"For decades," Lucy O'Brien writes in "She Bop," her shrewd new survey of women's role in the development of pop music, "women have been the addendum in the history of pop, with information on them sporadic and inconsistent." Not any longer. O'Brien, a British music writer, has crafted a pithy, incisively structured and well-documented classic that examines women's presence in the pantheon -- whether as musicians, industry insiders, music engineers or disc jockeys. O'Brien defines defines pop in "its widest sense," encompassing everything from rock to rap and from jazz to punk, and she writes with a feminist brio that often resembles Susan Faludi's in "Backlash." What's more, she deftly tracks various artists' bodies of work against larger cultural trends (and industry pressures) that are peculiar to women.

Reaching as far back as the blues and vaudeville scenes at the turn of the century, O'Brien organizes her material -- including more than 200 interviews -- by genre and theme rather than chronologically, with chapters ranging in subject from Motown girl groups to androgynous artists to disco divas. One theme that undergirds the book is the balancing act women often make between their work as serious musicians and the so-called "image" (or "cleavage") question. A chapter titled "Can the Can: Whatever Happened to the Rock Chick?" traces how ground-breaking musicians like Janis Joplin, Patti Smith and Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker spawned, during MTV's early years, a host of mediocre but photogenic lite-rockers such as The Bangles and Pat Benatar. With the entrance of more women into the business and technical side of the industry (to which O'Brien devotes the final chapter), musicians like Courtney Love, Sinead O'Connor, and Salt 'N' Pepa have carved out their own idiosyncratic sounds and images. To further the trend, O'Brien makes this impassioned plea: "Women need to become active as consumers, to discriminate, to argue, to read, to listen and therefore alter preconceptions of what popular music should be." Her book is an excellent jumping-off point.

-- Megan Harlan