The one in which I discover the artistic link between Sleater-Kinney, Patti Smith, and The Dixie Chicks

A woman I once respected described Sleater-Kinney as having “all the passion of remedial math.” A half-decade later this comparison still flummoxes me.

SK’s alleged lack of passion was part of larger online discussion on why rock fans don’t (or won’t) listen to female-fronted bands. I find it disheartening, though not really surprising anymore, when a women discredits art made by other women. Maybe she was fully convinced that Sleater-Kinney’s music was atonal, dispassionate noise, but I don’t hear it. I think it’s hard to look at that and not see the bigger issue at play: the old trope that women don’t “rock.” And the few that do — the ones granted access to the boys’ side of the playground — do so only because they co-opt a “male” style of rocking.

So who got a pass that day? Chrissie Hynde for one. Patti Smith did, sort of, when she wasn’t accused of being “the last hippy,” rather than “the first punk.” (This is fairly apt, by the way, but I dare anyone who doesn’t think Patti Smith isn’t a rock star in the truest sense of the word to go to one of her shows if you get the chance.) Throughout their careers, both women have aligned themselves with men, and, at least in Patti’s case, eschewed the feminist label in favor of the “artist” one.



I think what a lot of music fans mean when they don't like an artist's work is, really, they don't like the artist's "brand." I know I'm guilty of this. Sometimes it's really hard to separate the music someone makes with its cultural implications. I don't like country music. There. I said it.

And of course, this is a lie. I like the sound of county music, but the baggage that comes with it -- the stereotype of a country music fan who has a Toby Keith bumper sticker sandwiched between an NRA one, and another that says, "She's a child, not a choice." Logically, I know not everyone who listens to mainstream country music is a right-wing, second amendment supporting, anti-choicer, but that image is prevalent enough to make me groan when someone tells me he is, well, a Toby Keith fan.



The Dixie Chicks subverted country music's "narrative," and did so in a commercially devastating way after Natalie Maines's denouncement of the Iraq war and then-president Bush. (Check out the documentary Shut Up and Sing for the whole story.) Would I like them -- or admit to -- had they not recorded this song? I don't know. "Ready to Make Nice," is a great song under any circumstances, but it also solidified their position as country music outsiders, which is part of the appeal.

Why you can't force a "click" moment

I'm reading Amy Spalding's essay on Sleater-Kinney in Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, and there's a lot I can relate to -- and a lot I don't.

I more fascinated than envious of women who came to feminism by way of pop culture. I'm not trying to sound condescending -- sometimes I truly think I missed a crucial step in my third-wave feminist development. For most of my life, I've never turned to music for more than entertainment. Oh, I can "nerd out" with the best of them, but a great album has never caused a seismic shift in my thinking. I breathed a sign of relief reading through the rest of the book. Most women who call themselves feminist don't because of Ani, Liz, Courtney or Kathleen. Still...

I never had a "click" moment.



Like Spalding, I came to Sleater-Kinney kind of late to the game. I knew they were a very good, nay, great rock band who were loosely tied to the riot grrrl scene of the 90s. (A scene that largely passed me and probably a lot of girls in the middle of the country by.) Did the music resonate with me? Sure, of course it did. It was the first time I'd seriously listened to music made by and for women that definitely wasn't radio-friendly. I was a dyed-in-the-wool music snob by then with a perfectly cultivate disdain for the top forty pap of the 80s, but the heavier rock that followed was too dark and plodding to hold my interest for long. Sleater-Kinney was a pretty good match, and frankly, a good way to ease into the more political riot grrrl bands that I'd overlooked a few years earlier. But they still didn't make me a feminist. Borrowing a line from Spalding, "What (Sleater-Kinney) did was unleash what was already within me, fighting to get out and shook awake the part of me that thrives on passion and creativity." I still want my click moment, though.

When I look through my own life, I can't isolate a single incident that led me to a "great paradigm shift," but lots of little ones that I can piece together like a giant collage:

*Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth
Two watershed third-wave feminist books published my senior year of high school that led me to the feminist writers that came before them. I spent a summer reading my way backwards through the annals of feminist literature, and however I feel now about the two books that started it all for me, I'm glad they were there.

*Nuns
No seriously, some of the strongest women I knew were women of the cloth. I've long turned away from the catholic church, and religion in general, but nuns left a pretty big impression on me, and they didn't take shit from anyone.

*Darlene Connor
Darlene was my Daria, my Angela Chase, and my Cher Horowitz. There were so few examples of working class families that weren't degrading or cartoonish, and I latched on to Darlene early.

*Patti Smith
She never identified as a feminist, and always aligned herself with me, but gave me a sense of what being an artist without compromise meant.



And that's only the tip of the iceberg. None of these things made me a feminist as much as they made me aware that's there's more to life than whatever Cosmo's preaching this month. I can't remember a time when I didn't call myself a feminist, even now when I question the tenets of feminism and who it actually benefits. It was more of a gradual "growing into my feminism."

Lost and Found (Album): Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out

(Update - I did this a few nights ago and after much deliberation, deleted most of what I'd written because it sounded overly critical of the whole "riot grrrl" scene of the 90s. I'm in a weird place: on one hand I love a lot of that music and "get it." On another, I see the classism and elitism of a scene that makes itself largely unavailable to girls who need feminist role models. Also, as I was writing that last sentence about not have my "sense of self stripped away and replaced by something new," I realized it wasn't my scene, and trying to write about it as if it was feels forced and unnatural. Truth be told, I was a a little too old for riot grrrl or even for Tori, Liz or Alanis. Maybe had I still been in high school, I would have has that "woo-hoo!" moment.  I probably needed them in high school.)

Sometimes I feel as if I'm rewriting my own history.

There's been a spate of books and blog posts written about 90s female-led rock bands, and though I listened to a lot -- a lot -- of that music throughout my late teens and early twenties, I always felt I was hovering on the periphery of that scene. I love reading other women's accounts of Liz Phair or Alanis or Bikini Kill changing their lives, but I'd be a hypocrite if I said that every record I ever loved was somehow life-changing. Some of them were just records I loved. Music didn't teach me how to be a strong, outspoken critic of the patriarchy. I had a library card and an equally outspoken, second-wave feminist mother for that.

I had a simple system for discovering new music: I turned on the one good radio station whose idea of alternative wasn't a continuous loop of Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and Jane's Addiction. Or I went to one of my city's few enclaves of hip and glommed onto whatever didn't look or sound like anything on MTV. I actually think I was pretty lucky.

Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out was one of those albums I picked up sometime in the mid-nineties. I didn't have any great epiphany during that first listen. No "a-ha!" moment, just a subtle sense of recognition: here were three women who were my age, dressed like me, and sang about all the bullshit banging around in my head. Oh yeah, and they could play their asses off.

But none of it felt new to me. I mean, I was already there. The artists who stripped away my sense of who I was and replaced it with something better came before all that - Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, Siouxsie Sioux, and X's Exene Cervenka. The template was already in place. It just needed a bit of an update.

Books: Girl Power

I made a slightly unnerving discovery yesterday. I am not, as I thought, a card-carrying member of Generation X. But I'm not quite young enough to count myself among the ranks of Generation Y. This makes a lot of sense in hindsight: I was still playing Barbies when Madonna broke, and I was old enough to know better when the Spice Girls did. There wasn't a lot out there for a teenage girl in the late 80s and early 90s. Little did I know that while I bided my time between The Facts of Life and My So-Called Life, there was a groundswell of politically charged, female-led rock bands forming.

Fast forward a few years. It's the mid 90s, and I just scored a copy of Sleater-Kinney's Call The Doctor. I was just out of college, and looking to supplement my record collection when I should have been looking for a job. Here were three women about my age, who dressed like me and sang about all the shit that was bouncing around in my head. Until then the only band I remotely identified was the Replacements -- four working class guys from the Midwest who found (moderate) success without actually leaving their hometown of Minneapolis. At the time, this was groundbreaking stuff. I had no idea one could achieve if not fame, infamy, without moving to a coast. The only problem was that as much as their image -- or lack thereof -- spoke to me, the music didn't. Sleater-Kinney's did. And it led to the discovery of more and more "girl" bands, without whom this site probably wouldn't exist.

Marisa Meltzer's book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, tells the stories of those bands and the girls they inspired to pick up a guitar, or rage against the machine. And it's about time. There have been a lot of books about the 80s and 90s indie rock scene published in the last few years, but something's been missing: The women! Girl Power is a much needed addition to the canon. Along with the riot grrrl bands of the 90s, Meltzer also writes about the Spice Girls phenomenon and the rise and fall of Britney, which I'd never really thought of as a parallel to the more political, erudite bands, but whose influence on girls cannot be understated.

Related Links:
The Feministing Five: Marisa Meltzer (Feministing)
Marisa Meltzer’s Actual Girl Power: The Autostraddle Interview (Autostraddle)