Page updated on September 30, 2024
All news is attributed to the source from which it was received so that readers may judge the validity of the statements for themselves.
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. Happy Birthday Joanie! from: JoanJettBadRep.com
By JoanJettBadRep.com | Photo by Chris McAndrew
Birthday wishes go out to the Queen of Rock 'N Roll - JOAN JETT who celebrates her birthday today. "Put my head in my hands and cry": The tragic moments of JOAN JETT's rock and roll life from: faroutmagazine.co.uk
By Ben Forrest
Today, JOAN JETT is heralded as an elder stateswoman of hard rock and punk, with her successful music career spanning from the adolescent defiance of The RUNAWAYS to the mainstream rock success of the BLACKHEARTS. However, this reputation has not always been the norm. Since her very first steps into the music industry, Jett has been forced to battle deeply ingrained sexist attitudes and discrimination. Her journey to the top was certainly not an easy ride, and the further you dig into her career, the more tragic it becomes.
From her earliest flirtations with music, Jett's story has been one of continuous setbacks, often as a result of her gender. She received her very first guitar at the age of only 13, but her teachers and instructors repeatedly told her that she could not play rock and roll music, as that was still viewed as an exclusively male style. Spurred on by pioneering figures like Suzi Quatro, Jett continued her independent musical education, which eventually landed her a spot in the all-female group The RUNAWAYS.
Jett was only 16 years old when she joined the ranks of The RUNAWAYS, an all-female band manufactured by music industry mogul Kim Fowley to take advantage of the blossoming punk rock movement. Due to Fowley's previous experience in the industry and widespread setlist attitudes both within the musical mainstream and the punk subculture, The RUNAWAYS never achieved much success and were largely seen as a novelty act.
More than that, though, The RUNAWAYS appeared to be a means for Fowley to exploit and terrorise the teenage girls in the band. Allegedly, Fowley encouraged the band members to take drugs and drink heavily so that he could convince them to do whatever he asked. These demands ranged from wearing revealing stage outfits to - according to multiple allegations - performing sex acts. Multiple musicians, including Jackie Fuchs, Michael Steele, and Kari Krome of The RUNAWAYS, have accused Fowley of sexual misconduct, assault, and rape.
Jett herself has since said that she never felt threatened by Fowley and did not witness any of these heinous crimes. However, it does paint a particularly disgusting image of the treatment and attitudes that Jett and her bandmates were forced to endure while all still teenagers in the music industry.
On top of that institutionalised oppression, Jett also faced horrendous treatment from punk fans themselves. Spitting was depressingly commonplace during the early days of punk, and multiple prominent groups - The Clash, for instance - spoke out against it. In the case of JOAN JETT, however, the intensity of the gobbing seemed to increase as a result of her gender.
"It's difficult to get across to people what it's like to be spat at," she later told The Irish Times. "After the gig, I would be dripping in spit and just put my head in my hands and cry out of sheer frustration." Inevitably, this repeatedly harsh treatment, in addition to the breakup of The RUNAWAYS and the initial failure of The BLACKHEARTS, wreaked havoc on Jett's mental well-being.
Soon, Jett turned to alcohol to drown her sorrows. "I drank a lot, starting at eight in the morning," she once said, later to be printed in the biography Bad Reputation. "I was angry. I didn't know how to make sense of a world that gave girls shit for playing guitars." In many ways, the shit that Jett had to put up with for the apparent crime of wanting to play rock and roll music never went away. [more] Alanis Morissette on life after 'Jagged Little Pill': 'I was really lonely' from: today.com
By Sarah Lemire
The singer-songwriter opens up on the isolation of her early fame and how JOAN JETT helped fill the void nearly 30 years later.
Alanis Morissette is at a "good juncture" in life.
Having recently celebrated her 50th birthday and wrapped up "The Triple Moon Tour," a 31-city North American trek with guests JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS and Morgan Wade, it's a pivotal moment for the singer-songwriter.
"It's this beautiful perimenopausal unraveling," Morissette told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager during a recent segment on the fourth hour of TODAY. And with it has come a rush of reckonings, she says, starting with reconciling with her chronological age, both physically and emotionally.
"It's this catching up, and this losing and gaining and reframing and redefining," she says of the experience.
"It's biochemical, neuro, spiritual, identity, loss, grief and no more people-pleasing - if that's our survival strategy," Morissette says.
Being a people-pleaser is all too familiar to the musician, especially in the years following the release of her 1995 record, "Jagged Little Pill," one of the best-selling albums of all time.
"At that point, I was still in the pattern of being supply for narcissists," Morissette says while reflecting on that chapter of her life during a sit-down interview with TODAY.com.
"I didn't have a lot of people who saw me and saw what I was up to, saw my being an empath or highly sensitive, or my temperament. I was commodified and exploited. I was sort of a thing as opposed to a human being," she says. [more]
