Hump Day Treat, La Mamma Morta Edition

This song always reminds me of my mother. I'm thinking about her on this hump day, and every other day of my life.

Hump Day Treat, First Hump Day of the New Year Edition

Okay, so technically it's the second Wednesday of the new year. But as it's the first Wednesday post of the calendar year, it feels like a video to celebrate and ring in 2010 is in order.

I have high hopes for this year, and my unshakeable feeling of assurance that this will be a good year for girls in punk, hardcore, and other less accessible genres, and so the only youtube video of my go-to fierce, feminist fight song seems called for. So get your fist in the air, raise your voice, and enjoy Sleater-Kinney's criminally underknown "Male Model" on this hump day.

"It's going to take a lot of things", or: A response to some random naysayery

I'm lucky enough to have a few really cool friends who read and support my blog. A few weeks ago my dear friend Jackie went so far as to post a link to my post on Rock Camp songs on her facebook wall. I was so grateful and flattered, but the warm fuzzies I was feeling were tarnished by the following comment from one of her facebook friends:

"I think this is great, but we're not going to dismantle this dumb system with rock songs. We will by forming DIY community banks."

It was the classic 'progressive guy' condescension. Just in case you don't speak Sexism, I'll translate for you: First, you have the pat on the head ('I think this is great...'). Then you have the brush off ('we're not going to dismantle this dumb system with rock songs'). Finally, you get the solution ('DIY community banks'?) In other words, this is cute and all sweetie, but music and art don't really 'count' -- only male-identified arenas like socioeconomic and political institutions count.

I was upset by this comment, at first because of its sexist undertone, and then later because I was forced to consider what it said. What if that guy is right? I've spent the last few weeds wondering, what if rock songs won't dismantle the system? What if what I'm talking about is totally stupid, and totally irrelevant, and he's right to be condescending?

Here's the thing though: this guy is NOT right. To start with, he's wrong to argue that rock songs won't bring down The System because I never said they would. I'm idealistic about music and art, but I'm not delusional. I know that songs don't have the power to stop armies in their tracks, or pass legislation, or regulate financial institutions.

But music is a powerful and unique means of uniting people. Music is a unique medium for the transmission of new ideas to a large audience. And a good, pithy pop song breaks those ideas down into manageable, memorable pieces, using straightforward and familiar language that sticks in your mind, and that becomes part of your consciousness.


I listened to the Beatles a lot as a kid, I like to think that their pro-peace, pro-love ideas became a part of my consciousness early on.

When music opens up your mind like that, and gets you thinking about bigger ideas, and maybe even gets you talking with your friends about these ideas and how they make you feel -- that's when music has the power to change things. Music does have the ability to stimulate critical thought, and critical thought can lead to resistance.


This is one of my new favorites -- Swedish punk upstarts Refused knew how to bring the classic punk resistance to shitty/mindless popular music!

(If you don't believe me, just ask all the Latin American dictators of the '70s who banned pop music, assassinated outspoken musicians, and sent their military police to rock concerts with tear gas and grenades. They seemed pretty worried that music about human rights would get the young people to resist the military government.)


This guy, Victor Jara, was tortured, beaten, and killed by the Chilean military because he sang about political activism and human rights.

More to the point of this blog, popular music has become bigger than just songs and albums. Song itself can transmit positive ideas, and it can also transmit negative ideas. And since music is not just the music itself, but also the performers, their politics, their style of dress, and the way they present themselves, popular music also transmits ideas about men, women, sex and gender -- whether it means to or not. I've seen this for myself. I've experienced it for myself, I've seen it with my friends, I've seen it with the campers at Rock Camp.


An all time favorite: my beloved Sleater-Kinney singing in feminist protest of the corporate war machine

I've always assumed that most of us are sort of familiar with this phenomenon, and that most of us can appreciate what a positive influence music can have on your day-to-day life. (Don't a lot of us go through a phase during our teenage years where we just want to shut ourselves up in our rooms with our favorite records, and where we only want to talk to friends who are doing the same thing? Or maybe that was just me....)

I guess maybe my critic didn't go through this phase, and if that's the case, I probably can't say anything that will convince him of the power of music. All I can say to a person like him is, man, you must be listening to the wrong stuff.

This post is dedicated to Jackie, for her support, and to all of my friends who keep encouraging me to write, and to keep speaking up.

Hump Day Treat, 'In Memoriam' edition

Three years ago on this past Saturday, critically acclaimed punk trio Sleater-Kinney announced that they were going on 'indefinite hiatus'. Rock and the Single Girl pays tribute with by presenting four videos from one of their last overseas performances.

All four songs are from their final album, 2005's The Woods. A meditation on disenchantment, disorientation, growth, and growing apart, the songs are moody, contemplative, and treat love, sex, and partnership with a certain amount of cynicism. This was a major departure from positive and self-righteous denunciations of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars found on the band's previous album, One Beat (2003).

But fans were probably more shocked by the sonic changes found on this record. In retrospect, one can hear strains of classic rock swagger and grandiosity on both One Beat and All Hands On the Bad One (2000). But upon its release, Sleater-Kinney's new super distorted, aggressive, pseudo-1970s confounded longtime listeners, while attracting and challenging new fans. It seems like this is exactly the response the band wanted. Watch the videos below to see the spectacular and ferocious sounds of confrontation found on The Woods on this long Hump Day.

Mother, may you?

Last week in class during our unit on gender, I talked about the Mirabal sisters in an attempt to teach my students about alternative constructions of motherhood. A trio of underground political activists from the Dominican Republic who were apprehended, tortured, imprisoned, and eventually killed for their attempts to bring down tyrannical dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Mirabal women carried out secret resistance work while taking care of their husbands and children. They were in part motivated to do political work by their need to protect their kids, and they encouraged other women in their communities and churches to help the resistance for the same reason. They appealed to other Dominican women as mothers, and their sense of maternal responsibility, rather than as citizens or political subjects.

Talking about this construct of motherhood, and thinking about how awesomely and unintentionally the Mirabals rejected the June Cleaver, Virgin Mary conception of momness, got me thinking about a program I saw on VH1 not too long ago. I am a total sucker for those several hour top 100 shows they do, and a few weeks back I saw VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the '90s. There was a lot of "where are they now" on the show, and of course, quite a few of the female performers featured have become parents since their hits charted a decade ago.

The two performers who really caught my attention were Sarah McLachlan and Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries. Both more or less told VH1 that since they had become mothers, their music careers seemed less important.

Well, you can imagine that this disappointed me in a major way. I know that both Sarah and Dolores were only speaking for themselves, but I hate this idea that women, in any industry, are required to find motherhood more fulfilling than any other occupation. And I really hate the idea that life as a musician, particularly a rock or punk musician, is somehow automatically incompatible with being a mom.

To be clear, I don't think that Sarah and Dolores are tools of the patriarchy just because they expressed a greater interest in parenting rather than playing. It is possible for a woman to find parenting more fulfilling than a career or paid job, and I don't think that that's wrong or bad. It's not as if I think it's wrong for a woman to want kids, or to put her kids before her career, so long as it is her choice. But what about choice, and what about this constant conundrum of "Work or family?" that women are always faced with? Would a man ever have this dilemma? Were Dave Grohl or Mark McGrath or the dudes from The Spin Doctors telling VH1 about how fatherhood had made them change their priorities and put their music careers aside? Of course not.

That we never seem to see examples of women in rock who have successfully combined a personal life with a partner and/or children with a musical career that is fufilling and edgy and making a real contribution to music is really troubling to me. And even more troubling is that motherhood doesn't seem to have a place in any genre of music, perhaps most of all in punk and hardcore. It seems to me that in every genre, there are certain things women simply cannot be. I think in any genre, a female musician cannot be too 'masculine'; that's off-putting. Women artists can't be too critical or say anything too substantive, they can't seem too independent, and none of them can be 'too fat' or not fit a certain physical type. In punk and hardcore, which is youth oriented because of its derivation from the original youth culture genre, rock, there isn't much room for real adults of either sex. The conception of the mother, as the sweet, mainstream, suburban angel definitely does not fit in with the punk ideology, or what's left of rock's ideology.

It's a relief to me that it doesn't have to be that way. My beloved Corin Tucker, of Sleater-Kinney, has written some of the punkest songs of all time since becoming a mom in 2003, and a bunch of them are about actually being a parent and caring for her son. And she certainly isn't the only woman who's doing this, Kristin Hersh, Liz Phair (regardless of what I think of her later work), and Kori Gardner of Mates of State are all carrying on with their careers while raising children.

See, I don't need people like Sarah McLachlan and Dolores O'Riordan to lie about their priorities, and I don't need them to abandon their kids and go back to music. (Especially not you, Sarah....sorry.) What I do need, and want for all women and girls, is representation for EVERY kind of woman, whether they want to be moms or not, and whatever kind of mom or even just what kind of person they would like to be, in rock'n'roll, and pretty much everywhere else.

p.s. I just found out that on her new show, Megan Mullally (Karen from Will and Grace!!!) plays an aging frontwoman and mom who was in Pony, a "seminal punk band from March of 1984 to late July of 1984). She is probably the only person who could take the issue of motherhood and rock/punk stardom and make it hilarious, without even trying to make any sort of 'statement'. (There's a couple seconds of her being obnoxious onstage at 0:05!)

A Little Bit of Herstory: the Click Moment

Something I rarely discuss -- or even really think about -- is that I come from a family of musicians, singers, dancers, and music lovers. Music and dancing were a part of my childhood, but not in a Mary Poppins sort of way, not in a family-time, all-smiles and love, homeschooling kind of way. It was more like we soundtracked everything, even the bad times. Music was an escape, something we did even when my mother and my grandparents were fighting, unhappy, or dealing with financial problems.

And so it is unsurprising that even my 'click moment' was musical. A second wave feminist term, the 'click moment' refers to the awakening of a woman's consciousness, to that moment when it all 'clicks' into place, and you realize that feminism is necessary, and that you need to advocate for it in some way or another.

Example: Elizabeth Cady Stanton has a dramatic click moment story, according to historian Vivian Gornick, Cady Stanton and her husband traveled from New York to London to participate in the World's Anti Slavery Convention in 1840. The Stantons were respected abolitionists, and Cady Stanton was a vocal critic of slavery. But she -- and the well-known Lucretia Mott -- were refused entrance to the convention for being women. Gornick writes that at that moment, Cady Stanton realized that the rest of the world, outside her doting father and loving husband, saw her as "just a woman".

A little less than 160 years after this, I had my moment. In the spring of 1998, I was 14 years old, and fairly obnoxious about my taste in music. I knew that I was different from the other wimpy, prissy girls around me because I listened to classic rock, 'alternative', and bands like The Clash and The Ramones. Underneath the obnoxiousness was a genuine love of music, of playing guitar and singing, and of how listening to and talking about music brought me closer to my parents and my friends.

That year I had made friends with a girl who listened to 'alternative' music, but who also listened to a lot of bands that I had never heard of. (Turns out, I was nowhere near as cool and cutting edge as I'd thought I was when I was 14.) One of this girl's favorite albums happened to be Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney.

I went out and bought the album at my local Border's, and I'll be honest: I bought it because I wanted that girl to like me. But as soon as I plucked the cd from the rack in the bookstore, it stopped being about her, and it became something else entirely. I remember looking at the front of the cd, my eye drawn to the black and white of the guitar and the bright red of a girl's hair. I turned the cd over, glanced at the photo of the three girls in the band on the back. I turned it over again, held it in both hands, and felt this funny feeling in my fingers. It traveled up my arms and spread to my chest, my face, and my stomach. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I ran to the register to go buy that feeling.

I put the record on as soon as I got home. The opening chords of the title track, "Dig Me Out", brought back that feeling, that apprehensive excitement I'd gotten at the store. Corin Tucker's keening vocals and Janet Weiss's low, aggressive drumming came in a few seconds later, and I thought to myself: why doesn't all music sound like this? Sleater-Kinney made every girl I'd ever listened to, Fiona Apple, Gwen Stefani, Shirley Manson, etc, sound wishy-washy and boring, and made almost every classic rock band sound archaic.

And that was when it all clicked: the arguments with my father's super traditional Italian family, the machista ideas of my mother's Puerto Rican relatives, the way my mom and I had rejected the Catholic church, my mom and grandmother's struggle to support us, and my constant resentment of how much better boys were treated at school...somehow, all of it made sense. It all fit together. And nothing made more sense than how upset I was, how annoyed I was that I hadn't heard music like this before, and how excited I was to have finally found it.

It would be years before I really understood feminism, or even the many layers of meaning located within Sleater-Kinney's songs. It would be years before I really proclaimed my advocacy of feminism, and committed myself to supporting women in music. But it started with that one click moment in my bedroom. Click moments are inherently bittersweet, and they are paradoxical: you have a painful realization of how powerless you are in society, but the knowledge then somehow empowers you. My consciousness was brought to life by "Dig Me Out", and I can't think of a more appropriate band or song for that rite of passage.





this post is dedicated to every woman and girl who has ever inspired anyone, and to every woman and girl who someday will; Rock and the Single Girl has faith in you.

A Challenge to the Entire Genre.

Something major happened to me yesterday, readers. Brace yourselves. Are you ready? Okay, yesterday, I read an entry on Monitor Mix, the NPR blog written by Carrie Brownstein, and wound up hating it. This has absolutely never happened before. Carrie Brownstein is one of my idols, and my favorite guitarist of all time. She's one of my favorite musicians, but she's so much more than that: I would go so far as to say that Carrie Brownstein is a philosopher of music and pop culture. Her observations about how we listen to and relate to music are always sharp and funny, and I love them not so much because they're her observations, but because she always asks questions about people and music that I've thought about at some point.

Not this time. In this blog, Carrie asked us to consider who we think are 'quintessential' singers in various genres; she focused on rock and punk, nominating John Lennon and Pete Shelley, respectively. Honorable mentions went to Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Joey Ramone, and Paul Weller.

I have never once considered who might be the quintessential rock or punk singer of all time. And I certainly have never considered bestowing such an honor on Mick Jagger, a man I can hardly tolerate, or on Robert Plant, whom I used to enjoy before I found singers I simply liked better. Joey Ramone and Paul Weller are cool in my book, but quintessential? I've never thought of any of these people that way.

There is, of course, a pattern: all of these singers are men. I couldn't help but find this devastating, and I felt a knee-jerk reactionary rage towards Carrie Brownstein after reading this blog. Why is it always men? Why are men always the standard bearers, the typical examples, the perfect embodiment of everything? Perhaps my rage was related to the fact that yes, the majority of known rock and punk musicians are men, and that masculinity seems to be an integral and inescapable aspect of both genres.

Upon re-reading Carrie's blog today, I feel that I overreacted yesterday. My anger has since abated but I still find myself disagreeing with Carrie, and that in itself feels strange. If Carrie Brownstein jumped off a bridge I wouldn't automatically follow her. But when it comes to music, I take her opinions seriously, and consider her ideas and what their implications might be. (Note: this is what happens when you admire a person.) In this case, I actually didn't want to think about quintessential singers; the very notion seems to go against what rock and punk stand for. If these genres are supposed to be populist, individualist, and revolutionary, if they promise some kind of social liberation, and encourage all of us to DIY and to participate, why choose one voice out of so many as the embodiment of rock/punk practices and ideas?

Maybe I'm taking this too seriously. (Friends have told me on more than one occasion that I make too much of music debates, and that I judge fans of Interpol, Phish, Dave Matthews, and many others much too harshly.) Carrie herself clearly has a great sense of humor (um, have you seen "The Perfect Song"?), and she acknowledges in her blog that arguments over essentialness are "reductive". I would add that they're kind of pointless. I know I've never been swayed during one of these arguments, and I've never been able to convince anyone else that their musical opinion is wrong or off.

But these arguments can definitely be a lot of fun. I would like to think that we all have our High Fidelity type moments, where we hash out top fives and tens of record names and opening tracks and greatest concerts. I would like to think that we watch Vh1's top 100 programs, and read Rolling Stone's top 100 and 500 lists, and that we laugh at them, get annoyed at them, bitch about them to other people, and have amazing conversations with each other about music because of them. Carrie rightly points out that these sorts of conversations indicate more about ourselves than the music being discussed. She writes: "Whoever is at the nexus of our musical tastes becomes a litmus test; he or she helps categorize and map our own relationship to music." She goes on to say that the people we recognize as heavyweights in a genre help us form our conceptions of each genre, and helps us to figure out our own preferences. Talking about our favorites is a useful way to try to understand our tastes, and it's enjoyable, too. (Well, unless it's the Beatles v. Stones debate. That one is always serious.)

While I'm no longer opposed to choosing 'quintessentials', I do think I would have to go about it differently. Carrie ends her article by saying, "This notion of essence isn't meant to leave anyone out; it's more about who opened the door to let everyone else in." This doesn't make sense to me. If quintessential indicates the perfect embodiment of some thing, doesn't that mean the best of that thing? The first or earliest isn't usually the best, so why choose pioneers, even if they are pioneers like John Lennon, who are more than deserving of our respect? No, for me the perfect embodiment of punk and rock voices would have to be someone who embodies the revolutionary, sensual, antagonistic, aggressive, transgressive development of punk up until this time, someone different, someone provocative, someone whose entire being is a challenge to the entire genre.

And for me, that person would have to be Carrie Brownstein's old bandmate, the inimitable Corin Tucker.

No argument necessary. Just listen to any Sleater-Kinney album.

This blog is dedicated to my bff, Ashleigh, who is always willing to talk shit about music with me: to five years of bitching and bickering about music, and many more!