Hey kids, remember when I got sick a few weeks ago, and I had to put off writing a 'big deal' post? Well, live in suspense no longer! Here it is, finally.
I.
It all started on the Valentine's Day before the last. February 14, 2009.
When I heard that someone was doing an Anti-Valentine's Day Riot Grrrl Cover Band Show, I couldn't quite believe it. It was such a good idea that I couldn't believe someone was actually doing it. I went partly because I knew I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it for myself.
But I also went because the show's organizers were releasing a cd that night called Gimme Cooties, a compilation of live recordings by local girl bands that I absolutely had to hear. That morning, my platonic date for the show almost canceled on me, I didn't feel like getting dressed, and I worried that it would be weird or awkward if I showed up at this event where I wouldn't really know anyone. I ultimately decided that I didn't care, because I needed that cd.
Flyer for the first anti-V Day show
Fortunately things worked out. My friend Alma came with me, and yes, we were both a little awkward. We spent time between sets at the Dominican bodega across the street. During the sets we were stuck sort of in the back of the room, and we couldn't see what was going on, but we still managed to push up front for Bikini Kill's set. Afterwards I went to the For the Birds table, which was stacked high with zines, albums, and vegan cupcakes and got some cooties of my own. And then we went home.
It was nearly 2 am when I got in, and the first thing I did was look at the album's liner notes. A small collage of simple drawings and typed text on graph paper, the liner notes bare incredible resemblance to a zine.
The text is a message from Kathi Ko (Each Other's Mothers, Zombie Dogs), who put the cd together. "This is GIMME COOTIES," she says, "a comp featuring live tracks of all girl/girl fronted bands in Brooklyn and the surrounding east coast area." The notes explain that purpose of the album is to "document a new wave of badass girls playing music."
The text after this sent little waves of excitement/nausea running through my hands and up and down my spine:
GIMME COOTIES is a declaration of grrrlspace. It's proof of something that's happening right now...total scheming challenging creating gettingshitdone supportive cootie-swapping grrrl love. I want to see truckloads of girl hands storm in and reinvent boring boy scenes in ways we've been dreaming of. seeing and hearing other girl bands...I swear, it's a catalyst to start yr own. don't get yr cootie shots. listen to this comp. now go start a band with yr girlfriends. xo, kathi
Gimme Cooties cd
I couldn't sleep that night. I was lying awake in bed, thinking about the liner notes, not just what they said, but how they said it...I recognized the style of writing, I recognized the layout: it was the rhetoric of the original '90s Riot Grrrl movement. I had this funny feeling that I couldn't entirely articulate, and I kept thinking to myself, "Something that's happening right now..."
I spent the next month listening to nothing but Gimme Cooties. I wanted to blog about it, and I even contacted For the Birds, and then Kathi about reprinting the liner notes. But I just couldn't seem to get a post written on it, I didn't know why. I couldn't capture how the liner notes or the show made me feel.
II.
When I heard that there was going to be another Anti-Valentine's Day Riot Grrrl Cover Band Show this year, I still couldn't believe it. It was like looking out your window and seeing not one, but two unicorns, idly chewing on sidewalk grass.
Of course, I went. This time I went for the sheer spectacle, and because I wanted to hear songs by The Breeders, Stevie Nicks, Sleater-Kinney, and Bikini Kill live. But here's the thing: as soon as 'Bikini Kill' started, it became clear that they were doing more than playing Bikini Kill songs.
The long slate of 'opening' bands that night was comprised of many recognizable young women who play with a number of local New York bands. They were one night only combos of some of my favorite hometown punk feminist heroes (a.k.a. some of my favorite girls in the world.) They were all playing someone else's songs -- but these girls were all still themselves, playing someone else's songs.
Flyer for the 2010 Riot Grrrl and Women-fronted Band Cover Show
'Bikini Kill,' on the other hand, was clearly impersonating Bikini Kill. Before they began, 'Kathleen' had a volunteer from the audience help her write 'SLUT' on her stomach in lipstick. She mimicked Kathleen Hanna's voice perfectly, and began their set by announcing "We're Bikini Kill..." When the entire audience answered, "...and we want revolution, grrrl style now!" it almost knocked the wind out of me. Yes, last year's 'Bikini Kill' started their set the same way. But the feeling that you're not alone, that you're not the only one who still sings these songs never gets old.
III.
In the days after the show, I tried to figure out what 'Bikini Kill' was doing. I had this feeling that they'd done something very specific and deliberate, but was having trouble describing it. I kept thinking that it felt more like a Civil War battle reenactment than a show, but I couldn't explain it any better than that.
A few days later, Tobi Vail helped me put it all together. A quote from her review of Marisa Meltzer's new book helped it to make sense. Vail writes, "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?"
Why do people do Civil War reenactments, why do places like Colonial Williamsburg exist? They're strategic uses of history, meant to entertain, to educate, to commemorate events that are supposed to be significant to U.S. national history. Battle reenactments are rituals that enshrine the act of war, the spilling of blood, as a process central to the making of the United States as a nation.
I don't know about you, readers, but the act of war and the spilling of blood could not be less enshrined for me. However: Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Excuse 17, The Gossip, and Riot Grrrl and its descendants in general, are a different story.
These Anti-Valentine's Day shows, and Gimme Cooties, are rescuing the history of Riot Grrrl and bringing it to the center. Organizer Kathi Ko, with support from For the Birds (a feminist collective and distro), and help from surely many others, is taking this history, and everything it stands for, and making it apart of a current narrative. But this is about more than 'enshrining' or 'commemorating' a romanticized view of Riot Grrrl. This is about using history strategically, with the intention of opening up and continuing this history. This is about using shows, comp cds, and music from current bands to incite participation.
And the organizers of the show are doing so in a way that is fantastically subversive. These shows masquerade as just shows, as events with live music and liquor and general merriment. Both years, I went expecting nothing but music and general merriment, and I left feeling completely changed. I left those shows feeling inspired, feeling like I belonged to something, feeling like Riot Grrrl/punk/feminism, despite a lot of recent naysayery, are not dead, and neither am I. In other other words, I came out of that show with a scorching case of cooties. And I couldn't be happier about it.
I blogged yesterday about The Anti-Valentine's Day Riot Grrrl Cover Band Show. Because it's a night of one-off cover bands, part of the point is that you get to hear songs you know, by bands that matter to you. Both last year and this time around, I went because I wanted to hear live versions of songs by my dear Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, both of whom are no longer together. (I believe that there's a deep significance to the performance of songs by these particular bands, especially Bikini Kill, and trust me, we're gonna talk about that later.) But one of my favorite moments during this past Sunday's grrrl-a-palooza happened during a song I'd never heard before.
I mentioned in my last post that "The Breeders" were on the bill. I am forced to admit that I'm a lazy Breeders fan, the kind who only has Last Splash. So I wasn't really surprised when I didn't recognize the last song of "The Breeders'" set. But I was very surprised when I noticed that absolutely everyone around me, both ladies and gents, were singing along to every word, swaying and bouncing, closing their eyes and clutching at their chests as they repeated the song's chorus over and over again with the band.
Naturally, I went home and googled what I could remember of the song's lyrics, and found that it was actually a Pixies song that The Breeders have been known to include in their live shows. (I don't really know the Pixies very well. Yeah, I know, how I can blog about modern rock and punk if I don't know the Pixies? I'm getting on it, okay, cut me a break!)
So enjoy this incredibly rare public admission of ignorance, and a really wonderful, apparently well-known Pixies song on this fine, bright hump day.
Okay, so, I know that I said in my last post that we should all embrace the science and technology that enables the production and performance of popular music, that we should learn as much as we can about it. But just this past Sunday, I witnessed a different, but quite practical way to deal with technical difficulties in the live setting.
On Sunday night I was lucky enough to be at 1087's second (hopefully!?) annual Anti-Valentine's Day Riot Grrrl Cover Band Show. This is an event in which our favorite local hometown heroines from bands like Carnal Knowledge, Homewreckers, Each Other's Mothers, Death First, The Measure (SA) and more come together in various combinations to cover songs by grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, and others. This year the show branched out to include non-riot lady punk and rock by The Muffs, The Breeders, and....Stevie Nicks?
The second performer of the evening, "Stevie" (who I believe is known to most as Saiya, bass player for Scantron?) took on both vocal and bass duties, and was backed by an older woman with an acoustic guitar and an accordion. Between the off-color between song banter, "Stevie's" tilted platinum blonde wig, and the unlikely arrangement, it was difficult to read the performance's tone. It had nowhere near the focus and serious of a 'real' set of original songs, but it wasn't entirely comical, either. As the performers went through the set, there were times when it was hard to tell if they were intentionally being funny.
The other thing about the set is that "Stevie" and the band couldn't seem to get through an entire song without some sort of equipment failure. Broken strings, dead microphones, falling microphones -- if it could go wrong, it did. Perhaps the one song that didn't face this fate was "Edge of Seventeen", which they didn't actually play; instead they performed a dramatic reading of the lyrics. (This, of course, was a moment of deliberate, pre-meditated humor.)
I'll admit to being a serious Fleetwood Mac fan, as well as a fan of Stevie Nicks' solo work. So when they started "The Chain", I was both excited and bummed. Excited to hear one of my favorite songs, but bummed because I didn't expect them to make it to the end of the song, which is of course the best part.
Before "The Chain", as the show's organizers and the band were struggling to make adjustments to the sound and the equipment to keep everything running, "Stevie" made a bold announcement: "Okay, everything is broken," she admitted, "so you have to help us by singing along! Come on!"
Believe it or not, it worked. The audience participated enthusiastically during the first half of "The Chain", myself most definitely included. When the wheels started to sort of come off during the last rousing round of "I would never break the chain!", I frowned, thinking of that great bassline, and how we were so close to it, but how "Stevie" wouldn't even get to it. The song screeched to an awkward halt, and the audience waited, unsure of how to react. It felt like an entire minute of silence elapsed, as the band tried to right itself.
And then, "Stevie's" bass boomed back to life, with that fantastic bass line that ends "The Chain", that bass line that I would argue is perhaps one of the most important in the history of rock music, one that I myself have played many times for my own personal amusement. (I know from experience: it's not the hardest line to play technically, but it is a challenge to play it with the right mix of resentment, aggression, and general dissatisfaction.)
Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain", from their 1997 video The Dance, which I totally own and have watched many times. Skip to 3:35 for The Bass Line.
When "Stevie" came back with that solo, I let out the sort of cheer that deafens the people standing next to you, and when the entire band came back on, we all joined in for the final refrains of "The cha-ai-ain will keep us together!" It was something small, an entirely ephemeral moment which somehow seemed to capture the very meaning of the the evening, the show, the entire New York City grrrl underground. The band, with the help of the audience, channelled the spirit of doing it yourself, doing it together, and doing it whether or not you have the 'right' equipment, and whether or not you know exactly what you're doing.
For those twenty minutes, Stevie and her band took a lot of risks, put themselves out there, put up with lots of problems, and asked us to help them deal with it. And we did -- we didn't judge them, we didn't laugh at them, we didn't go out for a smoke or to get a drink at the Dominican convenience store across the street. Instead we laughed with them, cheered them on, and sang when it was appropriate. We even sang when it wasn't appropriate; the audience forced the band to make an unlikely segue from "Landslide" to "Go Your Own Way" when we started singing it before "Landslide" was quite over.
And I suppose that the moral of this story is that performances will always be rife with problems. Standing up there in front of an audience will always be a risk; there will always be a chance that your equipment might malfunction, or that you'll just forget what you're doing. But "Stevie Nicks" and co. demonstrated, much to my delight, that there's no technical difficulty that can't be overcome by a willing, persevering band, and an even-more willing, present, participating audience.
