Long May They Rock: Nine Trailblazing Women Who Rewrote the Rules of Music

In 2018, Recording Academy president and CEO Neil Portnow suggested that women needed to “step up” to win more Grammy Awards—a tone-deaf remark that contributed to his resignation.

Fast-forward to last February, when female artists dominated the Grammys. Doechii made history as only the third woman to win Best Rap Album. Chappell Roan took home Best New Artist, cementing her status as the painted face of pop. Beyoncé, at long last, claimed Album of the Year, and became the first Black artist to win Best Country Album. It was a confirmation of what’s always been true: Women are at the vanguard of music.

That is why we’re paying tribute to nine legendary performers who were instrumental in defining the sounds of today, and who paved the way for the current generation of female chart-toppers. Their personalities are as diverse as the sounds and genres they pioneered, and yet they all share the drive and determination that allowed them to thrive in an industry that was not always receptive to what female artists had to offer.

There is Michelle Phillips, 80, mama of California folk rock, mingling with Debbie Harry, 79, peroxide punk priestess of downtown New York. There is Aimee Mann, 64, the Oscar-nominated bard of melancholy, together with Apollonia, 65, siren of leather and lace, whose work with Prince still feels like a sign of the times.

Kate Pierson, 77, the B-52s fire-starter, shares space with Nona Hendryx, 80, cyberfunk ­technologist whose throaty alto powered the immortal “Lady Marmalade,” and ­Crystal Waters, 63, the club icon and high-gloss oracle of house music. We have Kim Gordon, 72, ­alt-noise auteur, and Pat Benatar, 72, the pocket-size powerhouse whose four-and-a-half-octave rock operas turned MTV into a battlefield.

Together, these women form a powerful collective that rejects the pedestrian, the predictable, and, when necessary, the patriarchal. They subverted strictures and ­transformed the record industry into something freer, freakier, and fiercer. It was true then, and it still is now.

Long may they rock.

Apollonia

Prince’s breakout 1984 film, Purple Rain, introduced the world to Apollonia, whose perfectly teased hair was rivaled only by that of her then boyfriend, David Lee Roth. “I was the rose Prince picked for a beautiful purple stage,” said Apollonia. Joining his pantheon of protégés as his on-screen love interest wasn’t easy: “He’d say, ‘You’re going to be the most hated woman I’ve ever worked with.’ He meant it with love—we were family. I don’t think I can ever watch Purple Rain again. It hurts my heart.”

The Oscar-winning film defined a hybrid genre that merged music video with mythic autobiography, influencing future pop operas like 8 Mile and A Star Is Born. The creative partnership extended to Apollonia 6, a Prince spin-off band that succeeded Vanity 6, popularized lingerie as stagewear, and captured the Minneapolis Sound with the hit “Sex Shooter.” (Prince originally recorded “Manic Monday” with Apollonia 6 before giving it to the Bangles. “ ‘Manic Monday’ was my concept, based on me wishing we had an extra day after Sunday, before Monday, called ‘Smonday’—my I-don’t-have-to-run day,” said Apollonia.)

Participating in this portfolio was a chance for her to see old friends and make new ones. “I ran into Pat Benatar, and I almost started crying,” she said. “I kissed her hands. I think I’ve only done that once or twice in my life.”

Pat Benatar

She was a renegade who broke into the 1980s stadium arena boys’ club and rocked the decade with a leather-clad persona that was as unflinching as it was unprecedented. Her MTV-era anthems—“Heartbreaker,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”—weren’t odes to sex or seduction; they were songs of survival.

Some 40 years later, Benatar recalled an industry drenched in testosterone: ’80s-era tour buses cluttered with Rambo VHS tapes and dudes rattling off their favorite Death Wish lines. “I was the only female in the building,” she said. “I was fighting for position, fighting for ideology. Every day there was some asshole trying to make your life hell.”

Her self-described “scrappy” spirit left an indelible mark on future generations, including her grandkids, who assumed all the world’s grandmas wore spandex and smudged eyeliner to work. That innocent misconception inspired Benatar to write, along with her onstage/­offstage partner in crime, Neil Giraldo, the children’s picture book My Grandma and Grandpa Rock!

At five feet one, Benatar is still standing tall. She and Giraldo are preparing to join Bryan Adams on tour this fall, when she’ll rekindle the hits that made her a legend. (Together, she and Giraldo have sold more than 36 million albums.) “It keeps you young,” she said of the endless song rearrangements and set list revisions. “Or it kills you.” Benatar still writes constantly—­scribbling lyrics on receipts and napkins, even in the shower. She curses with equal gusto. “Cover your ears, I’m going to say ‘fuck,’ ” she now tells youngsters in the crowd. Ever defiant, her grandkids admonish: “That’s 25 cents in the swear jar.” Benatar just laughs. “Honey, you’re gonna need a lot more than 25 cents for Grandma.”

Nona Hendryx

The R&B revolutionary and Technicolor technologist Nona Hendryx learned to code in her 70s—not to chase trends, but to rewire them. “I’m curious about life, and how you use ­technologies to create more life,” she said.

Hendryx began her career in the 1960s with the girl groups the Del Capris and the ­Bluebelles. She later emerged as the progressive force behind Labelle, the trailblazing vocal trio with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash that became the first pop act—and the first Black group—to perform at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. By the 1970s, she was pioneering cyberfunk chic: metallic catsuits, feathered wings, spiked headdresses, and towering platform boots. On her 1983 electro jam “Transformation,” she sings, “Change your mind / Change your skin.”

She meant those lyrics literally, it turns out. As part of her ambitious Dream Machine ­Experience—a mixed-reality installation exploring Afrofuturism, commissioned by Lincoln Center—Hendryx is collaborating with BINA48, an advanced social robot modeled as a Black woman. “I’m mentoring her ability to sing, how an AI can actually sing,” she explained.

Further blurring the boundary between woman and machine, Hendryx recently created an augmented reality experience for the National Black Theatre’s new home in Harlem, based on writings by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, a patron saint of the Black Arts Movement. ­Hendryx and her team also developed an augmented reality layer for a mural at Brooklyn’s Weeksville Heritage Center, a site dedicated to preserving the legacy of a free Black community established after New York abolished slavery, in 1827. “Artificial intelligence is just another pencil and paper,” said Hendryx, matter-of-factly. “It’s what I do with it that matters.”

Michelle Phillips

The honey-voiced enchantress of Laurel ­Canyon, Michelle Phillips helped define the sound of the ’60s as the enduring face—and last surviving member—of the Mamas and the Papas. The all-American band pioneered an erudite hippie sensibility, bringing harmonized hedonism to the Hollywood Hills.

Phillips—the “purest soprano in pop music,” as Time magazine once described her—is ­folk-rock royalty and the group’s living archive. Fiercely loyal to friends and family, she has spent decades preserving the band’s legacy, while living by a personal code that balances the nonchalance of her hit song “California Dreamin’ ” with personal discipline: never late, never in rehab, never dependent. She’s always had, as former bandmate Marshall Brickman put it, “steel under that angelic smile.” Today Phillips admits to having had a less-than-perfect record, especially in the early days: “I ended up in jail twice,” she told me, beaming with her signature doe-eyed mischief.

On weekends, she’s been known to drop off clothes, blankets, and cash to the homeless—who know her by name—as well as cookies and fruit to the local firehouse. She didn’t show up to this shoot empty-handed either. “I brought my own accessories,” she said, pulling estate-sale treasures from a Ziploc bag in her purse. “You never know when you’ll get to wear stuff like this anymore.”

Debbie Harry

Forever the queen of downtown New York cool, Debbie Harry defies definition, by design. Between 1979 and 1981, her band, Blondie, landed four No. 1 hits, each in a radically different genre: disco (“Heart of Glass”), new wave (“Call Me”), rocksteady (“The Tide Is High”), and hip-hop (“Rapture”). “At the time, it was considered groundbreaking,” recalled Harry, with a go-figure shrug. “Now it’s normal.”

She tested boundaries offstage as well, collaborating with designer Stephen Sprouse; ­haunting Warhol’s studio, the Factory; and starring in cult films like Videodrome and Hairspray. Her signature ­platinum look became the blueprint for pop provocation, imitated by nearly every blondie who followed her up the charts.

But her allure runs deeper than surface cool. She reinvented the bombshell archetype with punk cynicism, deliberately playing into—and subtly undermining—the stereotypes associated with beauty and fame. “The nature of art,” she said, “is to give a little pinch of your own salt.” Harry is still refining that recipe. She recently reissued her 1981 solo album, KooKoo, produced by Chic and featuring cover art by H.R. Giger. A capsule collection she designed for Wildfang is inspired by her own closet.

Blondie’s upcoming fall album—the band’s 12th, and its first since 2017—is helmed by producers John Congleton, whose credits include Erykah Badu, St. Vincent, and Lana Del Rey, and David Wrench, who has worked with Frank Ocean and Jamie xx. The release follows the death of longtime Blondie drummer Clem Burke. “I’m at a crossroads,” Harry admitted, still grappling with his passing. “I’m not thinking the same way.” Still, she perseveres—defiant as ever. “I’ve had one fuck of an interesting life,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir. “And I plan to go on having one.”

Aimee Mann

Aimee Mann’s creative process starts with a feeling—one she doesn’t fully understand until she picks up a guitar. “When you’re playing music, you’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s what’s been going on. That’s how I feel,’ ” she said. “It just all happens kind of at the same time.”

Mann first found success in the 1980s with the rock group ’Til Tuesday. In the ’90s, after ricocheting between record labels, she went solo, figuring anyone who cared enough would find her. Now a reunion with ’Til Tuesday is on deck. “Practicing those old songs feels like karaoke,” Mann joked, referring to cult classics such as “Voices Carry,” the 1985 hit that was beloved, in part, for its soap opera–esque video in which her boyfriend tries in vain to control her.

Mann holds a singular place in the American tradition of musical malaise. Or, as she put it, “Here’s a thing that’s legitimately sad, but also you can find the humor in it.” Case in point: “Save Me,” the Oscar-nominated song from the 1999 movie Magnolia, with lyrics like “You struck me dumb / Like radium / Like Peter Pan or Superman / You will come.”

“As soon as you start worrying about marketing to an audience, it’s over,” Mann says of her independent approach to music. “I can’t tell you how you’re supposed to feel.” That sensibility now extends to a graphic memoir, written and illustrated by hand, which she estimates will be out in a year or two. “It is mood-altering to be creative,” she said.

Crystal Waters

Crystal Waters’s catalog of clubland classics doubles as commentary on culture and class. Her breakout hit, “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” was the soundtrack to the summer of 1991. “The tune, which blasts from boomboxes and cruising Jeeps, has become seemingly ubiquitous,” The New York Times reported that June.

More than 30 years later, “Gypsy Woman” still resonates: sampled by Katy Perry and Doechii, channeled by Azealia Banks, echoed on Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Waters wrote the song after seeing a homeless woman singing in D.C., an encounter that changed her perspective.

A New Jersey native and great-niece of blues legend Ethel Waters, she had been pursuing a “Sade thing” before meeting ­Baltimore’s Basement Boys. “Once they brought me to New York’s Sound Factory, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in,’ ” she said. Her voice came alive in nightclubs. “All those vocals on the final ‘Gypsy Woman’ track were demos,” she added, laughing.

Mainstream success was just as unscripted; in the early ’90s, house music, rooted in queer culture, was still dismissed by the mainstream. “I was one of the only ones performing at Pride,” she said. Her 1994 ­follow-up, “100% Pure Love,” spent 11 months on the Billboard Hot 100. She’s since earned 12 No. 1s on the dance charts.

Waters continues to expand her footprint with everything from bootleg edits on micro-video platforms to her podcast I Am House Radio. “If I wrote ‘Gypsy Woman’ today, some exec might say, ‘Nobody wants to hear that,’ ” she said. “Now teenage boys know me as the TikTok lady.”

Kim Gordon

Kurt Cobain praised her dissonant rock as some of his favorite music. Marc Jacobs designed collections inspired by her skater–meets–French New Wave aesthetic. Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze once staged a guerilla fashion show for X-girl, the pioneering streetwear label she cofounded.

Kim Gordon is, without question, the auntie of alt-noise and the godmother of conceptual collaboration, forever blurring the line between punk and performance art. She has long inhabited a persona she described in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, as “detached, impassive or remote—opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold.”

As cofounder of Sonic Youth, she played bass lines that didn’t anchor songs so much as destabilize them. On 1988’s Daydream Nation, the band’s most acclaimed album, she delivered monotone menace. The record marked the dawn of a new alternative era, inspired a generation of ’90s visionaries, and earned a place in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2005.

Not that she’d ever bring that up—at 72, ­Gordon still prefers to let her sound and style do the talking. Her second solo album, The Collective, released last year, fuses trap beats with scorched guitar and lyrics that read like a dispatch from a postapocalyptic runway: “Button-down, laptop, hand cream, body lotion, Bella Freud, YSL, Eckhaus Latta.”

Gordon has spent her career disrupting, dismantling, and distorting boundaries, beginning with her first solo art exhibition at New York’s White Columns gallery, in 1981. She’s since created “noise paintings” titled after experimental bands, denim-skirt Rorschachs, and “Twitter paintings” sourced from the feeds of artists, directors, and critics. Taken together, it’s a catalog of cacophony shaped by sonic swagger and static.

Kate Pierson

When the B-52s debuted on Saturday Night Live in January 1980, they sent a tin-roof-busting thunderbolt to television audiences. With kooky moves and lyrics seemingly beamed in from the brain of Salvador Dalí, the quintet from Athens, Georgia, trumpeted the wild and the whackadoo. Their songs—punched up by twitchy guitar lines, razor-sharp drumming, and squalls of Farfisa organ—offered a pulsing invitation to shimmy and shake.

“People just said, ‘Whoa, they’re so weird. They’re from outer space,’ ” said Kate Pierson, the band’s atomic voice. All five members winkingly identify as “freaks,” mind you. Several—like ­Pierson—are gay. “That’s what you want art to do: give you a jolt.”

Like the beehive-shaped wig they’re named after, the B-52s’ art-surf riffs and interplanetary camp defied genres, influencing future acts from Deee-Lite to Dua Lipa. (John Lennon once called them one of his favorite bands.) “Rock Lobster” still sparks instant mosh pits. And “Love Shack”? “There’s just a certain beat—you forget that this song has been performed 100,000 times,” said Pierson.

Nearly half a century into their career, the B-52s still make audiences believe that nonsense makes the best kind of sense—and that easy answers are never the answer. As Pierson, channeling Divine in John Waters’s 1972 film, Pink Flamingos, put it: “Give me more questions.”

Hair for Apollonia, Benatar, Gordon, Mann, and Phillips by Teddy Charles at Nevermind; hair for Harry, Hendryx, Pierson, and Waters by Robert Recine; makeup for Apollonia, Benatar, Gordon, Mann, and Phillips by Pati Dubroff for Chanel at Forward Artists; makeup for Harry, Hendryx, Pierson, and Waters by Susie Sobol for EYE8 at Bryant Artists; manicures for Apollonia, Benatar, Gordon, Mann, and Phillips by Sayo Irie; manicures for Harry, Hendryx, Pierson, and Waters by Mayumi Abuku for Chanel at Susan Price NYC.

Produced by Get It Productions; Executive Producer: Tara Trullinger; Producers: Blanca Ballesté, Caroline Faller; Lighting Technician: James Sakalian; Photo Assistants: Annabel Snoxall, Khalilah Pianta, Kaitlin Tucker, Cindy Leaf; Digital Technician: Noah Esperas; Retouching: Dtouch nyc; Fashion Assistants: Antonina Getmanova, Sheena Annikki, Sofia Amaral; Production Assistants: Gio Trujillo, JB Holmquist, Lau James; Hair Assistants to Teddy Charles: Selina Boon, Kristen Barbagallo; Hair Assistant to Robert Recine: Shinya Iwamoto; Makeup Assistants to Pati Dubroff: Morgan Marinoff, Mikka Marcaida; Makeup Assistant to Susie Sobol: Shoko Sawatari; Tailor for Apollonia, benatar, gordon, mann, and phillips: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, Inc.; Tailor for harry, hendryx, pierson, and waters: Lindsay Wright.