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A few years back, your friends at Sex & Rock ’n’ Roll did you a favor. A big favor. Workhorses that we are, we took it upon ourselves to slip out of our comfy silk PJs, lay down the chilled martini, and venture outdoors. At the time, we noticed a trend in modern rock: More and more females—hot females, to boot—were making a big impact on the landscape. So, we being aficionados of modern rock and fine females, we took it upon ourselves to survey that landscape in search of the hottest women making music.
And just look who we profiled: A Perfect Circle’s Paz Lenchantin; Hole/Smashing Pumpkins’ Melissa Auf Der Maur; ex-Veruca Salt Nina Gordon; The Dandy Warhols’ Zia McCabe; Nashville Pussy’s Ruyter Says; Garbage’s Shirley Manson; Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews; No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani; Boss Hog’s Christina Martinez; and Bif Naked. A nice roundup, no? And these lovely ladies were quick to tell us why, to their minds, we just might consider them sexy:
Zia McCabe: “My tits. And, of course, the half-rack of Bud that’s given me a little sexy belly.”
Melissa Auf Der Maur: “I think the guitar, with that long neck, has a sort of phallic implication . . .”
Ruyter Says: “I’m not some beauty queen, but guys are so entranced with the fact that I have tits and can play the guitar—like the combination is impossible.”
Not “impossible,” hot Ruyter, so much as “so damn sexy, a drool cup might actually come in handy right about now.” What can we say? We love rock, and we love the ever-so-hot ladies who rock. Only, as will happen in the fickle world of rock, in the time since we ran the results of our scientific study, the names and faces have changed. Aside from Gwen Stefani and Melissa Auf Der Maur, our Hottest Women In Rock have seen their careers, if not their off-the-chain hotness, cool off some. So much so that, recently, we were left asking ourselves, “Who are the new Hottest Women In Rock?” Well, no sooner had we asked than, once again, we ditched the ’jammies, laid down the chilled martini, and headed back out into the field. In the first of a two-part, er, investigation, here’s what we found:
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Sahara Hotnights (cause we couldn’t pick just one)
“Great looks and great rock ’n’ roll,” is how singer Maria Andersson describes her band, the hotter-than-hot four-piece evocatively known as Sahara Hotnights. Described as Sweden’s answer to The Runaways, the leather-clad, all-girl outfit laces together teen-pop, glam, and straight-up punk rock on the hard-as-nails Kiss And Tell, their major-label follow-up to 2001’s knockout Jennie Bomb. But that, dear readers, is only half their story, seeing as, in addition to “great rock ’n’ roll,” Maria, Josephine, Jennie, and Johanna serve up some of the best looks rock’s seen in far too long.
Amanda Tannen, Stellastarr*
Blending the dark atmospherics of The Smiths and The Jesus And Mary Chain with the lacerating choruses of The Pixies, Manhattan art-school grads Stellastarr* made quite an impression with their 2003 self-titled release, which Rolling Stone called a “stirring debut.” What’s also quite “stirring” is a beautiful presence partially hidden in the group’s shadows, delivering the lighter-than-air sigh behind singer Shawn Christensen’s sullen bellow. It belongs to bassist Amanda Tannen—for our money one of the most breathtaking ladies in all of rock. Clad in her trademark wife-beater, the gorgeous girl in the pixie-blond ’do gives both indie-rock dorks and grown men something to think about long after the show’s over.
Jenny Lewis, Rilo Kiley
Thanks to its 2002 breakthrough album, The Execution Of All Things, the inexplicably overlooked L.A. outfit Rilo Kiley at last saw its country-tinged indie-rock cross over to an audience larger and more appreciative than any it had ever known. The group’s triumph was spearheaded by singer/guitarist/keyboardist/resident-hottie Jenny Lewis, whose aching vocals and songs of heartache reveal her as a genuine talent, but whose art-school good looks make her the object of some serious record-dork stalking. A former child actress, Lewis has also done time in synth-pop success story The Postal Service. But it’s with Rilo Kiley that she’s at her best. On their latest, More Adventurous, Rilo Kiley’s object of desire is only more desirous, thanks to the addition of steamy torch songs to their already top-shelf repertoire.
Melissa Auf Der Maur
With the release of her stunning solo debut, Auf Der Maur, our favorite redheaded Canadian vixen has proven what we suspected way back when we profiled her in our first installment of the Hottest Women In Rock—she flat-out rocks. But goddamn if she don’t look sexy as hell doing it. Fact is, one of her fellow females in rock, Paz Lenchantin, has described her as “smolder[ing] with a dark, mythical intensity,” while Auf Der Maur’s former Hole boss, Courtney Love, has called her a “complete goddess.” And if honing her chops on the likes of Hole’s Celebrity Skin and Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore doesn’t make her the female ideal, then her all-star-studded debut should just about do the trick. Isolated moment of supreme hotness: End of the single “Followed The Waves,” when she promises, “I’m gonna shuffle his deck clean.” Sweet Jesus . . .
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And that, connoisseurs of all that is hot and rocks, concludes our first installment of 2004’s Hottest Women In Rock. With the rock ’n’ roll landscape changing with the frequency of a Ham Radio, it’s important to keep up on who’s hot and who’s not. Please, allow us to be your program, cause like the man once said, “You can’t tell the players without a program.” We’ll be back with Round 2 when you quit drooling . . .
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