Great Broads

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The title of this series was inspired by none other than impresario Bill Graham, who on the album Cheap Thrills introduced Big Brother and the Holding Company as “Four guys and one great, great broad.”

Readers of The Psychedelic Series know that I do not share that opinion of Janis Joplin, so in defense of the truly great broads of music, I decided to celebrate their contributions with a series. The original series explored the work of fourteen women artists from the United States, the U.K. and France.

The current Great Broads menu is a synthesis of the original Great Broads series plus several standalone reviews by great women artists and three compilation albums; Early Girl 7″ Hits Parts 1 and 2 and Sexcapades. A second series on women artists, Third Wave: Women and Music in the 90s, has its own menu.

The experience of researching the lives of the women featured in the original Great Broads series led to my decision to abandon the blog for almost a year back in 2016. Most had experienced domestic violence, sexual assault or some other life trauma. I needed some time to explore my own status as a woman in our modern world, acknowledge the brutality and discrimination many women face, figure out how to cope with toxic masculinity and identify the things I could do to change the situation.

And I’m still working on that.