We don’t necessarily think about music. We absorb it. If the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” comes on while I’m waiting for a hoagie, I’m not going to riot. I’ll just stand there in a state of stupid happiness while I sing the whole song and mime the whistle parts. And I will get blissfully lost in Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” when it comes on immediately after (apparently there is a radio-station format where this can actually happen). These are old songs. Their age and the frequency with which you encounter them means they’ve achieved canonhood. Donna Summer has old songs too — jams. But I never hear them while I’m waiting for a hoagie.

Before canons are handed down, someone has to make them. The atmospherics around that consecration tend to default to masculinity because the mechanisms that do the consecrating are overwhelmingly male. Sometimes canons get shaped in favor of great men at the expense of great women. The recent HBO documentary series “The Defiant Ones” is about the conjoined musical legacies of the producers Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre; it includes a few passages about Stevie Nicks. When she was dating Iovine around 1980, anytime Tom Petty came over, Iovine made her hide in the basement. Nicks becomes, in her own description, the “mini baby pizza maker” for the boys in the studio. Maybe she was — and was made to do — these things. But because it’s a movie about the brilliance and tenacity of her ex, we have to live with the depiction of her — the Stevie Nicks — as a cellar-dwelling toaster-oven lady.

We take female musicians just seriously enough not to notice that we don’t actually take them seriously enough. They matter in the present. But posterity is another matter. Posterity is keeping them down in the basement in case Tom Petty comes over.

The critic Ann Powers, along with Jill Sternheimer of Lincoln Center, decided to conduct a survey compiled by dozens of women at NPR and throughout the public-radio system. They came up with a ranking of the 150 greatest albums by women from 1964 to the present that they called “Turning the Tables,” released in July. The idea of such a list might seem tardy. Something like this would’ve been useful in 1988, 1992 and 1994, when no Grammy Awards were given in the female rock vocal performance category, because of a lack of “eligible” entries.