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

["J Neo Marvin" <j_n_e_o AT hotmail.com>]

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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