national origin and led to the formation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the
women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which campaigned against rape and domestic abuse
and brought questions of consent into greater visibility, and the formalization in 1975 of “sexual
harassment” as an official phrase; and the 1991 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, which
dominated American media coverage and brought sexual harassment into public conversations in
a way that had previously never been seen.
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To this point, when questioned about whether things are better or worse in today’s music
industries, Sil Lai Abrams suggests: “If anything, I would imagine that there are a lot more of
NDAs and payoffs occurring… If change is not occurring in more moderate work environments,
I don’t have any reason to believe that over in the music industry things have shifted” (Olson,
2020). This increase in NDAs and payoffs, however, like the earmarked slush funds for sexual
harassment cases, makes clear who and what is valued within America’s music industries. Rather
than resources being dedicated to addressing prevention of sexual misconduct, labels have
invested in legal protections that foreground silence around misconduct, rather than the
eradication of the misconduct itself.
Sympathy for the Devil
“Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste/ I’ve been around for a long, long years
Stole million man's soul and faith…Ah, what's puzzling you

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As Cohen (2016) notes, “Though Thomas denied the allegations and was eventually confirmed to the Supreme
Court, Hill’s decision had immediate consequences: in its wake, sexual-harassment complaints filed with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission doubled, and payouts from court settlements increased as well.

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Is the nature of my game, oh yeah…/ So if you meet me
Have some courtesy/ Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politeness/ Or I'll lay your soul to waste”
- The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil”
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“He hit me/ and I knew he loved me
if he didn’t care for me / I could have never made him mad
But he hit me/ and I was glad”
- The Crystals, “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”
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Characterized by high competition, diverse and always burgeoning talent, and a strong
and eager youth presence, America’s music industries provide few safety nets for failure. The
cut-throat nature of participating in a highly-visible and highly-sought-after creative space
situates aspiring artists, musicians, and other music professionals in unstable positions, and often
short-term project- or tour-based appointments with few guarantees, let alone traditional
structural benefits. This precarity contributes to a complex context in which personal safety,
professional practices, and ethical standards become compromised as individuals navigate how
to achieve access, mobility, and advancement across the industries’ many sectors. This
compromise manifests, in part, via a complicity in and/or willingness to overlook and/or endure
the prevalence of sexual harassment and misconduct by men and women at every level of the
industries’ varied echelons. As I have detailed, it is historically and actively normalized—both
accepted and anticipated as the “price of admission” to a soundscape and infrastructure in which
such transgressions and abuses of power are perceived as natural to the built environments and
the social and professional dynamics within.
97

95
Jagger, M., & Richards, K. (1969). Sympathy for the devil [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://genius.com The-
rolling-stones sympathy-for-the-devil lyrics
96
King, C., & Goffin, G. (1963). He hit me (and it felt like a kiss) [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://genius.com/The-
crystals-he-hit-me-it-felt-like-a-kiss-lyrics#song-info
Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin in 1963 for The Crystals, the song was produced by Phil Spector.
97
The topography of America’s music industries is in this way similar to—though distinct from—Hollywood’s film
and TV industries. The “casting couch” in Hollywood has become a colloquial euphemism for expectations of sex in
return for professional roles and opportunities in TV and film. The “couch” reference calls attention both to the
prevalence of sexual harassment and misconduct, as well as to the informality of business meetings in many spaces
of these industries, including music, where late-night meetings in hotel rooms, bars, and other traditionally-

153
Abrams attests to this cultural norm and the complex tensions it presents in On the
Record:
You stay because you hope that, perhaps, you can provide enough value to the company
and move ahead. But part of the ability to ascend is contingent upon your ability to either,
A) comply with someone’s sexual advances, or [B)] let them think that they might have a
shot in hell, without encouraging them. It’s something that you have to go along with
because the alternative is that you’ll be unemployed. (Dick & Ziering, 2020)

This expectation—a quid pro quo—is complicated for women in music. For many it foregrounds
the dynamics of power present in both interpersonal and disciplinary dynamics, as women are
harassed by or endure misconduct from men with whom they work or to whom they report. For
many, these men can also be mentors and connectors—advisors in the business of the industries
and key referrals for more opportunities down the line.
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Too often that access and mobility is
contingent. At the same time, the music industries do provide opportunities for women—
mobility is possible—which can make navigating such misconduct more complicated. There is a
position or role or level beyond which a woman may be situated to which she can look, which
can increase the pressure on women to stay silent about sexual harassment or misconduct in an
effort not to jeopardize potential opportunities. “[The music industry] is a space where there is a
lot of mobility for women,” Abram’s clarifies, “but at the same time there is a tremendous
amount of sexual harassment…baked into the culture” (Dick & Ziering, 2020). This ambivalence

unprofessional spaces are commonplace and common practice. At the same time, this practice of holding meetings
at odd and often late hours outside of what would otherwise be considered formal spaces of business, contributes to
the structural and physical precarity for aspiring actors and artists and professionals (Zimmer, 2017). As Jodi Kantor
and Megan Twohey’s explosive 2017 exposé revealed, many of Harvey Weinstein’s victims recounted similar
stories regarding how they were invited to his hotel room under the guise of a meeting to discuss their careers, where
he then assaulted them. In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, artists Plastic Jesus and Joshua “Ginger”
Monroe placed a casting couch replica depicting a seated Weinstein on Hollywood Boulevard in anticipation of the
2018 Academy Awards (Brockington, 2018).
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Music historian and journalist Dart Adams speaks to why referrals and word-of-mouth opportunities are so
crucial, characterizing America’s industries music industries as comprised of “a business culture that's small in size,
chummy, with an everyone-knows-everyone kind of vibe [and] that small-world atmosphere has only become
stronger as the number of record labels decline or absorb into each other” (Leah, 2018).

154
complicates options for women working to navigate and ascend within popular American music.
On the one hand, ascension comes at a steep cost, on the other, routes to that ascension are
possible—if you’re willing to pay that price.
Dixon shares her experience navigating this dynamic while at Def Jam: “I thought it was
part of the culture and I just needed to manage around it…eventually I thought that I had proven
myself, and was now too valuable, for [Simmons] to want to burn the bridge; I thought I am an
executive with value and he is a business person and, a really well regarded one, so surely he will
leave me alone” (Dick & Ziering, 2020). Dixon’s success, however, her economic value to Def
Jam, was secondary to her identity. As her allegations make clear, Simmons wanted her to fall in
line like all of his “other skinny bitches.” In a telling moment in Do You!, Simmons writes:
Whatever your challenge is, you can’t let it defeat you…Fuck a glass ceiling! If you think
there’s a glass ceiling holding you back, then you’re a slave. Because we know that glass
breaks very easily. Shatter that glass, brush off the shards, and get on with your vision.
No obstacle is too severe for you to overcome it. (2007, p. 179)

Individuals in positions of power—those with the most stability, the most knowledge, access,
and deepest rolodexes across industry spaces—are cognizant of the power they hold in and
through their positions. Ertegun’s look at Carvello when she walked in to find him mid-blow job
was one manifestation of this—are you in? As Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge articulate,
“The culture industry knows the power of its own practices” (2016). This power has resulted in a
violent history of abuses and misconduct in which perpetrators—like Fowley and Ertegun and
Simmons and Reid—have been able to operate with a not-unreasonable expectation of impunity.
At the same time, the interrelation between power and precarity has resulted in ambivalent, even
if problematic, inter-personal relationships between colleagues—across industry spaces and
within particular hierarchies. Put another way, while some of these figures have abused or
exploited their positions of power at the expense of and to the detriment of others, they are often

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still revered and respected for the musical and creative contributions they have made to the
legacy of an industry in which a shared love of music is perhaps one of the few things as
pervasive as the sexism and sexual misconduct that tarnishes its histories. That reverence at
times remains even between victims and their perpetrators, which further entangles the domains
of power that intersect in particular conjunctures. Carvello (2018) characterizes this conundrum
as “sympathy for the devil”—repurposing the name given to the title track from The Rolling
Stones’ 1968 album, Beggars Banquet.
For Carvello, that devil was Ahmet Ertegun: “I see the man I still revere despite
everything, the man who gave me my first job in the music business and remained a trusted
adviser during my two decades working for Atlantic and other major labels. He’s also the man
who verbally, physically, and sexually mistreated me” (2018, p. 3). Dixon’s comments follow a
similar path: “I wanted Russell to be a hero, too. Russell Simmons is the king of hip-hop and I
was proud of him for that, so I took it for the team… I loved Russell, too.” As Hancock-Alfaro
reminds us, “one is neither purely an oppressor nor purely oppressed” (p. 2016, 82). This
complicated dynamic of love and admiration and harassment and assault is central to the
interlocking systems of power that operate in and through America’s music industries. To recall
Collins and Bilge (2016) “power relations are about people’s lives, how people relate to one
another, and who is advantaged or disadvantaged within social interactions” (p. 7). For both
Carvello and Dixon, the men who perpetrated harm against them were also the men who gave
them opportunities, who afforded them platforms by and through which they could grow
professionally. Simmons and Ertegun, likewise, represented more than bosses to each woman—
as two of the most successful and visible executives in contemporary American music, Ertegun
and Simmons held immense power; they continue to hold that power with respect to the depth

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and significance of musical catalogs they oversaw and contributed to directly during their
respective tenures. Their musical contributions are central to the legacies and canons of popular
American music. For her complicity, her endurance, her toleration, Carvello became the first
woman A&R executive at Atlantic Records; the importance of this should not be overlooked.
The trauma Dixon suffered, and the position of enhanced precarity in which she was placed
professionally in the wake of her assault by Simmons—compounded by her experiences of
harassment by Reid—derailed her career and had a devastating impact on her life. The
significance of that must also not be overlooked.
Choose Your Own Adventure
“The recurring message is that, for women, the music industry is a Banksy-designed Choose Your Own
Adventure book, with each career path containing its own lady-specific land mines.”
- Amy Zimmerman, The Daily Beast
99

The other cost to the enduring “price of admission” has historically been signing on to a
culture of complicity in order to gain access. While innumerable women recount experiences of
sexual harassment and misconduct, many of those women likewise acknowledge bearing witness
to the harassment or misconduct of other women and girls. Situated in a misogynistic and
patriarchal infrastructure, women find themselves both enduring and contributing to a culture in
which they are necessarily marginalized and objectified on the basis of their gender, in addition
to other categories of identity like race, sexuality, and age. The significance of this duality is
grave, for it becomes a key component of the axis of sexism and misogyny around which
America’s music industries turn. This is further complicated when those professionals
experiencing and witnessing harassment or misconduct are journalists—a position in which truth

99
Zimmerman, A. (2015, August 26). Women’s music industry horror stories: Abuse, sexism, and erasure. The
Daily Beast. Retrieved from
http://www.thedailybeast.com/womens-music-industry-horror-stories-abuse-sexism-and-erasure

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and fact comprise, in theory, a cornerstone of professional and ethical responsibility. Robinson
provides a detailed reflection of her own relationship with this issue specifically, which I include
here in full for the domains of power and professional stakes it reveals:
As a young journalist breaking into the music industry in the 1970s, I witnessed such
outrageous and disgusting behavior from male rock musicians toward groupies, and yet, I
wrote nothing about it. I did nothing about it. Who would I have called? The police? I
was an invited “guest” journalist on the private planes and the tours of The Rolling
Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who…By not writing about the private side of those tours, I
was trusted to accompany them and get the stories that no other rock journalist would get
and many of which I would never write. Looking back on it—and we’re talking more
than forty years ago—was I complicit in some of this? Possibly. But it was “the way it
was.” And there was pressure on me: I had to make a choice. If I wrote about what was
really going on, I wouldn’t “get to go” on these tours or have this access….I kept quiet. I
convinced myself that these guys had a right to their private lives. And “everyone” knew
about it. “Everyone” did it. “Everyone” thought it was delightful—sex and drugs and
rock and roll. Fun. Until it wasn’t. (2020, p. 65)

Robinson’s admission, while candid, does not necessarily suggest remorse. To the
question of whether she was complicit, the answer is yes, not “probably”; opting to overlook
sexual harassment and misconduct entangles Robinson knowingly and strategically in the
enablement and facilitation of such abuses. However, the conundrum she presents reveals the
complex positionality for women in American music. It is an ambivalent and complex position,
whereby complicity is a price paid in order to participate—access is contingent. Within the
structural and interpersonal domain of the industries’ infrastructure, the options available to
Robinson are/were mutually exclusive—access and work, or no access and thus no work (at least
with respect to the artists and musical acts popular and powerful enough to dictate which and
whether press have access at all).
100
While the interpersonal journalist-artist relationship is

100
In an interview with Def Jam co-founder and long-time music producer Rick Rubin on the Broken Record
podcast, Robinson further details that her relationship with The Rolling Stones began when lead singer Mick Jagger
reached out to her personally after seeing her positive coverage of Zeppelin. Such opportunities are thus closely
connected and the world of music and access small for those who are invited in to participate behind the scenes
(Rubin, 2021).

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mutually beneficial, it is not always situated on equal footing. Remember, too, as a pioneering
woman in the space of rock journalism, Robinson has carried with her throughout her career the
added burden of being tokenized, carrying the weight of representing women as a homologized
category of gender, while at once inhabiting a position of privilege and access to pave the way
for more women journalists to follow. “There was always genuine discomfort… the shared
whispers...there also was the knowledge that these were the men in power, they had the ability to
help grant proximity to the bands and had the access I needed in order to make a name for myself
in a world of the all boy rock journalists” (Robinson, 2020, p. 68) In this way, while I highlight
that Robinson’s comments do not suggest remorse outright, I call attention to this intonation not
to acknowledge that we must, again, carefully and rigorously consider what we mean by
progress, and how the interlocking domains of power within these spaces constrain options for
women. Robinson’s reflection comes with more than four decades of experience and insight in
the treacherous geographies of American music; she acknowledges this passage of time as the
conjuncture through which she now remembers and recounts particular events. Carvello offers
similar reflections (2018):
Yes, I felt conflicted. I saw many women get used like Kleenex—artists, employees,
groupies—and I didn’t like it. But that was the price of entry. And let’s not pretend it was
the hardest price to pay. I was living my dream, answering phone calls all day from the
likes of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and Mick Jagger, and sometimes partying with them
all night. Huge artists were always stopping by the office. (Carvello, 2018, p. 27
101
)

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Both Robinson’s (2020) and Carvello’s (2018) accounts offer another lens through which key figures in popular
American music are both examined—and canonized—as legends in the industry. The Rolling Stones and Led
Zeppelin, in particular, are offered as artists whose power and influence justified—or at least appeased anxieties
about—complicity in the misogyny and sexism that they witnessed and endured as a journalist and then-secretary,
respectively. In this way, while singling out these figures provides a glimpse of the magnitude of influence and
power that these bands held in popular music at particular conjunctures, highlighting them in memoirs and historical
reflections in this way also ensures that these placements will remain in contemporary canons of mainstream
American music. This reveals both a tactic and manifestation of the cultural domain of power, reinscribing The
Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin as the center or apex of SDRR in America (ironically, both all happen to be British
bands).

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The four decades that may separate Robinson and her experiences on the plane with the
Stones, or three decades that distance Carvello from her days as Ertegun’s secretary should not
be taken to suggest that things have changed in the years in-between. The straddling between
endurance (or tolerance/suffering) and complicity remains an active practice for many in the
contemporary moment. When questioned about whether things have changed since her assault,
Dixon reveals:
A lot of people in the industry have sent me private messages on social media and emails
offering support. And then I see them liking and commenting and praying for Russell all
Over his Instagram and praying for L.A. Reid all over his Instagram, I guess assuming I
won’t notice. I think a lot of people are trying to have it both ways. They want to check
the box and check in with me, but publicly they’re absolutely still with Russell and L.A.
Reid and the people who have the power. And the men have the power. (Olson, 2020)

In this way, Susan Sontag’s claim that silence is always relational, which I explored in Chapter
2, again becomes useful in thinking through its deployment and expectation within particular
conjunctures of America’s music industries. Similarly, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, offers another
useful framework from sound studies to think through this relationship:
The tension between the apparent acoustic impossibility of silence and the intensely
contrasting experiences it provokes lies at the heart of the types of presence and affect
invoked by the term. At the center of this tension lies the fact that a central element of
silence is a deployment of the limit. (2015, p. 184).

The acoustic limits of silence can be mapped onto the cultural and ideological limits that
constrain particular spaces within America’s music industries—the interpersonal and disciplinary
boundaries past which sharing information results in exclusion from particular acoustic spaces.
Here, I am concerned again with the “conjuncture,” “of mapping the specificity of the present
[and] of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and
opportunities” (Gilbert, 2019, p. 5). Silence is thus both verb and noun—a “creative tool” that is
a manifestation of and regulation by the imbricated domains of power operating within and

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through particular conjunctures (Gautier, 2015, p. 184).
Lisa Robinson entered the American music industries in a professional capacity as a rock
journalist in 1969, Dorothy Carvello joined Atlantic Records as a secretary in 1987, Drew Dixon
joined Def Jam Recordings in 1992. Three women, in three different sectors, covering three
decades who provide historical reflections and detailed allegations that demonstrate little
structural or ideological change with respect the underlying culture of misogyny and sexism in
America’s music industries. While the details from each have emerged in the midst of the
#MeToo movement, more recent disclosures provide little confidence that in the nearly three-
decades since Dixon left Arista Records any lasting change has taken place.
Is Your Boyfriend in the Band?
102

In August 2015, long-time writer, music critic, and then-Pitchfork Senior Editor Jessica
Hopper put a call out on Twitter: “Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1
st
brush (in
music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn't ‘count’?” Within hours, she received
hundreds of responses. Tweets ran an expansive spectrum of sexism and sexual misconduct:
Women journalists recounting experiences of being confused for assistants and asked to fetch
coffee; female musicians presumed to be girlfriends and asked to leave their own backstage;
radio DJs being told they play too many women artists; record store employees shunned by
patrons who only wanted music advice from men; departmental mutinies by male journalists
when women were promoted to editorial positions; countless unsolicited advances and “sexts”;
accounts of women being told some variation of “women never make good managers”; as well
as too-many women journalists disclosing experiences of sexual assault perpetrated by male

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In one example, Kristina "Teeny" Lieberson from the band TEEN shares in the 2016 documentary Playing Your
Gender, “I have a boyfriend who comes on the road with us once in a while…[and] there’ll be situations where
people in the clubs will introduce themselves to him. He doesn’t have anything to do with our music. There is never
the recognition that it is a possibility that we are in charge… if there is a man around it’s like that’s not possible.”

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interviewees, editors, and fellow journalists. In one of the perhaps more telling tweets, one
response stated, “this is making me realize how many incidents I have suppressed and/or
pretended to laugh off” (Saxelby, 2015).
More-visible figures like acclaimed musician Roseanne Cash also responded, tweeting:
“In all-male record label mtg for my 1
st
record, they said (to me) that the main marketing idea
was to make me appear 'fuckable'” (Schroeder, 2015). Red Bull Music Academy’s Lauren
Martin shared: “Pointing out comments on 1
st
big RBMA lecture about my looks/accent, told
they’re ‘talking points’ by (non-RBMA) male associates” (2015). And artist and music writer
Meaghan Garvey shared via a multi-tweet disclosure her own experience of being raped on a
professional trip to interview a group of rappers in Los Angeles (Schroeder, 2015). While the
majority of responses have come from women, men have joined the conversation as well—some
challenging Hopper’s initial question, with others pointing to the pervasiveness of sexism and
misogyny beyond the music industry: “every man who reads Jessica Hopper’s timeline would do
well to not write this of as a ‘music industry’ thing - we pull this shit constantly,” tweeted fellow
music journalist Brad Shoup (2015). Within hours, Hopper followed her initial call: “Imagine
what music would be like if we didn’t make young women jump through such demeaning hoops
to show they belong here” (2015).
103

Hopper’s initial tweet and subsequent Twitter thread were quickly picked up by other
media outlets, pointing to the hundreds of responses that poured in from women representing all

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In the wake of her allegations, Drew Dixon provides one response to this question: As Dixon told Billboard, “I
think the music industry is holding its breath and biding its time and hoping this Category 5 storm blows over. This
is why [On The Record] is so important because we can’t just go back to the status quo. It’s not only devastating to
women like me who are victims of abuse. It’s devastating to the business when an otherwise productive executive
abandons her career, or an otherwise talented artist like Sheri abandons her career because the only way to get from
point A to point B professionally is to cross paths with a sexual predator. This is not a black music problem. This is
a music industry problem” (Olson, 2020).

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corners of the music industries. While some coverage served to present a “highlight reel” of
particularly disturbing disclosures (for example, see: Framke, 2015; Zaleski, 2015; Gabler,
2015), other journalists took the opportunity to expand upon their own experiences of sexism and
sexual misconduct, adding to a digital conversation that quickly became multi-platform (for
example, see: Schroeder, 2015; Ewens, 2015; Baumgartner, 2015). Of note are the mixed ways
this coverage frames the conversation, ranging from utter surprise—“jaw-dropping” (Zaleski,
2015)—to reluctant acknowledgment of the much longer history in which such disclosures are
situated. As Minnesota Public Radio’s Jay Gabler reports: “The stories Hopper’s followers have
shared have been repeated reminders—for anyone who might have needed reminding—that
many men in music, whether consciously or unconsciously, continue to treat women with a lack
of respect” (2015). Others expressed both disappointing familiarity and surprise: “When your
passion and knowledge is not treated with courtesy and your gender is used against you, it is
tiring and predictable. But somehow, it manages to shock you every time” (Ewens, 2015). Still
others expressed surprise less with the accounts themselves, than with the uniformity and
unanimity among them: “perhaps what’s most shocking is not how everyone from all walks of
the music industry...has a story to tell here, but how universal these experiences are for so
many,” Newsweek reported (Mejia, 2015).
Twitter’s then-140-character-limit proved a particularly succinct format for disclosure; a
broadening of the “sisterhood” that emerges over the course of five years via the Billboard
Women in Music Award Luncheon that I detail above. This impact is twofold: it provided a
visible—and “spreadable”—platform on and through which disclosure could occur; and it
constructed an instantaneous network of women survivors of sexual harassment and

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misconduct.
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Indeed, as RBMA’s Martin later shared with Dazed’s Hannah Rose Ewens,
“when women share experiences like these, women can see how not alone they are and more
men can see that misogyny is utterly pervasive in myriad, complex ways”; Garvey similarly
shared, “I didn’t even realise [sic] how profoundly alone I felt in this industry until, in this
thread, I suddenly wasn’t” (2015).
The Industry Ain’t Safe
The digital affordance of social media and the Internet have allowed for visibility and
connectivity in a way inconceivable during the early years of Robinson’s or Carvello’s careers,
for example, which began in the 1960s and 80s, respectively. While crucial fixtures in the
emergence, rise, and circulation of #MeToo as a campaign and movement, these platforms, have
previously afforded women efficient and accessible routes for connection that circumvent formal
channels of reportage—new networks of women reaching out on their terms to connect over
shared experiences of sexual harassment and assault. At times, these disclosures are provoked, as
with the call Hopper put forth on Twitter. Other times, a groundswell in revelations emerges
following the public disclosure of a single individual woman who breaks her silence to name a
perpetrator and/or incident of harassment or misconduct. This was the case with Dirty Projector’s
then-singer and guitarist Amber Coffman, who in 2016 disclosed she had been sexually assaulted
by Life and Death publicist and manager Heathcliff Berru.
105

104
I am informed here by the work of scholars Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, whose theorization of
“spreadable media” (2013) is a helpful framework for investigating the spread of social media.
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In January 2016, Amber Coffman of the Brooklyn-based band Dirty Projectors took to Twitter to disclose an
experience of assault perpetrated by Heathcliff Berru, a long-time music publicist/manager, and co-founder and
then-head of Los Angeles-based Life or Death PR and Management (White, 2016). In a series of tweets, Coffman
(2016) recalled: “was just re-telling/re-membering a story abt how a very popular music publicist RUBBED my ass
and BIT my hair at a bar a couple years ago”; she continued, “This was someone I barely knew and had just met. He
did it in front of 4 of my male friends. Still makes me so damn mad thinking about it”; “And in case anyone was
wondering who the ass rubbing, hair biting mother fucker was, I’m not afraid to say it-”; “it was Heathcliff Berru, at
Life or Death PR and MGMT.”
Within an hour, a number of women began replying to Coffman, disclosing their own run-ins with Berru.

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Feminist activist and legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon provides one framework
through which disclosures like Coffman’s can be examined, a theory she conceives as “Butterfly
Politics.” Butterfly politics, MacKinnon articulates, takes up a term first introduced as “‘the

Publicist Beth Martinez replied, “he repeatedly put his hand down my shirt while driving me home after I told him
to stop many times”; singer Yasmine Kittles of Tearist replied, “Thank you @Amber_Coffman in 2009 he grabbed
my ass and then held me down onto my couch as he unzipped his pants & forced my hand on his dick”; artist Faithy
Wap replied, “this same night he roofied at least 2 other girls. he never touched me but i heard it all verbally”;
Balam Acab shared, “i fired heathcliff berru in 2012 as my manager for constantly tryin to fuck the vocalist i was
touring with/lure her to his hotel room”; Best Coast tweeted “Thank you @Amber_Coffman for bravely speaking
the truth. Heathcliff Berru is a scumbag and I’m glad someone finally spoke up”; and singer-songwriter and former
Life or Death client Sky Ferriera tweeted, “about time someone said something” (Bacher, 2016).
The response to Coffman’s initial tweets was swift. Both artists and individuals in the music industry who
had experienced similar incidents of assault responded, as well as others who had heard about Berru’s persistent
behavior—although, few realized the extent or volume of Berru’s actions. As Best Coast (2016) tweeted, “I was to
freaked out to ever say anything.” As with Jessica Hopper’s 2015 call on Twitter, social media proved a particularly
effective and efficient platform through which individuals could connect and share stories or show their support.
Jezebel’s Clover Hope reported at the time, “the series of tweets from Coffman had, to her surprise, done what
nothing else had to that point; other women in the music industry almost immediately began sharing similar
harassment claims about Berru” (2016). More importantly, unlike so many other cases prior to #MeToo, the
ramifications for Berru were immediate and severe. Coffman posted her initial series of tweets on a Monday
evening, by Tuesday Heathcliff had resigned from his position as head of Life or Death, and by Wednesday he had
issued a public “apology,” stating he would be entering rehab:
There have been several reports about my alleged inappropriate behavior which deserve a response...I am
deeply sorry for those who I have offended by my actions and how I have made certain women feel. If I crossed the
line of decency or respectfulness in situations when I was drunk and under the influence, there is no excuse, of
course….I do not want to be the type of person who would let drugs or alcohol take command of his life and
compromise how he treats people. Yet I have been this person and it’s time to put a stop to all of this. (Bacher,
2016) What’s more, a number of artists who had been represented by Life or Death quickly parted ways with the
company, including Kelela, Wavves, Divv, and Speedy Ortiz.
Prior to Coffman’s public disclosure on Twitter, she had taken other steps to come forward—and, having
been in the company of friends and fellow industry folks from her Domino Records label at the time of the incident,
she did not have the burden of proof in the same way that continues to plague artists like Kesha whose alleged
assaults occurred in private. In an interview with Billboard following the Twitter thread, Coffman shared that, the
day after the 2013 incident originally occurred, her label severed ties with Berru, and she reported the incident to her
publicist (Bacher, 2016). That Domino actually took steps to end its relationship with Berru at the time of the
incident, and that Berru stepped down upon the publication of Tweets by Coffman and so many others, were at the
time two exceptional instances. Historically, steps such as these have rarely been taken, and few have happened so
quickly; in this way, the conjunctural landscape that would soon be characterized by the #MeToo and #TimesUp
movements helped to push these changes and professional consequences forward. As Coffman recalls:
When Domino Records asked me what I wanted to do after [the incident at Bowery Ballroom], that power was a
scary feeling to me … the power to get somebody fired. However, I'm happy that they did. I was almost afraid of my
own anger or power. There is definitely an element in which you get angry as a woman but don't want to be
perceived as vengeful and wrathful, so you will downplay it. (Bacher, 2016)
Fear was a common through-line across the tweets posted in response to Coffman’s initial posts—fear of
retaliation in the industry, fear of being labeled one way or another, fear of the power and connections Berru held.
But the power Coffman expresses above is different, it is a fear of her own power, of being given a voice as a
woman in an industry that has historically silenced women at the same time as it commodifies their sounds. This
fear speaks both to lack of platforms/pathways women have had historically to come forward in the industry, as well
as the often-lack of power their voices are afforded as key players in the musical mix.

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butterfly effect’ in 1972 by Konrad Lorenz in a talk titled ‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in
Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’” (2019, p. 1). Butterfly Politics builds upon this question
through the application of chaos theory to provide a framework through which social and
political interventions and their impacts might be interrogated. “Butterfly politics means the right
small human intervention in an unstable political system can sooner or later have large complex
reverberations” (2019, p. 1). Disclosure is one such intervention—at least potentially. In
response to Coffman’s disclosure, another new community space dedicated to collective
disclosure quickly materialized: The Industry Ain’t Safe (TIAS), a Tumblr blog created to
“provid[e] a safe space for women in the music industry to share their experiences of sexual
predation, anonymously.”
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Aggregating accounts and allegations publicly and circumventing
more formal systems via a platform that allows for both accessibility and privacy, TIAS was
introduced as an alternative route to disclosure; its messaging contributes to the cultural domain
of power present in the industries and related spaces and platforms. In the introductory post,
“Why this is here,” the organizer introduces herself and her objectives for the blog, extending an
invitation to others to utilize the platform to share their stories:
I am a young woman working in the indie music industry. I was attracted to this job and
field mostly because I love music as purely as I’ve ever loved anything… Instead, I found
that the industry was a place just as shadowy as the real world (usually more so). I’ve
been the victim of sexual harassment and assault on multiple occasions, in multiple cities
and with multiple men. Some of them hardly knew me, others knew me well. Some of
them work closely with me and continue to do so, others don’t. Regardless of the
scenario, I often feel unsafe in the spaces in which I conduct professional work. When
bringing these issues to my colleagues, particularly male ones, they usually voiced
support but demonstrated clear ignorance in both word and action about how they could
verifiably help. Most all of the time, the need to maintain relationships with powerful
people in the industry outweighed the need to address a “minor” incident. And when I

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TIAS mirrors “The Shitty Media Men” list, a Google spreadsheet, which was formed in the wake of allegations
first lodged against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. This list, which “collected a range of rumors and allegations
of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing. The anonymous, crowdsourced
document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect
ourselves from sexual harassment and assault” (Donegan, 2018).

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shared my own stories with other ladies, I was shocked how commonplace, sometimes
even expected, these scenarios were. In light of several brave women coming forward
and outing repeated offenders by name - and the outpouring of other women victimized
by the same creeps but hitherto quiet about their experiences - I thought women could use
an outlet to anonymously share their experiences and find support in each other without
the risk of straining relationships, individually or corporately. Just as students at
universities have taken naming & shaming into their own hands when school policies for
sexual violence fall short of justice, I believe women can reclaim power from this
inarguably patriarchal industry and let their voices be heard - without jeopardizing their
jobs or companies. I invite women to “ask” me with their experiences, anonymously. I
will not edit out details like names or roles if they are shared. Men know they can wield
their influence to silence us in offices and at concerts, but it’s time we used the safe space
of the online world to make the real world a little bit safer too.

However, while a number of users posted stories on the blog between 2017 and 2020, whether
these disclosures amounted to anything beyond the disclosures themselves is not reported by the
blog. A search of some of the men named specifically via TIAS, likewise, returns no information
regarding whether alleged perpetrators were investigated and/or faced consequences for any of
the accusations lodged against them. In this way, while Coffman’s or Hopper’s initial tweets
might have provided the opportunity for an intervention representative of the butterfly politics
MacKinnon theorizes, these moments are better examined by returning to Banet-Weiser’s (2018)
conception of economies of visibility. While Berru was ousted following Coffman’s disclosure,
the issue was framed and addressed at the level of the individual. Moreover, we can examine the
TIAS Tumblr that emerges following Coffman’s tweet as a response to what Banet-Weiser
articulates as “the current demand for visibility for girls and women [which] is created in part
because girls are seen as in crisis” (2015, p. 56). In this way, TIAS is offering a supply of crises,
and the introductory post can be read as a plea for help—an announcement of the crisis—as
much as it can be interpreted as a call to action.
The crisis is both the interpersonal and disciplinary experiences of sexual harassment and
misconduct as well as the structural failure of the employers and colleagues within America’s

167
music industries to provide resources or assistance to address these issues. The other crisis, here,
however, is that individuals are, again, both problem and answer. Individuals harmed by other
individuals; individuals failing to help those harmed in order to maintain interpersonal relations;
and so on. In an interview with Broadly, the blog’s creator articulates her logic in looking to this
platform as a means by which allegations of misconduct could be aggregated to incite change:
“naming and shaming can 1) cause the entire industry to take accusations more seriously, 2)
provide a sense of relief for victims who may have talked about their experiences without
attributing them to anyone specific and 3) encourage others who have been victims at the hands
of the same man to know they are not alone” (Tsjeng, 2016).
What’s missing is the structural or systemic framework for such misconduct to either be
prevented or held accountable. It is necessarily outside of the formal structure of the industry in
order to avoid “jeopardizing” one’s career—but why disclosure should put one’s career in
jeopardy to begin with should be the starting point, not how to circumvent the system. “Calling
out” individuals takes the onus off of the structures and systems of America’s music industries—
it spotlights the interpersonal and cultural domains of power as distinct from the structural and
disciplinary domains, rather than foregrounding the interlocking nature of all four, which are
necessarily co-constitutive. As Sarah Jeong writes in a detailed consideration of these types of
platforms, which have frequently been categorized as “whisper networks”: “Whisper networks
certainly aren’t due process, but they also don’t bypass due process: they exist in a vacuum of
due process” (2018). Thus, Gray again offers a helpful framework for thinking through this
paradigm: “Where the state was once the primary site of struggle for civil recognition and social
equality, the media remain the crucial site where different sectors of disenfranchised populations
and communities continue to seek...greater visibility as a measure of cultural justice and social

168
equality” (2013, p. 781).
One way disclosure might then be examined further, in addition to a moment of potential
rupture, is through a new form of power that Gray conceives as “an incitement to visibility”
(2013, p. 777). Put differently, within a neoliberal framework and through Banet-Weiser’s
conception of economies of visibility, the desire for and value of recognition replaces political
investments in social justice and equality. Individuals who disclose experiences of sexual
harassment and misconduct, in a neoliberal economy of visibility, become recognized as “self-
creating entrepreneurial subjects…whose very visibility and recognitions at the level of
representation affirms a freedom realized by applying a market calculus to social relations”
(Gray, 2103, p. 771). In this way, Foucault’s conception of confession likewise proves useful, in
conversation with Gray and Banet-Weiser, in examinations of disclosure, whereby the
disclosure, as a confessional act, becomes the avenue for both recognition and repair:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of
the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not
confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the
interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it,
and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which
the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order
to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its
external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it
exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and
promises him salvation. (1990, pp. 56-57)

As Gray, Banet-Weiser, and Foucault each articulate, recognition—specifically external
recognition—becomes the goal, the demand, and the ritual. Thus, by calling out individuals,
TIAS situates itself as a circuit within the economy of visibility, a virtual confessional, providing
a healthy supply of industry “call-outs” and confessions. Indeed, as the creator emphasizes to
Broadly, “I don’t know a single woman in the industry who has never encountered [sexual
harassment and misconduct]” (2016).

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It is also helpful here to again recall the conjuncture to which Hall et al. (1980) attend;
this crisis, as a “social phenomenon,” is about relations between social relationships and
historical tendencies. Understanding this crisis “not as a fact but as a relation” thus helps us
better understand and contextualize the “terrain” of the crisis (viii). In the conjuncture of
neoliberalism and postfeminism, the economy of visibility replaces a politics of visibility,
whereby recognition of the crisis also becomes positioned as the resolution of the crisis—again,
at the level of the individual (Banet-Weiser, 2015). At the same, these crises are overlaid with
histories of sexism that police and regulate the expression of femininity—an expression that,
historically, was supposed to be inaudible. Womanhood as silence; femininity as silence. We can
thus think back to the multi-layered binds of failure to which Jackie Fuchs was subjected
following her public disclosure of being raped by Kim Fowley in 2015—as failed rocker, failed
victim, failed woman.
These crises become amplified and sought-after in greater demand in the conjuncture of
#MeToo. As these examples make clear, however, from TIAS to Hopper’s call on Twitter, and
the enduring “price of admission” for women, the recurring refrain is: “Everyone.” Everyone
knows. Everyone knew. Every(woman) has her own story. To this end, these individual call-outs,
the innumerable disclosures and anecdotes from women within America’s music industries
across both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are unremarkable. They are unremarkable in
their pervasiveness—everyone and everywhere. In this way, Tweets and headlines that express
“shock” and “surprise” when disclosures are made public both reveal their own ignorance and
contribute to situating this recurring issue at the level of the individual—dissociated from the
enduring history of misconduct from which each individual episode emerges. But they are also
unremarkable in that they have not made a difference in changing the structures of power that

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uphold America’s music industries. And, they have not made a difference, because the object of
progress has not moved away from calling out and canceling individual bad actors. Hopper’s call
and TIAS predate #MeToo—it did not take the Harvey Weinstein scandal for America’s music
industries to recognize the pervasiveness, severity, or magnitude of this “problem,” because it is
not a problem, it is the violent manifestation of the interlocking domains of power operating to
uphold a structure that is functioning by design.
Thus, while the conjuncture of #MeToo provides a more robust economy of visibility in
and through which disclosures of sexual misconduct in America’s music industries can circulate,
it did not reveal anything new to those within the industries’ many sectors. As one comment
posted on TIAS, which again was created in response to Coffman’s public disclosure on Twitter
of allegations against Berru, “Everyone knew Heathcliff was a scumbag. But he got results”
(Tseng, 2016).
107
And, in perhaps the most egregious of all these examples—the case of R.
Kelly—journalist Jim DeRogatis, through his decades of extensive reporting on the Kelly case,
reports he “learned the names of forty-eight women whose lives R. Kelly has significantly
damaged and sometimes destroyed…and [can] put the number of people who knew about or
witnessed that damage in the thousands [emphasis added]” (2019, p. 263).

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What’s more, and as I referenced briefly in Chapter 2, Berru employs the rhetoric of addiction in his statements
responding to the allegations raised against him by Coffman and others, “I have been fighting a losing battle against
drugs and alcohol for many years and will be checking into a rehabilitation facility in the hope that I can improve
my chances of winning that fight” [Billboard staff, 2016].

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Chapter 4: The New New
“Fending him off was a full-time job…It was exhausting.
It was like making a record while swimming in rough seas”
- Drew Dixon about Russell Simmons
108

“I don’t care about my title; just give me the power and let me do my job”
- Anonymous female executive
109

The Circle Game
Progress is a moving target. As I have worked to argue and detail in the preceding
chapters, moments of rupture, here examined via disclosure, present the opportunity for
change—at least the appearance of change—for alterations in the systems that enable and
facilitate abuses of power, and shifts to the ideological axes on which these structures are
sustained. While the #MeToo movement has presented a new conjuncture with new possibilities
for rupture and dismantling, its short tenure has also revealed that this moment of “progress” is,
like all others, nonlinear, inconsistent, and slow. While the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991
marked a prior conjuncture in which sexual harassment was brought to the fore of mainstream
American consciousness and Anita Hill’s publicly-televised testimony catalyzed conversations
regarding harassment—including within mainstream American music spaces, as sources and
media interviews have referenced throughout this work—Thomas was nonetheless appointed
(Bennett, 2019); moreover, polling conducted before and after the hearings reported that
Thomas’s public support actually rose by six percent following Hill’s testimony. In 2018, the
Brett Kavanaugh hearings presented a moment of historical deja vu, as Dr. Christine Blasey
Ford’s testimony, situated within the contemporary conjuncture of the #MeToo movement,
detailed allegations of an assault she endured by Kavanaugh nearly four decades prior. Yet, amid
renewed calls for accountability, a viral campaign to #BelieveWomen reminiscent of the “I

108
(Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2017)
109
One of the few female executives in the business who shared this statement off the record with Robinson (2020,
p. 179)

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Believe Anita” buttons that circulated in 1991, and a burgeoning international social justice
movement dedicated to calling out the enduring prevalence of sexual harassment and
misconduct, Kavanaugh was also nonetheless appointed to the US Supreme Court where he sits
alongside Thomas today (Edwards, 2018). Headline after headline touts progress to mark these
conjunctures in American culture, with reflections like: “How Anita Hill’s Testimony Made
America Cringe—And Change,” or “How Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony Changed
America” (Pruitt, 2021; Edwards, 2018). But what has really changed, and for whom?
One apparent shift in the groundswell of public disclosures that have emerged over the
past four years is that, in many cases, singular victims are no longer situated in the same position
of isolation as in previous eras. This distinction is not an indicator that perpetrators being named
publicly today have victimized more women than perpetrators in the past. Instead, it suggests
that the number of victims who formerly felt unsafe or were unable or unwilling to come
forward, because of the stakes and stigma attached to public disclosures, are afforded new
platforms and pathways through and by which they might share their experiences. The notable
shift in the number of women coming forward has impacted the discursive frames through which
disclosures are mediated and believed.
Previous sexual misconduct cases that were highly-covered by American media—such as
the 1991 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings or the Desiree Washington/Mike Tyson—often
pitted victims individually against their perpetrators; in most instances, the men involved held
more power than their victims, compounding the stakes for those women who came forward,
particularly for women of color.
110
Today, in a different conjuncture many accused have found

110
Drew Dixon, who alleges she was raped and routinely sexually harassed by Def Jam Recordings’ Russell
Simmons and later by Arista president L.A. Reid, cites public reactions to both Hill’s and Washington’s disclosures
in the On the Record documentary as key influences in her decision to remain silent for more than two decades. The
victim-blaming logic and public criticism that both women endured was taken into calculations regarding the risks

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themselves on the receiving end of allegations by significant numbers of women with
accusations spanning decades. A small sampling includes: more than ninety women have
accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct over more than three decades (Ransom, 2020);
sixty women have publicly accused actor Bill Cosby, with incidents spanning five decades
(Timeline, 2018); more than thirty women came forward against Charlie Rose with allegations of
misconduct occurring over three decades (Brittain & Carmon, 2018), and at least twenty-six
women have made allegations spanning more than three decades against Donald Trump, whose
presidency overlapped with the emergence and rise of the #MeToo movement (Relman, 2020).
111

Entering the second political administration of #MeToo, President Joe Biden has, likewise, been
accused of misconduct by more than eight women, ranging from “inappropriate touching” to
sexual assault—one of whom, Sofie Karaoke, alleges the incident occurred when she met and
was photographed with Biden at the 2016 Academy Awards as part of Lady Gaga’s performance
of “’Til It Happens to You,” where she was present as one of fifty survivors of sexual assault
included in the performance; the image that then went viral, she claims, captures the moment in
which “Biden violated her personal space” (Arnold & Lampen, 2021).
112

and stakes that Dixon could potentially face for coming forward. This was further emphasized for Dixon as a Black
woman considering how the public, widely, and Black communities, specifically, would react to her raising
allegations against a culturally beloved and celebrated Black man.
Importantly, this has not always been the case and the positionality of victims, as well as the cultural currency and
status of perpetrators contributes to variations in framing. Two examples: Michael Jackson, whose history of
predatory behavior against young boys has been well-documented in media, notably in 1993 in response to
allegations that Jackson had sexually abused a thirteen-year-old boy; the incident was settled out of court. Jackson
again became the center of public and media scrutiny in 2005 during a trial in which Jackson was accused, though
ultimately acquitted, of molesting another thirteen-year-old boy. The revealing documentary Finding Neverland,
which addressed these allegations and others in extensive in detail, which brings in the voices and stories of some of
Jackson’s alleged victims, was not released until 2019, in the midst of the #MeToo moment, a decade after
Jackson’s death (McGovern, 2019).
111
While this shift in the number of women coming forward is significant, it has not been experienced in the same
way or to the same extent by all who have publicly disclosed harassment and assault. For example, while Dr.
Christine Blasey Ford was one of three women who have accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, Dr.
Ford has been centered as the visible accuser in this case, in large part due to the political stakes and televised public
broadcasting of her testimony.
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Importantly, men have also come forward in greater numbers with allegations against men and women in power,

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This trend is also apparent in music. In addition to the exposés and documentaries that
have been released in the midst of #MeToo revealing numerous allegations against Simmons,
and explosive accusations against singer R. Kelly depicted in the Surviving R. Kelly six-part
docu-series, several women have also come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct
against once-celebrated singer-songwriter Ryan Adams (Coscarelli & Ryzik, 2019).
113
More than
two dozen individuals—men and women—have accused long-time country music publicist Kirt
Webster of ongoing sexual harassment (Lange, 2018); and more than five women have made
allegations against now-former president of the Republic Group music label, Charlie Walk
(Newman, 2018). At the same time, while public disclosure in America’s music industries has
been provided new platforms via the #MeToo conjuncture, some had already been utilizing the
accessibility and connectivity of social media to share widespread experiences of sexual
harassment and misconduct. Jessica Hopper’s 2015 call on Twitter, which I reference in Chapter
3, is demonstrative of one moment in which social media afforded an informal channel through
which women could disclose their experiences in music.
There have been other shifts with respect to the consequences faced by those accused of
sexual misconduct in America’s music industries. Whereas key gatekeepers, like The Runaways
manager Kim Fowley or Atlantic Records’ founder Ahmet Ertegun faced little, if any, notable
consequences to their careers or personal lives as a result of their actions, individuals today face
a different level of public scrutiny—this is in no small part to the connectivity and visibility
afforded via the rise and evolution of digital technologies and social media, as well as key

which has provided another entry point for interrogating the historic underreportage of sexual harassment and
misconduct cases for both women and men, even if women experience sexual harassment and assault
disproportionate to men. The Brennan Center for Justice reports, “nearly 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go
unreported” (Kimble, 2018).
113
Of note: Joe Coscarelli and Melena Ryzik also wrote the exposé first revealing allegations against Russell
Simmons in The New York Times in 2017.

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historical junctures like the #MeToo movement that I have detailed here. However, relative to
the historically unremarkable consequences faced by music executives and professionals,
measurements of “progress” in the contemporary context must be carefully considered and
reported in and through this larger lineage. So too must the critical considerations of
consequences themselves. While figures like Russell Simmons or producer Dr. Luke have
stepped down from their professional roles, or at least some facet of them, both men continue to
benefit financially from content created with and or by those who have raised allegations against
them, Drew Dixon and Kesha, respectively. Professional standings should not become the
guiding focal point alone against which progress is measured. Power in this sense is disrupted,
but not entirely derailed. While the interpersonal domain of power shifts aside, the structural
domain remains ever-present through the contractual obligations binding artists to labels and
contracts. As one of Kesha’s countersuits to Dr. Luke in the ongoing legal battle articulated:
“You can get a divorce from an abusive spouse, you can dissolve a partnership if the relationship
becomes irreconcilable. The same opportunity—to be liberated from the physical, emotional and
financial bondage of a destructive relationship—should be available to a recording artist” (Leah,
2018). The structural domain of power here continues to govern Kesha’s options, even as the
interpersonal and disciplinary have subsided with Luke stepping down and no longer working in
direct contact with Kesha as her producer.
To this point, the ousting of key actors and executives from across America’s many
industries has, in some sectors, resulted in an immediate and impactful rise of women in
positions of power. As The New York Times reported in March 2021, “#MeToo Brought Down
201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women.” But what does this look
like in America’s music industries specifically? And how might we investigate such statistics in

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industries where artists, for example, aren’t always “replaceable”? If we limit the scope of the
Times’s list to those men in popular American music industries who have been “brought down”
by #MeToo, only three names appear—Simmons, Walk, and Webster—and none of these men
have been replaced (Carlsen et al., 2018). Of the cases explored in this dissertation, which span
years beyond the start of the #MeToo movement, Ertegun died in 2006; Fowley died in 2015; Dr.
Luke was ousted as CEO of Kemosabe Records, but was not replaced; and, as the Times’s list
confirms, Simmons stepped down from his companies and Def Jam position but was not
replaced. The exception is L.A. Reid, who, after the initial round of sexual harassment
allegations made against him in 2017, was replaced by long-time music executive Sylvia Rhone
as CEO at Epic Records (Malt, 2019). Reid’s departure, however, was a distinctly different
outcome than “put[ting] the music industry on trial for sexual harassment” as one early Variety
article suggested would be the case following his ouster from Sony (Halpering, 2017c).
Both Reid and Dr. Luke continue to hold positions of power in music (Simmons has
currently relocated to Bali, which some have argued is connected, in part, to Indonesia’s lack of
an extradition treaty [Bradshaw, 202]). As mentioned in Chapter 3, Reid co-founded and now
runs Hitco Entertainment (Payne, 2019; Halperin, 2018). Dr. Luke, though no longer CEO of
Kemosabe Records, continues to work with and develop artists at this Sony label imprint under
the moniker Tyson Trax; he is currently riding on the success of hits like “Say So,” which he
wrote and produced for Doja Cat, and that rose to no. 1 on the coveted Billboard Hot 100
(Fekadu, 2020). So, while in some instances artists have quickly distanced themselves from
perpetrators, as was the case in 2016 with Life and Death publicist Heathcliff Berru, in the midst
of the #MeToo movement, other artists still opt to stay with, or follow, music executives,
producers, and other professionals against whom sexual harassment and misconduct allegations

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have been raised. One step forward, two steps back.
Regardless of whether these select individuals—or other embattled figures from across
America’s music industries—have been replaced, hiring more women is not a catchall remedy
for restructuring the enduring systems of sexism that are already baked in. Replacing individuals
does not alone dismantle infrastructure. This is not to say that it is unimportant to have better
representation across the board at every level within America’s music industries. Indeed, better
and broader representation is integral to destabilizing the patriarchal scaffolding that upholds the
façade. But hiring more women alone, without attending to the systems and structures
undergirding the patriarchal hierarchies of power into which women are being hired is not about
progress, it is about visibility—about a company’s or label’s ability to point to statistics as
evidence for cultural and ideological change. This again embodies a key tenet of Banet-Weiser’s
(2015) notion of economies of visibility. At the same time, and as Banet-Weiser has elsewhere
argued (2019), misogyny is not just a dominant ideology within the landscape of popular
American culture, but also an epidemic—a public health crisis—one that mutates and transforms
in tandem with and in reaction to progress, particularly with respect to gender. And this epidemic
is tethered to an historical lineage of violence against women that both traverses beyond and
pervades within America’s music industries. As Angela Y. Davis (1998) writes in her thorough
examination of early blues women: “violence against women remains pandemic. Almost equally
pandemic…is women’s inability to extricate themselves from this web of violence” (p. 31).
Importantly, however, as an undergirding logic of this web of violence, misogyny, like
patriarchy, is not a system solely constituted and upheld by men. As I explore in Chapter 3,
women also play an integral and active role in the maintenance of the gender binary through
which misogyny reasserts itself, and thus are key constituents in subscribing to and upholding

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this gendered logic, while they are at once marginalized and constrained by it as women.
To further problematize this paradox, while particular structures within America’s music
industries have closed shop as a result of sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, such as
Indie label Burger Records, the key through-line across each of these recent examples is that they
are framed and castigated individually—as individual bad actors or individual bad entities.
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The system remains intact. The mediation and visibility afforded these cases can thus be a
deceptive measurement of progress; here again Banet-Weiser’s conception of economies of
visibility provides the critical framework through which such questions of progress should be
examined. In the economy of visibility, visibility “becomes an end in itself,” rather than a
constructive route to change (Banet-Weiser, 2015, p. 55). I reflect upon these historical junctures
and select examples not to suggest that no changes have been made or that progress has been
static, but to emphasize the caution and nuance with which such claims must be made, as well as
to consider critically what we mean by and how we measure progress, accountability, and
change. More important than what consequences Fowley, or Simmons, or Reid, or Ertegun, or
Berru, or Kelly, or, or, or….or any of the men in America’s music industries who have abused
their power have or have not faced, is that, as The New York Times’s Jessica Bennet emphasizes,
“Consequences are not prevention.” Accountability is an essential component of justice and
healing, and consequences can disincentivize perpetrators from becoming repeat offenders, but
consequences alone do little to prevent such abuses from continuing to occur. Consequences, if

114
We are again reminded of the inter-relationships of the music industries, particularly in the space of Los
Angeles, as one remembrance of The Runaway’s manager Kim Fowley upon his passing glowingly reflected upon
him with a shoutout to Burger Records, five years before the record company would find itself embroiled in a
scandal stemming from sexual assault. Flavorwire reporter Jillian Mapes (2015) details: “That’s how Kim talked:
volumes of profundity and profanity. I only met him a few times, but we spent hours and hours on the phone, talking
about not just The Runaways, but about Burger Records, or the Downtown LA arts renaissance. Even in his 70s,
Kim was cutting edge. He knew his musical history and he was musical history.”

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and when they are enforced, are a reaction, a response to something that has already transpired.
Prevention is a systemic issue, it is a policy issue, and it requires that such incidents be addressed
as structural, not individual failings.
A Convex Mirror
One frequent oversight in critical considerations of progress in America’s music
industries is that progress is approached through and distinguished by a primarily forward-facing
framework. In other words, guiding tenets conceive that in order to mark progress, change—in
policy, in practices of accountability, in the cultural landscapes of the industries’ many sectors—
should attend to the future, to how things will be different moving forward. The past, in and
through these frames, is situated as a marker against which measurements of progress can be
made, not as a key site of struggle upon which change can and should also be addressed and
negotiated. The relation between past and present is as instructive and important as the
characteristics that distinguish each. Take, for example, the case of McDonnell’s historical
biography of The Runaways, which details (if covertly) Kim Fowley’s assault of Jackie Fuchs.
Fuchs remains unidentified in this historical narrative because of the constraints of information
McDonnell was working with at the time of writing, particularly Fuchs’s decision to withhold
this detail when interviewed specifically for the project. Fuchs’s disclosure in 2015 changes this
historical narrative, it provides nuance and specificity to an incident, complicating the dynamics
of Fowley’s role over and with the band—the interpersonal domain of power interlocks tightly
with the disciplinary domain. From a music industry standpoint, identifying Fuchs as the victim
in this incident matters for policy implications. (Importantly, this is not to say that when the
victim in this assault had been identified under the pseudonym “Marcie,” that the details of this
incident were any less horrific but knowing that it was Fuchs requires that we now apply

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different categories of analysis to interrogate the domains of power through an intersectional
approach for this assault.) Without addressing historical oversights and providing correctives to
the canons upon which the contemporary American music industries are constructed, the
infrastructure will always be faulty.
We might then look at progress through a convex mirror; objects in the mirror are closer
than they appear. In other words, the convexity, by virtue of its curvature, allows for more
information to be captured. When progressing forward, this facilitates more effective and
efficient navigation. Rather than spotlighting or magnifying particular characteristics
disproportionately, it expands the view of available information wider, allowing more into the
reflection for a driver to understand where and how elements are situated in relation to one
another. At the same time, the familiar warning reminds us that those elements are, in fact, closer
than they appear—that their presence and influence on the present conjuncture remains
considerable. The smaller scale of objects reflected in the mirror, which allows for a wider view,
does not mean that they are less important, it means that they are less exceptional, that they are
less uncommon. With respect to America’s music industries, without this vantage point, progress
will be constrained by the gaps in the archives or misinformed by sensationalizing common
patterns as exceptional. When incidents become magnified, the risk is that they are examined as
an exception; this contributes to the cycle of addressing incidents as one-off. Eradicate the
perpetrator and move on. But this approach has us playing whack-a-mole across a riddled
landscape. The convex mirror provides us with a different, and perhaps more useful, framework
through which past and present necessarily co-exist, and where landscapes are prioritized over
landmarks. It can let us see the bad orchards, not just the bad apples. Navigation requires an
active and engaged understanding of how the present spatio-temporal location is situated in

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relation to the existing environments. At the same time, a convex mirror can attend to the
industry as a moving target, it stays in motion with you and thus anticipates that progress, though
forward moving, will not always be linear.
“Who Gives A Fuck About a Goddamn Grammy?”
One space of some recent improvement is the industry’s coveted annual GRAMMY
Awards. Since 2018, women nominees in the awards’ most prestigious categories—Record,
Album, Song, Best New Artist and Non-Classical Producer—have increased from 9% to 21%—
the highest proportion since 2012 (Smith et al. 2018). This jump follows, in part, a major
reorganization of the Awards undertaken in 2011, which eliminated gender-segregated categories
in favor of “solo performance” distinctions for Pop, R&B, Rock, and Country awards (Were,
2011). Yet, as the Los Angeles Times recently emphasized, “the latest number still demonstrates
that four out of five Grammy nominees in those categories…are male” (Lewis, 2020). In the
wake of a report conducted by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in 2018, “Inclusion in the
Recording Studio,” backlash circulated via the mobilizing hashtag #GrammysSoMale—an echo
of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag first tweeted by April Reign in 2016, which quickly transcended
social media to stand as the call to action for a movement challenging the lack of representation
of minorities and underrepresented communities at the annual Academy Awards—the “pinnacle
in the industry”—and highlighting the enduring and overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood and
the American entertainment industry more broadly (Reign, 2020).
While the GRAMMY Awards, which are overseen and produced by The Recording
Academy, are upheld as the “biggest night in music” in the United States and around the world,
The GRAMMYS’s significance has long been contested. “Musicians and critics alike tend to
view [the Awards] as a bit of a sham,” WBUR reported in 2015, “an opportunity for the music

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industry to tout its artistic legitimacy while promoting only its most commercially successful
products in order to garner higher television ratings” (Mason). As Public Enemy’s Chuck D
queried in the group’s 1988 “Terminator X to the Edge of Panic,” “Who gives a fuck about a
goddamn Grammy?” One contributing factor behind the Awards’ decision to reorganize in 2011
was an open letter to the National Academy of Recording Arts (now The Recording Academy),
the organization’s then-president Neil Portnow, and the GRAMMY Awards written by music
executive Steve Stoute and published in a full-page, $40,000 ad in a Sunday edition of The New
York Times’ Style section:
Over the course of my 20-year history as an executive in the music business and as the
owner of a firm that specializes in in-culture advertising, I have come to the conclusion
that the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture. My
being a music fan has left me with an even greater and deeper sense of dismay—so much
so that I feel compelled to write this letter. Where I think that the Grammys fail stems
from two key sources: (1) over-zealousness to produce a popular show that is at odds
with its own system of voting and (2) fundamental disrespect of cultural shifts as being
viable and artistic….As an institution that celebrates artistic works of musicians, singers,
songwriters, producers and technical specialists, we have come to expect that the
Grammys upholds all of the values that reflect the very best in music that is born from
our culture. Unfortunately, the awards show has become a series of hypocrisies and
contradictions, leaving me to question why any contemporary popular artist would even
participate. (Stoute as cited in Aswad, 2011)

Media headlines following the annual ceremony over the past several years have continued to
highlight these enduring frustrations: “Why Do the Grammys Always Get it Wrong?” (Mason,
2015); “The Grammys Still Struggling with Gender Imbalance” (Hasty, 2016); “Do the
Grammys Still Matter?” (Tanzer and Moinzadeh, 2017); “The Problem with the Grammys Is Not
A Problem We Can Fix” (Powers, 2017); “#GrammysSoWhite Came to Life. Will the Awards
Face Its Race Problem” (Caramanica, 2017); “It’s Okay—The Grammys Are Useless and
Everyone Knows It” (Sargent, 2018); “Do the Grammy Awards Represent the Best in Music
Today?” (Doyne, 2020); “Can the Grammys be Trusted?” (Caramanica, 2020); “Are the

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Grammys Rigged?” (Marine, 2020). This tension has been further amplified by award recipients
themselves, with such artists as Macklemore (who beat out Kendrick Lamar in 2014 for Best Rap
Album), Adele (who was awarded Album of the Year for 25 in 2017 over Beyoncé’s Lemonade),
and Drake (who received the award for Best Rap Song with “God’s Plan” in 2019) vocalizing
their dissatisfaction with their own wins and calling attention to fellow nominees that they—as
well as critics and popular audiences—believed should have instead received their awards. More
recently, artists from Kanye West to Justin Bieber, Kendrick Lamar to Childish Gambino have
boycotted the show all-together, frustrated with its failure to make what they perceive to be
meaningful or lasting change to some of its historic and enduring oversights. In this way, while
individual GRAMMY nominees are often celebrated, the award show’s parent organization, The
Recording Academy, its criteria for submission, and nomination process remain key points of
suspicion, particularly with respect to the inclusion of women and artists of color.
Since 1959, the annual GRAMMY Awards has served as a highly coveted musical
mountain top, yet as these headlines and anecdotes suggest, it remains a tensely contested terrain
within the music industry’s larger landscape of award shows and recognitions and is a
constitutive component of the music industries’ larger structural domain of power. Inclusion in
one of the GRAMMY’s now-84 categories often leads to immediate and significant impacts for
nominees—from popular recognition and increased visibility to professional opportunities and
boosts in record and concert ticket sales (Watson, 2019). Following the 62
nd
annual Grammy
Awards ceremony in 2020, Billie Eilish—recipient of four of the night’s six biggest awards, Best
New Artist, Song, Record, and Album of the Year—saw an immediate 787% bump in
downloads for her single “When the Party’s Over” compared to the day prior (Watson, 2020a).
GRAMMY recipients in the 2020 ceremony’s various album categories similarly saw an increase

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of album sales by 153%, and a noteworthy jump in song sales by 684% following the show
(Watson, 2020b).
The paradox of music industry awards, from the highly-sought after GRAMMY Awards to
those that sit within its shadow in the music industry—the MTV Music Video Awards, the
Billboard Music Awards, and the American Music Awards—is that they fail to capture the
complexity, diversity, and range of contemporary popular music, while also serving as key
markers of success for nominees and recipients, boosting the economic and popular potential of
those artists and groups fortunate enough to receive their recognition. To borrow a term from
media critic Daniel J. Boorstin (1962/1992), these industry award shows are “pseudo-events,”
scripted moments that do not represent the reality of experiences or creativity “on the ground,”
but rather hyper-visible spectacles created to exist as such—illusions strategically produced to
uphold and project particular images and histories of a given industry, individual, or event.
Expanding upon Boorstin’s conception, Fader’s Myles Tanzer argues:
All award shows are ‘pseudo-events’…expressly created to generate publicity, with no
actual meaning behind them. The way that pseudo-events eventually attain meaning—like
the kind that The Grammys have today—is through their own history. The Grammys
matter not because they’ve been going since 1959, but because of the artists they’ve
honored over the years and all the memorable performances that have graced their stage.
(Tanzer and Moinzadeh, 2017)

In this way, while “the Recording Academy’s judgments are generally perceived as haphazard at
best, and routinely fail to tap into the cultural zeitgeist,” as one WBUR reporter claimed, they are
at once constituting factors in the potential economic viability of an artist’s career and a linchpin
in the historical and social record of popular American music.
Music industry awards crystallize an imprecise and incomplete history of who matters in a
particular conjuncture, constructing not only an archival record of popular American culture, but
also serving to underpin the construction of musical knowledge and discursive frameworks that

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then continue to reify myopic snapshots of American music and history more broadly. As SPIN’s
John Sargent asserts:
Awards are how we order history; this is true across society, from things like the Grammys
and the Oscars, to Most Valuable Player awards in sports, to even the Nobel Prize…The
point of awarding such trophies is not just to flatter people, but to sketch out a shorthand
history of culture, an easy way for people to understand what mattered the most in any
given year. If anything, the overwrought pomp and circumstance of awards shows, to say
nothing of the current microcosmic dissection of those shows by the great content machine,
helps obscure the nominal importance of the awards themselves (2018).

Award shows operate as marketing tools for a creative industry driven less by an interest in
fostering that creativity than by bolstering the bottom line; a line that gets broader and deeper in
the contemporary conjuncture marked by the undergirding tenets of neoliberalism. Gray explores
contemporary award shows as “a peculiar hybrid.” “Part industry…trade show, part marketing
tool, and part entertainment variety show with a dash of uplift and moral responsibility,” he
argues, “in their moral recognition of achievement and celebration of personal success and in
their circulation as sponsored packages for broadcast, these programs enact practices of
consumer sovereignty, market choice, self-making, and moral virtue” (2013, p. 787). As one
public “face” of the music industry, however, these outward performances of recognition—and
the credit they bestow upon recipients and nominees—project an image of authority, ordaining
what, and who, qualifies as the “best” in popular American music. In this way, they are integral
in the construction and maintenance of the cultural and structural domains of power. They
(re)present and concretize the value of particular artists and particular musics via the formalized
processes and structures through which such awards are bestowed. And, regardless of their
under- or mis-representation, the material and economic benefits for artists and groups who are
recognized are tangible and significant. We are thus left with slippery histories, histories marred
by patterns and practices of obfuscation and erasure that re-inscribe particular figures—

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historically those who skew older, white, and male—as the center of popular American music
(looking at you again, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones). In a rather transparent moment,
The Recording Academy’s former President Neil Portnow confirmed as much in comments to
reporters at the 60
th
annual GRAMMY Awards in response to queries about the Awards’
ongoing gender imbalance and underrepresentation of women in the show’s televised ceremony:
It has to begin with… women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want
to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry
on the executive level… [They need] to step up [emphasis added] because I think they
would be welcome. I don’t have personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that
you face but I think it’s upon us — us as an industry — to make the welcome mat very
obvious, breeding opportunities for all people who want to be creative and paying it
forward and creating that next generation of artists. (Portnow as cited in Angermiller,
2018)

Portnow’s comments were met with swift backlash, adding fuel to the #GrammysSoMale
hashtag and providing further fodder for a much larger history of gender imbalance in America’s
music industries. His sentiments call into question not only the skill of women artists, but even
more poignantly, their ambition, suggesting that if women only wanted it more, and took risks to
get there, their under-representation would not remain so dismal.
115

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One recent study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that examined 800 popular songs culled from Billboard’s
annual Hot 100 music chart between 2012 and 2019 concluded that women represent just 21.7% of all artists
(including duos and bands), 12.5% of all songwriters (including duos and teams), and a mere 2.6% of record
producers (Smith et al. 2018). Recent numbers published by the non-profit organization Women in Music reveal that
this pattern similarly emerges on an international scale, with women representing just “6% of recognized producers”
in the US and Canada. When such stats are broken down further within the variable of gender by such categories as
women-only credits or race, these statistics paint an even more disappointing picture: less than 1% of songs assessed
by the Initiative were written only by women and just 8 out of 1,093 producing credits were attributed to women of
color (0.73%). Put another way, 23% of the 800 songs analyzed were written or co-written by just eleven men,
among them such well-known Pop fixtures as Martin Sandberg (Max Martin), Benjamin Levin (Benny Blanco), and
Lukasz Gottwald (Dr. Luke) (Smith et al. 2018). As initiative founder and lead investigator Dr. Stacy L. Smith
emphasized to the Los Angeles Times: “Eleven men are setting the norm for lyrics in the 800 most popular songs.
That’s astounding. To really understand the perspectives of people from a variety of different backgrounds, it’s so
important to get artists to bring new voices to the table” (Lewis, 2020). While data reveal variation across genres—
32.6% of Pop artists were women in 2019 compared to just 11% of Alternative artists—the disproportion remains
prevalent across the board, an overall imbalance of 3.6-to-1, men to women (Smith et al. 2018). These numbers
translate up and down industry hierarchies and around the world on a global scale; The American Association of
Independent Music (A2IM) recently reported, for example, that only “15% of label members are majority owned by
women” in the United States, and, similarly, that “the gender divide across all regions is roughly 70% male to 30%
female” (Women in Music, 2020). Such statistics provide a numerical snapshot of the material hurdles women

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In April 2021, as part of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s
Annenberg Intelligence series, I was invited to co-moderate a public panel with Harvey Mason
Jr., the Chair and then-interim CEO of The Recording Academy (Park, 2021), who had replaced
Portnow following his ouster. I took this opportunity to raise the question of historical oversights
to Mason, asking specifically about existing gaps in the GRAMMYs, which I argue constitute an
archive of music content and knowledge curated through this award and recognition (USC
Annenberg, n.d.):
What, if anything is being done to address important erasures in the GRAMMYs
historical record as an archive of popular American music? Are current [Recording]
Academy efforts…also being directed to contextualize the Awards’ archival history, in
addition to reimagining its future?

In line with much of the forward-thinking framing that distinguishes conversations pertaining to
progress, Mason responded:
Honestly, I don't think that's something that we've addressed yet, not to say that we won’t
and it's something we could take a look at [but] my focus for the last 18 or 15 months has

confront throughout the popular music industry.
Qualitative research helps to connect the dots of a larger industry diagram, revealing patterns that foreground
gender as a central constituting factor in the industry’s enduring underrepresentation. In interviews with 75 female
songwriters and producers, Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 2019 report found that the following barriers
(re)emerged across the “lived experience of women in music” (Smith et al. 2019): 43% reported their skills were
discounted, 39% reported experiences of being stereotyped and sexualized, 36% shared their experience of the
music industry as a male dominated space—a sentiment in-line with the underrepresentation consistently confirmed
by data—and 25% reported being the only woman in a recording studio. These patterns of experience point to larger
systemic issues; imbricated structures of power that perpetuate underrepresentation, unequal access to opportunity
and deeply rooted beliefs about gender in the industry. As Dr. Smith elaborated upon the report’s release: “What the
experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about
women…The perception of women is highly stereotypical, sexualized and without skill. Until those core beliefs are
altered, women will continue to face a roadblock as they navigate their careers” (“Stereotyped, sexualized and shut
out,” 2019).
The central finding in the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 2020 report—as with previous iterations—is that
“women are still missing in the music industry” (Smith et al, 2020). The data their research provides points to key
areas within the industry where women remain grossly underrepresented, from songwriting to producing. Such data,
however, fail to capture the complicated hierarchies of power and barriers to entry that women face within the
industry that result in such numbers. What is clear, and what the swift backlash to Neil Portnow’s women need to
“step up” assertion reified, is that the lack of representation of women in the popular American music industry is not
the result of a lack of interest, talent, or ambition among women. “Music education programs, the audience for
popular music, and the population suggest that these figures are not representative of women’s interest in music,”
Smith et al. report, “Thus, the lack of women on the charts must be explained by other factors…it is imperative
that…we continue to ask why women are still shut out of music in so many ways” (Smith et al., 2020, p. 19).

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really been, how can we improve going forward, how can we fix what's happening right
now, how can we adjust to be more reflective.

While acknowledging this was not within the scope of current Academy efforts, Mason does not
entirely foreclose expanding the Academy’s future undertakings to take historical correctives
into consideration, saying:
I’m not trying to sidestep the question but it's just not something that we've looked into
yet, but it's a great idea and something that I’ll consider and look into with the
appropriate people at the Academy; I’d like to learn more about what that consists of.
(Mason Jr., 2021)

But Mason’s initial response suggests that “progress” for the Academy, at this juncture, still
equates to a unilinear approach to change, what can be done differently moving forward? Change
does require forward movement, that policies and practices evolve from those delimited by
outdated scaffolding and domains of power. However, if that movement and advancement pulls
forward the disinformation or misinformation of incomplete or problematic archives and
structures of power, then we are not leaving those outdated systems of knowledge behind so
much as incorporating them into “new” policies and practices and calling them “fixed.” It is a
band aid for a broken bone.
These gaps, in both physical and digital archives, are historical and economic, structural
and ideological; their preservation requires active restoration and maintenance.
116
As Lisa
Robinson also tells long-time music producer and Def Jam Recordings co-founder Rick Rubin
on his Broken Record podcast: “anything would be an incomplete list” (2021). Addressing these

116
One tragic example of the failure of music institutions to protect and maintain historical music archives was the
2008 fire that destroyed Universal Music Group’s storage warehouse on the company’s Hollywood backlot,
destroying an untold amount of original sound and music recordings from one of the most important and historic
recording collections in the world—many of which were lost to the fire forever. The extent to the devastation—and
the fact that this important archive was in the path of the fire at all—was the direct result of negligent upkeep and
improper storage practices on behalf of UMG, who then attempted to cover up the magnitude of what was lost in the
devastation (Rosen, 2019).

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oversights does not just contextualize and complicate music history, it requires that we learn
histor(ies) anew. Identifying and unpacking how oversights inform and have benefitted from
particular structures and domains of power, is as much a part of these histories as the oversights
themselves. So too is calling attention to the enduring and exploitative practices of compensation
in the dominant American music industries’ historical political economy.
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Economic Misconduct
Ownership and Exploitation
Whereas the Svengali figure explored in chapter 2 is a “master of control” through his
dominant and manipulative relationship with budding artists, there is another crucial “master”
that intersects directly with this project: an artist’s original recordings. This secondary
conception of a master—the “master copy.” Information and media scholar Matt Stahl provides
an in-depth examination of labor practices in the music industry in Unfree Masters: Popular
Music and the Politics of Work (Reconfiguring American Music), which provides a crucial
starting point for continued examinations of music industry contracts and how these
arrangements further, and often, disenfranchise artists as tangible manifestations of the structural
domain of power. Contrary to the historically-promoted image of the music industry as a
democratic, free, and fun-loving institution, Stahl breaks down the contradictions deeply
embedded in this image. As he details, “recording artists...typically work under unequal contracts
and must hand over long-term control of the songs and albums they produce to their record
companies” (p. 1). What’s more: “the contracts are also typically assignable, meaning that they

117
One important initiative that has emerged over the past several years is Turning the Tables led by Ann Powers,
which is a dedicated effort to providing alternative historical canons—such as “best of” music roundups and lists.
This is an essential component of progress, because it reveals layers of history, musical knowledge, and integral
creative contributions by women who have been overlooked and/or obfuscated by and through misogynistic
standards of evaluation that further uphold patriarchal and racist systems of power. “Legacies are preserved by those
who have the power to engage them in public,” Powers reminds us (2019).

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(and hence, in a certain sense, the artists) can be bought and sold, most often along with the
companies who hold them” (p. 2). Stahl makes clear the autonomous artist in control of her
career and music is the exception, not the rule. As I detail in the case of Kesha above, the
contractual struggle in which she finds herself with Kemosabe—and parent company Sony—is a
perfect illustration of the complex and often-unequal labor practices Stahl details—a
manifestation of the structural domain of power operating in a way that privileges the labels, and
Dr. Luke, over Kesha. And, as with Kesha, Stahl explains that, because of the perpetual
inequality in these contracts, artists often end up fighting them through legal channels in court.
Furthermore, Stahl theorizes the juxtaposing positionality of the artist within these
contractual arrangements—as both a public and hyper-visible image of freedom and creativity,
and as an employee stripped of her rights to the very music she creates. In much this same way,
music writer Ann Powers similarly asks, “is a game consensual if the rules prove exploitative?”
(Powers, 2017a). Feminist writer Andi Zeisler (2016) has similarly identified this type of
inequality as “the perils of negotiating while female” (p. 82). Stahl, however, (2013) conceives
of this paradox as “a double figure”:
The recording artist—the successful recording artist, in particular—is a double figure. On
the one hand, she is a symbolic figure offered for our consumption, contemplation, and
identification; she enacts forms of expression, autonomy, and desirability…. On the other
hand, she is a political and economic actor, a working person whose contractually
governed relationship to her company is sometimes one of real subordination. (p. 2)

While Stahl’s work provides an important examination of the unequal labor processes that
constitute and continue to underpin America’s music industries, his work offers little attention to
the ways in which laboring bodies are differently impacted on the basis of gender and race.
118

118
Important works crucial to this larger conversation include: Gayle Rubin’s The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
‘Political Economy’ of Sex; Lauren Berlant’s, Cruel Optimism; Melissa Gregg’s Work’s Intimacy; Kathi Weeks’ The
Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries; Angela McRobbie’s Be
Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries; Kristin J. Lieb’s Gender, Branding, and the Modern

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More recently, however, both gender and race have been foregrounded in conversations
pertaining specifically to this question of ownership and rights over one’s music.
Taylor Swift has become the center of conversations pertaining to
ownership after the original recordings of her first six albums were sold—twice over—without
her being given the option to buy her catalog.
119
As Swift detailed in a 2019 Tumblr post:
For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead, I was given an
opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time,
one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that
contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to
make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past. Music I wrote on my bedroom
floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then
clubs, then arenas, then stadiums.

In response to this turn of events, Swift has opted to re-record all of the albums for which she
does not own the original recordings, releasing this work consistent with its original form, but
now titled as “Taylor’s version.” These transactions are illustrative of the complicated web of
ownership and lack of agency that many artists—even an artist as successful, visible, and

Music Industry; and Christine L. Williams’ “The Glass Escalator, Revisited: Gender Inequality in Neoliberal
Times.”
119
Big Machine Records, the Nashville-based label that launched Swift into the public spotlight in 2005, retained
the original recordings of the first six albums she recorded while signed with the label. In 2018, Taylor left for a new
contract with Republic Records, a Universal imprint, at which point her original recordings were retained by Big
Machine Records, as is customary in contractual agreements with early-career artists, as Swift was when she first
joined Big Machine. However, Big Machine was bought shortly after Swift’s departure by Ithaca Holdings, which is
owned by celebrity music manager Scooter Braun, at which point Swift’s masters became the property of Braun as
Big Machine dissolved into Ithaca. Rather than retain Swift’s masters, however, Braun sold them to a separate
private equity group, Shamrock Holdings. While such business dealings are not uncommon, this has become a
highly-discussed acquisition. Unlike many artists, Swift is in a tier where she could afford to buy her original
masters, which sold to Shamrock for $300 million—a goal of any artist who wants to maintain ownership and
control of their music. However, she was never given the opportunity from Big Machine before the initial sale to
Ithaca, and again when Ithaca sold to Shamrock (Brunner, 2021). Swift is by no means the first artist to publicly
wrestle with record labels over contracts and ownership. Recently, artists have circumvented traditional label
distribution channels, opting instead to release their music directly to audiences and consumers online (e.g.,
Radiohead and Chance the Rapper). Famously, Prince clashed for years with labels in an effort to have control over
his music. The period in which he took on the moniker “The Artists Formerly Known as Prince,” was one strategic
rhetorical tactic by which Prince worked to distance himself from the structural constraints of his contract at the time
with Warner Brothers. As Billboard’s Melinda Newman recounts, at the 1995 BRIT Awards Prince’s acceptance
speech spoke directly to this contractual entanglement: “Prince. In concert: - perfectly free. On record: slave”
(2016).

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privileged as Swift—navigate in an industry in which, to return to Sterne, the unit of music is
valued above the artist. Swift’s re-recordings are one attempt to circumvent the structural
domains of power that have kept her from owning her music.
Rhetoric, Rights & Royalties
Since its inception, the popular American commercial music industry has strategically
and intentionally exploited and marginalized artists—particularly women and artists of color.
Importantly, and more specifically still, the popular American music industry is constructed in
and through America’s history of slavery—an economic system and American institution
necessarily based on the exploitation of Black bodies. Innumerable instances of cooptation,
appropriation, and exploitation mark a violent gendered and racialized economic history in
America’s music industries.
120
Recent efforts to address and attempt to pay reparations toward
this historical and economic violence have emerged over the past few years, particularly in the
context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has become a leading social justice
campaign and mobilizing effort coexisting alongside #MeToo, and was established in response,
in part, to the ongoing killings of Black men and women at the hands of America’s armed police
forces. One such effort is The Big Payback, a research initiative designed and helmed by Josh
Kun, which seeks to research and address musical reparations. Another recent effort,
spearheaded by artist and producer Pharrell Williams, has been to eradicate racist terminology
from music contracts; in particular, to eliminate terms like “master” and “slave,” which are

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As Josh Kun articulates: The history of enslavement has always haunted the music industry and always
structured it…If you go back to the first Black artist to ever make a commercial musical recording in [the 1890s]—
George W. Johnson, was a former slave who began his life not owning his own body, being owned by a master, then
[went on] to record a master that he did not own. This also gets at the long-standing belief and conviction of so
many Black artists, throughout the 20
th
century and into this one, that they have been treated like slaves by the
masters who they signed contracts with. That’s been true since the early 1900s, and it is certainly true now. (Kun as
cited in Halperin & Helliger, 2020). Additionally, several important texts have interrogated this history, including
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating
Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow.

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directly rooted in this history of slavery and pull forward a rhetorical violence that continues to
reinscribe white supremacy in an industry that would not exist without Black artists and Black
musical forms. As Pharrell clarifies, these terms have been used as the dominant language in
America’s music industries to stipulate musical recordings: “Master being the main recording
and the slave being all the copies made” (Halperin & Helliger, 2020). Sony has so far gotten on
board, and their efforts to make this redress will address both previous and future contracts—an
important effort in at once attending to forward-facing progress and the archives on which such
progress must stand.
The exploitation of artists is a historical through-line that defaces the legacy of American
music. In addition to a history of economic exploitation on the basis of race and gender, this has
also happened more generally via creative loopholes and strategic internal financing tactics
undertaken by labels to forge their books.
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As Carvello recounts from her time at Atlantic
Records, “for an artist or manger, the only defense was to audit the company on your own
dime…unless artists audited the company, they had no idea how their money was actually being
spent” (2018, pp. 59-60). In great detail, Carvello breaks down the many tricks Atlantic Records
devised under Ertegun to skim money from their own artists’ royalties—from the historical
practice of payola to its legalized offspring, “independent promoters,'' to “cut-outs,” “overruns,”
“cleans,” and “charge-backs” (2018, pp. 56-60). The money, unpaid royalties that belonged to
Atlantic’s own artists, was used throughout Carvello’s tenure under Ertegun to pay for
everything from “high-level executives…dropp[ing] $29,000 on hooker at a WEA
convention…[to] cash from cleans to pay off women who tried to blackmail [Ertegun]” (2018, p.

121
Grace Jones recounts in her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, “Signing to Capitol [Records] was like
signing a contract where they give you something on the first page, and on the final page they take it all away. They
wooed me with treats and pleasantries, and they wanted to dress me in a little leather bikini and have me submit to
being fucked in the ass” (2015, p. 311).

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60). This was a top-down disciplinary and structural abuse of power—one reinforced through
interpersonal relationships and maintained through a cultural dynamic that necessitated you
either get on board, mind your “business,” or you get out; to speak up or report such offenses
would mean not only the likely loss of a professional position, but, given the connective and
close-knit structure of the industry’s dominant “boys club,” likely also mean being blackballed
from any future opportunities in the industry. Silence was thus structured into these climates as
an unofficial—although a no less severe and binding—contract, which of course compounds
when official NDAs are introduced into the mix.
While beyond the bounds of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct to which this
dissertation primarily attends, I raise these examples as crucial components of any critical
consideration of the history of pervasive and endemic abuse in America’s music industries.
Commercial and creative exploitation is economic assault. Capitalist logic here intersects with
historical legacies of bodily objectification and exploitation to operate through the structural
domain of power. These issues are not just adjacent, they are co-constitutive. This is
compounded when those benefiting from commercial exploitation are also those who perpetrate
bodily harm and other abuses of power directly against artists with whom they have worked.
Take, for example, singer and producer R. Kelly, who is perhaps one of the most highly-covered
and well-known perpetrators of sexual misconduct in the landscape of contemporary American
music. In one of the few instances in which allegations have resulted in criminal charges, Kelly’s
case has moved beyond accusations, and he is now in prison facing federal charges for just some
of the many allegations that have been made against him. Still today, Kelly benefits financially
from the affordances of the very digital technologies that have sought to cancel his music and
resulted in the ousting of music professionals like Berru. Whereas #MuteRKelly became a key

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rallying hashtag mobilized across social media platforms calling upon consumers to stop buying,
and radio stations to stop playing, his music, the introduction of digital streaming services like
Spotify have led to renegotiations in royalty contracts to the benefit of individuals like Kelly.
In one example, Kelly’s royalties for producing Aaliyah’s 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t
Nothing But A Number, are paid out respectively to physical sales (e.g., the one-time purchase of
a CD or LP), however, streaming rates and royalties operate under different rules. Every time
Aliyah’s album is streamed, Kelly is getting a cut—and there is no limit to the number of times
one individual can stream an album or song. So, while royalties for streaming are often a fraction
of physical sales, the changing make-up of music’s digital landscape today, and shifts in
consumer practices, have resulted in a consistent trend away from physical sales and toward
digital download and streaming services. As a statistical snapshot, according to the RIAA’s
Year-End 2020 Revenue Statistics report: streaming accounted for 83 percent of U.S. music
industry revenues for 2020; physical units accounted for just 9 percent (Friedlander, 2020). As
reporter Lee DeVito of Aaliyah’s hometown newspaper Detroit Metro Times articulates, “for
now, muting R. Kelly means muting Aaliyah, too” (2019). To further compound this case,
streams of Kelly’s own music rose 116% immediately following Lifetime’s three-day airing of
the explosive and exposing 2019 docuseries Surviving R. Kelly (Zellner, 2019). A new paradox
of power thus emerges as does an added layer of victimization via the affordances, and
consequences, of new technological advancements.
Disquiet
#MeToo has inserted a bookmark into the contemporary historical context and, unlike
previous eras in which incidents of sexual harassment and misconduct were brought to the fore
of popular culture, the re-emergence of #MeToo as a global social justice movement has

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foregrounded the ubiquity and pervasiveness of these experiences. While the viral potential of
hashtag campaigns can mobilize movements—implemented both as rallying slogans and as
organizing tools of digital technologies to aggregate thematic threads—they can also risk
minimizing the gravity through which such labels are perceived. Read as succinct slogans in a
neoliberal, post-feminist economy of visibility that capitalizes on the language of empowerment,
hashtags are put into circulation as a social currency and risk devolving into the equivalent of
carefully-curated product placement. This is a key manifestation of the cultural domain of power.
As Gray suggests:
This newly realized social visibility and cultural recognition is a form of power that
regulates and manages through appeals to identifications with styles of life tied to
identities based on difference. The desire for recognition and the quest for individual
distinction take place not through the state, civil society or cultural institutions…but in
crowded cultural and social spaces like Internet-based social network sites. (2013, p.
771).

Thus, while #MeToo has opened up space for public conversations and debates surrounding
issues of sexual misconduct—the marker of “difference”—that is representative of a key shift in
discursive frameworks around gender-based harm and considerations of believability, public
conversations and avenues for disclosure should not be collapsed with accountability or stand in
as the only available “justice” for victims of misconduct. To the contrary, as Banet-Weiser
(2018) reminds us, visibility has at times been weaponized, held up to a fun house mirror that
seeks to reflect visibility as both the means and ends to progress, as justification for relegating
issues and conversations surrounding abuses of power out of momentary socio-political
spotlights and flashing chyrons and back to the margins: “Look! We’ve acknowledged this issue;
we can move on now.” This refraction is often strategic—informed by a logic of neoliberalism
that posits visibility as progress to wash clean the hands of those in power who at once want to
point to active measures and evidence that things are different, that steps toward justice are being

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taken to hold individuals and individual entities accountable, while also still upholding the same
hierarchies and ideological frameworks that recenter power in those systems most in need of
restructuring. “The alliance of difference and power instigates a yearning for representation as
an end in itself that perfectly expresses the logic of market choice, consumer sovereignty, self-
reliance, and cultural diversity,” Gray argues, “the incitement to media visibility and the
proliferation of media images that it generates is a technique of power” (2013, p. 784).
Yet #MeToo is also a disclosure; it is a revelation narrativized through the neoliberal,
postfeminist rhetoric of the twenty-first century’s socially-networked conjuncture. It is also an
invitation, asking us, as members of a global public, to situate ourselves in relationship to the
larger movement—not simply as observers, or more collectively as activists, but as victims, and
as victims who can become empowered through disclosure. So many of us have also said
#MeToo. In the closing scenes of On the Record, Drew Dixon offers a reflection that speaks
directly to the ambivalence of this conjuncture:
If you are a rape survivor, you are the crime scene. Your life is the crime scene. The
crime doesn’t end the moment the assault ends. The crime is perpetrated and re-
perpetrated every day that you carry it with you, and it informs your behavior. I am a
living crime scene. And I realize now it was a cage. I had no idea how much this one
night of my life shattered me. And until I said it out loud and lived to tell the tale that I
am still here, I couldn’t fully start to put the pieces back together. And I would have been
shattered forever if this #MeToo moment hadn’t happened…It saved my life. (Dick &
Ziering, 2020)

This moment is demonstrative of the both/and conditionality of this conjuncture. Dixon is the
ultimate embodiment of the #MeToo woman. The publicness of her disclosure, and the
documentation of the process as presented via On the Record, provides the perfect supply of
visibility for an economy in which women in crisis are in demand. Regardless of what
consequences Simmons may or may not face, her disclosure is both means and ends; the

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perpetrator removed from the frame, Dixon, as the survivor has survived.
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It is, as Gray
suggests, an “emotionally charged” mediated event in which Dixon, “models social uplift and
display[s]…the rewards of achievement [at once] instructing audiences in the moral lessons and
rewards of personal transformation and responsibility” (2013, p. 787).
Can You Hear Us?
In my discussion with Harvey Mason Jr., I inquired about the GRAMMY Awards’
current efforts to address the gendered imbalance of power within The Recording Academy, as
well as through recent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which have gained
traction across in the midst of the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements and campaigns.
Specifically, I inquired about Women in the Mix, a “producer and engineering initiative,”
launched by The Recording Academy in 2019 to, in their words “ignite industry-wide
commitment to solving [the] severe inequality” of women in these professional spaces (women
represent only two percent of producers and engineers) (Women in the mix, 2021). Over the past
two years, however, this initiative has had no tangible impacts on the number of women
engineers and producers working on the top charting songs. I asked Mason Jr. about the
initiative’s failure to meet its pledge, to which he responded:
We are working with organizations exactly like Women in the Mix because they are
trying to figure out what is the next version of this, how do we make a bigger impact, so I
think our partnership with them is doing exactly that—talking about what needs to be
done differently…the common theme for me [is] listening. We're listening to the people
who are experts and people who have opinions and are leading thought around what
needs to change. They've been doing it for a couple of years [at Women in the Mix],
they're revising what they're doing, [and] they're pivoting into doing new initiatives. The
work from the task force has been very helpful, so I think having that task force and
having these conversations with people that are like singularly focused on fixing this
problem for me and my style of leadership that's what I think is the best way to do it is
find out who's working on it, who's focused on it, and let's work together with them to
find out the solutions in the answers. (Mason Jr., 2021)

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Dixon notes in On the Record that she likes the term “warrior” to refer to her identity now have endured the
assault. She, likewise, lists “silence breaker” on her Instagram profile @deardrewdixon.

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Again, Mason’s response is telling in what it reveals about the Academy’s approach to
and perception of progress. On one level, the establishment of Women in the Mix is upheld as a
marker of progress—a new, dedicated effort to address the disproportionate number of men in
particular sectors of America’s music industries and to create new pathways for access,
advancement, and mobility for women. By one measure, it is progress—it is attempting to
change the gendered makeup of key sectors of popular American music by making resources,
education, and networking opportunities available to aspiring women sound engineers and
producers. However, with no actual impact on these numbers on the ground, progress remains
static at the level of visibility. Thus, while progress is indeed a moving target and slow, it is also
in need of active engagement, monitoring, and systems of measurement by which efforts and
initiatives committed to change can be held to account for these efforts. Otherwise, we risk
falling back into a cycle of pseudo action that never amounts to change. As Gray articulates, in
conversation with Banet-Weiser’s economies of visibility (here with respect to diversity efforts),
“the bargain with difference is fine so long as it is a difference that does not make a difference”
(2013, p. 780).
In this way, the appearance of progress can be read as sufficient within an economy of
visibility for which there is a demand for progress. The Task Force formed via Women in the
Mix thus becomes that progress, not the structural or institutional change they might be
organized on which to consult. Mason’s assertion that his leadership style is based on listening
recalls Pauline Oliveros’s important call for the practice of “deep listening,” which requires
attention, interpretation, and decisive action; deep listening must be part of the practices and
platforms that initiatives design and organize for individuals and organizations to be “heard.” But
listening itself is not the action, we must be listening for actions that are then put into place and

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acted upon. Mason’s comments suggest this is his intent—to listen in order to “fix the problem.”
As I argue in the closing pages of Chapter 1, however, the first step must be to acknowledge that
this severe inequality in producing and engineering positions held by women is not so much a
“problem,” as it is the tangible manifestation of a system working by design. (A note of
transparency: August 4, 2021, the day this dissertation manuscript was completed, The
GRAMMYs, under the leadership of Harvey Mason Jr., who has since been appointed as the
permanent President and CEO of The Recording Academy, announced that The GRAMMY
Awards has collaborated with Color of Change in an effort to enhance diversity, and will now
adopt an inclusion rider as part of the contracts with the show’s production company, Fulwell 73
Productions for the 2022 Awards, becoming “the first major awards show to publicly commit to
such a clause” (Nazareno, M., 2021).
The framing Mason presents here is not unique to The Recording Academy; initiatives
across different sectors of the music industries use issue-based, rather than system-based,
framing to inform the material, resources, and training made available via their platforms and
programming. Issue-based framing manifests, for example, in curated, women-fronted panels
that discuss how to make it in the industry, or how to navigate the music industry. While well-
intentioned, the knowledge and insider tips shared in these spaces often speak to navigating the
structures as they stand; progress is thus delimited by the scaffolding that upholds the same
hierarchies of power that have resulted in the need for such resources and programming in the
first place. As Jessica Hopper asks, “what is ‘girls learning to play a boys’ game by boys’ rules’
if not the game itself” (2019). Or, as Sasha Geffen similarly articulates, “Patriarchy relies on the
illusion of its own inevitability to survive” (Geffen as cited in Hopper, 2019).
Without oversight, accountability, or, more importantly, a long-term systemic approach,

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issue-based initiatives risk falling to the wayside when the next hashtag campaign and
movement—which will most certainly come—replaces #MeToo as a key priority. This is
particularly important because, as the longevity of hashtag-driven campaigns have demonstrated
in the decade in which they have become commonplace as mobilizing and unifying tactics of
social media, that next hashtag will come before transformative structural or ideological change
takes place across America’s music industries. As Hall et al., articulate with respect to the social
production of news:
Things are newsworthy because they represent the changefulness, the unpredictability
and the conflictual nature of the world. But such events cannot be allowed to remain in
the limbo of the ‘random’—they must be brought within the horizon of the ‘meaningful’.
This bringing of events within the realm of meanings means…referring unusual and
unexpected events to the ‘maps’ of meaning which already form the basis of our cultural
knowledge, into which the social world is already ‘mapped. (1980, p. 57)

Herein lies a key danger of the “newsworthiness” of #MeToo; it is positioned beneath the
spotlight, but only long enough to be admired, before being ushered offstage. Newsworthiness is
finite. In that way, #MeToo will join the “I Believe Anita” button collecting dust as a bygone
rallying slogan and will be situated alongside music article headlines again exclaiming that “the
women have arrived!” To this very point, media articles and social commentary have already
emerged bookending the #MeToo movement as a finite moment; the cultural domain of power
operating through messages that present this frame as one of chronology, rather than progress
toward the movement’s goals. Vox, which created a dynamic interactive online website dedicated
to tracking the names of those against whom allegations of sexual harassment and assault had
been lodged in the midst of #MeToo, stopped updating the list in February 2020. Posting the
following note, “While the MeToo movement continues to have an impact, this list is not an
ongoing record of allegations and their outcomes; rather, it is meant as a snapshot of a particular
moment in time” (2021). Yet the decision to stop updating the list, which included 262 names at

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the time it concluded, is, in fact, inscribing boundaries around that “moment in time.” In this
way, the Vox website sits as an online archive, a marker that our (online) engagement with this
“issue” no longer needs to be in real time. That bracketing of time contributes directly to claims
of post-#MeToo. Similarly, In March 2020, Tarana Burke the founder of the #MeToo movement
took to Instagram to call attention to—and hold a critical lens toward—this growing trend. Burke
commented, along with posting a series of media headlines addressing new reports of sexual
harassment and misconduct:
Every single day I see another post or article or comment about how #metoo has lost its
relevance or is co-opted or has run its course in one way or another. Most people don’t
really understand what our work is actually about and so they equate relevance to how
much they see it in the mainstream media. The reality is our work is ongoing and
consistent no matter who is covering it …We are not doing it all as an organization it is
spread out across a field that is full of people doing their part. Some are trying to change
laws and move legislation, some are trying to shift culture and the mainstream narrative
about sexual violence, some are keeping you informed and amplifying stories… It will
take MULTIPLE interventions in order for us to see progress in the fight against sexual
violence. It will also take time, and a lot of commitment. This movement isn’t over nor
irrelevant as long as there are still survivors needing support and people causing harm.

The shift from #MeToo to post-#MeToo is a conceptual demarcation and a chronological
implication that marks the ideological underpinnings of the cultural domain of power. It suggests
that the socio-cultural dynamics from which #MeToo emerged have changed, that enough
“progress” has been achieved, or made visible, and that the socio-cultural and political efforts
that were mobilized via this aggregating thread can now give way to the benefits achieved via
that progress. It is also a demarcation of time, a bookend that signposts the conjuncture at which
the movement shifted from one of direct action to one of cultural and historical reflection. This
shift is both dangerous and to be expected. The danger is in the resolution the prefix “post-”
suggests—that we are beyond, that we have moved past that which required attention. Such
moves are often premature; so too are they the result, particularly in a neoliberal context, of

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movements that frame progress via the individual rather than the system. It is for this reason
why, though I attend to the impact and significance of #MeToo throughout this research, I also
emphasize that the undergirding systems of sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny that constitute the
scaffolding of America’s music industries—the interlocking systems of interpersonal,
disciplinary, structural and cultural power—existed before, and will persist after, #MeToo. As
Stuart Hall et al. reminds us, “you cannot resolve a social contradiction by abolishing the label
that has been attached to it” (1978, p. vii). To do so would only impact one level of the
intersectional domain, the cultural; without identifying, attending to, or acknowledging the ways
in which America’s music industries are co-constituted via this interlock, “progress” will always
be elusive.
A Technicality
In the final weeks of writing this dissertation, actor and Cosby Show star Bill Cosby, after
becoming the #MeToo era’s first high-profile figure and celebrity to be criminally convicted for
his 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand, was released from prison on a legal technicality
(Bowley & Jacobs, 2021). This technicality was the result of one district attorney’s misguided
decisions during early proceedings in the Cosby case, and a technicality that did not undermine
the jury’s guilty verdict or the preponderance of evidence supporting Cosby’s initial conviction.
This new development in the Cosby case, which had been amplified and elevated as a marker of
progress in the larger #MeToo movement and framed via dominant media outlets like The New
York Times as the moment that the “Treatment of Women by Powerful Men Ha[d] Its Day In
Court,” marks a deflating juncture (Chira, 2017). At the same time, it is not at all surprising if we
follow the sordid histories that have failed to result in lasting or transformative justice for the
countless women who have been mistreated by powerful men across America’s professional

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industries.
123

As key actors within America’s legal system, what does it mean that two of the nine
justices on the Supreme Court—which holds the judicial power of the United States—were able
to circumvent legal accountability via that very justice system? What does it mean that a case
upheld as a benchmark for progress in the era of #MeToo instead becomes a footnote for legal
loopholes? What does accountability look like for Anita Hill, Dr. Blasey Ford, and victims
across the country when perpetrators hold power not only in professional and interpersonal
interactions, but they are the very individuals responsible for enacting and reviewing the laws
that dictate the terms and dynamics of how power in those interactions might play out in
America’s systems of “justice”? The ripple effects of these decisions are felt in industries far and
wide beyond the courts. Thus, while this dissertation is in no way a legal analysis of America’s
justice systems, this project has worked to highlight when and how criminal policy and law
intersect with the “court of public opinion” and the internal structures of power within America’s
music industries to further unpack how the stakes for victims of sexual misconduct are
compounded, how such highly-visible cases (re)construct discursive frameworks around
disclosure, and to provide context for the enduring under-reportage of incidents of sexual
harassment and misconduct in America’s music industries.
The boundaries of America’s industries are porous and particular conjunctures construct,
and are constructed by, specific ideologies that inform and regulate discursive frameworks of
knowledge around particular issues like sexual harassment and misconduct. The cases of

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Even then-candidate Donald Trump’s bid for presidency in 2106 wasn’t derailed by the seemingly constant
scandals and allegations of sexual harassment and assault, which included the infamous Access Hollywood tape,
obtained by The Washington Post and published almost exactly one-year to the day prior to the publication of The
New York Times’s exposé on Harvey Weinstein, on which Trump boasts “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful
[women] — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let
you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (Transcript, 2016).

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Thomas, Weinstein, and others incorporated here, which sit formally outside America’s music
industries, are brought into critical consideration following empirical sources, media reports, and
media interviews with key actors, who cite the impact of these cases for particular conjunctures
relevant to the case studies I explore throughout these chapters. In this way, and as I reference in
the pages above, sexism and sexual misconduct are in no way unique to America’s music
industries, but they are ever-present in the industries, baked-in to the systems and structures that
continue to uphold patriarchal and misogynistic structures of power.
I work to detail and specify particular conjunctures with respect to the moments when
alleged misconduct occurred, and when disclosures pertaining to those specific incidents became
public. The publicness is key to this analysis precisely because it is the moment when the
industries’ intersecting domains of power have failed to silence, failed to contain a woman’s
voice. These moments are cracks in a complicated structure, but cracks none-the-less and it is
through these cracks that the light begins to come through. With each crack, a bit more light. But
in order for long-term, systemic change to occur, these cracks must connect. This dissertation is
about America’s popular music industries, the infrastructures and internal systems of which are
informed and upheld by racist and sexist ideologies historically invested in maintaining
patriarchy and white supremacy and today enforced through the logic of capitalism and
neoliberalism. This project, through the primary analytic of gender, explores the scaffolding by
and through which these structures are constructed and maintained.

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Epilogue: Do You Believe in Life After Love?
Which direction is up?
Experiences of sexual harassment and misconduct are complex and multifaceted. Trauma
is compounded by a violent bookmark that instantaneously segments a victim’s life into two
defining chapters: before and after. Moments of disclosure place those chapters into a two-
dimensional quadrant: the before and after now segmented further into public and private. For
some, that segmentation multiples, public and private further divided; perhaps the first disclosure
was to a close confidant, the second is now to the world via a mediated divulgence (and this is
when a victim is able to maintain control over when and how the experiences they endure are
revealed). For those who experience repeated incidents of harassment and misconduct, the
gravity of this divide can compound exponentially. But this segmentation does not remove the
first chapters before moving on to those that come after; they remain bound. For those who bear
witness to, or to which victims disclose these incidents, a similar bookmark applies—a moment
in space and time forever sutured to the incident or revelation.
The impact of disclosures can be expansive, particularly when those we love are either
the victims or perpetrators in these incidents. This is true whether we know these individuals
intimately or have formed bonds from afar, as we do with beloved musicians and artists. Music
journalist Ann Powers, in a thoughtful reflection following the release of the revealing
documentary Finding Neverland—which provides a detailed investigation of Michael Jackson’s
history of predatory behavior against young boys—speaks to this disruption:
Whatever the path its reverberations take, the most striking thing about such a
revelation’s impact is the way it divides your life without erasing any part of it. There is a
before and an after, and it can be hard, nearly impossible, to make sense of the
relationship between those two…the time before becomes a mess that needs to be cleaned
up, rearranged, but it’s also still a home, a place you know. Forever changed but still
familiar and even longed for. When the alleged violator is famous, and the disclosures are

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not privileged but mediated, millions may become secret sharers in this confusing time-
space continuum. (2019)

While the #MeToo movement is brought into conversation as a key conjuncture in this research,
my intent is not for this project to be centered around #MeToo or to say that, as a movement, it
will be the mobilizing change agent that has been missing from America’s music industries or
culture more broadly to dismantle and reconstruct the systems that have enabled gendered abuses
of power to persist. If anything, the most shocking part of #MeToo has been about how little has
come out about America’s music industries.
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As I detailed in Chapter 3, a defining theme that
reappears across disclosures in America’s music industries is that everyone knew, that there was
little surprise to who was named or why when disclosures become public. Yet, because of the
interlocking domains and structures of power still constituting the industries, everyone knowing

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Efforts have likewise received attention in regions and music markets outside of the United States. In 2017, the
BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire TV show called attention to the pervasive sexual misconduct in the UK’s music
industry, featuring interviews with a number of women sharing their experiences. Unlike the dominant documentary
efforts that have been released in America to-date, this show attempted to address the issue on an industry-wide
scale, rather than centering the narrative around a single individual. As artist Yasmin Lajoie emphasizes, “sexual
assault and abuse in the music industry is endemic. I don’t have a single peer in the music industry who’s never been
sexually harassed or assaulted” (as cited in Ingham, 2017b). The interviews mobilized a campaign on Kickstarter
using the hashtag #Stop2018. An ambitious effort, the co-founders shared at the time of its launch: “Above all our
hope is that 2018 is that year that bullying, misogyny, sexual harassment, assault and rape in the music industry
stops” (Stutz, 2017a). While we are far from this goal, such campaigns have helped to elevate visibility and call
attention to the ubiquity of these issues. Likewise, women in Sweden’s music industry—a hub for writers and
producers key to America’s mainstream music sectors—published an open letter calling out pervasive sexism, “The
discrepancy between words and actions is enormous, and the values and policies, which are decided in the industry
concerning sexism and equality, are all nice words on blank papers,” they write in the letter (2191 women, 2017).
Inspired by Sweden’s letter, women in Australia’s music industry published their own open letter, launching the
campaign #meNomore (#MenNoMore, 2017).
Predating #MeToo, initiatives like the Ruidosa festival, which was first organized and established by
Chilean popstar Francisca Valenzuela in 2016, have been working via a multiplatform approach to address historic
gender disparities, particularly in music festival spaces (Bryan, 2016). Focused primarily on Latin American music
industries, one significant and tangible result from Ruidosa’s early efforts includes the passage of the Mercedes Sosa
Law, which was adopted in Argentina in 2019. Named after beloved Argentine singer, the late Mercedes Sosa, the
law requires that a thirty-percent minimum be met for lineups at all music festivals in Argentina that book more than
three artists. As Remezcla reported, prior to the passage of this law, “Argentina had the lowest percentage of female
presence in music festivals in Latin America” (Giaimo, 2019). As Valenzuela shared upon its passage, “quota laws
are a good initiative because humanity is imperfect and we tend not to correct certain issues unless we visibilize
them” (as cited in Giaimo, 2019). The passage of the Mercedes Sosa Law is a key marker in shifting the structural
domains of power for women in festival spaces; as law, as policy, it is both explicitly, formally adopted, and, most
importantly, can be regulated and enforced. While hashtag campaigns help to raise visibility, without the formal
adoption of policy changes on the ground., such efforts most often remain static at that level of visibility.

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has not resulted in everyone being able to talk, or in those voices amounting to actionable change
when they are heard.
Music Men Ruined for Me
125

Of particular relevance to popular American music, #MeToo has forced us to confront
and acknowledge in new ways that a burgeoning number of artists and creators we have known
and loved throughout our lifetimes are embroiled in scandal, many as alleged perpetrators of
sexual misconduct. Contending with these revelations can be complicated. The art of perpetrators
soundtrack key moments and memories from our lives. Some choose to stop listening. Some
renegotiate how and when they will listen. Some opt to listen in spite of—in disbelief, in denial,
or in indifference. And still others opt to listen because of. Even prior to #MeToo, this question
had been raised with respect to such artists as R. Kelly. In one 2013 interview with Jessica
Hopper, Jim DeRogatis, the journalist who first broke the Kelly story in the Chicago Sun Times,
reveals that as knowledge of Kelly’s assaults has come to light, a new type of music fan has
emerged: those fans who love, follow, and support artists not in spite of their histories of sexual
assault and violence against women, but because of them. DeRogatis shares that: “some
percentage of fans [like] Kelly’s music because they know…there is some sort of vicarious thrill
to seeing this guy play this character in these songs and knowing that it’s not just a character”
(Hopper, 2015, p. 39).
I am in active contention with this question. Can we, as many thought pieces have
recently posed, separate good art from bad artists? I remain unsure of how best to navigate this
treacherous terrain. Yet I am sure cancelling is not the answer. To cancel is to silence and

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In 2017, Toronto-based writer Alison Lang self-published a zine entitled Music Men Ruined for Me, which, as
the zine’s description describes: “collects stories from 30 contributors around the world about how men have ruined
certain bands and songs for them.”

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silencing is, itself, an act of violence that extends far beyond muting a singular individual. I also
reject the idea that the question of separation is the one we should be asking. Separation is an
attempt to obfuscate the conflicting nuances of the historical conjunctures in and from which art
is created and suggests that we must find some state of resolution—either we can, or we can’t,
we should, or we shouldn’t. This question of separation is also a tactic of erasure, asking that we
overlook how and the extent to which domains of power are always and necessarily interlocking.
It is posited as a means by which listeners can compartmentalize in order to appease personal or
social anxieties about ethical listening practices and revise behavioral expectations for conscious
consumption. It is, as Jessica Hopper similarly argues, a “lazy and unintellectual suggestion”
(2018). Contending with this question critically asks that we do more than simply “cancel”
individuals or groups against whom allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct have been
raised. It also asks that we allow space to process the personal messiness that comes with
navigating memories now annotated with an asterisk. To return again to Pauline Oliveros, we
must practice “deep listening.”
This is, and will remain, a deeply ambivalent question, and is one through which many
listeners, scholars, and fans are thinking, or thinking anew, catalyzed by #MeToo. Hopper, in a
review of Jones and Davies’ 2017 edited collection Under My Thumb, articulates the generative
possibilities of this ambivalence, it is “more than about music’s sexist history, this…is about
women carving an ornate space for themselves within music out of necessity; their willingness to
tangle with these issues is a testimony to their love of music, and the lengths women must go to
find some version of themselves reflected in it” (2018). In a complementary approach, bell hooks
urges imagination as a crucial component of rigorous critical thinking, “In dominator culture the
killing off of the imagination serves as a way to repress and contain everyone within the limits of

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the status quo” (2010, p. 61). Importantly, and in-line with the trauma-informed approach I
advocate throughout this dissertation, hooks likewise asserts that, “imagination is one of the most
powerful modes of resistance that oppressed and exploited folks can and do use. In traumatic
circumstances, it is imagination that can provide a survival life-line” (p. 61). hooks also brings
into this important conversation Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, who similarly
argue for a more inclusive and expansive critical approach:
Many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do
so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around
the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view…Revolutionary shifts
in the operational structures of our world seem to call for new definitions of who we are
and what we are here for. (as cited in hooks, 2010, pp. 61-62)

As I wrestle with the tensions imbricated in this ambivalence, I am informed and
encouraged by these malleable conceptions of critical research, which preserve space for
thoughtful engagement with messy questions. I have found both guidance and instruction in Ann
Powers’ own exercise of contending with this conundrum—one that we will no doubt continue to
confront about artists we love and to whose music so many of our deeply personal memories are
wedded (2019):
If I'm going to genuinely represent what it's like to listen to Michael Jackson after
Leaving Neverland, I have to ask you to stay with me in an uncomfortable place. In some
way, this is what criticism, what engaging with culture as a thinking person, always
strives to do. Yet it's so easy to stop short. To revel in the boldly stated conclusion. To
indulge in the flush of strong positive feelings. To rest in the perceived authority of the
self-appointed jurist and turn away from the role that a deeper engagement with culture,
in all its imperfections and even moral shortcomings, can offer: the chance to be a
trustworthy witness. If culture builds itself through revelations, explorations, secrets and
lies, any response that doesn't claim the contradictions gets it wrong.

With that, I defer to Cher to usher us out of this project with the same affirming question with
which she first welcomed me into this work twenty-one years ago: Do you believe in life after
love? I do. This dissertation is, in fact, a testament to that love, even if its central focus is the

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abuse and misconduct inflicted upon generation after generation of women across America’s
music industries. It is, optimistically, another crack through which a bit more light might just get
in.

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Appendix A
Spotify Playlist: How the Light Gets In
1. https://open.spotify.com/track/4iGxxqZaZ2Z0YFiXgd8n8O
2. https://open.spotify.com/track/2hMk3VNicbCoV8I81m7Z3q
3. https://open.spotify.com/track/62PaSfnXSMyLshYJrlTuL3
4. https://open.spotify.com/track/5QXFlowFZXYvOGfbwLzkID
5. https://open.spotify.com/track/75R95k0ICuZBFVEjBauOtt
6. https://open.spotify.com/track/47BBI51FKFwOMlIiX6m8ya
7. https://open.spotify.com/track/6gjhpFtiZv6PT05XIaIK5Q
8. https://open.spotify.com/track/6qRvnXftofjYJm1Mg98UWL
9. https://open.spotify.com/track/2HMqBDD9kDEcWOLcXd9zu0
10. https://open.spotify.com/track/4GdjzssY71uO4gzLlbdg6t
11. https://open.spotify.com/track/0pufbBQTb9Voh9ZtpCpYLH
12. https://open.spotify.com/track/7JJX0jNN99WhEHncAgoTKS
13. https://open.spotify.com/track/562JrM9b7jiu8LgzV62x3o
14. https://open.spotify.com/track/6nfqyVSVIL4YnIh5S7fG8Y
15. https://open.spotify.com/track/1MCh9c35k0NAxE81oCrHU1
16. https://open.spotify.com/track/7yQpHgbDPweCZhTD5ZtXES
17. https://open.spotify.com/track/7cioKB5CHVzk09SOtTyn0T
18. https://open.spotify.com/track/0lnIJmgcUpEpe4AZACjayW
19. https://open.spotify.com/track/356utrpfACzQkXJyE4MUmf
20. https://open.spotify.com/track/5Z27tZEeC8WBiQvoDpx1Sw
21. https://open.spotify.com/track/5Oc0vLGWdEWeCqIU8zyELt

270
22. https://open.spotify.com/track/1bI3L6ofoAGy3RbOLll3PK
23. https://open.spotify.com/track/0XyjtybwqSdqMAFfBEkmZf
24. https://open.spotify.com/track/2Fxmhks0bxGSBdJ92vM42m
25. https://open.spotify.com/track/0DuWyzeLH09PQcnOMJiRgE
26. https://open.spotify.com/track/2FMcDUopGfjBh3xMsrm78S
27. https://open.spotify.com/track/3MjUtNVVq3C8Fn0MP3zhXa
28. https://open.spotify.com/track/2EvwLVrnYbCZEG6Kx5DCRy
29. https://open.spotify.com/track/7FwBtcecmlpc1sLySPXeGE
30. https://open.spotify.com/track/2fl0B0OaXjWbjHCQFx2O8W
31. https://open.spotify.com/track/2o6U8T1Iq8Q704g7B2Idir
32. https://open.spotify.com/track/2goLsvvODILDzeeiT4dAoR
33. https://open.spotify.com/track/6WmXvFj5eGUXPYzMpiCMhr
34. https://open.spotify.com/track/0b9oOr2ZgvyQu88wzixux9
35. https://open.spotify.com/track/62eE3VOaPxTKlqjGZNncJP
36. https://open.spotify.com/track/25qfFpoGhk9Njgu5nl36sS
37. https://open.spotify.com/track/2R1CGhRSsNFwCsqRxYAZK7
38. https://open.spotify.com/track/09hxCc0SgV8u46gWsfeqJA
39. https://open.spotify.com/track/250V5LlDWkqUdqGZrmbILm
40. https://open.spotify.com/track/5TdCUrQdTWZoTSAZH7Pfup
41. https://open.spotify.com/track/6mib3N4E8PZHAGQ3xy7bho
42. https://open.spotify.com/track/1k5iH4KDKi56MFvlnrALNV
43. https://open.spotify.com/track/18ssFhD04lWo1RzpcohnrG
44. https://open.spotify.com/track/43X8V6N0QLwlAA4LXtWlZo

271
45. https://open.spotify.com/track/4QDbzpmRA6atTEEE2W7j7k
46. https://open.spotify.com/track/1S9zm4z41gFAJgPYPyVCHb
47. https://open.spotify.com/track/3Dv1eDb0MEgF93GpLXlucZ
48. https://open.spotify.com/track/6DCZcSspjsKoFjzjrWoCdn
49. https://open.spotify.com/track/7FVk4woYHORykpt16Sp320
50. https://open.spotify.com/track/64Ny7djQ6rNJspquof2KoX
51. https://open.spotify.com/track/6zC0mpGYwbNTpk9SKwh08f
52. https://open.spotify.com/track/2GbePPrWWSRxcmW6QRSPae
53. https://open.spotify.com/track/3QfsB9tPwAjMb5b9P7r3Z5
54. https://open.spotify.com/track/4tCtwWceOPWzenK2HAIJSb
55. https://open.spotify.com/track/1AJBNdi266U3cJkgxpHOlF
56. https://open.spotify.com/track/7mbYfvgRDd6QDkeV4TdA5F
57. https://open.spotify.com/track/5kz9GDBTX846OXwqWoyKzF
58. https://open.spotify.com/track/2zRiNcLBVh0K6A1VL3zeg6
59. https://open.spotify.com/track/40ZadKqJuiO6TgFDWyAf8r
60. https://open.spotify.com/track/3LGsgpx4TfxhXbr07OFKqs
61. https://open.spotify.com/track/2EuEGAJocPvy2Jrp4juzg4
62. https://open.spotify.com/track/0G21yYKMZoHa30cYVi1iA8
63. https://open.spotify.com/track/67q0QsfLcTa2SqhP2wQbia
64. https://open.spotify.com/track/4SWJh9qzSv0EJyZ3BZ5Fd3
65. https://open.spotify.com/track/2V4Bc2I962j7acQj1N0PiQ
66. https://open.spotify.com/track/72xpgWWuEyLWFFTIKnrAbZ
67. https://open.spotify.com/track/6X5ll3qz5YD2eC1Px5I1GC

272
68. https://open.spotify.com/track/2Mln8WN3MrBnUrDzgo0Nnk
69. https://open.spotify.com/track/3hNhCqbzz9YxqkPZnMzsW2
70. https://open.spotify.com/track/1f3W17GwtIwDr6dpfOf9J7
71. https://open.spotify.com/track/3G81cmOln00JhWC1q94vjw
72. https://open.spotify.com/track/5NXI6TWg0mQRmbGPHzkoHk
73. https://open.spotify.com/track/5WPawmpYBLjBbUjXoixxdQ
74. https://open.spotify.com/track/0KrDGZDnPPydH9KENqbXQc
75. https://open.spotify.com/track/2VzpKY6w1RGr5J0Fz5pmKa
76. https://open.spotify.com/track/5UuikgHTxSRFRnC0zXx10i
77. https://open.spotify.com/track/3Yh64aiu2ANBwDFztyPDkT
78. https://open.spotify.com/track/2Cdvbe2G4hZsnhNMKyGrie
79. https://open.spotify.com/track/0vwkXrG2ts3piPNwuHtwEK
80. https://open.spotify.com/track/14yws39qBiZig9vh3LiqHR
81. https://open.spotify.com/track/7pKfPomDEeI4TPT6EOYjn9
82. https://open.spotify.com/track/6MYDgkfu34kRRIdMfleVCV
83. https://open.spotify.com/track/37IqW0b5mPLvTjQIyVmQNJ
84. https://open.spotify.com/track/4y4spB9m0Q6026KfkAvy9Q
85. https://open.spotify.com/track/09CtPGIpYB4BrO8qb1RGsF
86. https://open.spotify.com/track/4CHyDw5J56I0x40MFk5f2V
87. https://open.spotify.com/track/5g1vtHqi9uV7xtYeCcFOBx
88. https://open.spotify.com/track/1wi4ti9BYUbwoGJ1EBUVtv
89. https://open.spotify.com/track/1mmSggRi7Oh5YpGBzKWQDX
90. https://open.spotify.com/track/6KOEK6SeCEZOQkLj5M1PxH

273
91. https://open.spotify.com/track/0cjvRZVV217eDcZXXTHxBl
92. https://open.spotify.com/track/3q2v8QaTnHLveAQzR6gvYm
93. https://open.spotify.com/track/4AboqNl74jNDpJhPfqYDmj
94. https://open.spotify.com/track/0jdny0dhgjUwoIp5GkqEaA
95. https://open.spotify.com/track/0z1IquwlPxxsQMaD7WIvCo
96. https://open.spotify.com/track/3OwCUKKBXq3BC8fUGJE2bv
97. https://open.spotify.com/track/6AczxDV0grtXZZ7h8xI5cS
98. https://open.spotify.com/track/0bCCGLHflR08UVA6oJJc8I
99. https://open.spotify.com/track/03hqMhmCZiNKMSPmVabPLP
100. https://open.spotify.com/track/3xaEnW4ypm5GRKG5ZDDhMo
101. https://open.spotify.com/track/6hu1f1cXSw7OAqhpSQ2zDy
102. https://open.spotify.com/track/70gbuMqwNBE2Y5rkQJE9By
103. https://open.spotify.com/track/7aAE5KL20Uycf3dswsaHjp
104. https://open.spotify.com/track/7bYZBVrnRfqeaPbhRyEvK3
105. https://open.spotify.com/track/3szW87j0gVLQmpulz4P8Rf
106. https://open.spotify.com/track/1ZPlNanZsJSPK5h9YZZFbZ
107. https://open.spotify.com/track/095MMFhB9qxPx2VsmvjnUs
108. https://open.spotify.com/track/5j6tQBJnNG4wLLdVISJ5g2
109. https://open.spotify.com/track/62EoPZVylvGUYIAIlJj94i
110. https://open.spotify.com/track/3zxp5k8QHSM9QAjhZaWbq4
111. https://open.spotify.com/track/3BniBNNfETcFIBLP9G2uOu
112. https://open.spotify.com/track/267ICvSKjxRja3XzUIkTLx
113. https://open.spotify.com/track/4VKnkoNNM6yTb4cXXX3wqD

274
114. https://open.spotify.com/track/54YmspVxT9aeIxQ7YvG9Or
115. https://open.spotify.com/track/7ytES33eLYS9WaZLKqWfYM
116. https://open.spotify.com/track/5jE48hhRu8E6zBDPRSkEq7
117. https://open.spotify.com/track/7LG5cNXKsKSV3IrHNrHzGa
118. https://open.spotify.com/track/6C3yPXYG2NJYlIYVe5J7hv
119. https://open.spotify.com/track/1kiNatIrwDusOZfR29W0LJ
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Asset Metadata

Creator Johnson, Perry Berne (author)

Core Title How the light gets in: sexual misconduct and disclosure in America's music industries

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 09/30/2023

Defense Date 08/17/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American music industries,disclosure,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular music,sexism,sexual misconduct

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kun, Josh (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Hancock Alfaro, Ange-Marie (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email perryberne@gmail.com,perrybjohnson@asc.upenn.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC16011904

Unique identifier UC16011904

Legacy Identifier etd-JohnsonPer-10127

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Johnson, Perry Berne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu