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Musikalsk feminisme og antikapitalistiske mulighedsorienteringer i 1970’ernes Århus

Abstract

The late 1970s saw several new currents of music played by all-women bands within the cultural orbit of rock music, in Denmark as well as other parts of the Western hemisphere. While the most commercially successful and best remembered Danish allwomen rock bands of the 1970s aimed at proving the capabilities of individual female musicians within pre-established cultural norms of music-making, others subjected music culture as such to political critique. The latter current, emerging in close contact with the new feminist movements and radical new-left politics, strove to develop new senses of community and equal participation around music, attempting to dismantle conventional, gendered hierarchies between active musician and passive audiences. This implied a conception of music as not only an expression of established social relations but also a strategic pivot of change and a utopian premonition of better futures. Focusing on Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, as a hub of such musico-political radicalism, this article explores the intentions, strategies and experiences of the largely forgotten radical project of anticapitalist-feminist all-women rock bands as an example of historical orientations of possibility.