Speakers
Sarah Hill
Dr. Sarah Hill is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. She has been Co-ordinating Editor of the journal Popular Musicsince 2012, and has published on issues of popular music historiography, popular music and politics, and popular music and cultural identity, particularly as it relates to the Welsh language. Her most recent monograph was San Francisco and the Long 60s (Bloomsbury, 2016); she is currently editing a collection of essays on one-hit wonders (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021) and, with Professor Allan Moore, the Oxford Handbook of Progressive Rock.
Women and Progressive Rock: A Fable in Three Parts
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Sarah Hill
‘When Robert Fripp looked out from the stage of the Anfiteatro Romano in Pompei during a King Crimson show there in July 2018, he saw something he didn’t expect: women.’
So opens a recent Rolling Stone feature on Robert Fripp.[1] The reader is presumably in on the joke: progressive rock is ‘boys’ music’; progressive rock is intellectual; progressive rock isn’t sexy. For fifty years progressive rock has been burdened with these stereotypes, perpetuated by the media and prog musicians alike. Looking back on his half-century at the helm of King Crimson, Fripp told Rolling Stone that he wished his band’s current incarnation would ‘move outside of the conventional male prog ghetto’. This raises questions of course: where is this prog ghetto, and why does Fripp – indeed why do we – assume that there aren’t any women there? To answer these questions I will present three short tales about progressive rock: one that tells of women in the audience, another that uncovers stories written by women in the music press, and finally a detective story that finds increasingly more women stepping onto the prog rock stage, from the late-1960s right to the present day.
[1] Hank Shteamer, ‘The Crimson King Seeks a New Court’, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2019.
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