What may be most dismaying about Smith’s book is the way it has been marketed and how well that marketing has been received. “For years, you’ve listened to men talk about all things music, but the female perspective has been missing. Until now,” the back flap reads. “Finally, here is a voice that speaks to women!” Early press clippings sent along by the book’s publisher—from rags as fluffy as Nylon and stately (and fluffy) as Vanity Fair—echo this cry of relief, which sounds not unlike something one of Ellen Willis’s readers might have uttered in the late 1960s, when such a thing truly was a rarity.

It wouldn’t seem prudent to begrudge the presentation and reception of Smith’s book if the book itself didn’t seem so satisfied by this same historyless view of itself. Embarrassingly few female music writers are mentioned in Record Collecting for Girls, and it’s hard not to wonder if Smith simply didn’t know any existed. One who makes the cut is the aforementioned Pamela Des Barres, the groupie and author of multiple tell-all memoirs; the other is New York Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg, who, in a particularly baffling chapter on which performer might or might not be the next Madonna, gets a nod for her offhand remark comparing Sri Lankan singer M.I.A. to a young Madge. And that’s it for the ladies.