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Subject: Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

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  • From: "J Neo Marvin" <j_n_e_o AT hotmail.com>
  • To: typicalgirls AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [TypicalGirls] A band of sisters
  • Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:27:43 -0700

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
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