Reviews
From Grrrls to Womyn
How modern rock women found their voices through the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s.
SOURCE:
Kathleen Hanna plays with Le Tigre in New York City in 2000.
New York University has acquired an unusual new collection. Kathleen Hanna, an activist and member of feminist bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, has bequethed her personal papers to the university's Fales Library. The documents, which include zines and letters, are the first acquisition for the riot grrrl collection, and are a fitting marker for the twentieth anniversary of an explosive underground music phenomenon that made it possible for women to really rock.
Since the Fales Library is only open to students of NYU, it's great to know that others are documenting the movement. Culture writer Marisa Meltzer's forthcoming book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music is an ambitious attempt to capture the impact of a massive generational shift in pop music. Part memoir, part cultural history, part guide to feminist theory, Girl Power recounts a messy, dynamic, and charged decade. It effectively recounts a generation in music, from the riot grrrls of Olympia, Wash. to Lilith Fair's angry womyn; from Spice Girls to Britney Spears.
The roots of riot
The 1990s music revolution is firmly rooted in the Riot Grrrl subculture, which was a multi-faceted, mult-media approach to feminist activism. The movement's eponymous zine was published by the founding members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, and called for a "revolution grrrl-style now" in its very first issue. Riot Grrrls were zinesters, musicians, DIY crafters, and activists. The riot grrrl movement coincided (and perhaps pushed forward) the beginning of feminism's third wave, which is still happening today.
Feminism's "waves" refer to generational shifts in activism. First wavers were the suffragettes, who fought for voting rights for women at the turn of the 20th century. The second wave started in the early 1950s and spanned the marches and protests of the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, mainstream feminist groups like the National Organization for Women were founded. The 1980s saw a brief stint of "post-feminists," who felt that the civil rights battles of the previous decades no longer applied. We're still involved in the third wave today (though some insist a fourth wave is beginning to take place), and tenents of the movement include a broader definition of women that takes race, class, sexuality, and culture into account.
Riot grrrls were rougher, grittier, and more in-your-face feminists than their predecessors. Meltzer does a great job of cataloging the primordial stew from which riot grrrls emerged. She creates context for the grrrls by recapping the failures and triumphs of first and second wave feminists, and how their lives impacted their daughters. Meltzer writes:
These women were reacting to issues within the relatively insular punk community, but also tapping into a larger cultural moment. The late eighties had been a particularly dark moment for feminism, and the decade became a kind of grab bag for feminist gains and losses. ... The generation of women that followed the second wave had reaped the benefits but were coming of age on thier own and beginning to critique the past 20 years. Third wave feminist was both a resurgence and reaction to the second wave. Third wave feminism was about embracing the individual, and acknowledging that feminism could be different for everyone, and not some monolithic force.
Meltzer handles this critical aspect of third wave feminism with aplomb. Many books on feminist theory and history tend to gloss over issues of class and elitism that plagued the first and second wavers. In 1992, the riot grrrl movement adopted a self-imposed media blackout, in which a majority of riot grrrl bands refused to speak with the music and mainstream press because they felt the media was distorting the movement's message. But in its attempts to remain underground and avoid mainstream scrutiny, it remained elitist and exclusive. Meltzer doesn't shy away from pointing out this downfall.
"As widepread as riot grrrl may have endeavored to be, it was still a movement started largely by and for white, middle-class women," Meltzer writes. "Writing a zine or playing in bands were the main ways to participate in riot grrrl. ... The fact that the movement was so concentrated on college campuses meant that it attracted the very young—the name alone might have turned off potential converts who felt aged out of girlhood—and the educated."
After the media blackout, riot grrrl faded into the background, clearing the way for what Meltzer dubs the "angry womyn." (The altered spelling denotes that women are separate from and equal to men.) In the mid-nineties, solo musicians like Fiona Apple, Alanis Morrisette, and PJ Harvey took the stage with music that echoed the riot grrrl attitude—but was produced by large record labels with hefty merchandising and marketing machines behind them.
Meltzer also neatly dissects a large feminist controversy that emerged in the nineties: How trans identities fit into the feminist movement. She visited both the Michigan Womyn's Festival, which only allows "womyn-born-womyn" to participate, and Camp Trans, a free space for all feminist gender identities, that was founded after trans woman Nancy Burkholder was booted out of the festival in 1991.
Buy me what I want, what I really really want
Girl Power is at its best when Meltzer frames the music with critical cultural analysis. While riot grrrl started the decade off with a bang, it had what Meltzer calls "a butterfly effect on nineties girl music." Riot grrrl music begat the angry rock of Alanis Morissette and Hole, which morphed into the power pop of the Spice Girls, and then trickled into the creation of pop princesses like Britney Spears. Today, Lady GaGa and Ke$ha lead the pop pack.
Meltzer's take on the Spice Girls—often targeted by second wave feminists for promoting stereotypes about how women should look while brandishing an overly optimistic view of equality—and the commercialization of girl power is tightly written. While the Spice Girls proclaimed "Girl Power!" in their songs, they were reluctant to align themselves with feminism because it wasn't "glamorous" and didn't celebrate "femininity and softness," as Geri Halliwell, aka Ginger Spice, said in 2007.
Meltzer doesn't quite buy the argument to rebrand:
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in the Spicified worldview was the ease of its messageless message; simply wearing a pink baby tee emblazoned with the words GIRL POWER became an effortless way to declare your allegiance, and the meaning behind the words became depoliticized and diluted to the point that they just became another faddish catchphrase. The Spice Girls enabled girls not to use their collective power to realize actual change in the world, but to accumulate Spice merchandise.
But, Meltzer argues, it doesn't mean that the Spice Girls didn't have value. For many young girls, their brand of "feminism light" was an entry point and broke down a lot of barriers. In many ways, the Spice Girls helped open up the movement for new generations and girls from different cultural backgrounds.
The rough stuff
But for a book about a multi-faceted, action-oriented brand of feminist activism, Girl Power is a little...dry. The book is missing the immediacy and intimacy that comes from the little details and anecdotes. Part of the problem is the format. Girl Power deserves the full coffee table treatment, with vivid color photographs, extensive profiles of key musicians and fans and maybe even a mix CD thrown in. Instead, the book is 140 pages of black-and-white text.
As someone who came of age listening to the grrrls from the pacific northwest make a ruckus, I was familiar with many of the bands and people in Girl Power. But to be honest, I had a hard time keeping it all straight—one page lists twenty different groups with little detail to tell any of them apart, let alone understand their individual sound and outlook.
Meltzer cast a wide net when conducting her research, but the book could have benefited with a more creative structure. Instead of an index and selected bibliography, extensive profiles of the musicians and key players would have helped craft a solid narrative and sense of story.
As is, many of the interviews are more about an individual's response to a movement than letting the interviewee tell their story of the movement. It's especially frustrating when Meltzer quotes fans, as we get little sense of who these people are. Fans are part of what makes a sub-culture tick, and they often have great stories to tell—or unique personalities. But Meltzer doesn't document their stories, much less try to create a picture of the individual that is speaking. While recounting Sleater-Kinney's final show in Portland, Meltzer quotes two fans that were in attendance and describes them thus: Alexa Weinstein is "a long time fan"; Connie Wohn is "a publicist." Each fan gets their soundbite, and then that's it. We don't know what their voices sounded like, how old they were, or why Sleater-Kinney was so important to them. This lack of detail makes the book less exciting.
But for the lack of detail, there are some standout fan anecdotes: Meltzer interviews one lucky girl who had Lunachicks' lead singer Theo Kogan as her babysitter and in another, writer Mikki Halprin recounts her attempts to introduce Avril Livigne to feminism (hint: she didn't have much success).
When all's said and done, Girl Power is a history worth reading. The book's finest moment comes when Meltzer recounts her visit to the Willa Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York, N.Y. In this passage, Meltzer brings riot grrrl full circle and showcases the exuberance and talent with which a whole new generation of girls are embracing rock and roll.
"...This current generation of girls has unprecedented tools at its disposal—the benefit of advanced networking technology, female role models in all fields, a history of feminist achievements to learn from, equal opportunities in school, and, of course, an amazing catalog of music for inspirations" she observes. The question now is what tomorrow's girl-style revolution will be.
Erin Polgreen is a senior program associate for The Media Consortium, a leading independent online news network.
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