Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  While in New York we also met with Matador Records. Home to albums and artists I adored at the time—Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo, Guided by Voices, Pavement, Helium—Matador had more muscle than most of the indies back home in the Pacific Northwest. Matador felt like—and should have been—a viable contender. With label cofounder Gerard Cosloy’s keen ear and prescience coupled with the savvy business and social acumen of his partner, Chris Lombardi, Matador was not only capable and successful, it was cool, free of preciousness or folksiness. It had a wide-reaching and solid reputation, a presence. Moreover, it was cosmopolitan, like a relative you might fantasize about growing up to be, who lives in the big city and sends theater and art reviews, teaches you about bourbon and millineries, hip and savvy, brimming with strategy and game. Matador was a legitimate possibility, mostly because they offered us a sense of one. So why didn’t we sign to Matador?

  My attitude may have been a factor.

  Our meeting with Matador was in the early afternoon. I hadn’t eaten anything, and I was famished, agitated, and fidgety from low blood sugar. I told Janet and Corin that I’d join them momentarily and I walked into a chain restaurant that sells creamy soups in bread bowls, food that can best be described as pale and needing sun. I sat down and very. slowly. and. deliberately. ate. I savored every bite of the chowder that was coagulating inside the circular loaf. I added saltine crackers and got a refill of soda. I watched the minutes go by, aware of my lateness growing conspicuous, less careless, more insolent. Forty-five minutes after my bandmates had arrived, I walked into the office. I entered with the willingness of a teenager who’s been asked to clean her room on a Friday evening. I was sullen, distant. I might as well have been wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sucking my thumb. Any lightness or curiosity I normally possessed was cloaked, clenched, choked. I was a sweaty fist. Janet and Corin glared at me as I joined them at a large conference table, the conversation already in progress.

  In contrast to my raincloud freakshow, the employees at Matador were bright, eager, and friendly. They talked us through their plan and the label infrastructure, pitching us on their capabilities and enthusiasm. I only showed momentary interest and a glimpse of levity when, as the meeting concluded, we toured the warehouse. I stocked up on their entire catalog in vinyl.

  I was acting out an unfocused haughtiness. I felt out of control. We should have left the meeting victorious and proud, at the very least excited. Instead I felt indignant, contrarian. Janet and Corin were justifiably angry and confounded. With no manager to ameliorate anxieties, to mediate, and to be the voice of reason or tie-breaker, we had only one another. There would be many decisions in Sleater-Kinney dictated not by reason but by fear, working from a place of consensus, like some high-minded, well-meaning nonprofit board, except these were our lives and careers. We fumbled around for a place that felt good, a space often situated right next to someone else feeling awful. It was a delicate balance. We had to go with what felt right, even if the decisions were wrong.

  Fortunately, my immaturity didn’t win out, at least not immediately. There was a serious discussion to be had, and Matador was part of that.

  Many of my reservations about signing to one of these larger labels could be boiled down to—I’ll borrow a phrase from an old Cat Power record—“What would the community think?” In 1996, if you lived in Olympia, like I did, or were part of any number of underground music scenes across the United States or even abroad, signing to a major label was resolutely considered “selling out.” Ambition itself seemed anathema, or at the very least drew skepticism. To court fame, money, and press felt dirty, sweaty—it implied you wanted to be accepted and loved by the mainstream, the same people who had rejected, taunted, and diminished you in high school. Jocks. Cheerleaders. Preppies. Yuppies. It sounds silly now but at the time these categories seemed finite, immutable, and significant.

  Much of it boiled down to identity, a way of differentiating punk from the rest of the world, making it subversive, confrontational. Whether quiet or loud, fast or slow, pretty or ugly—it was not about a sound or look—punk was about making choices that didn’t bend to consumptive and consumerist inclinations and ideologies, that didn’t commodify the music or ourselves. We didn’t want to be associated with a brand. Mostly, we didn’t want to be a brand. There was no middle ground. We came from a very specific context and it was difficult to imagine existing, let alone succeeding, outside of it.

  One assumption in the 1990s went like this: if you dressed a certain way, or were hanging around in any sort of artistic milieu, then you must know a lot about music (not to mention the concomitant film and art movements). I was so accustomed to hanging out with music nerds, and being one myself, that I imagined everyone must love music with the same fervor as me and possess encyclopedic knowledge of it to boot. We also subscribed to codified aesthetics; they created a shorthand. Part of it was on account of less immediate access to material goods; they were not at one’s fingertips and instead required long hours in record or book stores talking to clerks and other customers, rentals of videos, attending obscure film festivals, and doing a copious amount of collecting and borrowing. The seeking was tactile, the process of discovery more arduous but also highly interactive. And that effort really grounded the learning into contexts, chronologies, and histories. Making certain sartorial choices—hair dyed green or shaved on the side, a JFA or Diamanda Galás sticker on a three-ring binder, a book by Genet tucked under an arm, dressing up for school like a character from Twin Peaks—these were all signifiers so that we could locate other outsiders quickly. It didn’t mean we shared an entirely similar worldview or that we had grown up with the same set of experiences, but it was something, it was a wink and a nod. Nowadays, leather jackets don’t predict a love of Marlon Brando or the Ramones any more than skinny jeans indicate an affinity with Johnny Thunders or a striped boatneck shirt and pixie cut affirm that one’s a fan of Godard and Breathless. With access to everything, we can dabble without really knowing. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it’s easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance and predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease.

  The esoteric and extraneous knowledge of musical minutiae is still embedded deep within me, developed during those formative years as a means of social currency and credibility. Sometimes, I reflexively default to the reactionary and the habitual. For instance, if someone mentions Rites of Spring, I assume they could just as easily be talking about the band from Washington, D.C., as Stravinsky. And once we start discussing D.C. punk, we might as well mention (as to really stress our perspicacity!) lesser-known groups like Ignition, the Warmers, and Circus Lupus. If you say STP, I know that means one of Julie Cafritz’s bands post–Pussy Galore, not the Stone Temple Pilots. You want to talk about Kevin Rowland and the early days of Dexy’s? The connection between Dolly Mixture and the Damned? Howard Devoto, first with Buzzcocks and then with Magazine? Let’s! Tubeway Army? That’s Gary Numan, pre-“Cars” and at his most droll. Really, I get you; we have so much in common. The facts are often arcane, but like any memorized code, they mark a kind of inclusion, a competency. And though perhaps it’s a lexicon on its way to extinction, I suppose it’s still a way of quickly locating a fellow traveler.

  Protecting your group and ethos required a rigidity. The tacit agreement you entered into when you became part of an underground or indie music scene was that to go mainstream had the potential to water down—or be an inevitable compromise—of your art. Furthermore, it could put you in conflict with your community, potentially damaging it, certainly operating at the expense or denial of it. The notion of the mainstream’s toxicity wasn’t always an outright discussion at parties or among friends—again, the rules were implied and entrenched—but abundant treatises about selling out could be found in zines like Punk Planet or Maximum RocknRoll. By the time Sleater-Kinney was a band, there was very little question that the context from which we came was one o
f fairly radical politics.

  If nothing else, I was living in a town that had once been home to Kurt Cobain. The simplified version of his story could be reduced to a guy who signed to a major label, got so famous that he felt alienated from his audience, and then killed himself. And Nirvana had done it right—they had changed the weather, they had rewritten the rules, their music had mattered. And then: death. This tragedy was now in the figurative guidebook—it functioned as a cautionary tale. To wish for more was to wish for something potentially, crushingly horrible. So if you did wish for more, you had to keep it a secret.

  We chose Kill Rock Stars. We stayed close to home.

  The thing is, Sleater-Kinney was ambitious. We didn’t only want to preach to the choir, to the already-converted. We knew there was a potential audience in parts of the country that didn’t have a “scene,” an infrastructure. That there were people who wouldn’t hear about us via word of mouth or fanzines or independent record stores. Some people might only be exposed to our band if we were featured in larger magazines or sold our albums in big-box stores. Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.

  CHAPTER 12

  DIG ME OUT

  Half of the album Dig Me Out was written in my apartment on South Capitol Way in Olympia. Corin came up from Portland and sublet a room in a nearby house. We sat around on my cheap pleather furniture in a living room with wall-to-wall industrial blue carpet and wrote “Turn It On” and “Little Babies.” Lance had come to visit and I felt distraught. Corin was in a new place, falling in love. Still heartbroken by me. I wanted her to stick around, but she was gone.

  Though Corin and I had split up, there was never a question we wouldn’t stay together as a band. That also never gave us time to process the end of the relationship, except within the songs. Nearly every song on Dig Me Out is either about me or Lance—which probably seems obvious to any listener or fan of the band who knows even a modicum of backstory. Even if you didn’t, you could listen to a song like “One More Hour” or “Jenny” or “Little Babies” or “Turn It On” and know that these were songs about love and desire, both lost and found. But I didn’t know any of the songs were about me. In my ability to compartmentalize and subsume feelings, I blithely focused on the melody, the riffs, anything but what was actually being sung. And if I did tune in, it was with a psychic distance and detachment. Who is “Jenny”? Who is the person with the “darkest eyes” in “One More Hour”? Certainly not me.

  “Little Babies” is a song that sounds like it’s about the fans, and maybe it is. But later I realized that it was probably also about me, some confluence of Corin’s caretaking role toward both me and the audience, feeling taken for granted and misunderstood by both. The role of a woman onstage is often indistinct from her role offstage—pleasing, appeasing, striking some balance between larger-than-life and iconic with approachable, likable, and down-to-earth, the fans like gaping mouths, hungry for more of you.

  Being in a band with an ex, and both being songwriters and lyricists, takes a lot of compassion and understanding. Sometimes I think Corin and I fell back into a kind of platonic love by learning about each other through the songs we were writing. Since we sing on each other’s songs, and often have to write lyrics that work in conjunction with one another, we were forced to live inside the other person’s story, her perspective, her ache. We forgave each other, we empathized with later struggles, loss, and heartbreak, we witnessed growth and progress and change. We found each other again in the music, eventually.

  Recently I asked Corin what she meant by “Don’t say another word about the other girl” in the break of “One More Hour.” There had never been anyone else and she knew that. At first she couldn’t even recall if it was about someone in particular, a specific jealousy. Finally she said it was about all the people she thought wanted me, which, as I thought about my twenty-two-year-old cherubic self with a terrible dye job, sounded silly, and we both laughed. These are the moments I cherish with Corin, that we can shine a shared fondness on our past, like we have the same flashlight. There are no longer any dark corners.

  Sleater-Kinney recorded Dig Me Out over ten days in the winter of 1996. With a tiny budget that didn’t include housing, the three of us stayed with my father at my childhood home in Redmond. John and Stu’s studio didn’t have heat, so we set up a series of radiant space heaters. We played in sweaters and coats and did dance aerobics routines both to amuse ourselves and to stay warm. We did a few keyboard and guitar overdubs but we basically tracked live save for the vocals. As on Call the Doctor, John panned one of the guitars to the left and the other to the right. And, again, we didn’t switch guitar settings or amps in between songs.

  Halfway through the recording, it snowed heavily enough that we were unable to make it back across the 520 bridge to Redmond. We were too broke to get a hotel room, so I asked my mother and her husband if we could crash at their house in Seattle. I was twenty-two and had never once stayed with my mother after she moved out. I had never spent a night in one of the apartments she lived in, not once. My mother’s house was in the Montlake neighborhood. Designed by her husband, Eric, a civil engineer, the house was steely inside and out, concrete, gray on gray, like some beached cubist whale. He had built it prior to marrying or even meeting my mother, which is why I always found the double shower in the master bedroom so off-putting, but I suppose a less cynical side of myself would call it optimistic.

  Entering my mother’s world in the middle of recording was disorienting. Since leaving our family, she and I had been in sporadic and often tumultuous contact, seeing each other maybe only once a year. I was still quite hurt and angry. When we did visit each other, I couldn’t help but try to gauge her health, her weight. Was she substantial enough to carry anything around other than her own needs? She looked healthier now, happier. Nevertheless, she and Eric felt like a childless couple we were visiting, even though I was technically her child. The couches were covered in plastic to avoid the cats scratching them, and there was very little in the way of knickknacks or niceties. It felt like a W hotel lobby with Joan Osborne and Patty Griffin playing instead of electronic music. They made us cookies and called each other “baby” and “boo boo.” To this day I can’t tell you who is who, though I imagine they are both baby and boo boo.

  Corin and Janet and I settled in for two nights. With no official guest room in the house, we slept on the living room floor in sleeping bags or under blankets. We speculated about album artwork. We watched Pop Up Video on VH1 and played cards. We talked about calling the record Dig Me Out, at this point not just for the title of the song but because we were literally stuck in the snow, trapped at my mother’s house, unable to go into the studio, our van immobilized at the bottom of a hill. Those nights with Janet and Corin, it felt like being in the band had become its own version of family. They were there to insulate me against the craziness I felt by being in this strange house. On the second morning, when cabin fever had set in and my mother had clearly reached the end of her hostessing threshold (one night, it turned out), we walked to the van and shoveled it out from the snow. Janet got in the driver’s seat and did the requisite forward/backward technique to wrest the vehicle from its frosty hold. A softball-size chunk of ice flew from the back tire, missing Corin and me by a few inches, and smashed a window of the car behind us. We left a note with our phone numbers and an apology. (The owners wouldn’t find the note for two years.) We were on our way to finish our record—we had dug ourselves out.

  Back at the studio we finished the vocals and John mixed the record in a matter of days. He used Nirvana’s Nevermind as an example of impeccable sequencing. Th
at album was only a few years old at the time, so it was still the template for something incendiary. We put “Dig Me Out” first, followed by “One More Hour” (a song that featured a riff I came up with after listening to Gang of Four’s album Entertainment on repeat). Third was “Turn It On.” John’s baseball analogy was that you put your top three batters first. He also had an idea that there was an imaginary headphone listener named Jenny and that you should give her some sort of treat, something just for her, for that space in between her ears, like a secret message. So any time we added any little overdub or sonic Easter egg—Janet ended up playing one of the space heaters as a percussion instrument on “Heart Factory”—we’d think of her. I think that’s how “Jenny” ended up as a song title on the record.

  We really had no perspective as to what the record sounded like. Fellow Seattle producer Phil Ek and Fugazi’s Brendan Canty both stopped into the studio on different days. Brendan heard a song called “Not What You Want” and said he thought it was great. They each commented that they liked the record and gave us generally positive feedback. But we had no idea. We left with a cassette of the album that John dubbed for us.

  For the artwork, Janet had the idea of doing a take on The Kink Kontroversy. Something classic and clean. We had John Clark come over to Janet’s house and take the photos, each emulating our respective member of the British band. For the back we used a Robert Maxwell photo, an outtake from a Rolling Stone shoot that we had done. We didn’t make a video. We got out on the road.

  When Dig Me Out was released, we toured in a light blue Ford Econoline van, listening to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City on tape. Our friend Tim Holman, the one and only crew member, would sell T-shirts and help load the gear. Because he was the only male on the tour, some club employees felt more comfortable talking to him. He became our default interlocutor at times and also bore the brunt of people’s confoundment. One night Tim got punched out by a security guy as he attempted to let him know it was okay for people to come onstage and dance. Corin decided to write a zine while we traveled called Hey Soundguy. She took a picture of every house sound person we encountered, told a short story about them, and wrote a review of both their performance and their personality. The zine featured three women; the rest were men. In one club, we were told that the room was shaped like the inside of a speaker and that we should face our amps directly toward Janet. When we refused, we were met with astonishment that we wouldn’t change the ways we had always done things in order to fulfill this guy’s wet dream of a perfect-sounding room.