Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  Together, band and therapists, we became a ten-legged lover working through our issues. The first thing we did was make a pie chart. We were each asked to illustrate how much of our life we wanted Sleater-Kinney to occupy, so we could understand how each of us might be approaching the band and its importance in our lives differently. As I looked down at my divided circle, it was the first clue I had that the band was something that represented a fair bit of anxiety for me as compared to Janet and Corin. My drawing indicated that Sleater-Kinney, and in particular touring, were something I wanted as part of the story, but perhaps not the entire story. In total, we attended two or three sessions, learning to speak in “I feel” statements, airing our grievances, crying, and learning a lot about Susan and Nina. We left with a set of rules that served us well: No evil-minded buddying up. No breaking up the band on tour. Always say you’re sorry. And if someone calls an emergency meeting, you have to oblige.

  Therapy gave us tools and pulled us back together, but ultimately it was still just the three of us. Therapy wouldn’t diminish the number of times we’d get angry with one another, but now we at least knew we had to apologize. Of course, now that we’d aired our deepest fears and vulnerabilities, we also knew the quickest ways to hurt one another.

  CHAPTER 15

  ALL HANDS ON THE BAD ONE

  The Hot Rock had been a difficult album to record and to take on tour. The songs were tortuous and challenging to play live, each instrument traveling down a different road. As a result, we felt disjointed.

  The writing for our next record began between legs of the Hot Rock tour. We split the work between Janet’s basement in Portland and mine in Olympia. These songs came out easy and rapid, like fast-drying glue putting us back together; we were in a hurry to return to something cohesive.

  Corin had been playing in a side project called Cadallaca, a retro-sounding garage-rock trio with fake names and fake hair. She had come to enjoy the freedom of singing in character—male and female—and wanted to bring some of that vocal multidimensionality and nuance into our songs. Songs like “Ballad of a Ladyman” and “Milkshake n’ Honey” were sung with a saucy detachment that I hadn’t heard from her before.

  Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective. Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience’s part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary. When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she’s not performing as herself, and if she’s not performing as herself, then it’s not her who is wooing us, loving us. We don’t get to have her because we don’t know exactly who she is. An audience doesn’t want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness. Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening. When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome. Whether Corin was singing from her own perspective or from someone else’s, I never had to ask if she was okay. Her voice was torrential, a force as much as it was human.

  The songs that comprised All Hands on the Bad One were full of proclamations and affirmations. Once again, we were in conversation first and foremost with ourselves and with each other. All Hands was a reset button. We returned to working with John Goodmanson; we sang about the experience of playing music as if it were brand new. There is a sense of rejuvenation on the album. But for the first time we were also reacting to specific events and politics instead of doling out a diffuse rage à la Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out or the dark yearning of The Hot Rock.

  After years spent trying to distance ourselves from what felt like overly simplistic Riot Grrrl and feminist signifiers, attempting to eschew categories that seemed only to diminish or ghettoize the band and the music, sometimes the effort of pushing ourselves away felt like an act of self-amputation, self-effacement. It was also exhausting to continually try to separate who we were from what we made. And each time I wanted things to be transcendent, to disregard gender dynamics or sexism, those things reared their ugly heads. It’s hard to divorce yourself from that conversation.

  Especially at Woodstock 1999, when there was a reported rape and multiple allegations of sexual assault, and when “Show Me Your Tits” could have been the fest’s unofficial slogan. (We responded to the latter with a tour T-shirt that said “Show Me Your Riffs,” one that Corin and many of the fans wore around the release of the album.) This was our workplace: a concert, the music industry. Or later, while engaging in the camaraderie of a music festival in England called the Bowlie Weekender, when we found a note calling us “ladymen” affixed to the bulletin board on our chalet. Or attempting to talk about our music and the process of writing an album in an interview, then to read the article and see that the writer focused on what we were wearing or how we looked, discussed our gender, or made a sexist comment in the story.

  This was the same time as the Spice Girls and “Girl Power.” We knew there was a version of feminism that was being dumbed down and marketed, sloganized, and diminished. We wanted to draw deeper, more divisive lines. We wanted to separate ourselves from anything benign or pretty. One of my favorite songs that Corin has ever written, “Was It a Lie?”, sounds so prescient now in the age of social media and the voracious news and gossip cycles. The song is about a woman whose videotaped death is replayed for the amusement of others.

  Do you have a camera for a face?

  Was she your TV show?

  Was she your video?

  A woman’s pain, never private always seen

  I want to close my eyes

  I want to cut the wires

  I want a day not made for you to see

  We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly.

  I will now take a moment to compile for you a representative sample of journalism about Sleater-Kinney. Most of these articles are actually trying to be complimentary—the authors just fell into common traps and assumptions.

  You can call them punk. You can call them chicks. In fact, you can call them anything. But whatever you do, just don’t use that tired, worn phrase and call female trio Sleater-Kinney a riot grrrl band.

  Prior to the interview, the band’s publicist even suggested that we refrain from asking the inevitable “women in rock” questions. But after listening to Sleater-Kinney’s tender yet irate brand of punk, you almost can’t help it. . . .

  (CNN, 1999)

  But never does Sleater-Kinney sound forced, angry or sweet—the three words one most associates with all-women rock bands, and the three words that tend to hold women’s music back from the kind of raw believability that characterizes more macho rock.

  (Metroactive, 1999)

  Post-Riot-Grrls Sleater-Kinney are a boy rock critic’s wet dream. Not just because they sport that pouty, Salvation Army T-shirt-wearing look that drives those guys wild, but because SK’s fifth album, All Hands on the Bad One (Kill Rock Stars), is the kind of complex, multifaceted work that sparks hours of tedious nerdspeak. Is it a self-important, jaded up-yours to their indie-rock peers? Is it a portrait of the young ladies as artists? Is it a song-by-song conceptual re
sponse to the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat? The answer, more than likely, is yes to the third (the thematic cohesion is remarkable), but who cares? . . .

  The trio blends synthesizers (!) and fuzzed-out boy-rock almost sweetly everywhere else—clues to the lay listener that there’s more going on here than just some spoiled little tomboys postponing their entrance into the workforce. . . .

  So the Y-chromosome-bearing, cardigan-and-chain-wallet-wearing set can pop open a six-pack of Mountain Dew, kick off the Chuck Taylors, and settle in for a night of fawning. Everyone else should take All Hands on the Bad One as evidence that Sleater-Kinney aren’t some overrated one-trick indie artifact to be filed between Bikini Kill and Bratmobile—and proof to the boys that they’re more than three hot chicks in low-rider cords.

  (City Pages, 2000)

  The four questions Rolling Stone asked us in a mini feature:

  Who were your musical heroes growing up?

  Were there female musicians who were particularly influential on you? [A follow-up, perhaps because Janet had answered the previous question with “Joe Strummer”?]

  How has parenting affected your songwriting, Corin?

  Have things changed for women musicians much during the last decade?

  (Rolling Stone, 2002)

  Fortunately, their frequent lyrical challenges to gender roles didn’t devolve into rote male-bashing, and both sexes jumped and bobbed with joyful abandon. It helped that the three were quick with smiles, obviously enjoying the charged room.

  (Washington Post, 1998)

  The above were written by men and women. Obviously, it’s easy to internalize sexism.

  You get the idea.

  Critics were not as unified in their affection of All Hands as they had been on the previous albums, nor as effusive and laudatory as they would be about the later two. In fact, a weekly Seattle paper called The Stranger decided to publish not one review but instead a roundtable on All Hands on the Bad One. I read the issue in an Olympia coffee shop the day before we started our tour for the album up in Seattle. And the next night onstage, I thought about the negative criticism far more than I did the sold-out crowd. It was the last time I read a review.

  Despite feeling vulnerable about the mixed feedback, in hindsight I appreciate the effort of the publication to engage its audience in a thoughtful and well-informed critique regarding a creative work. An entire roundtable! A divisive album! More and more I am glad that Sleater-Kinney had little universal appeal, that there were elements to our band that were essentially “deal-breakers.” There was no middle ground; we were either loved or hated, but at least our music elicited a reaction and fomented conversation.

  I think cultural criticism and long-form critique have their place and their purpose. But for a creator, it’s so easy for the discussion surrounding a phenomenon to usurp the phenomenon itself. It’s worse, of course, with comment sections on websites and blogs, particularly anonymous comments, or the incessant chatter and opinions on social media. Everyone gets to write a headline, and when you or the thing you do is being talked about, you get to feel like a headline—an addicting feeling for sure, but also a pernicious one. The discourse builds its own body, and it’s usually a monster.

  Although I will confess that All Hands has shaken out to be my least favorite Sleater-Kinney record, I will say that there are crucial moments on it that act as the connector between the first and second half of our catalog. There are times that a work exists for the sake of getting you to the next step, as a testing ground for ideas, for recognizing parts of your process that were theretofore unnoticed or undiscovered. Most of the other songs on the album were a continued expansion and stretching in our songwriting. There is the nod to classic rock in “Male Model,” thick, sludgy riffs that hint at “Light Rail Coyote” on One Beat and much of The Woods. And a catchiness in the choruses of songs like the title track and “Leave You Behind” paid more attention to melody than we ever had in the past.

  All Hands on the Bad One also illustrates the differences between how Corin and I approach lyric writing. While we often wrote the music collaboratively, we worked on the words separately. Whoever had brought in the original riff or song, or whoever came up with the vocal melody, was usually the one who figured out a theme, a subject matter. We responded to our environment in different ways. My narratives were often oblique, hers direct. She was bold; I described boldness. I read books about the Civil War and likened two obstinate people to the ironclad ships the Monitor and the Merrimac. “The Swimmer” was inspired by an interview with long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox and the way she described the ocean as being a world in which she felt the most herself, needing to escape in order to be found. Corin, on the other hand, took out her anger and alarm head-on. “#1 Must Have” dealt explicitly with the Woodstock 1999 violence. Contemptuous, sarcastic, using clever turns of phrase, she was able to shove back the listener with her voice. The song also explored the commodification and co-opting of the once-radical tenets of Riot Grrrl and punk rock feminism by the mainstream, their remnants echoed in hollowed-out and sellable phrases, divorced from any form of social justice or action. “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun” was about a certain kind of arrogant, self-serious indie boy. It was sassy and direct, with a Shangri-Las–style taunting, a ganging-up after having felt ganged-up on. It was retaliation you could sing along to.

  I admired Corin for the way she wrestled our songs down to the ground with her vocal delivery, tamed them or took flight, could play with the tension between the guitar and vocal melody, could be as punchy and deliberate as the drums. She was masterful. Up until All Hands, when I sang I often felt like the songs were on the verge of swallowing me. I didn’t feel like that on guitar; my guitar could fight back in a way I never could with my voice. But All Hands was the first album where I start to sing above the surface of the song.

  All Hands was certainly more accessible than its predecessor. These were songs that allowed us to focus on the task of performing. They were imbued with drama, the choruses sounded like choruses; we expanded the scaffolding and it made us a better live band. We had been operating from a place of sonic misanthropy in some ways, but All Hands also has frivolity and irony, a sense of humor despite all its seriousness and direct assessment of specifically tragic incidents. It brought the band back to the center but scraped enough from the outer edges of what we’d reached for to give us musical fodder and confidence for what would come next.

  —

  Live, we were tighter and more confident than ever, and the All Hands touring was energetic and mercifully free of injury.

  By the time we went to Europe during the All Hands touring cycle, I had no illusions about tour as a vacation proxy. Climbing into the van in Amsterdam, my body knew what to do when it hit the seat: slump, readjust and sit up straight, slump again. Tour consisted of riding in the van for eight to ten hours a day depending on the distance between cities, a bottle of water and a bag of chips held between my knees, a book in my hands, nodding off to sleep then jerking awake, my body compressed and folded.

  Our first show of the tour took place at the aptly named Dour Festival in Belgium. I didn’t recognize any of the other bands who were playing, which meant one of two things: 1) The rest of the bands were from Europe, or 2) They were bands from the United States who were only popular in Belgium. It was a show during which death from electrocution felt both certain and imminent. The rain was coming at us horizontally and much of the stage was wet, including our instruments. My guitar glistened with droplets like in a bad ’80s hair metal video. It was so cold that I was dressed in layers, piling onto my body nearly everything I had packed in my suitcase. As a precautionary measure, the stage manager covered the monitors with large garbage bags, and in retrospect, I should have asked him to throw some plastic over me as well. We played to ten beer-drinking, poncho-wearing men and a lone poncho-wearing woman.

  We arrived in
Paris to play two shows (safely indoors) opening for Sonic Youth. A bit timid after the humiliation of the previous day, we started our set the first night feeling beat down, like we had to fight our way back. It took about half the set for my confidence to return, for the music to move through me without getting tripped up on the interlopers of doubt and nerves, to know the sound belonged within me.

  My friends James and Ian from the Washington, D.C., band the Make-Up showed up with a small entourage of Parisians. They invited us to a party; I tried to convince Corin and Janet to join, but they weren’t up for a late night. In the end it was only our sound guy, Juan, and I who ventured out. We arrived at a high-ceilinged apartment sparsely decorated save for two large wall mirrors and neon artwork atop the mantel. There were a handful of men milling around, drinking wine and smoking. There were only two other women present, who I assumed to be friends of the hosts, but who I was told were actually call girls.

  As music played on the stereo speakers and dancing ensued, the atmosphere turned Dionysian. I sat on a sofa watching bodies become more entangled, turning from angles and lines to squiggles and waves. I mentally riffled through the files of my Olympia experiences to find the right protocol for this situation. A futile exercise. Then I thought of the Left Bank in the early 1900s, about expats, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Colette. But this was a situation where knowledge was no match for experience. I wanted to come across as insouciant. I was in a rock band! I was on tour! I was at a sexy soiree in Paris! But I couldn’t even figure out what to do with my face. I held my expression perfectly still, trying to appear neither overly curious nor mildly shocked. I soon realized the tension in my jaw was forming a grimace. In the end, all I could manage was the kind of shoulder dance moms do when they make shrimp scampi in the kitchen while drinking white wine and listening to Bruce Hornsby. I shimmied right out of the room, exited the apartment, and took a taxi back to the hotel.