Following the release of her new album, ‘Another Door’ with Tripsitter, Ann Wilson recently had a chat with Audacy Check In. At one point during the interview, the topic revolved around the sexism she and her sister, Nancy Wilson, experienced during the ’70s and ’80s rock era, as she explained:
“I think that people used to misinterpret us a lot. The only real image for rock women that people understood at that time was like the Lita Ford-type, real, real sexy kind of porn girl image. And Nancy and I have never been that. We’ve always been more down-to-earth gals that you can go camping with.”
Giving an example, the singer went on:
“So I think in the early days, there was a lot of misinterpretation going on. Especially in the ’80s, they really wanted Nancy to be the front and center, wearing almost no clothes, jumping off the cliff with a guitar. So she had to go through a lot of that.”
She also commented on women’s situation in the ’80s rock scene by saying:
“I don’t know whether the woman thing in rock was the chicken or the egg because, for a long time, women didn’t even attempt to enter the rock scene because it was just too hard.”
Revealing what female rockers faced at the time, the Heart member added:
“I mean, nobody took you seriously. Nobody gave you any credibility. So you didn’t even try. But once a few of us kicked the door open enough to squeeze through, more and more women started to come in and see that it was okay and you could do it. But it’s a struggle because you’re always gonna be misinterpreted.”
Wilson once mentioned that she wrote 1977’s ‘Barracuda‘ about some of these struggles after finding out about an ad that presented her relationship with Nancy as lesbian love. Still, according to her sister, sexism directed at them didn’t stop with the song, as she told People magazine:
“It was a harder time to feel taken seriously because of the objectification in the videos and the corsets and the stilettos. It was the ego-driven style of the cocaine era that we were in, which was not quite as hippie as where we had come from.”
Heart’s commercial decline followed the release of ‘Barracuda,’ although the band made a comeback with the album ‘Heart’ in 1985 by launching four top-10 songs: ‘What About Love,’ ‘Never,’ ‘These Dreams,’ and ‘Nothin’ At All.’
