Nobody Ever Asked Me about the Girls: Women, Music and Fame

Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music and Fame by Lisa Robinson is a fascinating look at women in music and the common threads that run through so many of their stories.

Music, particularly the popular music genres, is very much about the men. Even with all of the interviews Robinson did with women she comments that when people would ask her about any of the celebrities she had met it was almost exclusively about the men. This book doesn't simply rehash old interviews, it explores and comments on the distinct obstacles and issues women in the industry faced in addition to the ones both men and women had to overcome.

Organized by topic rather than either separate musicians or genres, the reader more easily sees the same show more desires and the same hurdles across both genre and time. In her epilogue Robinson mentions some of the changes that have begun to take place during and after the writing of the book, but the comments from these women are remarkably similar whether from the 1960s or the 2010s.

I highly recommend this for readers of music history, especially rock and pop music, as well as those interested in the unique obstacles that women face that men largely never even know about.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

This was disappointing. The author's decision to break up her chapters by themes means she provides little snippets of information about a lot of female musicians but not very much depth about any one of them. Yeah, we get it - being a woman in a male-dominated music world is hard. Appearance is overly emphasized. There's a double standard about sex for men and women. It's hard to maintain a relationship when you're a famous musician, and it's hard to stay popular when you're an aging female musician. Tell me something I don't know.

Robinson also seems to have a personal grudge against Madonna and Taylor Swift, viewing both of them as fame-hungry hacks without any real talent. She's allowed to have her opinions, I guess, but a) I don't show more agree with her and b) she's unnecessarily cruel and dismissive of two women who, for better or worse, have both changed the landscape of popular music.

There are a few musicians who get a slightly deeper focus than the others, including Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell and Sheryl Crow. I wish Robinson had written a book that examined the lives and musical histories of these three greats instead of this scattershot hodgepodge that only skims the surface. I understand that Robinson's late husband digitized thousands of hours of interviews that she used for the book, and in some ways the book feels like a tribute to his work, but she could have made the book much stronger with some judicial editing. show less

A light and easy read of quotes by musicians such as Stevie Nicks, Adele, Beyonce, Linda Ronstadt, Rhianna, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Mavis Staples, Debbie Harry, Jennifer Lopez, and Lorde about sexism, fame, money, groupies, family, road life, stage fright, and musical influences. Big, mysterious slam on Taylor Swift.

There are some interesting tales here, although Robinson's sometimes misogynistic take on some of the women, and her hero worship of others, sometimes interferes with what the author is trying to do. The format is a little odd, as the author tries to weave together these tales by theme rather than by artist or timeframe.