Let's clear this up right off the bat: in her new book You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music, critic Lesley Chow means strange in a good way.

This is a book in the spirit of "well behaved women seldom make history," but in the true spirit of that expression, not in the bumper-sticker version that implies women should break the rules to make history. What Laurel Thatcher Ulrich originally meant was that women who make positive impacts on society seldom have their names remembered: history would prefer to remember the Lizzie Bordens.

Some of the twelve women celebrated in You're History have names that may be unfamiliar to you: Michelle Gurevich, Marcella Detroit, Siobhan Fahey. (You may have heard of the latter's bands: Bananarama and Shakespears Sister, which also includes Detroit.) In most cases you have heard of them, and when it comes to the likes of Chaka Khan, Neneh Cherry, and TLC, Chow has this to say: "these women are not influential enough."

Although You're History, relatively slight at 162 pages, is an appreciation rather than a manifesto, Chow does have an argument: music criticism, uncoincidentally dominated by white men, has been overly fixated on legible lyrics. Hence the godlike status of Bob Dylan and the singer-songwriters who followed in his wake. Artists who don't make music for Harvard classics professors to analyze tend to be marginalized or misunderstood.

The You're History chapter list, heavy with critics' darlings, might not be the list of artists you'd choose to make that argument most damningly; assertions like "Sade has largely been ignored by critics," for example, are rather overstated. That said, Chow's larger point isn't that these artists have been forgotten, it's that they haven't been sufficiently appreciated on their own terms. Robert Christgau, Chow's paradigmatic lyrics-obsessed critic, dismissed Sade's songwriting as "well-meaning" and her voice as "grainy," whereas Chow bemoans that "choosing lyrics for their mellifluous potential is unlikely to star trends" and "no-one gives out awards for timbre." This is what Chow means by "strange": because Sade's greatest strengths fall outside the parameters of traditional music criticism, even when her achievements are recognized, she remains a unicorn.

Another of Chow's examples is Kate Bush. There's no question that she's critically revered; here, though, Chow argues that too much of Bush's acclaim rests on her inarguably substantial lyrics. Chow points out, for example, that "Wuthering Heights" — the breakout single that won Bush a lifelong reputation as a literary lyricist — was actually inspired not by the novel but by a partial viewing of a TV miniseries. The author would like to see Bush justly celebrated not only for her lyrics but for her "chord progressions that give us catharsis," her "startlingly aggressive hooks," and her "surprisingly hummable" melodies...not to mention her distinctive dancing and pathbreaking visuals.

Chow is fascinated with bristly artists, those who can oscillate between seduction and subversion in ways you might miss if you don't really listen to the music, to the ways singers use wordless vocalizations (in an appendix, she lists "The Greatest Oohs in Modern Music" and puts Prince on top with the opening to "Gett Off"), chord combinations, and jittery rhythms to keep listeners off-balance.

Janet Jackson's classic catalog is a case study, to which Chow devotes an entire chapter. Jackson forgoes "vocal pyrotechnics," notes Chow, instead masterfully using her breath and tone to "make being armored seem sexy." She deconstructs "Nasty," with its cool appraisal of wolfish men underlaid with music that sets out "to achieve harmonic stability and then vamp effortlessly around it." Chow also cites "What Have You Done For Me Lately," where Jackson's lyrically ruthless but makes room for passion and, perhaps, forgiveness (at least for a night) with the evocative chorus of "ooh-ooh-ooh, yeah!"

Chow loses interest in the later Jackson, a more conventionally seductive catalog. Conversely, she gains interest in Taylor Swift when the superstar gets nasty herself, in songs like "Blank Space" and "Style." (It tells you a lot about Chow's wide-ranging reference points that she admits initially dismissing Swift as "the prim Juliana Hatfield of our times — possessing strong musicality, but hemmed in by coyness and convention.")

Even if you don't take a particular interest in Chow's meta-criticism, you'll appreciate her insights into artists like Khan, whose "voice is about the freeing of energy"; and Nicki Minaj, who "occasionally plays the toddler," but "it is her ability to infantilize others that makes her persona so distinctive." She also defends problematic artists like Azealia Banks, whose rapid-fire onomatopoeia dazzles Chow's ear as "a nonsense buffet of language." While acknowledging that Banks can be "a provocative, sometimes vicious, loudmouth on social media, flinging out bait on topics from Trump to skin-bleaching," Chow nonetheless argues she's "the most formidable female rapper we have had since Neneh Cherry."

If it seems like a contradiction to devote so much expert wordsmithing to the praise of the wordless, Chow has a response to that too. Skewering Martin Mull's oft-cited aphorism that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture," Chow notes that "many of the great choreographers of the last century — Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris — do in fact construct dance about architecture."

As Sister Sledge, Toni Braxton, and Chaka Khan might say, "Ooh!"

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