Little grrrls lost: angry, anti-capitalist punk girl bands power the U.S. economy.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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WHEN WILL President Obama create a Manhattan Project for girl groups?

The stimulative power of girl groups has been clear throughout economic history. France and Italy, which in the early 1960s were still emerging from postwar depressions, made smart, targeted investments in the ye-ye movement, producing international sensations such as the tireless pixie France Gall and the boyish sparkplug Rita "The Mosquito" Pavone. During the decade, France's economy grew by a factor of 2.3, according to the World Bank. Italy went from having the world's seventh to its fifth largest economy, leapfrogging China and Canada.

Why didn't the United States see that kind of growth during the '60s boom? America entered the decade with a hearty complement of girl singers--the Chantels, the Shirelles, and the Ronettes, to name a few-but soon lost interest in these acts in favor of a self-styled "invasion" of boy groups from socialist, girl-groupless Britain. Broadly speaking, girl groups correlate with economic expansion, boy bands with stagnation.-We went off the girl standard before France did.

The Girl Group Effect became more pronounced as Girl Group 1.0 evolved into a second wave of all-female bands. The Go-Go's fueled the recovery from the early 1980s recession, while the onset of the 1990 recession coincided with the breakup of the Bangles.

The effect was strongest in the 1990s. U.S. productivity grew at a whopping I.7 percent per year for the first half of the decade, while the nascent riot grrrl movement--a nebulous grouping of feminist all-female punk bands--gave rise to such standouts as Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. NAFTA allowed the free exchange of angry Canuck songstress Alanis Morissette. Britain maintained low inflation and low unemployment while outperforming the Eurozone countries in GDP growth, thanks both to economic liberalization and to the rise of the Spice Girls.

This last boom--the 1990s--is the subject of a breezy and long-overdue study in Marisa Meltzer's Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music (Macmillan). Girl Power eschews cutting-edge economic theory, instead charting the histories of various partially intersecting trends during a decade when popular music was blessed by an explosion of female acts. Like everything now, the book is also a memoir, showing the author's transformation from a sloganeering teenage riot grrrl into a grown woman wondering what it all meant.

Meltzer takes a broad view of a...