A long-overdue collection of Jessica Hopper's music writingplants a flag for female rock critics

During my infancy at the Reader some seven years ago, I got to know Jessica Hopper through herwriting. Although she was a regular freelancer for the paper, she was rarely if at all seen in theoffice. Instead, Hopper was part of a nomadic bunch of music-journo idealists who took obviouspleasure both in the freedom of the freelance life and in the writing itself.

Hopper had a very personal and distinctive style that was never alienating to her readers butactually drew them in more than here-are-the-facts reporting. Whether she was documenting a fewweeks she spent at the suburban teenage wasteland of Warped Tour or snarking at a soulless 20th-anniversary Nirvana box set, she was happy to muse at the anthill of the music scene through amagnifying glass--and for everyone's enjoyment, particularly her own, she'd sometimes refract a rayof sun here and there to scorch a hole in it.

Now settled into a senior editor position at Pitchfork, Hopper has just released a new book, The FirstCollection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. As she puts it in a short preface, the hard-core, slightly tongue-in-cheek title "is about planting a flag" and "is not meant to erase our historybut rather to help mark the path." Broken into eight parts (Chicago, Real/Fake, Nostalgia, California,Faith, Bad Reviews, Strictly Business, and Females), the work is an aughts-era hodgepodge ofreviews, escapades, oral histories, investigative features, and stream-of-consciousness meditationsfrom her Tumblr page, Tinyluckgenius, that flows in a happy sort of disjointedness. While Hopperoften brings her own experiences into narratives--as in her EMP Pop Conference paper "LouderThan Love: My Teen Grunge Poserdom," which is her punk-rock coming-of-age story--the rawpersonal notes are reserved for the subjects of each piece.

The collection shows off Hopper's range: it skates from "Sweet Things," a whimsical open letter toSufjan Stevens, to "Will the Stink of Success Ruin the Smell?," a deconstruction of the undergroundvenue the Smell, to "You Will Ache Like I Ache: The Oral History of Hole's Live Through This."

There's also some serious journalism. An in-depth 2013 interview with Jim DeRogatis about hiscoverage of the R. Kelly sexual-assault scandal in the late 90s reveals that the former Sun-Timespop-music critic still struggles with the details he uncovered in his reporting. And Hopper'sincredible 2009 Reader profile of Pedro the Lion's David Bazan details a front man's battle with hisfaith (or lack thereof) as he returns to perform at the Christian music festival Cornerstone, fouryears after being exiled for getting wasted on the festival grounds.

This is a collection that is long overdue, but for readers who have only recently discovered Hopper,it shows the evolution of a distinctive voice into a well-known byline. v

Tags: Book Review, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, Jessica Hopper,Pitchfork, Tumblr, EMP Pop Conference, Sufjan Stevens, the Smell, Jim DeRogatis, R. Kelly, Pedrothe Lion, David Bazan, Corner Stone, Recommended

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