It is tempting to write about the many famous all-male punk bands that Viv Albertine’s band, The Slits, influenced and inspired. Many reviewers, writing about her new memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys have been unable to resist that temptation. But isn’t the message of so many female rockers that they can make music on their own terms? That instead of settling for being the girlfriend-of, muse-of, or neglected-wife-of (insert badass rock dude here), why not cut out the middle man and just become a rock star yourself?

For sure that’s the take-away of Albertine’s visceral, honest, and unapologetic memoir of her years as lead guitarist and songwriter for The Slits, and all the adventures and misadventures in love and music that followed. So, rather than name the names of the boys, boys, boys Albertine and her bandmates dated and dallied with, let’s instead pay homage to her sisters in musical solidarity and check out some other memoirs by and biographies of women who would rather be in front of the microphone than waiting offstage.

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Patti Smith wanted to be a poet before she became a rock star. If she hadn’t found music we’d never have Horses, but if she hadn’t first understood the power of the unadorned word, this memoir wouldn’t be half as powerful. In prose as plainspoken yet evocative as her lyrics, Smith writes about her early days running around New York with her lover, friend, and co-muse, Robert Mapplethorpe. He would go on to become a famous photographer and die of AIDS; she would ascend to the stratosphere of punk goddess infamy, where she resides to this day.

Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh

Imagine you’re barely out of your teens. Your band is finally getting some attention, and looks primed to break out into the big time. You’re enrolled in college. The future could not be rosier. Then you get diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and the medication for the disease robs your creativity. What do you do? Such was the dilemma facing Kristin Hersh, frontwoman of Throwing Muses, in 1985. In this memoir she writes about how she negotiated her music, her mental illness, motherhood, and her decades-long career in rock.

Lips Unsealed by Belinda Carlisle

The Eighties weren’t just about guitar gods in Spandex and foot-high bangs, or androgynous Brits moaning behind synthesizers. It was also a decade when girl bands stormed the stage -- some in leather and combat boots; others, like the Go-Go’s, in less threatening garb. But just because they looked perky didn’t mean they couldn’t rock. In this memoir of her time as lead Go-Go, Carlisle writes about having the beat, losing it, and finding it again on the other side of fame.

Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus

It started in the Pacific Northwest, and, for a few years, it threatened to kick the boys in flannel offstage. The riot grrrl movement was part musical expression, part political protest, and completely a blast for the women of bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsey. Marcus interviews all the grrrls for this history of the movement, reliving the glory of their shows and examining the cultural context of this punk feminist uprising.

Buried Alive by Myra Friedman

Freedom may be just another word for nothing left to lose, but it also means being talented and famous enough to stop caring what the world thinks of you, and just sing the songs you want to sing. In this biography of Janis Joplin, Friedman writes about the homely girl from small-town Texas who made her way to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury convinced she was destined to set the world on fire, and managed to do just that.