In the past decade, music scholars have made key contributions to a growing body of literature on young women's involvement in post-WWII media. Specifically, books on girls’ and women's musical cultures in the 1960s—including Jacqueline Warwick's Girl Groups, Girl Culture and She's So Fine, edited by Laurie Stras—have developed critical musicological tools for understanding young women's contributions to 1960s pop production and consumption.Footnote ¹ These volumes take seriously the labor of young women as singers, as performers, and as listeners, and, in the case of Warwick's book in particular, have proved crucial to our understandings of the legacy of girl groups: vocal pop groups of the 1960s comprised of young women.

In Leaders of the Pack, Sean McLeod promises to contribute new perspectives to how we understand the legacy of girl groups, examining their influence beyond audiences of young women to their impact on British and North American popular culture more broadly. Ultimately, the book does not deliver on this promise but instead raises new questions about the sort of work that still needs to be done in girl group research.

Leaders of the Pack offers a chronological history of a selection of girl groups and girl singers, beginning with the Shirelles in the 1960s through contemporary performers like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. The book largely synthesizes existing research, relying heavily on work by Warwick, Stras, Susan Douglas, Alan Betrock, Sheila Whiteley, and a few other authors. McLeod's writing, despite being clear and concise, often falls into generalizations and relies heavily on summaries of existing scholarship, and the book as a whole would be richer if it incorporated more primary source accounts.

McLeod opens with a chapter on the emergence of rock and roll post-WWII that presents the well-known narrative of the 1950s and early 1960s as the period that saw the rise of the teenager, the beginning of the civil rights movement, and the consequent crossover appeal of rock and roll. It does not, however, delve into the more complex racial and class politics of the time. The chapters that follow fall into two sections: four chapters examining key categories of 1960s girl groups and five chapters on the musical influence that girl groups have had on subsequent artists.

The first section of Leaders of the Pack includes chapters on a number of well-known girl groups, positioning them as exemplars of the genre. There are chapters on the early successfully girl groups, with a focus on the Shirelles; the groups who worked with Phil Spector, including the Ronettes and the Crystals; Motown's girl groups; and finally, the “bad girl” girl groups as exemplified by the Shangri-Las. These chapters offer thoughtful descriptions of the sonic effects of the groups’ recordings and discuss how audiences may have responded to these songs. Although McLeod states that his goal in writing the book was to bring attention to the girl group singers who have largely been ignored in popular and scholarly accounts of the period, his focus in these chapters does not do enough bring their voices to the fore. Although he describes the roles that singers’ voices played in creating the meaning of girl group songs, a strong emphasis on the production or songwriting work of producers like Spector, Shadow Morton, and Berry Gordy dominates, undermining his stated goal. In extolling the accomplishments of these producers, the labor conditions around the production of girl group music are overlooked. So while McLeod discusses the importance of girl group music to young women listeners and its role in shaping and reflecting 1960s gender ideology, gendered power inequities in the studio get short shrift. For instance, the chapter on the Ronettes and Phil Spector includes a discussion of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” (31), the controversial and complex Carole King–penned/Spector-produced song about domestic abuse, but concludes that Spector's violent tendencies towards women and his exploitation of singers are beyond the scope of the book.

A study of girl groups must grapple with this difficult history. Girl group music is deeply contradictory: it both challenged gender roles and was produced in conditions that reproduced gender inequity and in which young women (often of color) were often exploited. It can be challenging to account for both of these truths, but to do so is necessary in order to fully capture the gendered histories and politics that inform girl group music. Leaders of the Pack thus raises a question that I often ask of myself as a scholar of the girl group genre: how does one listen to girl groups with an intersectional feminist ear—one that is both attentive to the transgressive potential of this music and critical of the exploitative labor conditions that produced it? As both a scholar and a fan of girl group music, I sometimes find it difficult to reconcile the fact that music that I love was produced under circumstances that actively caused harm to women and depended on deeply entrenched gender, race, and class hierarchies, but doing so is necessary for understanding this history and its continuing impact. The influence of the 1960s music industry has not been uniformly positive: it normalized systems of power that continue to impact music production today. Gender-based abuse and exploitation continue to run rampant in the music industry and keep women out of positions of power and influence. (Ke$ha's recent allegations of abuse are one high-profile example, but women working in all areas of the industry report regularly experiencing harassment and assault.) We have an ethical imperative to talk about this history and the impact that it has had and continues to have in silencing and controlling women's musical voices.Footnote ² As girl group scholarship moves forward, we need to continuing listening for the agency and labor of singers like Ronnie Spector, Shirley Owens, Darlene Love, Martha Reeves, Mary Weiss, and their contemporaries and also critiquing the conditions of production at every opportunity. For many women in music, those conditions are still a reality, and by calling them out, we can work against their normalization.

The second half of Leaders of the Pack examines the influence of girl groups on later artists. This section proceeds chronologically, with chapters on 1960s bands (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Who, the Small Faces, and others); glam rock, punk, and new wave in the 1970s; 1980s groups, including the Bangles, the Go-Gos, Bananarama, and the Smiths; a chapter on Madonna; and a final chapter that examines the 1990s through to the present, with discussions of the Spice Girls, retro acts like Amy Winehouse and the Pipettes, and solo performers like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. These chapters attempt to weave together a great deal of information, and as a result they are somewhat disjunctive, jumping from one artist or topic to another.

By pointing out the influence of girl groups on rock, punk, and new wave, MacLeod does a valuable service in articulating the influence of young women on rock music—an influence that is often overlooked or written off. He illustrates how the sounds of 1960s girl groups and elements of their performance style manifest in the work of acts like the Ramones, David Bowie, Blondie, and others. However, the chapters on the 1960s and 1970s focus largely on groups that are either part of the established rock canon, conveying an underlying implication that the worth of girl group music lies not in its own merits, but in how it shaped the work of artists whose work is already considered valuable and prestigious. Furthermore, given the roots of girl group pop in the black diasporic musical practices, the lack of discussion of girl group influences on black artists is a stunning omission. Funk and disco get no mention here, despite their direct lineage to 1950s and 1960s pop and rhythm and blues (not to mention work of groups like Labelle, who began as a girl group in the 1960s as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, the Brides of Funkenstein, and others). Likewise, there is no discussion of the influence of girl groups on acts like En Vogue, Salt ’n’ Pepa, TLC, Destiny's Child, or any of the enormously popular female R&B and hip hop groups who emerged in the 1990s and who demonstrate at least as much (if not more) connection to 1960s girl groups as do the Spice Girls and Madonna. Of course, one would not expect a book to address every artist or group influenced by girl groups, but this particular set of omissions is indicative of the larger patterns of marginalization of black artists in rock and pop historiography. McLeod's intentions notwithstanding, these omissions reflect a historiographical discourse that construes the work of black musicians as only valuable as a resource for white musicians to build upon.

Leaders of the Pack begins with good intentions but does not live up to its ambition. It does, however, point to the kinds of questions scholars of girl groups need to continue asking.