The original riot grrrl

Ellen Willis, the New Yorker's first pop critic and a pro-sex feminist, was a literary Janis Joplin to generations of women. In tribute, we present her 1976 essay on the singer.

Read more: Feminism, Rock 'n' Roll, generations, Life

Photo: (Janis) AP/WideWorld

Ellen Willis (left) and Janis Joplin

Nov. 13, 2006 | Ellen Willis -- feminist, critic, professor, revolutionary and occasional Salon contributor -- died of lung cancer on Nov. 9. Willis was, in my mind, the original riot grrrl. A brilliant political essayist, journalist and music writer, in the late 1960s and 1970s, Willis was the first popular music critic for the New Yorker and also wrote for the Nation, Rolling Stone and Dissent. Socially reticent and humble, her written words were forceful, generous, pensive and irreverent. She lived out loud through her language. An avowed atheist, Willis' idea of prayer was social justice.

In New Journalism, writers like Tom Wolfe and gonzo Hunter Thompson dived right in. They read the social world like a Zap comic, like the Ramones. But Willis went further, transforming the personal into the cultural politic, inciting two generations of women to write the social text. Smart, cool, serious good-bad girls like her who loved sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Her writing was powerful, reasoned and hip; sexy and playful about ideas; and full metal jacket on principles. She was never shy about controversy, railing against the sexual prudery she saw in the feminist movement, decrying the anti-intellectualism of the Clinton years, inciting the Nader vote in these pages.

Willis had been my idol ever since I was a teenager, sneaking the forbidden Village Voice into the house past my right-wing paramilitary dad. I remember the first time I saw her byline in the Village Voice -- the Jewish police captain's daughter from Queens didn't hide her sex as "E. Willis" or stick to "women's issues." There she was, Ellen Willis, feminist, smart and determined. As an editor at the Village Voice, she taught me how to write and to speak my own truth. That's a sacred practice in a profane world.

When and where she entered, the doors ripped open and two generations of women followed madly behind her. She was our literary Janis Joplin, sexy about ideas, hungry for truth, thirsting for individual freedom. Willis' daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, an editorial fellow at Salon, appropriately selected this essay on Joplin from her mother's collected works, originally published in "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll." In Ellen Willis we all lost a great American intellectual -- scholar, patriot, hero, friend and fearless warrior goddess, first battalion. But her words are immortal -- alive and kicking.

-- Donna Gaines

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Janis Joplin

The hippie rock stars of the late sixties merged two versions of that hardy American myth, the free individual. They were stars, which meant achieving liberation by becoming rich and famous on their own terms; and they were, or purported to be, apostles of cultural revolution, a considerably more ambitious and romantic vision of freedom that nevertheless had a similar economic foundation. Young Americans were in a sense the stars of the world, drawing on an overblown prosperity that could afford to indulge all manner of rebellious and experimental behavior. The combination was inherently unstable -- Whitman's open road is not, finally, the Hollywood Freeway, and in any case neither stardom nor prosperity could deliver what it seemed to promise. For a fragile historical moment rock transcended those contradictions; in its aftermath, our pop heroes found themselves grappling, like the rest of us, with what are probably enduring changes in the white American consciousness -- changes that have to do with something very like an awareness of tragedy. It is in this context that Janis Joplin developed as an artist, a celebrity, a rebel, a woman, and it is in this context that she died.

Joplin belonged to that select group of pop figures who mattered as much for themselves as for their music; among American rock performers she was second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation's history and mythology. She was also the only woman to achieve that kind of stature in what was basically a male club, the only sixties culture hero to make visible and public women's experience of the quest for individual liberation, which was very different from men's. If Janis's favorite metaphors -- singing as fucking (a first principle of rock-and-roll) and fucking as liberation (a first principle of the cultural revolution) -- were equally approved by her male peers, the congruence was only on the surface. Underneath -- just barely -- lurked a feminist (or prefeminist) paradox.

The male-dominated counterculture defined freedom for women almost exclusively in sexual terms. As a result, women endowed the idea of sexual liberation with immense symbolic importance; it became charged with all the secret energy of an as yet suppressed larger rebellion. Yet to express one's rebellion in that limited way was a painfully literal form of submission. Whether or not Janis understood that, her dual persona -- lusty hedonist and suffering victim -- suggested that she felt it. Dope, another term in her metaphorical equation (getting high as singing as fucking as liberation) was, in its more sinister aspect, a pain killer and finally a killer. Which is not to say that the good times weren't real, as far as they went. Whatever the limitations of hippie rock star life, it was better than being a provincial matron -- or a lonely weirdo.

Next page: "It was seeing Janis Joplin that made me resolve, once and for all, not to get my hair straightened"