International Women’s Week (4):
Bands That Didn’t Play Nice
Since joining The Riff, I’ve been focusing on women's history in American popular music leading up to and including rock. That history is far richer than most people realize: Much of it was erased from canonical histories until recently. It took dedicated effort by a few archivists and researchers to rediscover much of that legacy.
For a sampling, check out my piece on women of the Big Band, Swing, and Blues eras.
Rock itself, having been in large measure invented by a woman, became egregiously sexist by the mid-1960s at both the artistic and business levels. In the late 70s and early 80s, there was a surge of activity on the part of women who did all the stuff that had been arrogated to men, such as play instruments (especially guitar), arrange, produce, and lead bands.
Then there was a backlash, sometimes accompanied by actual violence. The cycle would go on to repeat.
Meanwhile, rock was splintering into multiple sub-categories such as punk, new wave, metal, and arena rock (later to be known as Dad-rock 😁), and would soon give rise to grunge (by the way, many musicians classified as “grunge” hate the term and have disavowed it).
Acceptance of women varied across these genres, with punk being perhaps the least welcoming of all. That only spurred female punk rockers to fight even harder to be heard. Perhaps the most accepting subculture toward women was grunge, personified by Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain.
Hole: “Violet”
Courtney Love pushed the envelope harder than just about anyone. She became an avatar of feminist protest and rebellion. Though she shared a lot of artistic and political impulses with the Riot Grrrls (see below), she rejected identification with them.
Like the Riot Grrrls, she wrote and sang about sexism, sexual abuse, and female empowerment. However, she embraced traditional femininity, made conscious use of her own beauty in her live and video performances, and tried to walk the line between inviting male attention and refusing to be controlled by it. That stance remains controversial and has invited criticism from both the left and the right.
Hole went through a lot of instability and lineup changes, but almost all the instrumentalists were women. That alone set them apart in a world where it is estimated that less than 5% of commercially successful rock musicians were women. Outside the U.S., that percentage has soared in recent years, but in the U.S. it remains unchanged.
Hole had a lasting influence on several rock music genres including grunge, punk, and emo. Their influence extends beyond music to feminist politics more broadly, including the notion of acceptable forms of self-expression for women. It is a debate with particular salience today.
Love’s relationship with Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) is legend and has been compared to that between Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Love and Cobain, if anything, are much closer to equals in terms of overall cultural and commercial impact.
Cobain was the more commercially successful, but I think Love’s best stuff is better than anything Nirvana did. Here is a case in point:
Seven Year Bitch: “Hip Like Junk”
Founded in 1990, 7YB were a punk band with a distinct 60’s throwback vibe. They were influenced by the Riot Grrl movement, though they did not outright claim the term for themselves. For those who don’t remember, Riot Grrrl was a movement encompassing feminism, punk music, and the rejection of gender norms.
7YB were personally influenced by the violence and misogyny which seemed to be surging in the 1980s as a backlash to mainstream feminism. Their songs were overtly political, with titles like “Dead Men Don’t Rape.”
After the murder of one of their closest friends, Mia Zapata (the frontwoman of the Gits, another punk band), they dedicated considerable effort and money to the search for her killer — he was eventually caught and died in prison — and to supporting programs to train women in self-defense.
Seven Year Bitch disbanded after almost exactly seven years together as a band. Most of the members went on to other bands or solo projects in the arts. They remain artistically and politically active.
…….
Bikini Kill: “Rebel Girl”
Considered the definitive Riot Grrrl band, Bikini Kill played straight-ahead hard-core punk. They started not as a band but as an underground self-published fanzine dedicated to establishing a voice for women in what had become a toxically sexist Punk community. Prompted by friends, they essentially formed a band with the same name.
Not surprisingly, Bikini Kill were politically radical, which didn’t please everyone. They frequently had to cope with people who came to their concerts to heckle and even assault them.
The founder and lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, sometimes acted as bouncer in the middle of their sets, wading into the crowds and throwing out some of the trouble-makers.
Hanna was a friend of Kurt Cobain and reportedly spray-painted “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, giving him the name for Nirvana’s most famous song. (Teen Spirit was the name of a cologne for women that was briefly fashionable.)
She later encountered Courtney Love at a music festival, where Love punched Hanna after a verbal altercation. Hanna had allegedly trolled Love about Cobain’s drug habit, which killed him. Love was convicted of assault and spent a year on probation. Small world.
Sources:
“Hole: Courtney Love, The Gaze, and Complex Feminisms”, Scribe, 2022 https://scribemag.com/hole-courtney-love-tragic-real-life-story/
Last FM: Biography of Hole, https://www.last.fm/music/Hole/+wiki
Personal conversations with representatives of Fender Guitars, Dean Guitars
Seven Year Bitch, Discogs https://www.discogs.com/artist/307066-7-Year-Bitch
“Riot Grrrl: The 90’s movement that Redefined Punk”, 2017
Wikipedia entries on Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna, Courtney Love, The Gits, Seven Year Bitch