The Quiet Before, page 16
At first Bratmobile was largely aspirational, a few a cappella numbers and some bad covers. But with the starkness (just two chords on Molly’s guitar, repeated again and again) they created their own sound, brave and heartfelt. Allison sang in a childish lilt, not Kathleen’s primal scream, but as if she were rewiring childhood melodies: “You’re too cozy in your all-boy clubhouse / To even consider having kool-aid at my house.” As Bratmobile gained a small following that year, Molly defended their unvarnished act as a conscious choice: “I think it’s really good for bands to go out when they’re not ready. Because, then, as you do get a grasp on your instrument, people see you in a continuum, as opposed to just you jumped out of nowhere, which is what I always thought: The boy comes out of the womb with a screaming Led Zeppelin guitar, and I feel like I’ll never know how to do that.” The aesthetic was similar to the zines; the messiness and lack of finish were a rebuke to polished patriarchal society.
Kathleen saw what was building in D.C. a few months later at a show that was almost instantly legendary. It was June 27, and Bikini Kill had played in Kentucky the night before and Alabama the night before that. They had been met almost everywhere with a mix of jeers and insults from men (and a few thrown beer bottles) and always a small clutch of girls trying to move closer to the stage, a few who would thrust their own zines at them. Mostly, though, there was confusion: Were they trying to be sexy? Why were they so angry? But now they were at dc space, a club at Seventh and E streets NW, and the crowd was completely theirs. Kathleen, with her back to the audience, ripped off her T-shirt so that when she turned around, the word “SLUT” sloppily scrawled across her stomach could be seen under her black bra. She jumped and screamed and yelled out her lyrics, and the crowd, women and men, were mesmerized. After the show, Ian MacKaye, the lead singer of Fugazi and a key impresario of punk music at the time, immediately offered to record them for free.
The band decided to stay in the city, everyone scraping by, with Kathleen stripping at the Royal Palace, a club just north of Dupont Circle. In 1991, D.C. was in bad shape, with the murder rate reaching a record 482 homicides, including the killing of a young woman who lived alone in a basement apartment just down the street from where Kathleen was renting. And on Cinco de Mayo, there had even been a riot a few blocks from the Embassy. After a Salvadoran immigrant was shot by the police, rumors spread that he was handcuffed at the time. Protesters threw bricks and bottles at the cops, and the melee ended with tear gas. One of Allison’s friends who witnessed it all wrote to her that what was needed that summer was a “girl riot.”
Molly and Allison came back to D.C. in July. One night, hanging out with Kathleen and a few other women, they pulled out a typewriter and some glue sticks and decided to transcribe the feminist revolutionary spirit they were feeling. They assembled a zine, a mini-zine, just one page folded into quarters—something they could hand out at shows. Molly then commandeered another Capitol Hill copy machine. They called it Riot Grrrl, a riff on “girl riot” and a slight jab at “womyn” and “womban” and all the other inventive feminist spellings of the word “woman.” Also, it looked like a growl.
On the cover was Madonna with her fists in the air and the logo for Utz potato chips, with a little girl looking mischievous, modified with a Sharpie to read “slutz.” Inside, the girls declared the beginning of a movement: “There has been a proliferation of angry grrrl zines in recent months, mainly due to the queezy feeling we girls get in our stomachs when we contemplate the general lack of girl power in society as a whole, and in the punk rock underground specifically. In this long hot summer we are presently experiencing, some of us girls thought it was time we put our collective angry heads together and do a mini-zine, and put it out as often as possible. Hey, there’s also a sale at kinko’s now, if you know anyone who would want one of these, it would only cost 6 cents to copy it for them.” As Sara Marcus, who wrote the definitive book on Riot Grrrl, put it, the new zine’s title “created its audience of girls by naming them, radicalized them by addressing them as already radical.” The girls started handing out the Riot Grrrl zine at a barbecue that Fourth of July.
By the second issue, the zine had doubled, to eight quarter-sheet pages filled with information about upcoming gigs and parties, as well as musings by Kathleen like “Be as vulnerable as you possibly can” and “Commit to the revolution as a method of psychological and physical survival.” Were there like-minded girls who wanted to shake complacency and talk about difficult subjects? On the back cover of that second issue of Riot Grrrl, the call was made clear, even plaintive: “We don’t know all that many angry grrrls, although we know you are out there.”
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THE WOMEN WHO made Riot Grrrl would be loath to pinpoint what exactly their revolution was for. But they knew what it was against. They could see the gains of their mothers’ generation, but they weren’t enough. During the 1980s feminism had headed in two directions, but neither felt useful to them. On the one hand, talk about sexism had become all too academic, chewed up and turned into abstract theorizing about power (largely impenetrable to a lay audience and absent a direct political agenda). The other path felt soft and meaningless, with its highly solicitous tones of self-help (see Gloria Steinem’s 1992 book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem). These girls still felt sexism in their lives—in small ways, like the persistence of pink and blue stereotypes, and large, like the degrading way rape survivors were treated. But they didn’t want to ignore the trauma and just succeed like the men. They wanted to reckon with these realities by holding on to that pain, the individual experience of it, and building a politics that came out of the hurt. For Kathleen it was the victims of sexual assault she had worked with in Olympia who were her audience. And zines met their needs. “Zines are profoundly personal expressions, yet as a medium of participatory communication they depend upon and help create community,” wrote Stephen Duncombe, a New York University professor who studied the form. “The contradiction is never resolved.” That was fine. The contradiction was the point.
Kathleen called a real-life meeting of Riot Grrrl in Issue No. 3 of the mini-zine. It took place on the evening of July 24, 1991, at Positive Force, another punk group house, this one in Arlington, Virginia, just outside D.C., where kids in torn jeans and T-shirts covered in black Sharpie volunteered at homeless shelters, brought food to poor seniors, or took part in anti-apartheid marches. About twenty young women showed up, including Molly and Allison, and they just talked, going around the circle. It lasted hours, reminiscent of the consciousness-raising meetings their mothers had taken part in decades earlier. They wanted to express the way they saw the world, as girls, the way they were sexualized, not taken seriously, physically assaulted, and just made to feel bad about themselves. After their second meeting, Kathleen, Allison, and Molly sat down for an interview with Mark Andersen, one of the founders of Positive Force, who was then trying to write a book about the D.C. punk scene. “I seriously believe the majority of people in this country have stories to tell that they aren’t telling for some reason,” Kathleen said. “I mean, with all of that energy and anger, if we could unify it in some way…”
The meetings continued, though never drew more than a handful of girls who were based in and around D.C. It was rather the zines that produced the community. More and more were popping up and identifying openly with Riot Grrrl. It was a medium they felt belonged to them, and the swapping and sharing that resulted allowed them to coalesce naturally around certain themes without needing to define their aims.
“Well I’m a riot grrrl—that’s the coolest thing in my life right now,” wrote a contributor to Fantastic Fanzine, a zine put together by Erika Reinstein, an eighteen-year-old living in the D.C. area. “Well yeah…basically the coolest. I love myself, well not always. I mean I try and love myself. Because I know it’s important. Except the thing is I still have all these feelings like about myself. And there are things I just don’t talk about. Even though I know that I can talk about anything at Riot Grrrl. Like my weight is one of those things. I mean it helps a lot that I am in an environment that is generally very accepting. It helps a lot because I’m learning. I’m trying to really accept myself. But still it’s kind of like this secret that I have, you know that I don’t think I’m really pretty or attractive.”
They wanted to own their vulnerability and give it room to be discussed on their terms. “BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US,” Erika wrote in one issue. “BECAUSE in every form of media I see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked, and killed.”
The number of zines grew throughout 1991. Girls would seek out readers, asking that a dollar be sent to the address provided in exchange for a copy. A crisscrossing dialogue ensued, with zines referencing each other, writers copying and pasting one another’s words. And they also began to partake in a kind of shared visual vocabulary. There was joy in being your own editor and art director and publisher that was evident in the final product, even when the subject matter turned dark, as it often did. Beyond their DIY quality, their photocopied and stapled-together look, the zines all reflected a desire to subvert and undermine and mock popular culture, to draw a great big mustache on it. It was an aesthetic of bubbly, girly handwriting, but also smeared red paint. In one zine, I Amy Carter, ironically but lovingly dedicated to the former first daughter, stories from the National Enquirer on Madonna’s rumored lesbian lover sat next to solicitations for information on a female serial killer. There was a reclamation of all the impossible images of women that advertising produced and that weighed on the consciousness of girls. By taking the photo of an impossibly skinny blonde in a shampoo ad and then adding a thought bubble that had her wondering about whether she would be raped tonight, the zine makers were desecrating a poisonous culture while also trying to remake it. And the scrapbook look, of cut-up magazines, bubbly hearts, and stickers, also captured adolescence, the moment of transition from innocence to sarcasm and dark humor. As Kathleen succinctly put it, “We are turning cursive letters into knives.”
In their third issue of Girl Germs, Molly and Allison expressed an incipient anxiety that anyone might try to claim some ownership over this creative burst. They wanted it made very clear: all you needed to participate were scissors and a glue stick and maybe a typewriter. “Riot Grrrl is so much. It will end up being so much more I am sure. Right now it isn’t anything concrete, it’s not a fanzine or a group or anything specific, although it is also all of these things. As of now, it has been a mini fanzine, and there have been some girls who met once a week calling themselves riot grrrls, talking about issues in and outside of punk rock that are important to us. But I know, and I’m sure some of you know that it’s going to be something BIG….There’s no copyright on the name so if you are sitting there reading this and you feel like you might be a riot grrrl then you probably are, so call yourself one.”
Zines were now everywhere. Psychobitch from Martinsville, Indiana; Riottemptresses from Lexington, Kentucky; Growing Pains from Chicago; Girl Fiend from Amherst, Massachusetts; and many more, each one pushing another into existence. Though always at least partly diaristic, the zines circled around the same set of taboo issues: rape, eating disorders, body image, sexual assault.
Most of the zine creators were white and upper-middle-class, girls like Molly and Allison, but there were a few zines, too, that tried to capture inequities beyond sexism. Nomy Lamm, who grew up in Olympia, had lived with a handicap since the age of three, when her leg was amputated because of a bone growth disorder. She started a zine, I’m So Fucking Beautiful, to talk about fat discrimination. The writing was bracingly forthright and unlikely to appear anywhere else: it was the scribblings of a teenage girl who didn’t want to feel so ashamed anymore. “I know I’m never gonna be thin and don’t want to be thin (usually), but I still have this thing like ‘well maybe if I were just a little bit smaller then not only would I just be able to accept my body, I’d be able to really, really love it!’ and no matter how much I say that fat is totally awesome and that we should revel in our fatness, I don’t think I’d want to be fatter than I am now. So what if I do get fatter?” Her zine also had a sense of humor, with Lamm giving her readers permission to laugh and break through the silence around these hard issues. In a list of “fun things about fat,” number one is “fat floats, so I don’t have to worry as much about drowning!”
Another zine from far afield was Gunk, from Ramdasha Bikceem, who was a fifteen-year-old New Jersey skater girl when she put out her first issue. As a Black girl, she was an unusual participant in Riot Grrrl and wrote about her status as an outsider among outsiders. In the fourth issue of Gunk—an issue that had a childhood photo of her face, looking furious, below the words cut out from the side of a milk cartoon “Have You Seen Me?”—she recounted her experience at a gathering of Riot Grrrls in D.C.: “I think I was one of only 3 black kids there I mean Riot Grrrl calls for a change, but I question who it’s including….I see Riot Grrrl growing very closed to a very chosen few, i.e. White middle class punk girls. It’s like it’s some secret society, but then again there are some who feel that a secret society is what we need.”
The multiplying zines signaled to Kathleen and Allison and Molly that there were other angry girls out there. The music they were producing was also getting more recognition. In late August of that year, 1991, Olympia’s Capitol Theater held a six-day music festival called the International Pop Underground Convention, and a special Girl Night brought together all the bands who were the musical corollary to the zine scene—Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, 7 Year Bitch, and many others. It was momentous for the women who just a year earlier hadn’t thought there was a place for them in punk. Reporting on the evening in the next issue of Girl Germs, one girl who had been in the audience described the feeling: “Girl’s night will always be precious to me because, believe it or not, it was the first time I saw women stand on a stage as though they truly belonged there. The first time I had ever heard the voice of a sister proudly singing the rage so shamefully locked in my own heart. Until girl’s night, I never knew that punk rock was anything but a phallic extension of the white middle class male’s frustrations.” Allison and Molly invented a shorthand to memorialize this moment: “prdct,” or “punk rock dream come true.”
There was something special in this emotive Northwest brand of punk, and America at large was soon introduced to it through Tobi Vail’s now-former boyfriend, Kurt Cobain, and his band, Nirvana. Their album Nevermind was released a few weeks after Girl Night, and by November it had gone gold and then platinum. By January 1992 it had knocked Michael Jackson’s latest album off the top of the Billboard charts and was selling about 300,000 copies a week. Capitalism was always looking to conquer a cool subculture, and the quick commodification for a mass audience could have scary consequences. The terror in Cobain’s eyes told the story. You lose the power to set your own direction.
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IN JULY 1992, Riot Grrrl saw itself, for the first time, covered in the pages of a mainstream publication (in a magazine not produced in someone’s bedroom, that is). Only a year had passed since that first real-world meeting in D.C. The network of girls now regularly communicating through swapped zines had expanded, but it still felt like a private project; it was still burgeoning. When a young journalist from L A Weekly, the city’s independent paper, asked to sit in on the inaugural meeting of the Olympia chapter of Riot Grrrl, Molly and Allison, the organizers, saw no problem. It seemed strange to imagine anyone would want to write about them. “This meeting is really figuring out what we want Riot Grrrl to be here,” Allison told the group of about seventeen girls sitting cross-legged on the floor of a basement laundry room. As the journalist jotted down their words, the group brainstormed an idea to create pocket-sized zines about sexism and rape and planned a concert for the following week, Riot Grrrl Extravaganza, at which admittance for girls and any boys who showed up in dresses and bras would be two dollars. All other boys would pay three dollars.
The resulting article, appearing a few months later, took its headline from their motto: “Revolution Girl Style Now.” Floodlights were now shining, hot, through their bedroom windows. So much so that the first sentence seems ironic in retrospect: “Maybe the girl revolution won’t take shape in the public world, the world of men. It certainly won’t happen out on the street, where girls aren’t safe. Maybe it will begin in a private, enclosed space men never enter, a generic space women enter and leave, often together, writing messages for each other on the wall: a restroom.” Women’s restrooms at many universities were indeed where students could anonymously scribble the names of men who had sexually assaulted them, as a warning to others. Zines were now this “private, enclosed space.” They were “time bombs disguised as thick letters,” as Emily White, the author of the piece, wrote. “All across the country, girls wait to hear from the fanzine network, a phantom community they belong to but never see—it’s an underground with no nucleus, built of paper.”
