Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  The next day, Janet, Corin, and I went to the designer Marc Jacobs’s apartment to help Kim Gordon out with a Sonic Youth video for the song “Nevermind (What Was It Anyway).” We were assigned roles as ambivalent party guests and told to sit around on various couches looking disinterested. We stared past the other guests or looked out the window until the boredom would become too great and one of us would stand up and leave the room, only to be replaced by another vacant-eyed partygoer. We shot for a few hours, the action easy to execute but the finesse and coolness hard to pull off without looking like I was trying too hard. It didn’t help that I was wearing a too-tight, pale blue sweater that I’d purchased at a French department store the day before and a pair of office-employee slacks.

  As if to cement my sense of humility, I stepped in dog shit right as we exited Marc’s apartment. I spent the walk back to our hotel in search of puddles or serrated edges with which I could rid myself of my shameful, putrid secret.

  Later in the tour, the band taped an Italian MTV interview in Verona under the famous balcony where Juliet stood gazing down at her beloved Romeo. Afterward, the three of us paid money to climb up that very balcony and gaze down at hundreds of non-Romeos, a.k.a tourists. (Not to say that we were anyone’s idea of Juliets either, especially after a few weeks in the van.) I opened the guest book that sits at the top of the stairs. Instead of declarations of love worthy of Shakespeare himself, or at least worthy of posterity, I was met with drawings like the requisite cock ’n’ balls and epistolary outbursts perhaps best saved for bathroom-stall confessionals.

  All of these experiences summed up the disparities and vacillations that typify tour: the ridiculous and the sublime, the charming and the execrable. In a journal entry I wrote on the flight home, I noted that it felt like I had been gone for months instead of three weeks. It’s as if I’m wearing new skin, or rather that I hardly fit inside my old anymore, I feel stretched and distorted. The end of tour, it’s almost like waking up in the hospital after an accident: Slowly you take stock of the damage, a cut, a scrape, maybe you discover a part that no longer functions properly.

  CHAPTER 16

  ONE BEAT

  In 2000, Corin called to tell me that we would need to take time off from the band—she was pregnant. I went into a momentary state of panic. What would I do without Sleater-Kinney? But also, who was I without this band?

  The quest to answer that second question led to a manic state of traveling, working, and filling up my days, weeks, and months. I made plans. And then I made more plans. I became a full-fledged research assistant to my former sociolinguistics professor and mentor. I flew to Los Angeles to meet with my uncle’s ex-wife, who was an executive at Paramount Studios; I thought perhaps I could be a production assistant and get into film and television work. I applied to be a substitute teacher in the Olympia School District, which apparently suffered a shortage of qualified applicants. So, with a bachelor’s degree, five albums on my résumé, and years of touring experience, I was hired. I woke up at five a.m. two or three days a week, drove to a middle school or high school in town, and followed the teacher’s instructions for their sub—me—which usually involved pressing play on A/V equipment in science, English, and history classrooms and showing the students a movie or handing out pop quizzes. Within a few weeks I knew the drill: Walk into class and write “Mrs. B” on the board because the kids were used to everyone being married and having pronounceable names, and wear a pair of high heels because otherwise most everyone thought I was a new student.

  When I wasn’t “teaching,” I acted in one of Miranda July’s experimental short films, which involved me sprawled out on a bed in a turtleneck while a long-haired cat preened around on a floral bedspread, and I auditioned for and got a role in a local independent movie about group therapy that essentially put a handful of women who were “acting” and “in character” through (excruciating) group therapy while they filmed us. None of these activities told me specifically who I was or who I would be outside of Sleater-Kinney, but they did speak to a newfound confidence and intrepidness that I had not previously realized I had. This respite from the band also highlighted a restlessness that I found was hard to satiate. I quickly grew weary of stillness.

  Olympia had been a valuable incubator, but by the time I was in my late twenties, it felt decidedly claustrophobic. I had outgrown its perennial adolescence. The cyclical nature of a college town means a new crop of fresh-faced eager hopefuls pour into and populate the city at the same time that an older, more seasoned group, with new ambitions and new sights in the crosshairs, moves away. At a certain point, I felt too old to hang with the new recruits, too ambivalent toward the quirkiness that small-town DIY life engenders, too young to settle down, too irked by the self-aware preciousness of it all. Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don’t care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON’T CARE. These self-aware scenes are as cool as a secret handshake and a sly shared gesture of recognition, but at some point I was done living inside the town equivalent of a wink.

  A major turning point for me in my feelings about ambition and career came during the planning of Ladyfest, a festival that took place in Olympia in August 2000. As its website declared, Ladyfest was a “non-profit, community-based event designed by and for women to showcase, celebrate and encourage the artistic, organizational and political work and talents of women.” As a volunteer for the festival, and part of a team of people attempting to raise funds, I attended planning meetings. Frustration was high, as a group of about twenty of us attempted to navigate and cater to everyone’s needs and wishes, differences and ideologies. We were often at an impasse, inert from politeness (or passive-aggressiveness), no one wanting to take charge or declare themselves a leader. Despite our best intentions, we had the momentum and direction of a silk scarf being juggled by a mime.

  During one of these meetings we talked about press for the festival. The team that was in charge of PR expressed open agitation and disdain that many of the media outlets were most interested in interviewing Sleater-Kinney. At the time, we were one of the biggest acts playing the festival, and certainly the most well-known active band associated with Olympia. Here I was in a group of women, allies, I thought, colleagues, and I felt like I was being shamed for the relatively modest success I had achieved. But instead of sticking up for myself, I apologized. I downplayed my level of enthusiasm for my own work and accomplishments, I expressed remorse for the fact that my band was considered separate from the community as a whole. And, truth be told, I did feel terrible. At least in that moment. I left the meeting with a pit in my stomach. Later, however, I was livid. And heartbroken. I felt like I had been thrown under the bus and betrayed by my own gender.

  As much as I love and loved Olympia, and owe so much of my musical upbringing to its ethos, it was a place I needed to leave. I never wanted to feel ashamed for striving, for desiring, for ambition. And I never wanted to judge another woman, or anyone, for that matter, for their own aspirations, even if they differed from my own.

  —

  When Corin’s son was born, I began traveling to Portland more frequently so that we could write songs and I could hang out with her new baby, a boy named Marshall. I spent many hours on the couch catching up with Corin. I held Marshall in my lap, placing my lips on his downy, delightful infant head. I was downtrodden, bewildered, and ungrounded. I wanted to be closer to this feeling of home, of love. Portland seemed my only viable option if I wanted to keep the band intact and vibrant, and I did. In the fall of 2001—with 9/11 like a new sky over the country, a different air on our skin, changing the way we saw and felt everything—I decided to leave Olympia altogether.

  I moved to an apartment in southeast Portland that October, with my cats Hector and Lyle, fresh from being cheated on and a subsequent breakup and in that post-9/11 mind-set, where all the structures you felt like you could count on no
w seemed tenuous. You acknowledged the unsteadiness and either braced yourself against it or let it transplant you somewhere else. I didn’t go far. My new home was two hours south of my old one and only five miles from the border of the state I’d lived in my entire life.

  Compared to Olympia, Portland seemed both cultured and urban. It felt like a real city because of how derelict it was, how many homeless people, how much garbage and grit. A city’s scope could be measured then not by the number of good restaurants, coffee shops, and dog daycares but by the quantity of problems it had. Its realness could be quantified by its deficits. And here the music scene had more than one center; it felt multifaceted, like you might not meet every single person, which is an obvious fact in most cities but not in small towns. I sensed a greater amount of drive and ambition in Portland that was still matched by many of the principles on which Sleater-Kinney had been built and founded. We remained far from the music industry centers of L.A. or New York, still able to create from the margins, and people here valued community, innovation, and the retention of artistic credibility.

  Portland became a respite and a true hometown. Personally, as well as in Sleater-Kinney, I have always relied heavily on resetting. I venture out and take risks, but then I need to return to steadiness and calm. Portland has a nurturing quality, a placidity. For better or worse, it’s a perennial but shyly hopeful city; if we had a gesture it would be a shrug.

  When I’d visit Portland in the ’90s, it had a seedy quality to it. Just watch Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy if you want to get a fairly realistic picture of some of the locals. Like Seattle before the dot-com boom, Portland—and the Pacific Northwest in general—still felt like a place people came to disappear. You can hear that heaviness in the music from that era, the sadness in Nirvana, Mudhoney, Crackerbash, the Wipers (who were from earlier years)—the sounds embodied the emotional equivalent of getting washed up on the beach somewhere. You can feel at the mercy of your surroundings in the Northwest, subsisting on dreariness until even your internal landscape feels soggy. It’s depressing, and before the money came in, before the buildings started to reflect the bright ideas and optimism, that sadness was reflected back much more poignantly.

  —

  Writing songs after 9/11 felt treacherous. There wasn’t much of a vocabulary other than fear and patriotism. Many people felt a growing anger and distrust toward the Bush-Cheney administration, yet public dissent or even questioning of the status quo was likened to treason. The Dixie Chicks’ relatively mild comment admonishing George Bush while performing overseas would soon ignite vitriol, boycotts, and even death threats.

  Yet the political landscape wasn’t the only thing fueling our songwriting or the element that defined the sound on our next record. For one, it was the first time in the history of the band that all three members lived in the same city. Rather than me commuting to Portland for a matter of hours, or Janet and Corin driving up to Olympia for the day, we could retain both a prolonged intensity to the writing sessions but also work without the pressure of a time limit. In the past, if inspiration didn’t strike, the next time we would all be together might be days or weeks away. But now we could take breaks when we got stuck or tired, or reconvene the next day. We had a new sense of continuity and momentum, ease and fluidity. And the short hiatus we had taken while Corin was pregnant instilled within us a need for Sleater-Kinney.

  Janet lived off Hawthorne Boulevard, a street where hip met hippie, where vintage clothing and bead stores commingled. The front-cover album photos for Dig Me Out were taken in her living room. We’d been practicing in the basement of her one-story bungalow since the Hot Rock days. The interior color scheme of the house was garish and bold, Pepto-Bismol pink in one room, kelly green in another, landscape and animal paintings hung on the wall. There were sleek pleather sofas and chairs, and coffee-table art books. These rooms were as familiar as those in my own house. Across the smudged and graying linoleum of the kitchen, down a few steps where Janet had old newspaper clippings from the Portland Trail Blazers’ one and only championship season stapled to the wall, past the washer/dryer and, finally, around a corner, was our practice space. It smelled of mold and cleaning supplies, dryer sheets and dust. Old carpeting and mattresses were affixed to the walls for soundproofing, along with a small chalkboard on which to write the song names. Now we stepped into it as if anew.

  The riffs Corin and I were bringing in were charred and bluesy; Corin had one we called “Sympathy,” partly as a nod to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” There had been an article in a local paper about a coyote hopping a ride on the light-rail transit system, which we turned into a love song to Portland. “Combat Rock” was our version of a reggae song as done by the Clash, which of course was why we called it what we did. And we had a tune with a working title of “One Beat,” which characterized its drum part.

  We recorded One Beat at Jackpot! Recording Studio’s original location on NE Morrison Avenue, with Larry Crane as the engineer and John Goodmanson again as producer. I’ve only cried once in the studio, and it was when Corin sang her vocals for “Sympathy,” a song about her fears of losing her son when he was born premature, the anxious, tender, and frightening days he spent in the NICU. Janet and I sat on the couch behind the mixing console and held our breath. Corin did the song in a single take.

  One Beat is often characterized as a “political” album, which speaks to how long it took for musicians—especially in the mainstream—to address or make sense of the xenophobia and jingoism that took hold of the culture post-9/11. One Beat was one of the earliest. Yet the common thematic thread on the record is less overtly political and more an exploration of faithlessness, of trying to uncover hope or meaning in a time that was very, very bleak. Certainly “Faraway” and “Combat Rock” address politics explicitly and deliberately, but the title track and “Sympathy” search for meaning in scars, using pain and wounds as a vernacular. The album spoke to a dismantling of old ways, of old loves, of old ideas.

  We had stepped away from the band for only a moment but realized soon enough that we wanted to pour everything we had back into it. Sleater-Kinney is never a group I could be in with any sense of passivity; there is a deliberate, almost unseen force to it. We wanted to be a sonic call to action, anthemic, to either join in or get out, to be shaken from indifference—not only the listeners but ourselves.

  Before the album was released, we were asked to open for Belle and Sebastian at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall in Washington, D.C. It is a beautiful theater, a far cry from the rock clubs and venues we were used to playing. Every once in a while—mostly at festivals stocked with bands with incessant four-on-the-floor kick drum patterns and choruses and arrangements graspable both immediately and from a mile away—I would be reminded of how abrasive our band could sound, how harsh we could appear in a feather-wearing, beach ball–tossing, polite context. And really, there was no band who played more polite music than Belle and Sebastian. Knowing we had no way of winning over the delicate ears of their cardigan-wearing fans, we played our unreleased record, in its sequence and entirety, to the audience. None of our old songs would have likely been familiar anyway. In that ancient world of pre-cellphone-camera codependency and social media addiction, no one captured the moment.

  One Beat was released in August 2002. We took a small and up-and-coming band from Akron called the Black Keys out on the road with us. It was unnerving to venture back into a world where we might yet again have a label or indexer placed before the term “band.” We had spent years attempting to exist free of excess and arbitrary labels that were not descriptions of our music: female, indie, queer. Riot Grrrl, post–Riot Grrrl music. Now here we were with the potentiality of being a “political” band. But in the interim years we’d realized that denial is its own form of compliance and self-erasure. Plus, it’s exhausting. We would go out on the road and play these songs and people could interpret them how
ever the hell they wanted.

  CHAPTER 17

  OPENING UP

  Some of the bands who opened for us went on to be huge: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gossip, the White Stripes, the Black Keys. No matter whether they would go on to blow up or break up or stay small, we wanted to tour with artists that we could stand to see night after night. Picking an opening band is an act of curation—you want there to be differentiation between the bands on the bill, but nothing too jarring, nothing that takes somebody out of the experience. And you don’t want to be aggressively contrarian so that your audience isn’t receptive to the openers, standing with crossed arms, counting down the minutes until you get onstage. It was always a very deliberate, considered decision for us. We wanted to expose our audience to new bands. Mostly, however, we wanted to feel challenged. We never wanted a band to play before us that wasn’t capable of being a great live band, or that would make us seem bigger, louder, or tighter. We were confident enough to be matched, perhaps even usurped.

  The Black Keys had just put out their first album when we asked them to come on the road with us for the second leg of the One Beat tour. Dan and Patrick were mournful and gritty onstage, affable and Midwestern off; there was lots of pool playing. In Detroit, hometown of the White Stripes, a particularly proud and loyal audience member, with the intention of playing off a perceived rivalry, turned his back to the Black Keys for the entirety of their set, his middle finger raised defiantly in the air. You’ve got to appreciate a dedication analogous to the crazed affection toward sports teams, but disrespect is another matter altogether. Janet called the guy out during our show.