Tag

female-fronted rock

1. 

   The Band She Built: Vixen, Jan Kuehnemund, and the Limits of the Female Bon Jovi

   She started the band in 1973 in a Saint Paul high school. She moved it to Los Angeles in 1981. She fought for it across four decades, through three substantially different lineups and one lawsuit she filed to keep the name. She died of cancer in 2013. The body of work she built — two commercial peaks separated by years of structural difficulty — represents one of the more under-credited careers in late hair metal. A retrospective on Vixen, the band that almost everyone called the female Bon Jovi, and on the guitarist whose forty-year creative project the band actually was.

   By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · 7 August 2026 · 14 min read

2. 

   The Singer the Label Wanted: Femme Fatale and the One Album That Wasn't Supposed to Be the Only One

   MCA Records signed them. MTV played them. Cheap Trick took them on tour. Their manager developed brain cancer mid-promotion and the label decided they'd rather keep the singer than the band. A look at Femme Fatale's 1988 debut — the album that should have been the start of a career and instead became the entirety of one — and at the singer who has spent thirty-six years building a different kind of music life around the eighteen months when the major-label commercial infrastructure briefly noticed her.

   By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · 24 July 2026 · 14 min read