In The Beginning There Was Rhythm!

Girls To The Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus came out today.

I read it straight through when it came in the mail without stopping. It took about six hours. I thought "oh I'll write a review, but I have plenty of time, it's not coming out for a few months". Then I got an email from Johanna Fatemen where she mentioned she was reviewing it for Book Forum, so I decided to wait. I'm glad I did. Jo is a really, really, really good writer. She's one of the smartest and more captivating writers-who-wrote-zines-in-the-90's for sure--definitely in my top five favorites of that era of feminist fanzine writers. If you ever get a chance to read her zines you totally should do that: Snarla, Artaud-Mania or My Need To Speak on the Subject of Jackson Pollock are the ones I remember, but she may have written more. I'm imagining you finding her work in a zine library or in a musty archive or perhaps in PDF format or maybe will get a shitty xerox sold on eBay for too much $. Please sit there and read everything she has written, you will be grateful that you did and your life will be altered and enriched and you will want to make art or culture or just plain want to make something happen.

Johanna's review of Sara's book is pretty favorable, but there is a hint of criticism lurking underneath the surface. That is the part I would have liked to have read more of, but I understand she is writing the review for Book Forum. If I was reviewing this book in a pretty mainstream publication with a wide-audience I would give it a good review too. I am giving it a good review now. I liked the book. When I was done reading it I wrote to Sara Marcus and said something like "Dear Sara Marcus, Thank You For Writing This Book. I Can't Imagine How Much Work It Took. Wow! You Really Did It! Congratulations!" and mentioned that there were some things I remembered a little differently…other things I didn't know about….but really the emotion I felt when I was done reading the book was appreciation and relief and while I was reading I was totally consumed by it, not noticing that any time was passing at all. So yeah, I like the book, some things I liked about it more than others. You should read it and make up your own mind though and post your review so that there are multiple feminist voices discussing this representation.

Whenever one of these books comes out, I get a little nervous about how I will be represented. I felt a little odd about that in this book, but I tried not to let my self-image issues get in the way of my perception of the work as a whole. My own relationship to riot grrl is complex. Riot Grrl would not have happened without Bikini Kill for example, but I identified as a riot grrl for only a short time, when it had two "R"'s instead of 3 maybe. Who added the third "R"? This is a real question?! Riot GrrL/GrrrL started in Washington DC in June 1991. But it really started the year before that in Olympia, WA. Girls To The Front explains that history really well I thought. I moved back to Olympia (from DC) at the end of 1992 and the third "R" had been firmly established. It was at this time that I finished writing Jigsaw #5, which documents a pretty hard year, Fall 1991-Fall 1992. By the way if you are 23 years old and you think you should write a fanzine about everything in your brain you might regret it later because it turns out that fanzines are not ephemeral art after all, they actually last forever! I guess if you are that age now (or way younger even) then you have no illusions about anything being temporary because you grew up with the internet and you don't care about privacy. Well, I made 10 copies of Jigsaw #5. Yes, 10 copies. I am serious. It's about 92 pages long. I couldn't afford to print them. I sent them to 10 people. A few years later I printed 25 more copies. At the end of the 20th century I published Jigsaw #7 and printed about 20 more copies of Jigsaw #5 to send to friends and that was it. So even though that fanzine seems like it may have been written for a lot of people to read, I tried to keep it a secret.

There are a lot of reasons for that deliberate decision, but I think the best explanation is that the overnight success of Nirvana changed everything. I had been going to shows in Olympia since 1983, so when Riot Grrl (with one R) was formulating- pre-Nirvana success story-we were still thinking in that 80's mindset. The 90's hadn't happened yet. We were living in an underground culture that was being turned into a commodity and sold back to us, which was really disorienting. It is impossible to explain this, because it was so different, but if you use your imagination maybe you might understand a tiny bit. So when everything changed, it felt natural to take a step back. It was confusing. I was confused. Bikini Kill was confused and suddenly "riot grrRl" had a media created-definition and that was not the sound of the revolution because the media was sexist and all about selling shit and we wanted to destroy society. (Later it became obvious that the media had a positive impact as well as a negative one, but that was not clear at the time.)

Jigsaw #5 basically kind of says "fuck you" and "get away from me" and "we don't need you" and "we go with the kids yeah yeah yeah yeah" over and over and over again, in an attempt to navigate the distance between the 80's underground idea and the early 90's pop culture crap that was for sale at the mall. I was trying to say, "hey let's not all become capitalists, let's try to make something revolutionary happen." But I was also freaking out and fluorescent lights were shining on us and we were naked and lots of flashbulbs were going off and people were being exploited and no one had any money. Ok, well some bands on major labels did, but nobody in a "riot grrrl" band was getting paid, but a lot of money was being made off of our image. It's fine to make shit for free, but to make shit without a profit motive and to see something you helped create being used to make money for corporations without your permission totally sucks. So Jigsaw #5 uses terms like "squares" a lot, to try to set up the idea that if you are against capitalism, you are not interested in "the square world", you want to create an alternative, where making money and being successful in those terms is not the point of art or music or whatever it is you do.

I feel like I need to explain this, because Sara Marcus quotes Jigsaw #5 in her book. In fact, she kind of uses a quote from me in her book in a pivotal way in the story arc. I wrote a long-winded Gertrude Stein-meets-Jack Kerouac inspired rambling girl of an essay that tries to address this 80's underground mindset collision with the still emergent 90's pop culture reality where I say that I do not identify as a riot grrrl anymore and say some kind of insulting sounding stuff about "well intentioned hopelessly enthusiastic isolated young girls who still feel that label is meaningful to them". Looking back on this now, it sounds really harsh! But I am me and I can remember writing it and I know what I meant at the time. I was ready to give it up and start something new! I wanted to move things forward. I thought that it had become meaningless and that we needed to start the next era. It had seemed miraculously easy to make riot grrl happen, so why couldn't we just re-invent punk rock feminism again and again and again? In fact, isn't that what we are still doing over and over and over again even now in the year two thousand and ten?!!! We are still making things happen, creating independent culture, self-representing, making work, participating in community life, sharing ideas, listening to each other, disagreeing, discussing, making mistakes, learning and living our lives with our eyes and ears and mouths and hearts open. Right?

History is tricky. For instance now everyone calls that whole time period of punk feminism "riot grrl" and it has a much broader definition than it did back then. There is a market for "riot grrl" history, so we have to be suspicious of that economic factor but we shouldn't let this stop us from documenting our own scenes. Nostalgia is the enemy. Just look at what happened to the baby boomers. 60's radicalism was actually radical, but you have to unearth that radical history, it will not be handed to you. Read Marissa Magic for more on this theme.

Bringing up the question: Is punk rock feminism dead? No. Is "riot grrrl" dead? Well I will not make that claim now because in retrospect, it was certainly not dead in 1993, it had relevancy to all kinds of girls then, even if I no longer felt it was a useful term, and I think the same is probably true today. In fact I know it is true, because I get letters (ok emails) from girls all over the world all the time who tell me they are riot grrrls and love Bikini Kill and that they believe in "The Revolution, GRRL STYLE NOW!" By the way, I still think that the emphasis needs to be on "now" and "revolution" rather than on "grrl" or "style", but if you disagree, please let me know why! But if you are a Riot Grrl then own it! Don't get all caught up in early 90's retro crap. Start a fucking riot!!!!

Riot Grrl belongs to whoever needs it and believes it has the power to give their lives meaning and change things. That is the reason for all of this. Change the world. Don't accept things "the way they are now". Create your own meanings. Make your own definitions. Use culture as a tool. Just know you will have to be quick and constantly on your toes and maybe it's harder than ever to create something ephemeral, to live in the moment, but maybe it's even more than necessary now. The now of now.

If you are interested in starting a young feminist movement rooted in your generation, my advice to you is not to let anyone stop you. People will laugh at you. Ignore the sound of their voices and listen to your own. Scream if you have to, even if you think that no one can hear you. If you are actually threatening the status quo you will not have the approval of the status quo. Call it whatever you want, the point is to fuck shit up. This is true for feminists of all ages and eras by the way.

And never forget what Ari Up taught us: silence is a rhythm too.

Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music by Marisa Meltzer

Girl Power traces the influence of OG "riot grrl" groups (Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens To Betsy) to the Spice Girls, covering "foxcore", Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre and Ladyfest as well as several other pop stars and other all-female alternative/indie rock groups along the way.

The book is written for a mainstream audience and suffers from some of the awkwardness that comes along with trying to explain this stuff to the general public. Marissa comes across as a former indie-rocker who felt she didn't really fit into the punk scene, yet was invigorated by the feminism (and celebration of girlhood) that happened during riot grrl. This makes sense, as she admits she found out about the movement through Sassy (her previous book is a love letter to the pro-girl teen magazine) She argues that riot grrl's "media blackout" led to its demise and wishes that the original groups would have stuck around and tried to find a larger audience. Describing an experience of seeing Sleater-Kinney play to 13,000 people, she recalls wishing that riot grrl had been able to sustain itself. Paradoxically, she acknowledges that, while the Spice Girls were cool in some ways, their "girl power" was limited to marketing and questions what that means in terms of empowerment. Quoting Kathleen Hanna, she points out that buying a Spice Girls notebook is not going to change the world. This makes me wonder what would be different if it had been Bikini Kill notebooks the girls were buying.

I knew Marissa around 96/7 when she lived in Olympia and had a cute all-girl accapella group called The Skirts. In the interest of "full disclosure"--I was a big Skirts fan and she was my favorite member! It was a weird time period. It was interesting to read her take on things as someone who admits (somewhat reluctantly) that she moved here to go to Evergreen after getting into riot grrl and even "semi-stalking" Kathleen. I wish she would have told more of her own story here. Her voice comes through loud and clear when she is critiquing what she calls the elitism of independent culture. She belongs to the camp that believes that it's exclusive to play basement shows, failing to see how this can be a more inclusive model. By booking our own tours and creating a DIY feminist network through the mail, Bikini Kill encouraged girls to meet each other and start their own scene. Sure a "scene" can be clique-ish and Olympia was/is no exception, but the idea we were were working with is that if we can do it here, certainly you can do it where you live. Only a few bands can get on MTV or sign to a major label. It's far more populist to encourage kids to put on shows where they live and take their own work and friends seriously. To her credit she does acknowledge that Ladyfest was a successful attempt to take this idea to another level.

I was interviewed (via email) for the book and am quoted a lot, which is kind of embarrassing, as I don't think what I'm trying to say really comes through, which is partially my fault, not thinking about who the audience for the book would be and just neurotically rambling on to her about how strange it is to have been a part of something that had such a big cultural impact. I remember telling her how weird and hard to talk about a lot of this is for me without going into a lot of detail. I tried to explain my perspective. On the one hand you want to take credit for your work, especially because women are encouraged NOT to take credit for anything. On the other hand, it's embarrassing. Sometimes I feel like I'm lying when I talk about this stuff because what actually happened is so surreal and bizarre that I often have a hard time believing it myself.

Personal weirdness aside, I think it's cool that someone wrote this book for a mainstream audience. My hope is that teenage girls and young women who don't know this history will get inspired to find out about riot grrl. It would be really cool if it inspired girls to create a new young feminist movement rooted in their generation.

The book made me think a lot about documenting history from a strategic perspective. How could this story be told to incite participation in girls? A big part of the original "girl power" idea, was to get girls to stop being consumers of male-dominated culture and start producing our own. I guess my fear is that this kind of pop-culture history could encourage girls to simply consume "girl-culture", thereby claiming the identity of "riot grrl" or "feminism" through the act of buying a record, as opposed to starting their own band or fanzine or putting on a show. To me the point is to encourage girls to start their own young feminist movement, not just to copy what we did. That is the danger of nostalgia I think...

So I'd be interested to hear what people think about this. How can we tell our story without feeding into this consumer-oriented nostalgic trap? Or is that inevitable?

FAB-R: Feminist Action Brigade Book Club

Inspired by BISAR (and several women's only book clubs) as well as by riot grrl, Ladyfest and BAB (Bands Against Bush), I started FAB, which first stood for Feminists Against Bush but ended up being called Feminist Action Brigade.

In some ways FAB was an experiment that failed, which I won't go into great detail about here, but basically we were trying to incite a DIY network of feminist activism that was political beyond the personal (without discrediting the personal) and wasn't just about culture, but also addressed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 'our' place in the world as feminists living in the US, an extremely rich, imperialist nation. The urgency of the presidential election of 2004 was the immediate impetus.

My outrage at what was going on in the world collided with my background in "cultural activism"(Bikini Kill, Ladyfest Etc) and experience of the hardcore scene during the Reagan era to inspire me to get a bunch of people together in Olympia to start Bands Against Bush, and Pogo for Peace (a series of shows the publicized anti-war actions)....on a personal/local level, this was a response to Rachel Corrie's death, on a national/international political level, it was to protest the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan...basically all this stuff was a way of responding to the US government's repression and violence after 9/11. When the war was starting in March 2003, we didn't see the punk scene here as being overtly political, and we wanted to change that; especially because, more than ever before, we had access to our own media, resources and distro: from shows to flyers to zines to websites to self-made and produced movies to youtube to community radio to pirate radio to public access tv to PA systems to house shows to xerox machines to scanners to all the local record labels, bands and festivals that are known internationally and constantly going on tour and doing interviews and selling merch and talking into microphones to audiences and staying up late on tour having conversations with people they just met all over the world--we really were in a position of cultural power as members of the Olympia music scene. We wanted to use this power to spread dissent. In the face of what was happening in Iraq we felt it was our responsibility as US citizens to try to use these resources to speak out and organize a resistance movement against our government's policies. We got pretty far with it and then it stopped. I honestly don't know why exactly.(Please write in with your take on this)

We worked really hard and did a bunch of stuff but both of those organizations/tactics were sort of losing steam as people got more and more depressed after our big event in October 2003... then Fallujah happened...."beers against bush" went from a bad joke to a way of life for many friends... by the time Bush was re-elected I was ready to try something else. We were all really depressed so it took awhile. I had decided to go back to school to study US history, and was losing faith in the idea of culture as political terrain. Maybe being in a band, writing fanzines and holding benefit shows wasn't enough anymore... Plus all those meetings were starting to make me go insane. I wasn't writing songs or articles, I was just posting organizational emails to countless list-servs. Still, we had to do something, right? So we kept at it and FAB was born.

FAB was something we (me, maggie, amy and wendy yao) had thought of while eating dinner the day after the 2000 presidential election, but nothing really came of it at first (other than a few signs at anti-war protests). By November 2004, it seemed like nothing was going to happen with FAB unless we made an effort, so the idea we started with was 'baby steps', so I suggested a feminist theory book club that would meet locally but also have an online presence.

Rather than to have it be 'women only', we invited people of all genders to participate but then on the side also had a lady's book club where we read mostly fiction. The reason it was open to everyone was because Feminism For Everybody by bell hooks had just recently been published and it made a persuasive argument that men should be included in feminism; ie Feminism is not for Women Only. I was a little nervous about including men in the group, but as it turned out only one or two guys were interested in coming to meetings (big surprise) and their inclusion seemed to pose no problem (none that I was aware of anyhow, although men did dominate the list-serv, making many women hesitant to post).

FAB-R (the R stood for readers) was short lived in it's initial form, but had a lasting impact locally. Besides reading feminist theory together, we also networked with local feminist organizations by attending, promoting and participating in a locally held Feminist Summit, which was really informative/inspiring and put us in contact with a diverse group of feminists in our own community who were of different generations and who were utilizing different tactics. We organized two events, one being a panel discussion at Ladyfest on 2nd Wave Feminism, featuring local women who had been involved in the women's liberation movement; the second was a book reading by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman, a book we read together (thanks Kanako!) We also managed to make two zines and a website, thanks to Marissa Magic (thanks Marissa) and brought them on Spider and the Webs tour, where we used the merch table and the microphone as a platform to get the word out about FAB. On top of this, we went to anti-war protests together and helped organize/participate in a counter-action to an anti-abortion rally. I think we did a few other actions, but I really can't remember right now.

There's a lot more to say about why FAB failed to turn into an actual Feminist Action Brigade, as well as why Ladyfest succeeded and what happened with BAB. This is something I'm interested in documenting, as we need to write our own history of resistance as we are participating in it--Erick Lyle's On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City being a recent example of how effective this can be. It's important to talk about what didn't work as well as about what did work. This is how we learn not to repeat our own mistakes. I know first hand that riot grrl could have gotten a lot further had the second wave histories that have been written since the early 90's been available to us then.

On a personal level with all this stuff, when FAB began I really didn't want to start a new organization from scratch--I kind of wanted to check out what groups were already working in our community and try and help them with publicity and outreach. I had realized I had a lot to learn from older, more experienced organizers and really did not want to be in any kind of "leadership" role. Still, I did (and do) want to use the public voice I have and resources I have access to for political purposes. So in the face of this personal situation, I wanted FAB to be more of a network, rather than an actual organization. I guess we weren't really sure how to do this or what we wanted to do exactly and it turned out not to be such a good strategy, as there wasn't really a basis for our platform, or even a means of developing one collectively, we were just individuals without any kind of structure for action reading books and doing stuff we felt like doing when we felt like doing it. There wasn't accountability and since people are busy, things don't usually get done unless people feel like they've made a commitment to follow through. I think if we had made a magazine together that came out regularly, or even just a blog or a website that was more interactive it could have gone farther...like to Tacoma.

Writing about this is something I have started working on and will continue to so contact me if you'd like to contribute your perspective on this history. For now, inspired by Slim's BISAR post, I will leave you with a short list of books FAB read in the first six months or so of our existence, as well as a long list of books I wish we had read together.

Here's what we read:

The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy; Women, Politics and the Future by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner
The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's Rights and How to Fight Back by Gloria Feldt
Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
Daring to Be Bad by Alice Echols
No Turning Back: The History Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle B Freedman
Outlaw Woman by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis
Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader
Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement ed by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (i think this was extra credit,we just passed around a copy at the meetings)

Looking at the FAB-R email archive, it looks like a small group was reading the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir over the summer, while most of us were swamped with organizing Ladyfest and stopped having regular meetings. At the end of the summer Kanako held a second meeting for new recruits who had read Outlaw Woman after we had already met about the book, and that's when we held the event hosting Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. By this point I was in school full time and I'm not sure if the book club continued or not -I think it did, but under a different name?

Here's a list of books I would still like to read in a Feminist Theory book club-this is up for debate, should a book club actually form:

Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
North/South: The Nawal El Saadawi Reader
Inessential Woman by Elizabeth V. Spelman
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body by Susanne Bordo
Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan
Ideas of Action by Cynthia Kaufman
Women, Gender and Islam by Leila Ahmed
Thinking Class: Sketches of a Cultural Worker by Joanna Kadi
Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue by Leslie Feinberg
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
Vindication of the Rights of Women Mary Wollstonecraft
The Orgins of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels
This Bridge Called my Back & Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua
Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
"Can the Subaltern Speak?" by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (maybe more in the Spivak Reader)
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy ed Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich
Women and the Politics of Class by Johanna Brenner
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminist ed Zillah Eisenstein
Anarchism and other essays by Emma Goldman
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures ed Chandra Mohanty
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class Ed Michelle Tea
Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition by Kamala Kembadoo .
Dangerous Liaisons : Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism by Chandra Mohanty
Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex INCITE