The problem for women is that our role in popular music was codified long ago. And it was codified, in part, by the early music press. In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments—the Rolling Stones vs. Muddy Waters, Motown vs. Stax, Bob Dylan vs. the world—was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony. Whether a teen-age fan or a member of a girl group, women lacked genuine grit—even female critics thought so. “The Supremes epitomize the machine-like precision of the Motown sound,” wrote Lillian Roxon in her rock encyclopedia. “Everything is worked out for them and they don’t buck the system.” Judgments like that are still routinely applied to female artists today. In Hopper’s book, under the chapter heading “Real/Fake,” appears a 2012 essay on Lana Del Ray, an artist whose look harks back to those big-haired, mascaraed sixties singers, and whose career has unfolded beneath a cloud of suspicion as to her credentials, musical and otherwise. “As an audience, we make a big stink about wanting the truth, but we’re only really interested in the old myths,” Hopper writes. The myth of women’s deceitfulness is one of the oldest.