Our Grrrls? They’re Rioting
A THREE DAMES PRODUCTION!
Dames Nation, it’s that most special of all possible special events: a three Dames email!*
Dames Karen and Sophie are carrying the majority of the issue with a conversation about attending two different stops on Kathleen Hanna’s recent book tour, but I, your Dame Margaret, wanted to write an intro about a distinct-but-related subject: girl groups!
Reason the first for this theme: Slate’s Hit Parade podcast, a long-standing favorite podcast of both Dame Sophie and myself, just released the second episode of its two-part deep dive into the history of girl groups in American pop music. Stretching from the Andrews Sisters through to KPop sensations like Blackpink and NewJeans, it’s another typically brilliant episode from Chris Molanphy and I highly recommend giving it a listen!
Reason the second for this theme: I was particularly receptive to these great episodes of Hit Parade because just last night I went to see the band Camera Obscura, another long-time favorite shared by Dame Sophie and myself. While not a girl group themselves, their brand of blue-eyed soul is heavily– and brilliantly– influenced by Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production style, which means the girl group era was very much on my mind . Listening to them with a bunch of other delighted elder Millennials was such a treat because their new stuff (from their first new album in nearly 10 years) sounded every bit as good as their old stuff, and their old stuff hit just as hard now as it did when I first fell in love with the band eighteen years ago. If this is the first you’re hearing of the band, I can recommend them unreservedly, and please enjoy this sample of their excellence:
And reason the final for this theme: This very day, I appeared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour to debate the best fictional band of all-time!
While the fictional band I repped does not technically satisfy Chris Molanphy’s parameters for a girl group, they are certainly closely related to the category. Recording the episode was a blast, but we skipped over a lot of the BIG CONTENDERS in this category on the show, so please share your picks in the comments!
*If I had the time, I would absolutely make a version of the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt with the heads of each Dame edited onto a corresponding wolf.
Two Dames, Two Takes: Kathleen Hanna
Dame Sophie: Hellooooo darling Dame Karen! We both went to see Kathleen Hanna's respective local-to-us appearances as part of the tour she's just wrapped up for the release of her new memoir, Rebel Girl. I'm a very basic-level admirer of her work -- I read Sassy in the olden times, I knew she'd given Kurt Cobain the title of Nirvana's most popular song by scrawling "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the wall of some shitty apartment, I scream along with "Rebel Girl" whenever I heart it, and I know she and Ad-Rock have been together for nearly 30 years, but that’s about it -- so I went in as kind of a blank slate. What's your relationship to Kathleen & her work been over the years?
Dame Karen: Hoo boy, it’s a little complicated. I’m sure this was just internalized misogyny, but despite being into both feminism and punk in high school, I mostly found Bikini Kill kind of annoying and childish. (Despite being, yes, an annoying child at the time.) I’m sure I also discovered them via Sassy. I had the album Pussy Whipped and loved the songs “Alien She” and the pretty, gay-seeming “For Tammy Rae.” I appreciated the concepts of “girls to the front” as I was constantly getting either just blocked by or even carried out of the way by idiot boys at rock shows. It was also for her own protection as she was constantly harassed by men in audiences! I was also very interested in the sort of solidarity that was championed by the Riot Grrrl movement, but I guess the aesthetics didn’t appeal to me. Again, kind of silly in retrospect! I also subscribed to a few riot grrrl zines but there was a lack of humor in them that turned me off. I was much more interested in women like Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Kim Deal of the Pixies and later the Breeders, and all of L7 and Babes In Toyland, who seemed like more grown up and dangerous versions of bands like Bikini Kill. Later, I really loved her solo synthesizer project Julie Ruin which morphed into the band Le Tigre. To me, 90 percent of modern pop music is a Le Tigre rip off. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but only a little wink wink.
DS: I was interested in all of those women, but from a distance, in part because they got zero airplay, even on the college station. My experiences with all of them are best described as General Awareness and Appreciation, Thanks To Magazine Coverage. I think the set-up for Kathleen’s tour has been the same across the board: a Q&A with an interviewer she invited, no audience questions. In Philly, her interviewer was Hari Kondabolu, and they had such a great rapport. He came prepared with really good questions, too, which went a long way towards taking any sting out of the lack of audience participation. Did you have a different interviewer? What was the vibe?
DK: Yes, her interviewer was Imani Perry, which I was excited for as I am a fan of her writing, but the questions were real softballs and a lot of them gushing over each other, which, great, you both deserve a lot of praise, but also zzzzzz. I did like what they had to say about parenting -- they both have sons and it was interesting to hear a little bit about feminist son-raising. Kathleen took some audience questions that had been submitted ahead of time, but they were very general and I wondered if they were real, hahaha. One was advice for young women starting out in music and her immediate answer was the only way to make any money is to get your music placed in commercials and TV, which, Jesus fucking Christ. It continues to be shocking and sad to experience how DIY is the way to financial ruin, especially since the ‘90s were briefly an inspirational time for the possibilities of DIY. Sort of related, she brought up the importance of having your own sound person “even if you don’t make any money.” Ok, first of all, who can afford that? On the other hand, there was an entire movement in the ‘90s via the woman-led Simple Machines label that emphasized the importance of women learning things like engineering and sound design to be able to do just what Hanna suggested -- have your own entire, independent roadshow and not rely on the sound people at venues, who particularly during the Bikini Kill days were often pissy men who did things like purposefully shock her throughout the show. ANYWAY…I wish Simple Machines had reached more eyes and ears, I guess. I wish there were more robust outcomes from ‘90s feminism in a lot of ways.
DS: Yeah, it’s easy to see, with hindsight (and in some cases, foresight), that we’ve been living through a multi-decade backlash to 90s feminism. I’m not talking here about good faith criticism around DEI and how painfully white so much of Riot Grrrl and mainstream feminism was (and to this day, remains in a lot of cases), I mean everything from the Manosphere and Gamergate to the dismantling of reproductive freedoms, tradwife-ry, and even that dangerous football player’s terrible, retrograde commencement speech a few weeks ago. All of which bites, is not surprising, and points to a certain lack of attention to infrastructure-building or maintaining. Although, considering how anathema selling out was in 90s indie culture, it makes perfect sense that most of that era of feminism would be focused on DIY, which is very very very labor-intensive, demands near-constant attention to urgent matters rather than providing breathing room to think through ones that are more complex and important.
DK: Yes, excellent point. It also requires solidarity and community-building, which are not things than come naturally to most Americans. It’s certainly not taught or modeled for most of us. It’s also significant that part of the reason Riot Grrrl died out is because some affiliates stopped talking to the mainstream press at all, which, understandable, as it was sensationalized and mocked and misunderstood, but it also means the movement became even more insular. I know KH goes into the movement’s intersectionality problem in the book, and I’ll be interested to read about it, but one thought I had at the reading was looking around and seeing a nearly entirely white audience and thinking, “ok, nothing this white can have sweeping relevance.” That’s not the best or most sophisticated way of considering this problem, nor was it a feminist gathering, it was a group of people listening to a conversation between two writers, but it was striking. Again, Kathleen Hanna has addressed this in the past and I’m sure there’s much more in the book.
DS: It will surprise you not at all to learn that the crowd in Philly was also overwhelmingly white.
DK: Ok, I wondered, because, you know, Boston….
DS: Yeahhhh. Philly is a very diverse city, but having been to Hanif Abdurraqib’s reading recently (which was a reading, plus on-stage Q&A, plus spontaneous conversations with the audience), also in Philly, the distinction between the two was pretty stark. It was about 50/50 for Hanif’s event, and 90/10 at this one. Which speaks to KH’s demographic – everyone who was there was a long-time fan or fan-adjacent, and those fans were also in the main, white. Have you read much of the book yet? We received copies with our ticket purchases, but I’m finishing another book and I think my 18 year-old has snagged my copy.
DK: Nice, I’m eager to hear what they think about it. Embarrassingly, I opened the book at random and happened across the part where she discusses meeting and falling in love with Adam Horowitz, so the only part I’ve read is a very mushy and adorable love story. Nothing wrong with those, and as someone with a lifelong crush on Ad Rock myself, I am INTERESTED, but I’m more interested in the other stuff.
DS: I think the other stuff is what will have the most historical value — the same way that oral histories of XYZ, diaries of people who lived in a given time, etc. — though, like you, I am INTERESTED. It’s interesting what you said about both KH and IP talking about their sons, because KH’s son was mentioned only in passing, by Hari! I hadn’t even known she had a son until a couple of weeks ago. Bravo to the Hanna-Horovitz family on such rigorous maintenance of their child’s privacy (and also I would have loved to hear some curated stories about him).
DK: He’s a real bookworm who recently made an index for himself which reading A Court of Thorns and Roses (sad parts, funny parts, spicy parts, etc.) -- KH yelled to the audience “I didn’t know it was fairy porn, guys!” hahaha.
DS: Ahahaha! WOW, I like this kid already. That’s a degree of obsession I respect deeply. [For those not familiar with fairy porn / romantasy, A Court of Thorns & Roses is the first in a very popular series of books with a massive, cross-generational readership.]
DK: Yeah, I was with Holly and she nudged me and said “that sounds like something you’d have done as a kid,” which, yes, I was indeed into making my own indexes and ratings systems and such. Still am!
DS: I’m glad! The world needs more incredibly specific spreadsheets and evaluation systems! This is the content I’m here for! I don’t think WHYY is going to make KH’s appearance available on YouTube or as a podcast, and it’s a shame because she was really thoughtful and had fun with Hari’s questions about form and process. He’s a standup comedian, she’s a poet and songwriter, so they’re both very well-versed in short-form writing, and Hari is anxious about writing a book of his own. He said that reading Rebel Girl gave him a real confidence boost because he saw how short-form writing can work in the context of a much longer project. They talked about her writing method, which I also liked. It involves lots of color-coded post-its and ideas that arrive when she’s not really thinking about anything in particular – she told a funny story about reaching a hand out of the shower to jot something down in her Notes app mid-shampoo.
DK: I love that!
DS: It was delightful and the kind of detail that’s usually invisible to everyone other than the writer. I think that’s what I’ll remember most months from now; I wish I’d thought to bring a notebook with me.
DK: Same, I wanted to take some notes but we weren’t supposed to do anything with our phones. Always gotta leave room for keeping it analog!
DS: SO true. I’m looking forward to reading several memoirs this summer – Rebel Girl, and Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler off the top of my head, but I think there’s another one on my list that I can’t summon at the moment. Do you have recs to share for the old To Be Read Pile (which threatens daily to take over my entire house) to close us out?
DK: This will be the first newly-published book I’ll be reading in…years? I am in the middle of three different “old” books right now. Only one is actually old -- it’s the Persephone Books reissue of the enormously entertaining To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski, which was the pseudonym of writer Sarah Russell who didn’t want to write something so RACY under her own name! The other two are Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin (terrifying! beautiful! Massachusetts?!) and Big Black: Stand At Attica by Frank “Big Black” Smith which is also terrifying and beautiful in a completely different way.
DS: “Terrifying and beautiful in a completely different way” is a perfect note to conclude on. May we all immerse ourselves in the terrifying and beautiful things that suit and surprise us the most!
I really enjoyed this Riot Grrrl conversation! After a concert once Kathleen Hanna told me I had a cool look and suggested I learn the bass "because it was easy!" Those words meant a lot to me in high school. (Although not enough to pick up a musical instrument!!) But I appreciated that she took the time to see & pay attention to girls, a real rarity at that time.
Really enjoyed this! I’m reading the book at the moment and I didn’t know about KH writing “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” I told my 15yo and he said “everyone knows that, Ma.”