10 Best Frontwomen In Rock Music History
1. Janis Joplin (Big Brother And The Holding Company)
Why She's Here: Because she's the one who started it all. Before Joplin, women didn't really have a place in rock music--they sang vapid pop songs or twangy country or soulful Motown or quietly determined folk, but electric guitar-based bands were the territory of young men. Then Joplin came along and showed that a woman could turn herself into a channel for the ecstatic life force behind rock and roll. Her raw and raspy blues voice, bred in her native Texas and honed in Haight-Ashbury, was ideal for expressing the anger and anxiety of the Western world's young people in the late 1960s.
Her performances did this to an even greater extent, as she turned into an unstoppable whirlwind on stage, her entire body engaged in the music. Every female rock vocalist aspires to hold a crowd's rapt attention the was Joplin could. And her untimely death at the age of 27 merely cemented her mythical status in the annals of rock history.
Highlight: "Piece of My Heart," off Big Brother and the Holding Company's 1968 album Cheap Thrills, features Joplin at her acerbic best. She howls her way through the song with impeccable phrasing and tone, her love bleeding out through her mouth via primal screams. Nearly fifty years after its release, "Piece of My Heart" remains one of the best female vocal performances ever.