"I Don't Give A Damn 'Bout My Reputation"

Jett grew up during a time when rock ‘n’ roll was off limits to girls and women, but with her first band, The Runaways, in 1975, she promptly blasted the door to the boys’ club off its hinges. It was the first of many iconoclastic moments in her life.

Watch Joan talk about starting with The Runaways

"Livin' in the past, it's a new generation"

“You can’t let other people dictate your life to you,” she says. “Being told that girls can't play rock 'n' roll— I mean, even as a kid, it was so illogical to me. It's like, what do you mean? That girls can't master the instruments?" She continues, “Other people have called me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. If I listened to everybody who told me I couldn’t do it, then I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Watch Joan read a rejection letter

"A girl can do what she wants to do"

Jett formed a kismet collaboration of menace and pop sensibility when she met Kenny Laguna, her longtime producer, collaborator, and business partner. Together they pressed up their own records and sold them out of the back of Kenny’s Cadillac at concerts, long before doing so was ever part of the music industry landscape. Blackheart was born in an era that did not see many artist-owned indie labels. And when mainstream radio wouldn’t play the Blackhearts’ single “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” fans bombarded stations across the United States and helped turn it into an unstoppable hit that eventually spent seven weeks at #1. Jett has gone on to score eight platinum and gold records and nine Top 40 singles, proving time and again how audiences knew something about her that record companies didn’t.