Eternal Cavalier Press is proud to release details from our third title, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90′s and Changed Canadian Music by celebrated Vancouver-based music journalist Andrea Warner, due April 2015.
We Oughta Know is equal parts music criticism, cultural analysis, and feminist coming-of-age memoir. In a series of thought-provoking, subversive, vulnerable and intelligent essays, Warner writes about the four best-selling Canadian artists in Canada: Alanis Morissette, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, and Shania Twain. Narrowing in on the five-year period between 1993 and 1997, Warner focuses on the music and legacies of the four artists, and their influences on her as a teenage girl.
The book will be presented as a series of essays with titles that include: Adventures in Sexism: Media, Music Critics, and Mucking up the Boys Club; Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill, and 1995: What it Feels Like for a Girl; and Of Feminist Heroes, Vapid Wonders, Madonnas, and “Whores.” Capturing the intriguing wit and detailed research skills Warner has displayed as a writer/associate producer at CBC Music, We Oughta Know is a powerful debut from one of the strongest young voices in music journalism that will appeal to fans of music, pop culture, feminist art, and engaging, razor-sharp criticism.
“To me, women have always been at the forefront of Canadian music. But I know that’s not the case for a lot of people,” Warner says. “I started to find all these weird statistics that proved it wasn’t just in my head, and I wanted to explore that. What has it meant to me, to music, and Canada? How have our perceptions of them been shaped — sometimes unfairly — by the media and our own biases? Dion, Twain, Morissette, and McLachlan are these hugely important artists, they really did change everything, but they don’t always get the respect they deserve. Sometimes even from me.”
Some aspects of We Oughta Know have already been examined in Warner’s pieces for CBC Music, but it’s the personal perspective that she adds to both her critical writing and her examination of feminism in Canadian music that will make We Oughta Know one of the most talked about music books of 2015.
We Oughta Know will be available at independent bookstores and online retailers across Canada.
Eternal Cavalier Press is proud to continue its look at Canadian music stories that often go untold with a commitment to furthering the conversation about Canadian music and developing independent music culture in Canada.
Andrea Warner has contributed to the CBC, Exclaim!, the Georgia Straight and the Globe and Mail. She is a Polaris Prize Jury member who served on the Grand Jury in 2013.
