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Have Joan Jett news to report? Email us at jettfc@aol.com, and please include the source of the information so it can be validated. 10 JOAN JETT-INSPIRED ARTISTS WHO ARE BREAKING BOUNDARIES JUST LIKE HER from: altpress.com by Tim Stegall \ Photo Flickr, ceedub13
"JOAN JETT doesn't play rock 'n' roll," I wrote two years back, reviewing her SXSW showcase for The Austin Chronicle. "She is rock 'n' roll."
It's true. The individual born Joan Marie Larkin in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, embodies the music and spirit better than anyone this side of Keith Richards. As Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong put it in Magnolia Pictures' 2018 documentary Bad Reputation, "There's just those rare times where you feel like someone was put on the planet to show you what rock 'n' roll music is. Could be Bowie, could be Kurt Cobain. It's definitely JOAN JETT." Yet, the moment she went to her first guitar lessons after her parents got her a Sears & Roebuck electric six-string for Christmas, her instructor informed her, "Girls don't play rock 'n' roll."
The fuck, they don't. And Jett demolished more walls than anyone, paving the path every woman with a guitar has traveled since.
"I was so into this idea of girls being able to play rock 'n' rollÉas well as boys will, and [that it] would be so cool and sexy because it had never been done," Jett remarked in the documentary of her founding glam act the RUNAWAYS. Instead, for her troubles, she was assigned epithets beginning with the letters S, W and C. "I've been hurt. I've had my head split open by a beer bottle, a rib cracked by getting a battery thrown at meÉ Just because I'm a girl.
"Tell me I can't do something and you'll make sure I'm gonna be doing it," she concluded.
She had the last laugh after the RUNAWAYS disbanded at the tail end of the '70s. She went solo, backed by the BLACKHEARTS, working clubs up and down the East Coast for three years, selling her first album out the trunk of manager KENNY LAGUNA's Cadillac at her shows when no major label would touch her. Soon, her mix of glam, punk and bubblegum crashed into the charts via a remake of obscure Brit-glam B-side "I Love Rock 'N Roll," topping Billboard's Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1982. Yes, like the Clash and Blondie, Jett brought punk into the mainstream a good 12 years before Green Day made Dookie.
Jett broke boundaries. She reset all standards. She didn't "play pretty good for a girl." She played great. Period. And made it so that future generations would never have to hear that insult again. But she didn't do it just for women. Her influence transcends gender, sexuality and even musical genres. As proof, Alternative Press presents 10 directions in which JOAN JETT's influence has spread. [more] JOAN JETT Wants To Smash The Stigma Of Women On The Open Road from: forbes.com Joe Sills
JOAN JETT remembers other girls at her Long Island elementary school playing Beethoven and Bach. She remembers how they were encouraged to master the violin and the cello, and she remembers the words her guitar teacher said to her, words that sounded nothing like the phrases other girls were hearing. "He told me girls don't play rock n' roll."
From that day on, Jett has been defying stereotypes about what society says women are and are not supposed to do. She grew from a little girl plucking the strings of a department store guitar to a rock music icon with her own line of axes by Gibson. Along the way, she picked up a slot among Rolling Stone's 100 greatest guitarists of all-time and a Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame induction.
"I knew what he meant, and I knew he was wrong." Jett says of the teacher that kickstarted her music career. "He meant rock 'n roll was sexual, and girls can't sing about sex because nobody is comfortable with it. He wasn't telling me I couldn't play acoustic guitar or folk music; he was saying I couldn't play rock music specifically, because it was sexual."
Jett is right about that. Sex and rock n' roll go together like peanut butter and jelly, but there's another ingredient of that recipe that's been lingering in the background since the dawn of the genre, a forbidden fruit that society has long cast an uneasy eye towardsÑmotorcycles. Elvis Presley began riding a Harley-Davidson around Memphis as soon as he started cashing checks from Sun Records. Bob Dylan famously wrecked a Triumph after releasing "The Times they Are A'Changin'". Prince sat atop a Honda on the cover of "Purple Rain."
The front woman of The BLACKHEARTS is no exception to the rule. She can be found perched atop flaming HarleysÑclad in black leather and fringeÑthroughout the magazine and video collections of rock n' roll. But though she conquered the spotlight and her sexuality with her guitar, Jett has a secret: she hasn't actually owned a motorcycle until now. Surprisingly, Jett describes herself as a shy person. Sure, she's used to singing at sold out arenas and stadiums around the world, but when it comes to motorcycles, she admits the learning curve associated with them as kept her from reaching her full potential.
"Through the years, I have had a lot of friends that owned them," Jett adds. "But I have always ridden on them. I haven't been the driver." [more] The 10 Best Uses Of JOAN JETT Songs In Movies from: screenrant.com by BEN SHERLOCK
Called the Queen of Rock and Roll, JOAN JETT's iconic tunes crank up the energy of any movie scene they're played in, from Shrek to Birds of Prey.
Described as the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll, JOAN JETT is one of the most iconic rock musicians of all time. She has the distinction of having played with two wildly popular bands - first, the RUNAWAYS and later, JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS - and she's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the latter group. Three of the BLACKHEARTS' albums have been certified at least gold, with one going multi-platinum.
From "I Love Rock 'n Roll," which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for almost two months, to "Bad Reputation," Jett has recorded a bunch of rock classics, and some of them have been repurposed to create memorable movie moments.
10. "Time Has Come Today" In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
After the first Neighbors saw a hard-partying fraternity moving in next door to a suburban couple with a newborn baby, the second one saw a hard-partying sorority moving into the same house.
It could've just copied all the jokes from the first one, but director Nicholas Stoller interestingly used the new premise to explore gender inequality and sexist rules on college campuses. Given the sequel's feminist message, JOAN JETT is right at home on the soundtrack.
9. "Long Live The Night" In Days Of Thunder
After making every Navy recruiter's dream, Top Gun, Tony Scott and Tom Cruise reteamed for Days of Thunder, an exhilarating drama about a racecar driver. "Long Live the Night" by JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS sits alongside Elton John's "You Gotta Love Someone" and Guns 'N' Roses' cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" on the soundtrack.
While the movie's script was criticized for its similarities to Top Gun, the action scenes, Cruise's performance, and Hans Zimmer's score were all widely praised. [more] In conversation with JOAN JETT and Taylor Momsen: "Until women control the money, that glass ceiling is still gonna be there" from: kerrang.com by Hannah Ewens
JOAN JETT and Taylor Momsen sit down for an inspirational conversation about the music industry, perception, mentoring women and how to instigate real change.
Neither JOAN JETT nor Taylor Momsen needs an extended introduction: both musicians have been figureheads in the rock world for decades. Joan began in the '70s when women were non-existent in hard rock music, carving out a space for herself and future musicians. Taylor spent the 2010s leading one of America's most prominent alt.rock bands, The Pretty Reckless. Until the pandemic hit in March 2020, they were essentially living as full-time touring musicians. It's all they've known since the ages of 15. But for the first time in years, they have to sit still.
How they originally met remains a mystery, but it was around the time Joan was positioned to produce the Pretty Reckless' debut album Light Me Up, which unfortunately didn't happen due to scheduling conflicts, but they remained close acquaintances.
While they might be generations apart, they're realising that with age comes valuable wisdom. "You're not that old," Taylor tells Joan. "Personality-wise you might not think that," she replies, "but still, when you get here you realise how young the 20s are, how young the 30s are, and how you're not even starting to know yourself at all until you're 40. For real."
On the evening of International Women's Day 2021, Kerrang! joined the pair in conversation. They spoke of breaking the glass ceiling of rock, gave advice for female musicians dreaming of breaking into heavy music, and considered how they've handled professional disappointments...
The Glass Ceiling Of Rock'N'Roll Joan:
"Attitudes have not changed as radically as people would like to believe. They believe, 'We've come so far, women are equal,' but if you live in this business - or I bet countless women will tell you - things haven't changed that much. But there is an appearance of equality, the PR of 'You're equal'. Women and girls have a lot more tools now: social media, the internet, you can get your music out to people easier and cheaply, and you can reach the world. In The RUNAWAYS, we had no shot of doing anything like that. We were very limited.
"Musically I still had a lot of resistance until fairly recently. [The glass ceiling] is live and well, but I feel it crack a little bit more each time. I thought when I got to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame [in 2015] it was a big deal. You just don't know how much people notice it or not. And, you know, it's never something I aspired to; I didn't join a band to get into the Hall Of Fame. But I can't explain it... I hadn't felt 'seen' since I Love Rock'N'Roll. Since the early RUNAWAYS, where I was taken seriously.
"I think until women control the money - control the dollars and who gets them, where the money goes - that ceiling is still gonna be there. And that's not to say that women won't necessarily open doors for other women all the time, either. You just don't know." [more] Miley Cyrus Reveals What Female Rock Stars Influence Her The Most from: iheart.com by Katrina Nattress | Photo by Getty Images
Miley Cyrus' latest album Plastic Hearts has transformed her from pop darling to bona fide rockstar. Her first foray into rock music landed her a No. 1 album on the rock charts, and in a new interview she credits her upbringing, as well as a handful of influential female musicians, for paving the way.
"My dad's jukebox, when like Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash would come over, he didn't really have country singing dudes on his jukebox, to be honest," she recalled. "My dad had Etta James [and he] made me listen. I never could appreciate it until I was older. [He] drove me to work every single day because we grew up working together. And my dad had one CD in his car and it was Etta James. And I listened to it for four years and it was Etta. It was Stevie, it was Joan, it was Debbie [Harry]. It was always female rock and rollers. And I never grew up with that stigma, a stereotype that rock 'n' roll was made for dudes."
Cyrus continued by praising strong women like Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna and JOAN JETT who stood up for what they believed in and took risks in their music. "Some of my favorite artists, their music has always been political," she said. "Their activism has been in their performances and their style of entertaining. Kathleen Hanna, I mean, she was writing like 'slut' across her chest and in many schools wearing a pair of panties while singing rock and roll music at the same time that people were lining up to see mainly dudes perform rock music. I mean, even for Joan, she was told like, 'get rid of the guitar. We're not looking for an artist like this. You know, if you're ever going to make it, drop the guitar, drop the leather, be more feminine.'"
"And I think that politics and music, there is a marriage there," Cyrus added. "I think there is something about old-fashioned entertainment escapism. There are times where that's what you want from your music, but there are times where you also want demand and you want there to be a reflection of what's happening politically or culturally in your music. And Kathleen's a big inspiration for that."
In a full-circle moment, Cyrus recruited Jett for Plastic Hearts, along with the legendary Stevie Nicks.
