Women Who Rock: Greatest Breakthrough Moments

Their hits include "Shy Boy," "I Heard a Rumour" and the immortal "Robert De Niro's Waiting." Somehow, they manage to go through their entire career looking hot and bored at the same time.

Girl power will never be the same. The Go-Go's started out as hardcore L.A. punkers, hanging out with the Germs. But when they learn to sing, play and write songs, they discover that they are actually a great rock & roll band. Beauty and the Beat defines a new kind of California teen cool, and Gina Schock is one of the toughest drummers in rock history.

Singing "One Way or Another," she brings punk rock and Miss Piggy together and shows the mainstream clout of New Wave.

"O Superman" later becomes a freak hit, reaching Number Two in the U.K.

She loves rock & roll, and rock & roll definitely loves her back. She's worn the same black leather jacket ever since.

The classic single "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" is a raw punk anthem featuring Styrene's scream and her high school pal Lora Logic on saxophone. Styrene is definitely a weirdo in the rock world – young, clumsy, half-Somalian, with funky clothes and a big mess of curly hair – but she sums up the eternal appeal of punk to outsiders and underdogs everywhere.

She brings her eccentric art-rock voice to songs such as "Wuthering Heights."

Fusing avant-garde poetry and garage rock, she kick-starts the punk revolution.

With Nicks singing hits including "Rhiannon" and "Landslide," the Mac become the world's most popular band.

The seventeen-minute Giorgio Moroder production puts disco – and simulated orgasms – on the map.

Dressed up as disco Martians, the three nightbirds hit Number One with the gitchy-gitchy classic "Lady Marmalade."

The album, featuring "You're No Good" and "When Will I Be Loved," perfects the L.A. mellow sound.

Reaching back to the Andrews Sisters, Bessie Smith and Sophie Tucker, she opens up rock's emotional repertoire.

King is already a veteran when she makes her first hit album, Tapestry. As one of the legendary Brill Building songwriters, she co-wrote hits such as "The Locomotion," "Up on the Roof" and "One Fine Day." But after her marriage ends, she moves out West and makes the grown-up soft-rock autobiography Tapestry. It becomes one of the Seventies' longest-running hits, eventually selling 22 million copies and spawning the hits "I Feel the Earth Move," "So Far Away" and "It's Too Late."

It's the end of an era for girl groups and the Motown empire.

Song to a Seagull introduces a new style of poetic songwriting that continues to be hugely influential on artists from Cat Power to Prince.

The London beehive diva makes her American pilgrimage for the torch-pop masterpiece Dusty in Memphis.

Janis Joplin becomes the reigning goddess of the new hippie love generation at the Monterey Pop Festival, belting the blues epic "Ball and Chain" with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. A Texas girl relocated to San Francisco, Joplin is a nobody before she comes to Monterey, but she steals the show. In the Monterey Pop movie, you can see Mama Cass in the audience shake her head and say, " Wooow " – and that says it all.

The mysterious acoustic Southern-gothic hit holds a nation spellbound – what did they throw off that bridge, anyway?

When Aretha Franklin heads down to the Alabama studio to cut I Never Loved a Man, she truly becomes the queen of soul. After growing up on gospel, she made her first records in the early Sixties for Columbia – mostly tame lounge jazz. But producer Jerry Wexler lets Franklin cut loose with the immortal Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section, and the results earn her the name Lady Soul.

The great rock & roll love story begins.

Her backbeat in "I'm Waiting for the Man" becomes the definitive punk rhythm.

The band turns from mellow folkies into the hard-driving psychedelic rockers of "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit."

They're the first band ever named after a girl drummer – and Honey's bouffant was even bigger than her bass drum.

"Be My Baby" bombshell Ronnie Spector belts her way into history as one of the sultriest, grittiest rock singers ever. Her great collaboration with Joey Ramone, She Talks to Rainbows, comes out in 1999.

He's got Cher to kiss good night, she's got Sonny to hold her tight, and thus begins Cher's lifelong reign as America's most-beloved drama queen.