[TypicalGirls] A band of sisters

J Neo Marvin j_n_e_o at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 20 14:27:43 EDT 2006


Kind of a non-story, really. News flash: bands break up, new bands form, 
life goes on.

Good Erase Errata interview though.

-J Neo Marvin
***********************************************
"So I went fishing
A note from a fish said:
Dear dope, if you wanna catch us
You need a rod and a line
Signed the fish"

                                                              -Mark E. Smith





>From: WWWhatsup <joly at dti.net>
>Reply-To: "Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa  
>1975-1980s)" <typicalgirls at lists.ibiblio.org>
>To: Typical Girls <typicalgirls at lists.ibiblio.org>
>Subject: [TypicalGirls] A band of sisters
>Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:30:50 -0400
>
>
>[This story is spin I'd say. Le Tigre are just on hiatus.  And there are
>more girls in bands now than ever.]
>
>http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=1130&catid=107&volume_id=147&issue_id=234&volume_num=40&issue_num=42
>
>
>A band of sisters
>
>As Sleater-Kinney, Destiny's Child, and le Tigre bid farewell, an
>ex-all-girl punk band member wonders, where have all the music-
>making women gone?
>
>BY KIMBERLY CHUN
>
>kimberly at sfbg.com
>
>Cast your eyes on the Billboard chart and it seems like summer
>2006 will go down in history as the season of the Latin diva, with
>Nelly Furtado doffing a soft-focus folkie-cutie image by declaring
>herself "Promiscuous" and Shakira holding on to the promise of,
>well, that crazy, sexy, but not quite cool chest move she's close
>to trademarked via "Hips Don't Lie." Rihanna and Christina
>Aguilera brought up the rear of the Billboard Hot 100 singles
>chart last week — solo singers all. But with the on-again, off-
>again slow fade of Destiny's Child, the imminent demise of the
>explicitly feminist Sleater-Kinney, and the earlier evaporation of
>the even more didactic le Tigre, one has to wonder, what has
>happened to all-girl groups?
>
>Was it a gimmick? Did Newsweek and Seventeen leach riot grrrl's
>genuine grassroots movement of its "authenticity" and power? Was
>Sarah McLachlan lame? Was Courtney Love insane? Perhaps the answer
>is on today's pop charts, where the sole "girl group" — if you
>don't count the manly guest MC appearances — is the frankly faux
>Pussycat Dolls, a sorry excuse for women's empowerment if there
>ever was one. Their ’90s counterparts the Spice Girls baldly
>appropriated "girl power" as their own marketing slogan, but at
>least they gave 30-second-commercial-break lip service to the
>notion.
>
>The scarcity of all-female bands — particularly the variety whose
>women do more than simply lip-synch on video — has perhaps spread
>to supposedly more progressive spheres. Erase Errata bassist-
>vocalist Ellie Erickson notes that when the band recently played
>Chicago's Intonation Music Festival, she was shocked to discover
>that their all-female trio made up almost half the total number of
>women performing among about 50 artists. Even at a more down-low,
>underground gathering like last month’s End Times Festival in
>Minneapolis, where Bay Area bands dominated, only one all-girl
>band, T.I.T.S., made the cut, observes the band's guitarist, Kim
>West. "When we were in Minneapolis there were so many girls who
>came up to us and were, like, 'This is so awesome! There are no
>all-girl bands here and it's so rare to see this,’” she recalls.
>
>Girl groups do persist: the news-making, stand-taking, chops-
>wielding Dixie Chicks among them. But for every Chicks there's a
>Donnas, now off Atlantic after the Bay Area–bred band's second
>major-label release stumbled at takeoff. Is Dixie Chicks
>credibility forthcoming for commercial girl bands like Lillix, the
>Like, and Kittie? Some might argue that feminism's gains in the
>’70s and ’80s — which led to the blossoming of all-female groups
>from TLC to Babes in Toyland, Vanity 6 to L7, and Fannypack to
>Bikini Kill — have led to a postfeminist moment in which strongly
>female-identified artists are ghettoized or otherwise relegated to
>the zone of erotic fantasy (e.g., Pussycat Dolls). Gone are the
>days when Rolling Stone touted the "Women of Rock" in their 1997
>30th anniversary issue and Lilith Fair brought female singer-
>songwriters to every cranny of the nation.
>
>"I think that with the demise of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre, it's
>a very sad time for girl groups," e-mails Evelyn McDonnell, Miami
>Herald pop culture writer and coauthor of Rock She Wrote. "It
>seems like the end of the ’90s women in rock era, an era that
>unfortunately left fewer marks than we hoped it would 15 years
>ago."
>
>Radio's known resistance to women-dominated bands hasn't helped.
>Le Tigre's Kathleen Hanna told me last year that despite the best
>efforts of her label, Universal, to get her feminist trio's first
>major-label release, This Island, out to the masses, "MTV didn't
>play our video and radio didn't play our single either. Some of
>that is that we're women and they've already got Gwen Stefani. So
>we just have to wait till she stops making music or something like
>that." She was told that a group of three women was less likely to
>get play than a band of men fronted by a female vocalist.
>
>Perhaps feminism is simply not in vogue, speculates Erase Errata
>vocalist-guitarist Jenny Hoyston. "I think any woman who's a
>musician is going to have people say she's only getting attention
>because she's a woman," she says. "It's gonna be assumed that they
>don't know how to work their gear, that they don't necessarily
>play as well. That kind of typical stuff.... A lot of people
>aren't taken seriously, especially if they get too queer or too
>gay in their songwriting, and I think that people get judged a lot
>for being too feminist, for sure, and I think there's a major
>backlash against feminism in scenes that I've been a part of in
>this country. I think people are cooler about it in the UK
>definitely and in some other countries in Europe."
>
>But how does one explain the strong presence of all-female (or
>female-dominated) bands in the Bay Area such as Erase Errata,
>T.I.T.S., 16 Bitch Pileup, Blectum from Blechdom, Boyskout,
>Vervein, and Von Iva? "I think San Francisco is a big hub for
>women bands," offers West, a veteran of Crack: We Are Rock and
>Death Sentence! Panda. With a provocative name and costumes ("It's
>sexy from afar — and scary once you get closer," West says), the
>band — including guitarist-vocalist Mary Elizabeth Yarborough,
>guitarist-vocalist Abbey Kerins, and Condor drummer Wendy Farina —
>reflects a kind of decentralized, cooperative approach to music
>making. "There's no lead," West explains. "I think that's a really
>big element. We all sing together and we all come up with lyrics
>together. We each write a sentence or a word or a verse and put it
>in a hat and pull it out and that becomes a song. No one has more
>writing power than anyone else — it's all even. I think girls are
>more likely to like some idea like that than guys."
>
>And there's power in their female numbers, West believes,
>discussing T.I.T.S.'s June UK tour: "It's funny because it was the
>first time I'd ever been on tour with all four girls. When I'd go
>on tour with Crack, guys would be hitting on us, and with
>T.I.T.S., guys were a little more intimidated because I think we
>were like a gang. We had that tightness in our group, so it's
>harder to approach four girls than one girl or two girls,
>especially when we're laughing and having a good time."
>
>In the end, McDonnell is optimistic that feminism could make a
>comeback. "I see a revival of progressive ideas in general in
>culture, largely in reaction to war and Bush.... The Dixie Chicks
>are arguably the most important group in popular music, and
>they're fantastically outspoken as women's liberationists," she
>writes, also praising the Gossip, Peaches, and Chicks on Speed.
>"And the decentralization of the music industry should open
>avenues to women, making success less dependent on cruelly,
>ridiculously chauvinist radio."
>
>Ever the less-optimistic outsider, I'm less given to believing
>file sharing and self-released music can dispel the sexism
>embedded in the music industry — or stem the tide of social
>conservatism in this country. But that kind of spirit — as well as
>going with the urge to make music and art with other women, from
>our own jokes, horrors, and everyday existences — is a start. SFBG
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>              WWWhatsup NYC
>http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>TypicalGirls mailing list
>TypicalGirls at lists.ibiblio.org
>http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/typicalgirls




More information about the TypicalGirls mailing list