Alice Echols is professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She has written four books about the long Sixties, including Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin and Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Her latest book, Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking, explores the underbelly of American capitalism through a Depression-era banking scandal.

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) was the first rock critic for the New Yorker, an editor and columnist at the Village Voice, and cofounder of the radical feminist group Redstockings. Her award-winning posthumous collection of rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, was published in 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.