Despite my familiarity with the American underground, I used to think of Riot Grrrl in a limited way, as a regional and stylistic subgenre of rock like her Pacific Northwest brother, grunge. Short bangs and slut scrawled on skin were the counterparts to flannel shirts and long johns worn under army shorts. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy were sister bands to Nirvana, the Melvins, and Seaweed.
Sara Marcus’s new history, Girls to the Front, reclaims Riot Grrrl as something much more important and complicated. Riot Grrrl emerges as a movement of girls seeking to redefine feminism using, in part, the ethics and techniques of punk and indie rock. Through zines, activism, meetings, art, and community, as well as fashion and music, riot grrrls seized some space in their own lives, as well as at the front of the crowd at rock shows—turf usually dominated by moshing boys.
Marcus tells the story in a counterpoint that is simultaneously with the girls pounding furiously at typewriters and trap sets, and mellowed with age, perspective, and erudition. The book includes poetic and insightful analysis of the music and zines (“…‘Rebel girl rebel girl rebel girl you are the queen of my world,’ sung-chanted to a beat that could govern a drill line of revolutionaries in vulva-shaped berets…. With this incantation, the girls raise the shade of the role model, the someone they’ve been longing to see…. They make of each other that girl. They make her themselves.”), and also reflections on what was so vital about Riot Grrrl and what broke it up.
I asked Sara a few questions about Girls to the Front over e-mail, and her responses are really sharp. Read on:
1. Even before your DIY exhortation in the Epilogue, I found myself pausing my reading to pull my guitar out of the closet and play for the first time in a long while. How did you do that? Or, not to take credit away from you, how do you think the story of Riot Grrrl inspires that get-off-your-butt enthusiasm?
Josh! I’m so glad that the book got you to pick up your guitar! One of my favorite e-mails I’ve received so far is from a young woman who wrote “It kind of hurts to type right now because I decided to start playing guitar.” Yes, this effect is a result of a sort of collaboration between me and my material. I very consciously sought to tell this story not in the conventional rock-history mode of “Here were these amazingly special souls who made magic things”—not at all to diminish the gifts and talents and vision of the people in the book, which are considerable—but rather as a story about how valuable it is for everybody to make things that they’re passionate about, even if they’re not “the best.” This was a central idea of Riot Grrrl, one that had a lot to do with the permissive DIY spirit of the punk scene in Olympia, Washington. That scene was all about encouraging everybody to make whatever they could make, rather than leaving music to the Real Musicians and writing to the Real Writers. For people who are a little overachievery, and particularly people who live in a major city like New York, where there’s so much greatness at every turn, it can be hard to maintain a hold on what’s to be gained by doing something creative just for the love of it, and I’m glad the book seems to be helping people to pay attention to the value of simply creating something and being part of a conversation with a community.
2. Compared with other subcultures, it seems that Riot Grrrl had vastly less time to mature in the underground before getting shoved into the spotlight. The predominantly male punk/indie rock scenes had a good share of the ’80s to develop their codes and culture before Nirvana came out, whereas Riot Grrrl got almost immediate attention, as you lay out in the book. Was this just bad luck of Riot Grrrl’s happening to appear just before punk broke—or do you think it was somewhat inevitable in our society that a girl movement would, like the girls themselves, be objectified in its early adolescence?
I love the elegant parallel you draw, but I think the timing—the fact, for instance, that Nevermind came out two months to the day after the first Riot Grrrl meeting, and went gold two days before Nirvana and Bikini Kill played a show together in Seattle (it went platinum a couple weeks after that)—actually had a much greater impact on how quickly the media latched on to Riot Grrrl. Adolescent girls are easy objectification targets for media, sure, but condescension and dismissal are even stronger forces. Narratives about hysterical, passive girl fans (see: Justin Bieber) or puerile girl rebels are usually the trump cards in media coverage of young women (unless the young women are predominantly poor and/or not white, in which case of course entirely other narratives hold sway). What I’m getting at—and this is all highly speculative, of course—is that I don’t think the media would have known how to see these young women as cool or important had they not been linked (by geography, by scene) to a male phenomenon that was already seen as cool and important.
3. That mainstream media attention was profoundly damaging to Riot Grrrl, but as you reveal in your Author’s Note, it was a Newsweek article (which one girl called “the worst possible thing that could have been written”) that threw you a lifeline as a teenager. Is there any way to resolve that contradiction? Was it worth it for the most idyllic form of the movement to be martyred so it could save a much greater number of girls?
It’s true: Some people hated the Newsweek piece and felt really hurt by it, while I and others were inspired by it and drawn to the movement by it. Same thing with the Spin article—the experience of working on that piece led many of the DC girls to swear off media forever, but the group in Vancouver, BC, started directly as a result of some girls reading that article.
I’m going to go out on a limb, and perhaps offend some people, by saying this trade-off was worthwhile, because if you look at the stated goals and vision of those participants in that earliest “idyllic form”—getting more girls to start bands, to talk to each other about sexism, to save their lives and one another’s lives—the media attention really helped that to happen. Of course it’s lamentable that the media attention sullied the experience for other people, and the distortion enacted by the media attention led some people to feel that their ideas were being hijacked. That’s legitimate. But if I’m to do a John Stuart Mill–style analysis of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, the fact that the basic ideas of Riot Grrrl were able to spread so far, albeit in watered-down or distorted form, has had long-lasting positive effects on our culture, and although I wish Riot Grrrl could have had another year or two to shore itself up internally before the media invasion came along, I don’t wish the media had never paid attention.
4. There was something really moving about your Postscript, a collection of short bios of many of the book’s players a decade or two after the heyday of Riot Grrrl. They run the gamut from various kinds of activist to very quiet, conventional lives to Mixed Martial Arts fighter to professional sauerkraut maker. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so beautiful about these bios. Have any insight?
I just started a Tumblr blog yesterday, and the website gave me a menu of about forty preprogrammed templates from which I had to choose one, and that was what my blog would look like. Becoming an adult is a lot like that: Based on everything you’ve done up through your late teens or early twenties, there’s a set of options that you’re expected to choose from. You could choose something else, of course, but nobody really tells you how, and meanwhile there’s this whole menu of templates just waiting for you to pick one and follow it. Personally, I remember being a senior in college and actually drafting letters to people whose class notes in the back of my alumni magazine made their lives sound interesting, and my letters—none of which I ever sent—were all asking, How do I chart my own course through this stuff?
Riot Grrrl was a community of people trying to help one another come up with new ways to live. Toss out the prefab list and make up something else. When I started writing the book, I knew that several Riot Grrrl zine authors had become successful writers or journalists, and I half expected everybody to be doing in a professional capacity whatever form of self-expression they had found through Riot Grrrl. Instead—and this is what you found moving about the mini-bios, I believe—I found out that each participant really had built herself a completely original and individual life. Which is even more exciting than if all the musicians were running nightclubs and all the zine people were working at newspapers and all the convention organizers were working at NARAL. Everybody remained committed to making their life a work of art and making it up in as original and creative a manner as possible.
(Click here to see video epilogues and reflections on Riot Grrrl. Also, there is an exciting book-release event on Saturday, October 2, at Bruar Falls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other events across the USA in the next few weeks.)
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