Women who rock

Sleater-Kinney's rock and Neko Case's alt-country are seen as leaders of the pack.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Carrie Brownstein, the former guitarist for Sleater-Kinney who has done as much as any woman for defining the art of rock guitar, also sees an aesthetic shift from the basics of indie rock. “I think that after a period of time one thing that seems radical can swing so much in the opposite direction that it suddenly feels pro forma, and so you want to do the exact opposite of that,” says Ms. Brownstein, whose punk-influenced band showed a hint of this new expansiveness on “The Woods,” its 2005 farewell set. She added that if you put in an elaborate guitar solo “or can play at a certain speed or a certain level, that’s no longer antithetical to interesting art.” “And I think that with the mainstreaming of a lot of indie music, people are looking for something that has an oddity to it,” she continued. “I think that virtuoso playing is polemical in some ways. People either find it really appealing or they’re turned off by it.”