American culture writing work

Chapter 40

Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

Riot grrrls, revolution, and women in independent rock

N THE METEORIC RISE OF QUINTESSENTIAL Seattle grunge band Nirvana 1from indie obscurity to corporate rock fame, a rumor emerged among rock circles nationwide: that the cryptic title of their megahit 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was the

invention not of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, but of his neighbor Kathleen

Hanna, who jokingly scrawled it on the wall of Cobain's house prior to his ascen-

Sion to rock stardom [Arnold, 1992]. From this one gesture and its retelling ensue multiple ironies, dizzying in their cumulative effect. First, the anecdote hints at the

creative invisibility of a woman behind what was to become a ubiquitous, industry- changing, Top 10 hit for a male rock group. The story additionally implies the male appropriation of Hanna's own ironic reference to a brand name deodorant marketed

to teenage girls (Teen Spirit). While the pointedness of Hanna's reference gets lost

in Nirvana's translation, she uses a brand name which itself conjures not of female

teenage identity, group activity and group solidarity; in short, in an ambiguous use

of 'teen' which actually refers specifically to female teens 'Teen Spirit' creates a

marketable fantasy of female youth culture. Moreover, in contrast to her previous

invisibility, Hanna now suddenly occupies a position of mass visibility as lead member of Bikini Kill, a band that has gained particular prominence, both within the independent music scene and in the corporate rock press, for its role in fostering

the Riot Grrrl 'movement' of young feminist women in underground rock. Given these origins, Henna's slogan consolidates several themes that we propose to

explore in this essay: namely, girl-specificity within commodity culture and youth

subculture; the historical invisibility of women in rock; the newfound prominence Of women bands; the relation between performance gender and sexuality; and the possible links between women's musical production, feminist politics and feminist

aesthetics.

We will examine these themes in the context of the recent explosion onto the independent or underground rock scene of all-women bands or individual women

356 JOANNE GOTTLIEB AND GAYLE WALD

artists making loud, confrontational music in the ongoing tradition of punk rock.

The appearance of these bands and their widespread recognition in both the main-

stream and alternative presses would seem to signal a heady change, one that situates

the broadened access of girls and women to the transgressive potentialities of rock, and especially punk, subculture within the larger narrative of gains made by women

in the wake of feminism. At best, this change promises to expand the possibilities

for women's public self-expression, individual or collective gender identifications, at least within the bounds of white, middle-classand transgressive behaviors

culture in which this scene is primarily staged. The recent visibility of women in rock not only signals greater access for women to male-dominated realms of expres- sion, but also specifically frames these expressions in terms of femininity and

feminism. [.. •l

Our optimism is tempered, however, by two crucial observations: first, despite the advances of particular female performers, the ongoing tradition of rock is still

deeply masculinist; and second, because of patriarchal restrictions, the youth cul-

tures of girls historically have been defined by very different parameters from those

of boys. As a result of this second circumstance, girls may have different access to

the expression of, or different ways of expressing, nascent teenage sexuality and

rebellion against parental (that is, patriarchal) control, two themes that predominate

not only in rock music, but in the formation of Western teenage identity in general.

The conjunction of these two terms intimates that the forms of resistance offered by

rock culture are closely linked with the music's frank expressions of sexuality.

This means that rock 'n' roll is a potentially, though by no means an inher-

ently, feminist form; indeed, among male punk and hardcore performers, there is a long tradition of this rebellion being acted out at the expense and over the bodies

of women. . .

Punk spawned a tradition of male bands semi-ironically naming themselves after

exaggerated phallic symbols (Sex Pistols, Revolting Cocks, Dickies, Meat Puppets, Prong, Fishbone) , as well as bands that identified themselves with distanced and object-

ified references to women, women's genitals, or women's sexuality (Mudhoney),

from which they derive a certain self-conscious masculinity. Conversely, many of the

new women's bands name themselves in response to a ubiquitous and negative vocab-

ulary for the female body, calling themselves Hole, Burning Bush, Thrush, Queen Meanie Puss, Snatch, Pop Smear, Ovarian Trolley, and Dickless. Women bands have also employed names to communicate a succinct critique of masculinity, as in the

names Pork, Thrust, Spitboy, and Weenie Roast. In one particularly interesting exam-

ple, a band that used to call itself PMS later adopted the name Cockpit, combining references to both sexes. Self-naming here becomes a tactic not only of reclaiming

and recirculating masculinist terms (and thereby depleting their potency), but also of

outing or enabling women's uses of vocabularies otherwise forbidden to 'good' girls,

who are never supposed to swear or speak to loudly in public, let alone refer explic- itly to their genitals and what they do with them.

These bands find a precedent for their parodic self-naming in the example of

the Slits, one of the greatest and earliest all-female punk bands of the late Seventies.

This brings us to another aspect of the 'women in rock' phenomenon: despite its

RIOT GRRRLS, REVOLUTION, AND WOMEN IN ROCK 357

arent novelty, its roots date back approximately fifteen years, with the emer- app ence of women out of the 1970s punk movements in Britain and America. Women could participate in punk in part because the lack of musical experience — or even prejudicial beliefs about female musical incompetence — were relatively unimpor- tant in punk, which rejected technical virtuosity and professionalism in favor of

amateurishness, iconoclasm, and a do-it-yourself aesthetic. [. . .

Before moving on to a specific consideration of the riot grrrl phenomenon, we want to explore the problematics of women in subculture, and specifically women in rock. To do so, we draw on two figures in British cultural studies: Simon Frith,

who has written key texts on youth, music, and politics; and Angela McRobbie, who has worked on the culture of girls, and who has attempted a feminist rereading of

male-authored theories of subculture. The study of the gendering of subculture helps

in part to explain why girls historically have not participated as actively as boys in rock culture — both because of the patriarchal restrictions on girls, and because their pleasure and identity-formation, in response, tend to take a different form from

those of boys. Social restrictions on girls, their limited access to the street, and their

greater domestic role make the public spaces in which subcultures are acted out

(clubs, the street, bars) prohibitive and exclusive for them. The street often poses

a threat to girls and women, insofar as they are liable to male heckling, harassment

or assault. Though women historically have participated in street culture as prosti- tutes, such access is nevertheless regulated by patriarchal ideologies that designate

women sex-industry workers 'unfit' to occupy domestic roles. Therefore, while

male youth culture is public, oriented around the street, girls' culture often takes

forms that can be experienced within the home, such as dressing up, or engaging

in the creative consumption of mainstream pop idols, including fan-oriented visual

materials such as magazines, photographs and, most recently, videos. The conclusions of Frith and McRobbie suggest that rock 'n' roll subculture is

not the place to look for female participation, especially in terms of rock's produc-

tion, and at first glance rock history seems to bear this out. In the past, when women have participated in rock culture, they have tended to do so as consumers and fans

their public roles limited to groupie, girlfriend, or backup singer, their primary

function to bolster male performance. When women performed, Frith writes, it was 'almost always as singers, fronting a performance or record, their musical abil-

ities confused with their visual images and style.' Frith accounts for the exclusion

Of Women from rock production as part of an ideology of rock growing out of

bohemian culture. Rock was a place for male friendship in a resistive unregulated life-style, where women represented unwelcome demands for 'routine living,' for the provision of money for food and rent [Frith, 1981: 85—71. Moreover, rock culture, like other forms of oppositional culture that McRobbie describes, devel-

Oped signifying systems that privileged masculinity, systems in which '[tlhe meanings

that have sedimented around other objects, like motorbikes or electronic musical

equipment, have made them equally unavailable to women and girls' [McRobbie, 1991:291.

[However,] [wlhen the traditional asssociation of love and romance with popular

music (as well as the association of sex with pleasure) came apart in punk, women's

voices began to emerge, 'shrill, assertive, impure, individual voices, singer as subject

not Object [Frith, 1981: 243—41. As punk performers, participating in a new way,

358 JOANNE GOTTLIEB AND GAYLE WALD

these women 'brought with them new questions about sound and convention and

image, about the sexuality of performance and the performance of sexuality

[Plunks opened the possibility that rock could be against sexism (Frith 1981, 244).

What precisely are women punk rockers saying about the sexuality of performance

and the performance of sexuality? In order to answer this question, we need to look back to the what male rock

in other words, what male rock performance means.performers have done Women punk rockers emerged out of a decade of male rock experiments with gender, such as those of Gary Glitter or David Bowie. That is, the trajectory of

(male) rock up through the late Seventies was marked by increasing androgyny and

gender ambiguity. The male gender bending of Seventies glam-rock forms an

important node in this history: breaking with the heterosexual romance paradigm

of Elvis or the early Beatles, the glam-rocker elevated the erotica of performance

to a high narcissism, alternately playing alien, outcast, deviant, prophet, high priest,

and messiah. [. . •l

Glam-rock produced some freakish results in the form of heavy metal cock-

rock, which attempted to recoup this performance tradition for masculinity. In this

genre, glam's camp and sexual ambiguity became cockrock's baroque staging of

a phenomenona peculiar form of longhaired, becostumed hypermasculinity easily parodied, for instance, in the documentary spoof film This is Spinal Tap. The

progression from glam rock into cockrock (the masculinity of which is actually

ambiguous and conflicted) suggests that within rock performance, there is a struggle

with femininity that may stem from the feminine gendering of the performance

position itself. [. . .

.1

Women performers [thus] go through complicated contortions as they both appropriate and repudiate a traditionally masculine rock performance position which

is itself premised on the repression of femininity, while they simultaneously contend

with a feminine performance position defined primarily as the erotic object-to-

be-looked-at. These complexities are also played out historically. Although male

experiments with gender did not translate into an equal flexibility for women, glam and disco helped to erode the necessary association of popular music with romance

and heterosexuality, thereby preparing the way for female performance in punk rock. Introducing explicit homoerotics onto the rock stage, male glam-rockers

like their female punk successors — revealed the performativity of gender. Ironically, the same years which saw women emerge as punk artists also witnessed the estab- lishment of a new cultural form — M TV. The advent of music video provided a space for women rockers based on traditional aspects of female musical perform- ance — the visual and emotive connotations of the female vocalist [Lewis, 1990: 69]. A generation whose teenybop idols included for the first time women who displayed not only sexuality but also some degree of independence and sexual power, Riot Grrrl emerged from punk via Madonna.

If MTV provided multiple images of women rockers, including Madonna's street smarts and her easy assumption and rejection of various feminine roles, punk's

staging of defiance and impropriety allowed female punk performers to negotiate

the paradox of femininity on the rock stage by enacting transgressive forms Of

RIOT GRRRLS, REVOLUTION, AND WOMEN IN ROCK 359

for instance, in frighteningly unconventional hair, clothing styles and

femininity, . ] In one of the most outrageous examples of the feminist appro- stage activities. [. riate and adaptation of male punk stage antics, one member of the band L7, in response to heckling from a male audience member at a concert in Boston in fall

1992, reportedly pulled down her pants, pulled out her tampon, and threw it at Aside from raising the question of what happens when women exercise their

ower in the form of an aggressive and confrontational expression of their sexu-

takes the notion of a woman's being 'on the ragality, this act — a reverse rape? and literally hurls it back at patriarchy.

In one response to the complexities and contradictions of their performance

positions, women rockers, from Yoko Ono and Tina Turner and continuing up to

Bikini Kill, have resorted to the strategic use of the scream, a radically polysemous

nonverbal articulation that can simultaneously and ambiguously evoke rage, terror,

pleasure, and/or primal self-assertion. In the examples of Ono and Turner, we link the female scream with two divergent musical traditions — the performance art tradi- tion in which Ono was a germinal figure, and the R & B tradition embodied in Turner, especially in her role as a crossover artist. Gaar notes that 'shouting and

screaming' figured highly in the R & B tradition from which Turner's musical style emerged (Gaar: 89). Screams work as linguistic signs, having no particular referent outside of the context in which they are uttered; the scream can be read as a kind

of jouissance, a female body language that evades the necessity to signify within

male-defined conventions and meanings. But far from being a fluid signifier, screams

are also emotional ejaculations bearing specific associations with highly charged

events — like rape, orgasm, or childbirth. Often associated with femininity at its most

vulnerable, the scream in its punk context can effect a shocking juxtaposition of sex

and rage, including the cultural terrors of the open expressions of female sexuality,

or feminist rage at the sexual uses and abuses of women. If female screams are often

associated with women's sexual violation and rape, then these examples seem to

voice a collective outrage at such abuse. An attention-getting device, the scream publicizes private or internal experience. These girl screams, moreover, voice not

only rage, but rage as pleasure, the scream as orgasm. Taken together, they seem to be suggesting something new — not just that women are angry, but that there's pleasure in their performances of anger, or even just pleasure in performance; the

scream thereby replaces the pleasant, melodious and ultimately tame emotionalism

traditionally associated with the female vocalist. Conversely, these screams can

COmmunicate a profound ambiguousness about consent and coercion, a fine line

between orgasm and rape, as when Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland chillingly apposes the chanted phrases 'I'd love to/ I had to' and punctuates them by a piercing

Good God!' in the song 'Blood.' A form of expression both denied to women in Public (screaming is unladylike) and devalued in private (women are so emotional), punk

screams are a wordless protest against the overdetermined femininity that

these female performers — performing as women — must occupy; the scream musters e ener

th gy Of the whole body to burst these constrictions. unruly and unexpected,

ese screams deploy punk values to violate the demand that women remain patient, uncomplaining, and quiet.

360 JOANNE GOTTLIEB AND GAYLE WALD

[In fact,] [ilnstead of tirelessly insisting on the right to be called 'women,' as

mainstream feminism has long been advocating, riot grrrls foreground girl identity,

in its simultaneous audacity and awkwardness — and not just girl, but a defiant 'grrrl' identity that roars back at the dominant culture. Indeed, reclaiming the word 'girl'

and reinvesting it with new meaning within their own feminist punk vernacular has proved one of the most salient aspects of the riot grrrl revolution. Such a recuper-

ation of patriarchal language in part reflects the subculture's celebration of preteen

girlhood — indeed, precisely those years in girls' lives that Frith and McRobbie deem so crucial in understanding their ongoing relation to and participation within

subculture, and the same years on which feminist theorists Carol Gilligan and Lyn

Mikel Brown [19921 focus in terms of women's relation to society broadly defined.

In their song 'Girl Germs,' for example, Bratmobile revel in the idea of their

toxicity to boys/ men; in the age of AIDS, they ironically relate germs to girls' self-

protection and their ability to repel unwanted sexual advances. 'Germs' here also

suggests 'germinal,' the potential girls have to develop into powerful women; alter-

natively, it refers to girl-specific culture in its embryonic stages. While parody and

wordplay are central to the riot grrrl redefinition of 'girl, ' there is also, admittedly,

a crucial element of fantasy in their self-construction — a nostalgia for the appar- ently close relationships between girls prior to the intrusion of heterosexual romance

and its spin-offs, sexual competition, and sexual rivalry. (In Bikini Kill, for one,

jealously is a favorite target of critique.) Bikini Kill's song 'Rebel Girl' asserts the

importance of such girl solidarity as a response to the sexual commodification, cate-

gorization and subsequent or resultant (self)-division of women: 'They say she's a

slut,' they sing, 'but I know she is my best friend.' Most important in light of our earlier discussion of the journalistic labels that have come to define women in rock,

the riot grrrls, in rewriting 'girl' as 'grrrl,' also incorporate anger, defiance, and

rebellion into their own self-definition, construing female rage as essential and

intrinsic to their collective punk identity.

Unlike some other women in the punk and postpunk alternative music scenes, riot grrrls draw upon their experiences of girlhood to emphasize female difference

in concert with female equality. In other words, riot grrrls both assume women's

equality and understand that it has not necessarily been efficacious in securing them

recognition as 'legitimate' rock musicians.

The band Bikini Kill is in this regard both representative and exemplary. An

essential part of their 'Revolution Girl Style' is their attempt to encourage young,

predominantly white, middle-class girls to contest capitalist-patriarchal racism and

sexism, precisely through acts of individual transgression against the implicit or

explicit norms of 'ladylike' or 'girlish' behavior. The band links these individual

challenges to private (that is, domestic, local, or familial) patriarchal authority to

collective feminist resistance and struggle. McRobbie supports this notion in her

suggestion that many middle-class girls' first political experiences involve escape 'from the family and its pressures to act like a "nice" girl' (32—3). Bikini Kill makes

this connection between personal transgression and progressive feminist politics explicit in a song such as 'Double Dare Y a,' in which singer Hanna screams:

RIOT GRRRLS, REVOLUTION, AND WOMEN IN ROCK 361

You're a big girl now you've got no reason

not to fight

You've got to know

what they are

Fore you can stand up

for your rights

Rights rights Rights?

you have them, you know

.1 In concert, Hanna sometimes parodies Madonna, appearing on stage in a black bra and biker shorts, the word 'SLUT' penned in across her abdomen. The

ways in which riot grrrls perform on and through their bodies reaffirms the very

themes articulated in their songs. The abuses of girls' and women's bodies are

constantly represented by riot grrrls, both in their music and zines; since such abuses

are generally associated with women's alienation from their bodies, the ability to

be embodied — the deployment of the body in performance — provides an antidote to its previous violations. Not only do girls wield their bodies in performance, but

they do so in such a way as to make their bodies highly visible: this visibility coun-

teracts the (feelings of) erasure and invisibility produced by persistent degradation

in a sexist society. Such performance recuperates to-be-looked-at-ness as something

that constitutes, rather than erodes or impedes, female subjectivity.

In this respect riot grrrl performances build upon (and surpass?) the challenge

to the male gaze that Hebdige describes when he writes that female punks of an

earlier generation 'turned being looked at into an aggressive act.' [1983: 851. The

current generation of riot grrrls derive their strategies from the first women punks,

who put on

the conventional iconography of fallen womanhood — the vamp, the

prostitute, the slut, the waif, the stray, the sadistic mistress, the victim-

in-bondage. Punk girls interrupt[edl the flow of images, in a spirit of

irony invert[edl consensual definitions of attractiveness and desirability,

playing back images of women as icons, women as the furies of classical

mythology • [ibid. 1983: 831

The current generation work changes on the iconoclastic methods of early female punks, replacing punk's angry masochism with a deep sense of abuse and a

stronger critique of patriarchy, and relating it ultimately to what happens, not only

in the street, but also in the home. Rather than reducing the political to issues of

Self-esteem, riot grrrls make self-esteem political. using performance as a political forum to interrogate issues of gender, sexuality, and patriarchal violence, riot grrrl

Performance creates a feminist praxis based on the transformation of the private

into the public, consumption into production or, rather than privileging the tradi-

üonally male side Of these binaries, they create a new synthesis of both.