F 'em!

by Jennifer Baumgardner

  Changer sold between sixty thousand and eighty thousand copies that first year. To date, Olivia has sold over one million records. (To give you a sense of that accomplishment, indie-label superstar Ani DiFranco’s best-selling record sold 240,000 copies.) Williamson’s album changed the alternative women’s music scene, giving it an economic spine that supported Olivia, Ladyslipper, and countless feminist bookstores. Changer enabled them all to grow, connecting women through a record the same way Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics magnetized political women a few years earlier to begin fighting on their own behalf. In 1973, women’s music became a movement.

  In 1975, Olivia moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the mainstream music industry and then to Oakland. The remaining five women of the collective, who had been pooling their money and living together for the past seven years, began to disperse. The Reagan-Bush years hit; Olivia stopped putting out new records and performed a series of fifteenth-anniversary concerts in 1988. The two at Carnegie Hall in New York were the largest-grossing concerts at that venue in its history. Still, The New York Times barely mentioned the show. Dlugacz, the remaining founder, was tired. Even though Olivia put out world music and salsa records, it was most successful with acoustic solo acts. The folk music that was cutting-edge when she began Olivia was not going to be the music for the next generation of women. “In order to continue, we had to reinvent what we did and how we did it,” Dlugacz says. “And it didn’t make real sense for us to do that.” So Olivia Records became Olivia, the lesbian cruise line, later that year. Meanwhile, Ladyslipper, which had fought for years to have separate bins in record stores for the genre of “women’s music,” was feeling that innovation backfire. Women’s music felt like a ghetto, and even a band as pro-feminist as the Indigo Girls chose not to be distributed by Ladyslipper.

  WOMEN’S MUSIC IS usually associated with a certain breed of (white middle-class lesbian) singer-songwriters with a guitar. If untangled from the claws of homophobia and internalized misogyny, the term actually refers not so much to a genre of music as to a consciousness. Laurie Fuchs defines women’s music as “self-determined”—female artists taking control of their look, sound, profits, and career. Women’s music also means creating a femalefocused audience, one in which women can both be the intended beneficiaries of the songs and feel safe to be swept away by the music. At a women’s music concert, one perhaps need not worry about getting elbowed in the face by an overzealous mosher or molested by a free-love Woodstock boy.

  The sexism in the punk movement—from violent mosh pits to boring guy bands who nonetheless felt entitled to play music—inspired a group of Olympia, Washington, feminists to create the next women’s music movement. In 1992, Riot Grrrl seemed to spring out of nowhere, Athena-style again, with the media’s discovery of the young punk feminists. In actuality, activists such as Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail (from the band Bikini Kill) were not only reacting to a boy-dominated punk scene in Olympia and D.C., but drawing from Second Wave feminist history. Hanna spent an entire semester studying The Second Sex in 1989 and worked at a battered-women’s shelter by day. Alison Wolfson, who played in Bratmobile, was raised by a lesbian feminist single mother who founded an abortion clinic. By the time Bikini Kill and Bratmobile moved to D.C., they were actively soliciting a women’s audience. “I was at the point when we were in Olympia where I didn’t even want to go to shows anymore, from getting harassed or guys rubbing up against you, and feeling alienated by some of the music,” says Hanna. “I really felt like the music I wanted to make was for women, so we had to make a specific attempt to reach out to them to come to our shows. We had a mailing list and sent postcards to people before we came to different towns: ‘Please come and bring friends and as many as you can.’”

  A loose network of girl punk bands, zine writers (Riotgrrrl, Girlgerms, i’m so fucking beautiful, and Jigsaw, to name a mere few), and activists grew out of acts such as Hanna and Vail’s. But, true to Gerda Lerner’s claim about women’s history, by 1994, the media was already declaring Riot Grrrl over and strong women in punk and rock were distinguishing themselves from a label that suddenly felt too restrictive, too white, too trendy, too targeted. It was “women’s music” all over again.

  “Not wanting to identify with women’s music is the same thing as not wanting to call yourself a feminist,” says Kaia Wilson, the singer/guitarist for the Butchies, former member of dyke punk band Team Dresch and Adickdid, and owner of Mr. Lady Records and Video (with her girlfriend, video artist Tammy Rae Carland). “There can be really good reasons for not wanting to call yourself a feminist, but most of the time, it’s due to misogyny. [‘Women’s music’] is like saying ‘feminist music’: strong, women-identified women playing music. That doesn’t necessarily fall into a genre but describes the people playing. To me, we are women’s music.”

  Loads of other women are carrying on the spirit, if not the name, of the women’s music movement. They own labels, produce shows, and organize mail-order distribution so that girls and women can avoid the macho record-store experience if they so desire. Some focus on producing records by women—such as Tinuviel, who founded the Riot Grrrl label Kill Rock Stars and is now the owner of Boston’s Villa Villakula label. As a punk teenager, she always felt intimidated and harassed by the self-perpetuating cool-boy punk scene, especially in record stores. “I decided that instead of limiting myself to a genre, I’d limit myself to a gender,” says Tinuviel. “I put out people’s first projects and encourage girls to realize their projects. Instead of just saying, ‘Oh, I wrote these songs once,’ record them.”

  Tinuviel and some friends put out a zine, Cakewalk, in early 1997 that included advice on how to direct one’s career and analyzed the politics of being in a band. Cakewalk also printed ad hoc archivist Sharon Cheslow’s list of women in punk bands between 1975 and 1980. There are hundreds—from the Adverts to White Women.

  FOR SOME, HAVING a new generation of woman-centered music, with its own sound and culture, is critical. Amy Ray started her own label, Daemon Records, in 1989, soon after the Indigo Girls were signed to Epic, and uses her major-label career to bankroll the independent community to which she is much more committed. Daemon is a co-op, which means that the artists are obligated to give fifteen hours of work for each record they do. By 1992, Ray, who had resisted what she experienced as a possessive and separatist women’s music scene, recognized many of her values being confirmed by Riot Grrrl—from finding a co-op printing company to print your catalog to using a credit union instead of a bank.

  “I suddenly felt camaraderie, like, Oh, there’s people out there who want to do these same things,” says Ray. “And Riot Grrrl influenced me in terms of hiring women employees—with Daemon and Indigo Girls, too. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, here’s a guitar tech, and he’s a man,’ we find some women who can do guitar tech and train them.”

  WHETHER OR NOT women’s music moves you, its revolution has had a profound and unacknowledged impact on women in the mainstream. They created a robust production network of music festivals, club shows, and alternative distribution (a tricky and unglamorous part of the biz, which no younger women have attempted to take on1), and made concertgoing something that was geared toward a female audience specifically. Artists who happen to be gay or bisexual or didn’t look or sound a certain boilerplate way—Ani, Melissa Etheridge, and Tracy Chapman—all had a place from which to enter and an audience of loyal fans from which to draw. The audiences at Lilith are majority female, Lilith grossed $35 million dollars in its first two years, and over the tour’s whole life, more than $10 million went to national and local charities—a percentage of ticket sales. “It’s a woman’s market,” says Olivia’s Dlugacz, “and that took a lot of work.”

  Many of the women who have labels know next to nothing about Olivia or Ladyslipper but want the same things: creative control and to not play by someone else’s rules. Bettina Richards’ ethos for her Chicago label, Thrill Jockey, is complete freedom for the artists and a
fifty-fifty profit split. Jane Siberry started Sheeba, her Toronto label, after eight years on Warner Brothers. “The respect factor was the biggest reason for leaving,” says Siberry. “As soon as [Warner] said I had to work with an outside producer, I knew that they had no idea what I was trying to do.” But independence isn’t easy: Siberry runs the enterprise by herself, from shipping to phone duty to bookkeeping. Richards, Tinuviel, and Wilson all have other jobs to pay the bills.

  I’m a feminist who was three when Judy Dlugasz and her friends created Olivia Records, and I want to know about the women’s music movement because I don’t think it’s embarrassing or cheesy. I am proud and I know that the women who are making it today owe something to all who came before them: Motown girl groups, Bessie Smith, Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde. It’s all part of the same history, but the women’s music movement is kept under wraps; we are encouraged to not align ourselves with them, and the divorce from history makes me shudder. I hate it because it’s ahistorical and younger women need to have all of the information, all of the examples of changing the system, all of the victories, and all of the mistakes in our memory banks, too, if we want to stop reinventing the wheel.

  The disparaged bluestockings eventually got their due when radical foremothers like Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis began uncovering the lost history of their bold actions. Paying homage to the nineteenth-century feminists, they named their core group the Redstockings: “red” for revolution, “stockings” for the old suffragists. Riot Grrrl and the greater young punk women’s community we associate with it often acknowledge their debt. Bikini Kill recorded with pioneer Joan Jett. Ani DiFranco refused to sign an exclusive distribution deal with Koch, insisting that she be able to sell directly to Ladyslipper and Goldenrod, the two largest women-controlled distributors, because they had supported her career since the beginning. Many women are carrying on the philosophy of self-determining women playing music together. The Indigo Girls joined the tour all four summers the Lilith Fair existed (which, ironically, has more men onstage than women because the backup bands tend to be male) but also organized an alternative all-woman tour called Suffragette Sessions, which drew from diverse genres. The Indigo Girls have toured with women’s music star Ferron. Meanwhile, Kaia, who works part-time at Ladyslipper, covered the Cris Williamson song “Shooting Star” on her last Butchies record.

  The women at Lilith knew very little about the women’s music movement, made clear by the fact that McLachlan claimed that until Lilith, “the summer festivals out there were completely male dominated.” This disconnect from history is dangerous. For all of the attention “women in rock” got in 1997 and 1998, by the summer of 1999, immature or misogynist acts such as Limp Bizkit and Eminem were dominating the covers of Rolling Stone and Spin. It was known and accepted in the industry that commercial/alternative radio was not playing any women. Without the benefit of the history of women’s fighting back in the music industry, the gains of these divas were again receding under the tide of backlash. If Lilith were understood as part of a revolt that began with Mary Lou Williams and gained momentum through the women’s music movement, Riot Grrrl, and Ani DiFranco, the twin forces of a feminist movement and music would be crashing forward—not drowning.

  —Originally published in Z Magazine in 1999 and the Ladyslipper catalog

  Kathleen Hanna

  “REBEL GIRL” WAS THE FIRST BIKINI KILL SONG I EVER heard. The line “In her kiss, I taste the revolution” was sexy and pro-girl, but it reminded me of a sensation from my past I had never acknowledged because I never knew how. The feeling was that passionate love and connection you feel for a best friend, and the sense of possibility you feel when you are really aligned with another girl. That kind of sisterhood was hard to find, even for my feminist-influenced generation.

  Like the women’s liberation movement (WLM) of the ’60s and ’70s, Riot Grrrl had many mothers. These ’90s feminists were a loose network of artists, musicians, writers, and activists who were marrying Second Wave theories with punk rock and DIY culture, and birthing one of the first iterations of the Third Wave. Kathleen Hanna, born two months after the 1968 Miss America Pageant Protest that put radical WLM on the map, is the most well-known of the original Riot Grrrls. As the lead singer of Bikini Kill, Hanna used every gig as an opportunity to organize (clipboard in hand, taking names and contact information), cowrote several important zines (Bikini Kill, Jigsaw), and took on the clichéd hypermasculinity of punk rock and mosh pits.

  Riot Grrrl had at least three revolutionary tenets: demystifying men’s activities (playing in bands, being loud) and opening them to women; connecting women and girls who were isolated from each other, via zines and meetings and shows; and a “pro-girl line.” That last bit evolved from a signature piece of Second Wave theory. Around 1970, the New York–based feminist group Redstockings and particularly Ellen Willis (the radical feminist rock writer who died in 2006) came up with the “pro-woman line.” Established to counter the “prevailing anti-woman line,” this theory said that women often acted out of “necessity rather than choice,” making the most powerful decisions possible given the context of patriarchy, misogyny, or sexism. Riot Grrrl’s pro-girl line elaborated on that theory by saying that girls, far from being weak, catty, and inferior to boys, were in fact strong and able to align with one another, and had good reasons for their anger, sadness, and occasional failure to thrive. Riot Grrrls brought rape, sexual abuse, incest, violence, sexual double standards, and queer sexuality all out into the open, using the tools of ’90s pop culture—music and zines—rather than protests and pamphlets. They wrote epithets like “slut” on their bodies, appropriating a term used as a weapon to keep females in line.

  Kathleen Hanna, forty-one at the time of this interview, is two decades older than the fiery Evergreen student who helped unleash Revolution Grrrl style on the backlashed 1990s. She’s married to Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, planning to adopt, and forming a new band around Julie Ruin, a record and persona she created after Bikini Kill. Leaders, icons, and stars have a palpable quality of specialness, and Kathleen is no exception. There are the qualities that make her media-friendly (she’s uncommonly good-looking, has signature style, is comfortable in front of a camera or a crowd), and the qualities that make her a great organizer. Over eighteen years of knowing Kathleen, I’ve never had a conversation with her that wasn’t embroidered with name-dropping obscure books, artists, and people she thinks deserve their due. When I met her in the mid-1990s, she recommended that I buy a copy of Lesbian Ethics by Sarah Hoagland. Her plug provoked me to read one of the most revelatory books about feminist theory I’ve encountered, and I’ve quoted Lesbian Ethics ever since. She connects the rebel girls in her midst—and in doing that, she feeds the revolution.

  Kathleen: Hey, do you see those photo booth pictures on the bulletin board? That was from the day I met you at Ms. magazine in 1993.

  Jennifer: I’ve thought about that a lot—that you came to New York and sought out the editors of Ms. Why did you do it?

  K: I was a fan. My mom used to read Ms., and it was the only feminist thing around. In Bikini Kill, I was all bogged down in these stupid indie-rock fragmentary discussions about who’s a sellout. Bikini Kill was a lightning rod for people’s anger—at women, at themselves, at whatever—and I knew I couldn’t be nourished in that community. I thought, My scene is feminists; I’m going to find them. So I wrote a fan letter to that band Betty and asked to be on their mailing list. I wanted them to know we’re here, and exchange records—just little things like that. I write a lot of fan letters. I’m desperate for connection.

  J: Your desperate attempts at connection have paid off, I’d say. You’ve said that when you were in Bikini Kill, your songs were directed at an anonymous sexist guy.

  K: The idea of Bikini Kill was creating a female-gaze scenario—I was singing to men, and women were watching that. We wanted to be feminist heroes for somebody, just like people had been feminist heroes for us. At t
he end of Bikini Kill, though, I just felt like a big boob that everybody sucked off of, and I was drying out.

  J: How would you characterize the narrators and audiences of Julie Ruin and Le Tigre?

  K: Julie Ruin helped revitalize me. In Le Tigre, we were preaching to the converted. By then I wondered, Why am I trying to change the mind of an asshole I don’t care about? Why am I inviting assholes to the show, instead of my community? Also, I really, really, literally did not want to get beat up. Bikini Kill shows were so violent. I realized I didn’t want to play that kind of music. I had to have surgery on my vocal chords because I was screaming every night on shitty equipment and not being able to hear myself. I want a sound person; I want to play music that doesn’t rely on me screaming. I want to play to audiences who aren’t going to beat us up. I started singing songs to the kids who wrote us letters, like “Keep on Living.” “Hot Topic” is for the feminist community, thanking women who had come before us and who were still doing great work but were being ignored because they were past their prime.

  J: That’s your anthem where you name-check everyone from Faith Ringgold to Angela Davis and implore “Don’t you stop.” I appreciate that you celebrate, educate, and give marching instructions all in one song.

  K: I know what it feels like to be like a “has-been” at thirty. My peak was supposedly in the ’90s, but it’s 2010 and I’m still making work. That’s why I say “Don’t You Stop” in “Hot Topic.” I don’t want these women to stop—making art or anything.