![]() ![]() Embarrassingly, I was very much a “not like other girls” girl growing up. Jett’s presence in that male-dominated, old-school rock world was a signal to my younger self that I could take up space there too. If she can do it, and sound so cool doing it, I thought, why can’t I?īut playing an instrument, of course, is just one way of being into an alternative subculture. She was one of the people who inspired me to pick up a real guitar, with ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’ being one of the first songs I ever learnt properly. Joan Jett’s take on the hard rock of the ’80s was a gateway for me in so many ways. It felt like I’d discovered gravity, or fire-something that’d obviously been there for long before I was born but that’d irrevocably changed how I saw the world. From then on I was gazing longingly at studded belts in charity shops, or scribbling little rants in my journals about how I wished I knew more rockers because god, I wanted to talk to someone about this. Her name and her song title flashed up at the bottom of the screen: ‘Hate Myself For Loving You’ – Joan Jett. I’d hardly ever heard women making the kind of rock music I was listening to, let alone sounding as unshakeably confident as the blokes of the genre. A marching beat, a guitar revved like an engine, and a woman at the centre of it all, snarling.Įven singing about being hopelessly devoted to her man she sounded like a badass. But loading up one of the games, I vividly remember hearing a song intro I just couldn’t not search up. My song choice was pretty limited all I wanted to play was the old macho hair metal my dad put on in the car, or indie songs that were generic enough to get played on the radio. My tiny hands could barely reach all the wee buttons but it didn’t stop me. I’d kill hours in our playroom, sacrificing valuable Disney Channel sitcom time to pretend I was some leather-jacket-toting rockstar. Like any edgy young person who grew up in the mid-to-late 2000s, I was obsessed with Guitar Hero. ![]()
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