Last Sunday, I met up with my friend Curran at United States Art Authority to attend Homoscope, an international queer arts festival. The first portion of the event was a screening of a variety of short films. Two titles I could find on the YouTube include Dino Dinco’s El Abuelo and the music video for The Hungry Hearts’ “In Your Face-The International Lesbian Anthem.”
Other noteworthy offerings included:
Lares Feliciano’s Push On, about two women who meet by chance on the side of the road.
Vince Mascoli’s Dear Dad, Love Maria, an animated meditation on a transitioning MTF confronting her father’s scorn.
Jonesy’s Poised and in the Throes, a collage piece featuring male pin-ups and Jeanne Moreau’s “Each Man Kills the Things He Loves.”
Gina Carducci and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s All That Sheltering Emptiness, which documents a New York City call boy’s experiences.
I stayed for some of the second half of the festival before carting myself off to bed in anticipation of another work week, which meant I regretably missed Chainbow. But I’m glad I stuck around for Katastrophe, a San Francisco-based rapper whose flow and charismatic personality reminded me a little of Themselves‘ MC Doseone. Many of Katastrophe’s songs address depression, confront transphobia, or focus on the mundane details of daily life, but take to these topics with humor.
From left: Katastrophe, with Original Plumbing editor-in-chief Amos Mac; image courtesy of villagevoice.com
In addition, Katastrophe also helps publish Original Plumbing, a quarterly devoted to trans men. I picked up issue #4 at the show and have been poring over profiles on a baker, a stunt man, drag performers, and a business professional. In short, Katastrophe’s efforts and worth both a look and a listen.
Poster for Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World; image courtesy of wikimedia.org
When I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World a few nights ago, my first thought was “man, someday I gotta get back in graduate school. If I were working on a dissertation, it could write itself. Throw in Michael Hirschorn’s ‘Quirked Around‘ essay and James McDowell’s ‘Notes on Quirky‘ piece on top of all the other stuff I’ve read about film, feminist media studies, and music culture and be done with it.”
My friend Erik put it differently, but in a more succinct fashion: “it’s nice when they make a movie for me.” A stylish adaptation of a cult comic book series about a young guy who plays bass in a band called Sex-Bob-Omb and has to fight seven exes arcade-style to win the affections of a girl he likes speaks to a lot of people I know.
This comment interested me. After the screening, my friends and I were talking about our thoughts, which slid into a some musings on how the movie isn’t raking it in at the box office. However, we left a packed audience at the Alamo Drafthouse. Recently, there have been a rash of quirky indie-friendly movies about hip white young people falling in love and/or finding themselves that I was surprised weren’t making piles of cash given how popular they were in Austin (see also Whip It!, Adventureland, and (500) Days of Summer, but note that Scott Pilgrim was released through Universal instead of Fox Searchlight).
Like desultory twentysomethings, this is hardly a new phenomena. “Cool” cities feed on desultory twentysomethings’ disposable income. Austin has a thriving film community, a varied music scene, and a substantial population of amateur and professional pop culture enthusiasts. Nonetheless, I do think looking at the box office activity of certain cities in relation to gross revenue is an area worth pursuing.
I especially wonder what a bunch of Southern post-grads share with like-minded peers in Toronto. Are we just watching ourselves on screen? And if so, are our daily routines and heterosexual courtship rituals boring whether or not the people in them listen to indie rock or play in bands or fight like arcade avatars with something to prove? God, we’re probably as annoying as mugging hipster celebrities.
This may be a depressing thought, and one I’ll continue to wrestle with until more like-minded productions challenge heterosexuality and music fandom. By my estimate, none of the movies I listed do, including Scott Pilgrim. I wouldn’t even wager that they recontextualize the soundtrack as an ansillary product.
As John Caldwell discusses in “Critical Industrial Practice: Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts,” these byproducts indicate how what he refers to as ”critical textual practices” help cultural industry professionals consolidate political and economic power by intervening in cultural formation of media’s significance in that process. Extrapolating this concept for his argument about the use of heavy metal in contemporary horror movies, Joseph Tompkins argues “that film music functions not only as a cross-promotional medium for marketing movies and licensed recordings, but also as a key site for effectively managing and containing processes of consumption (Tompkins 2009, p. 68).” Hence the employment of Beck and lauded producer Nigel Godrich in the architecture of Scott Pilgrim‘s soundtrack, which is just as critical to the movie’s production and reception as the casting and directing.
Indeed, it’s nice when they make a movie for me, even if I’ve been engineered toward this response.
Here are my thoughts. First the good stuff:
1. By my estimate, director Edgar Wright pulled off the comic’s style without making it insufferable. As the series modeled itself after manga and 8-bit arcade game graphics and juxtaposed the quotidian daily lives of its characters with a manic tone, this is no small feat. This could’ve been a precious movie on a level surpassing Juno and (500) Days‘ quirk, but I feel it remained grounded by solid performances and Wright’s control. Yes, sometimes this meant that entire passages of the series were lifted for the movie. But it remained faithful to the source material while using a different medium to enhance the storytelling.
1A. The fight scenes were pretty good. Since I know Hot Fuzz is awesome, I wasn’t so worried about Wright this pulling this off. That said, Wright did a good job incorporating his directing style into the action sequences. After listening to Jody Rosen, Dana Stevens, and June Thomas discuss Sylvester Stallone’s lethargic direction on The Expendables on Culture Gabfest, I remembered the importance of the director – along with the cinematographer and editor – to establish the pacing and framing of action sequences for maximum effect.
2. Michael Cera did a good job. I was concerned about this casting decision, as Pilgrim is cowardly, impulsive, juvenile, giddy, thoughtlessly cruel, but somehow also charming. If he were younger, I believe Vince Kartheiser — who demonstrates many of these traits in a different fashion as Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell – would have been great in the role.
Vince Kartheiser's Pete Campbell, a bratty child posing as a businessman; image courtesy of blogs.amctv.com
Cera’s screen persona tends to be defined by reticence, discomfort, displays of grave maturity that belie his age, and being put upon. Scott Pilgrim is supposed to be relentlessly youthful. Cera looks like he’s lived through 45 years of other people’s bullshit. But Cera struck a competent balance between how he’s defined himself and what’s expected of the role.
3. The comic is largely defined by its supporting cast. Likewise, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, and Kieran Culkin are great in their roles. Credit casting director Allison Jones, who’s been responsible for creating several great ensembles. One interesting credit is Parks and Recreation, a show that substantially increased Plaza’s profile.
And now my issues.
1. The movie ends differently than the series, which makes more sense and is considerably more satisfying. In the movie, Pilgrim and ex-girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) band together to defeat Pilgrim’s girlfriend Ramona V. Flowers’s seventh evil ex, Gideon Gordon Graves, a weasely venue owner and tastemaker. This was potentially a remnant from the movie’s original ending, which had Pilgrim reconcile with the underaged Chau. In the series’ sixth volume, Pilgrim and Flowers battle Graves. This makes their ultimate reconcilation feel earned, and also serves as an indication that Flowers is kind of a bad-ass. In the movie, however, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays her as a saturnine pixie dream girl, her arms permanently folded and her mouth always formed into a pout. This brings us to my second issue . . .
2. The female characters are much more interesting in the books. As I mentioned in a previous post, Sex Bob-Omb drummer Kim Pine is my favorite character in the entire series. She’s smart, loyal, talented, resourceful, and unimpressed. She’s also the person who both Pilgrim and Flowers confide in. Here, Alison Pill and the script render her as a lobotomized Ellen Page, only able to play the drums and deliver a pointed quip in deadpan.
Kim Pine: insert quip here; image courtesy of iwatchstuff.com
Brie Larson plays Envy Adams, one of Pilgrim’s exes who becomes a successful pop star. In volume 3, we learn that Natalie V. Adams is devastated by super-cool Pilgrim’s kiss-off, and reinvents herself largely out of revenge. In doing so, parallels are drawn between Adams and Chau, as well as between Pilgrim and Flowers’ treatment of former lovers. This is barely acknowledged in the movie, yet one of the more interesting aspects of the series.
"Hi, I'm Envy Adams and I'm barely in this movie"; image courtesy of collider.com
In short, the female characters in the movie are subordinant and passive. This may have trickled into its marketing, best illustrated by the limits of the Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator. Mine is below, but the folks at Paste created some interesting celebrity avatars.
My Scott Pilgrim avatar, who unfortunately cannot play her white Gibson SG left-handed because her arms are folded. Girl avatars get the passive aloof pose and boys get the active "rock out" pose.
3. Oh, how troublesome difference is here. Race relations are strained. This was actually a problem I noticed in the series. For one, appropriating manga to tell the story of two straight white people falling in love is awkward enough on its own. For another, having Chau be a Chinese Canadian high school student seems to infantilize women and girls of East Asian descent.
In addition, three of Flowers’s exes are men of color. The first is Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha), who actually performs a Bollywood-inspired musical number during his battle with Pilgrim. The other two are musical twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi (Shota and Keita Saito), who only appear in a battle of the bands sequence and have no dialogue. So much for inclusion.
Homosexuality is sidelined as well. Pilgrim’s roommate Wallace Wells (Culkin) is somewhat developed and well-played, but a minor character. Flowers’s ex Roxie Richter (Mae Whitman) is represented as crazy and bitter and identifies as a lesbian. Flowers — like Summer Finn before her — dismisses their time together as merely a phase before helping Pilgrim finish her off.
But I still liked it. As summer popcorn movies go, I certainly enjoyed it more than Inception or Salt. It wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped and it won’t beat The Expendables, which is making a killing at the box office. But perhaps Pilgrim‘s disappointing returns best prove that it’s a movie made for me. But arguing about it potentially suggests my resistence toward having my consumption managed and contained.
Last night, Tobi Vail shared wonderful news with the Typical Girls listserv: Kill Rock Stars’ acts Grass Widow and STLS were releasing new music today and playing a few gigs together. You can even listen to Grass Widow’s new album, Past Time, through Spinner. STLS’s Drumcore doesn’t officially come out until September 7th, but I’m already excited.
Past Time (KRS, 2010); image courtesy of buyolympia.com
Drumcore (KRS, 2010); image courtesy of buyolympia.com
I’ve been following Grass Widow‘s mumbled surf rock since Carrie Brownstein highlighted them on NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW preview. STLS’s new work also comes as good news. One half of this percussive duo is Lisa Schonberg, erstwhile member of the now-defunct Explode Into Colors, who I luckily got to see once before they disbanded. In sum, the two bands abide by two tenets I’ve since added to my list of biases in a recent post decrying the work of Ke$ha and Katy Perry, whose sophomore effort Teenage Dream also comes out today.
1. Eschew conventional rock outfit line-ups. Don’t clamor for a bassist or two guitarists if the music doesn’t call for it or if you can’t find instrumentalists willing to commit or with whom you gel. If your instrument is the accordion or you and a friend both want to play drums, let it happen.
2. Women picking up guitars and playing together will always excite me, especially if they’re interested in odd tunings or angular melodies.
Unfortunately, these acts will not be making it to Austin on their dates together. Hopefully they’ll change their minds and add a few dates. But if they’re coming to a venue near you — especially if you’re a blogger named Caitlin who is relocating to Portland — I do hope you check them out.
I felt pretty meh about Kansas City, despite its promising subject matter. Read my Music Movie Monday post in full here, and see what else is cooking at I Fry Mine in Butter.
Cover of Psalm One's Woman @ Work Volume 1; image courtesy of psalmone.bandcamp.com
I wrote about Psalm One’s Woman @ Work, Volume 1 for Scratched Vinyl. Check it out, and anticipate future reviews of subsequent installments from the series.
Back in 2009, Kristen at Act Your Age and I were talking about NPR’s coverage of that spring’s SXSW, which dovetailed into a discussion about Bob Boilen’s stilted interaction with Thao Nguyen. As the conversation continued, we began to air our shared disdain for him, which was engendered by his accompanying narration for song selections on All Songs Considered. These feelings were generated from his voice. We interpreted his voice and its tone as the epitome of rationally minded, sensitive white male condescension, particularly in his dealings with women and the output of female artists.
Having spent some more time with Boilen’s studied baritone, I’m not as prone to irascibility when I hear him speak. I still find his preferences to be predictable. However, it’s a criticism I’d wage on anyone affiliated with All Songs, as they tend to warm to the indie frippery of supposedly unadorned acts like Bon Iver, Mountain Man, the Swell Season, and Fleet Foxes. I appreciate that he can laugh at himself and take a joke when Robin Hilton and Carrie Brownstein mock his tastes. And I’ve found his guest dj sets with various musical artists to be very interesting.
But I do keep thinking about that word “studied,” which could be applied to any NPR correspondent. “Studied” is NPR’s M.O. It has long been the respite for liberals looking to escape AM radio’s conservative harangue. To these ears, NPR has as much to do with creating a through line between modern American intellectuals as rational, level-headed, and secular-minded people as the prevalence of deism did during the Age of Enlightenment. It also is particularly responsible for disseminating programming that appeals toward its white, upper-middle class, college-educated target audience. Patton Oswalt has ranted beautifully on the subject.
But the term ”studied” is superficially applied here. Sure, when I think of NPR, I think of Saturday Night Live’s “Delicious Dish” segments, which centered around a fictional NPR program hosted by polite foodies Margaret-Jo McCullen (Ana Gasteyer) and Terri Rialto (Molly Shannon). Actually, one of my classmates in graduate school is currently an on-air personality for Austin’s NPR affiliate, and she got the job after imitating McCullen and Rialto.
Despite its uniform emphasis on elocution and non-regional dialect in the service of upholding radio’s tradition of providing what Michele Hilmes refers to in her seminal historiography Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 as “the national voice,” NPR correspondents do different from one another. I never confuse Nina Totenberg with Michelle Norris, nor do I have trouble singling out Ari Shapiro or Robert Seigel.
Terry Gross; image courtesy of advocate.com
Furthermore, I’d hazard to guess that one of NPR’s breakout personality, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, is exclusively defined by her chewy alto. Of course, Gross — along with This American Life’s Ira Glass — is also noted for her interviewing skills. Though I find her style to lean heavily on assumption and often attempt to box interviewees’ responses into preconceived trajectories, particularly evident in a 2009 interview with Drew Barrymore, I recognize its contributions.
But some have fetishized Gross’s voice as the thinking person’s sex object. I find this objectification insulting and troublesome. Perhaps it’s a variation on Tina Fey’s glasses. Maybe it presents a cultural assumption of the linkage between radio personality and phone sex operator, something I had to forcefully clarify for the perennial harassing male caller along with several female colleagues at my college radio station. That several contemporary American horror movies, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, The Fog, and Death Proof have positioned female deejays and radio personalities as victims and final girls further emphasizes our cultural discomfort with the disembodied female voice.
Writing checks our asses can't cash; image courtesy of tumblr.com
Late last month, media scholar Jason Mittell posted a piece on why he dislikes Mad Men. I was intrigued by his argument, especially his claim that objects of analysis in academic scholarship are primarily determined by taste. In other words, we tend to research and write about what we like and eschew applying similar critical rigor toward what we don’t. He references Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which attempts to explore the music critic’s disdain for Céline Dion by examining the album that boasts Titantic‘s “My Heart Will Go On.” However, Mittell notes a difference in attitude between him and Wilson. Wilson comes to Dion’s oeuvre as a hip outsider. Mittell, lauded for his ground-breaking work in television studies, approaches one of the two jewels in AMC’s original programming schedule from within his own habitus of quality televisual aca-fandom.
Though I found Mittell’s commentary trenchant, I had a few problems with “On Disliking Mad Men“. He paid peripheral attention to the show’s deliberate peripheral attention to race and gender, the former of which continues to bother me and folks like Michael E. Ross believe needs immediate intervention. As Ian Bogost argued, Mittell also failed to capture a singular argument against Mad Men that couldn’t be applied to other like-minded quality programs.
But my primary quibble is with methodology. As Mittell reports in the essay, he only watched the first season of Mad Men and a few of season two’s episodes for the purposes of constructing his argument. Several commenters addressed this as an issue, though many were fans who seemed at least partially propelled by motives of conversion. Though a fan of the series, I’m not interested in whether Mittell would come to like or appreciate Mad Men. Most of my interest in his criticism actually stemmed from his anti-fandom, a position that tends to get overlooked. My complaint has a completionist bent: how can you write about something you haven’t submerged yourself in?
Mittell makes the valid argument that a season should provide a viewer with enough of an arc to motivate continued investment for a show’s duration. However, for the purposes of criticism this still feels too arbitrary. This may be a tenuous position for a person who values deliberate misreadings and appropriation, as it suggests that texts can only be consumed and interpreted in a limited set of ways. But a television series is a medium of progression and process. A movie ends conclusively, unless it’s spun off into a multiple-installment franchise. Serial television does not. Cliffhangers bridge seasons together. Characters develop, sometimes in profound and unexpected ways. To acknowledge this evolution it seems one has to watch the entire series, even if the person’s opinions don’t change.
Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), Mad Men's symbol of change in its Sopranos-esque preoccupation with inertia; image courtesy of thesmogger.com (click on the image to read an entry on Sally from Act Your Age)
Music fandom informs my criticism. Completionism is a fan practice that exists across mediums. Often this is exploited through the commodity fetish, which again straddles mediums. The same person who has the Six Feet Under funeral plot DVD collection probably owns Rhino’s One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found, which is packaged in a hat box(I know him — he’s my friend Erik). But I came to understand completionism through music. I’ve followed several artists across albums, in an effort to plot out their artistic trajectories. Sometimes, I continued to keep up long after I lost interest in their musical developments. Other times, I defended them long after they lost cultural relevance. occasionally, I’m surprised when they’re as vital as ever.
But again, we’re talking about taste. To the ire of Animal Collective’s Bordieuvian contrarianism, taste is nigh impossible to escape, much less transcend.
Mittell’s essay presented me with an interesting opportunity. During our workshops for Girls Rock Camp this summer, Kristen at Act Your Age and I noticed two pop stars who consistently showed up when we asked our girls to name the female artists they liked: Katy Perry and Ke$ha. I dislike both artists’ music, which some astute mash-up artists note shares producer credits to the point of becoming compositionally interchangeable.
Initially, I had a hard time understanding either pop star’s musical value. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll enumerate my biases going into the project. Below is my criteria for the music I like. Three of these items were stolen from conversations Björk and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy had on musical preference. Unsurprisingly, I like both artists. If an act hits on at least two of these, there’s an excellent chance that I’ll like the music.
1. Emphasis on strange and/or unexpected vocal harmonies. Throw in a 7th or a 5th when you think the triad will satisfy. Better yet, lean into a 2nd. Harmonies should facilitate discord.
2. Preference toward superficial or actual repetition. Song length is usually not a concern, nor is an overt attempt at progression. What is important is hypnosis, transportation, and the space to parse out subtle variation and compositional synthesis (swiped from Murphy).
3. Eschew conventional rock outfit line-ups. Don’t clamor for a bassist or two guitarists if the music doesn’t call for it or if you can’t find instrumentalists willing to commit or with whom you gel. If your instrument is the accordion or you and a friend both want to play drums, let it happen.
4. Women picking up guitars and playing together will always excite me, especially if they’re interested in odd tunings and/or angular melodies.
5. Tenuous reconciliation between electronic and acoustic instruments (thanks, Björk). Emphasis on “tenuous.” I have no use for a twee indie rock outfit that shoehorns in cute synth burbling over conventional rock riffs.
6. Funneling intensely private emotions through the very public act of singing (Björk has few peers in this category).
This rubric may strike some as oppressively pretentious, but these are my comforts and points of interest. I think at its best, mainstream pop music is capable of touching upon at least the first three items on the list, so it’s not necessarily a matter of art versus commerce when mapping out preferences. But Ke$ha and Katy Perry don’t meet any of this criteria for me.
The protectionist feminist in me is also pretty horrified that girls like them. While I don’t think censorship is the answer, I do think figuring out what they like about them is necessary.
I admit to being amused by Ke$ha when Kristen at Dear Black Woman, posted an early performance of “Dinosaur.” Actually, some music geeks I know like her, deeming her funny, smart, ironic, and a forward-thinking pop star. Jamie Freedman at Always More to Hear talked about posting an entry called “In Defense of Ke$ha” during a lunch date, and I’m interested to seeing this piece materialize. But as much I wanted to like her talk-singing and deliberately shambolic performance on Saturday Night Live, I could not. Also, Ke$ha’s odes to partying and borderline alcoholism register differently in a gay club than they do when a pre-teen sings about brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack. Plus, she has got to stop her sartorial appropriations of pan-Native American garb.
Oh honey, no: Ke$ha at MTV's World Stage VMAJ; image courtesy of fabsugar.com
When Perry’s second single “I Kissed a Girl” became a smash in 2008, I was throbbing with righteous indignation. Some of it was full-on music snobbery. How dare some pop tart swipe Peaches and Goldfrapp’s glossy electropop? I bristled at Perry’s image as a preacher’s daughter turned servile kewpie doll seemed to spring from the id of Leisure Suit Larry. But the message behind “I Kissed a Girl” made me angrier. It positioned Sapphic flirting as harmless, temporary, superficially transgressive, and ultimately in need of heterosexual male validation. I want the exact opposite in a pop song. You can imagine how I felt when Out put her on their cover.
Katy Perry makes the cover while Alyx fumes and wonders where the queers of color are; image courtesy of gawker.com
By the time Perry’s inane ”California Gurls” came out earlier this summer, her image as a superficially edgy pop star with a predictable sense of heterosexually palatable feminine camp did little to challenge what I already thought of her. Neither did employing venerate sell-out Snoop Dogg for guest services. Neither did playing dress-up with various markers of teenage identity as host of the Teen Choice Awards. Neither will marrying Russell Brand. Neither will providing the voice of Smurfette in the doomed film adaptation of The Smurfs. Casting my friend Chu in the “Teenage Dream” music video tested my subjectivity, but ultimately confirmed that Perry needs to associate herself with hip, fashion-foward, androgynous young people to bolster her image. Thankfully, my friend is not the one in the headdress.
So I had to put theory into practice. I listened to every track of their’s I could find for the past few weeks, anticipating Perry’s forthcoming Teenage Dream album. For fun, I tempered this experiment with Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs to test whether my reaction toward artists I don’t like changed in relation to Important Music. I also read Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love in preparation of my experiment. I recognize its contribution, though I can’t champion the effort I derisively referred to as Let’s Talk About Anything But the Album. Too often, Wilson sabotages insightful contextualization of Dion’s aspirational class positioning and ethnic identity in relation to her voice’s function as a luxury item or a continuation of hair metal’s power ballad against gross projections of his unbridled disdain or unnecessary explanations to oft-cited theories of taste circulating in Western philosophy and cultural studies. Furthermore, the chapter he devotes to Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love is a reprinted submission that reads like a conventional album review.
This potentially illustrates the limits of such critical inquiries. Though I found Wilson’s book frustrating, I couldn’t improve upon it here. I warmed a little toward Ke$ha’s Animal, which foregrounds her singular personality and features the pop metal barnburner “Party at a Rich Dude’s House.” Perry’s first two albums are joyless affairs, saddled with the burdens of putting up with bad boys and defining yourself as someone else’s vacuous sexual object instead of your own realized sexual subject. Both artists (and their songwriting teams) share the habit of putting down men through emasculation and viewing every girl as competition.
In short, neither pop star move me toward any notable form of appreciation regardless of how much I consumed. I’m curious to try this exercise on other artists, though am frustrated that taste will continue to warp the outcome. Am I really all the things that are outside of me? Probably. Can I transcend them? Maybe not, but I’ll keep listening.
Riot grrrl artifact from Experience Music Project's Riot Grrrl Retrospective; image courtesy of grrrlsounds.blogspot.com
First, an admission: like several feminist friends in my age group, riot grrrl didn’t make a profound impact of me until college. I was 10 in 1993, the year Sara Marcus claims as pivotal for the movement in her book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. I was moving away from Mariah Carey and getting into the Pet Shop Boys. Riot grrrl was first on my radar through mainstream distortion in the pages of Spin and in the Spice Girls’ defanged “girl power” message. In high school, I started listening to post-riot grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney, who were in rotation on the local university radio station. But it wasn’t until hearing about bands like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear in women’s studies courses, reading essays that connected riot grrrl with queercore, and programming a weekly show as a college deejay that I came to have any relationship with the movement. Marcus’s book is a great reintroduction and a valuable entry point for folks who have only a cursory knowledge of riot grrrl.
Author Sara Marcus; image courtesy of riotgrrrlbook.com
I especially appreciate that, despite the book’s monolithic title, Marcus incorporates the shared experiences of many girl participants. Riot grrrl tends to be defined by its adult-aged bands, with Bikini Kill and Bratmobile representing the movement. But many teenage girls were inspired by these bands. Some formed ‘zines and bands of their own, like Girl Friend founder Christina Woolner and Heavens to Betsy’s Tracy Sawyer and Corrin Tucker. Not all of their contributions were preserved or recorded, so the book’s intervention is all the more important. Some of these girls also came from working class or single-parent households or did not attend college. Furthermore, while much is made of the movement’s Pacific Northwest origins and identification with liberal arts colleges like Evergreen, Marcus is quick to refute essentializing class assumptions. Riot grrrl’s class heterogeneity becomes more pronounced when Bikini Kill and Bratmobile relocate in Washington D.C. and contend with the hardcore scene, which was primarily peopled by diplomats’ children.
Bikini Kill, sisters (and brother) in the struggle; image courtesy of jessalynnkeller.squarespace.com
Cover of Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman's Girl Germs 'zine -- the duo would also found Bratmobile; image courtesy of wikimedia.org
By dialoging band members’ and movement participants’ shared experiences, Marcus challenges the notion that riot grrrl was sustained exclusively by white, middle-class, college-educated women. She also points out the movement’s aspirations toward queer inclusiveness were complicated by the efforts of predominantly straight or bi-curious cisgender females. Previous interpretations of riot grrrl represent it as a celebration of white girls challenging gender politics in a vacuum. Marcus points out how some girls created ‘zines, formed organizations, chaired panels, and created conferences challenging feminism’s inherent white privilege, racism, heteronormativity, and class politics, often causing contention and defensiveness from within.
Thus, I also liked reading that riot grrrl was an imperfect, discursive movement comprised of many conflicting opinions, belief systems, and identities. Despite third wave feminism’s investment in the fragmented female self, so often riot grrrl is depicted as a halcyon period for a then-nascent third wave. While it’s sad to read about in-fighting and rivalries, it’s refreshing to read differing opinions on philosophies and movement imperatives. As someone who’s participated in collective and politically-minded non-profit organizations, it seems a more honest representation.
Furthermore, the presence of male oppression from within informs riot grrrl in interesting ways. Riot grrrl formed in response to the right wing’s attack on feminism’s political gains as well as the cultural silencing of incest, sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, poor body image, and low self-esteem. It also opposed punk and hardcore’s exclusionary, homophobic, and misogynistic tendencies, best symbolized by the mosh pit, and implemented “girls in front” or “girls only” policies at shows. So it was really interesting to read about how bands like Fugazi aligned with riot grrrl, but were less willing to cede control over their audience. In 1992, Fugazi and Bikini Kill played a Supreme Court protest. Frontman Ian MacKaye bristled at the idea of sharing the bill out of concern that the event would be misunderstood as a concert. He was also unable to reign in the aggressive inclinations of his predominantly white male fan base, and blamed the women in the audience who defended their space in the pit.
Marcus also does a good job addressing controversial figures like Jessica Hopper. Now an established music journalist who penned The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, Hopper was associated with the St. Paul/Minneapolis scene and came to notoriety as the girl who sold out riot grrrl by speaking out of turn to Newsweek, whichhit newsstands in November 1992. Many riot grrrls, who already witnessed message dilution in other mainstream publications, interpreted her interview with Farai Chideya as an attempt to further her own media career. By her mid-teens, Hopper launched a successful ‘zine, Hit It And Quit It, interviewed Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, and corresponded with Courtney Love. Marcus honors the opinions of girls who knew and felt betrayed by Hopper, but also tries to represent the writer’s viewpoint as well.
Girls to the Front suffers a sad ending, as many believed fell riot grrrl. Like Hanna, some riot grrrls were strippers but had difficulty negotiating theoretical rebellion against capitalism and conventional sexual politics with adult entertainment’s regressive market imperatives. More of them disbanded local chapters after internal struggle and lagging membership. Bratmobile disbanded after a major blowout on stage. Girl love is revolutionary, but it can be hard to sustain.
Marcus concludes by outlining riot grrrl’s cultural contributions and documenting the late-90s trend of commodifying girlhood and the mainstreaming of post-feminism. She mentions riot grrrl-influenced bands like Gossip, as well as the influence figures like First Lady Michelle Obama hold. I would like more of a discussion about the cultural significance of Girls Rock Camp, as well as Ladies Rock Camp. The many-armed non-profit is carving space in several cities in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and is catching on in countries like Argentina. Founded in Portland, Girls Rock Camp counts Hanna, Bratmobile’s Erin Smith, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, and Gossip’s Beth Ditto as champions. The organization is perhaps the clearest indication of riot grrrl’s influence. It certainly borrows from riot grrrl’s reliance on regionalism to spread its larger message. More importantly, it provides space for girls’ actualization and self-empowerment through music and DIY media production, which were riot grrrl’s main imperatives. As both organizations are still quite young, I understand wanting to wait and see what these organizations will become. Also, they should get their own books.
Splash!, a band formed at the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp and a part of riot grrrl's legacy; image courtesy of alwaysmoretohear.com
However, Marcus does something valuable with Girls to the Front. In representing riot grrrl’s imperfections and contradictions, as well as its relevance, she argues at once for its historical significance while challenging how we understand it. Make sure to check it out when it hits stores in October. Maybe it’ll convince you form a band with your best girlfriend and kick off a new revolution.
