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In the early nineties, riot grrrl exploded onto the underground music scene, inspiring girls to pick up an instrument, create fanzines, and become politically active. Rejecting both traditional gender roles and their parents’ brand of feminism, riot grrrls celebrated and deconstructed femininity. The media went into a titillated frenzy covering followers who wrote “slut” on their bodies, wore frilly dresses with combat boots, and talked openly about sexual politics.
The movement’s message of “revolution girl-style now” soon filtered into the mainstream as “girl power,” popularized by the Spice Girls and transformed into merchandising gold as shrunken T-shirts, lip glosses, and posable dolls. Though many criticized girl power as at best frivolous and at worst soulless and hypersexualized, Marisa Meltzer argues that it paved the way for today’s generation of confident girls who are playing instruments and joining bands in record numbers.
Girl Power examines the role of women in rock since the riot grrrl revolution, weaving Meltzer’s personal anecdotes with interviews with key players such as Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. Chronicling the legacy of artists such as Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney, Alanis Morissette, Britney Spears, and, yes, the Spice Girls, Girl Power points the way for the future of women in rock.
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Marisa Meltzer is the coauthor of How Sassy Changed My Life (Faber, 2007). Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Elle, and Teen Vogue. She attended Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, is the kind of university that offers neither grades nor majors. Its central quad is called Red Square; its concrete-block, riot-proof buildings are nestled among acres of forested land; and the chili in the main café is always vegan. As can be expected from its left -of-center reputation, the school has attracted a mix of outcast students since its inception in 1967: hippies, slackers, and punks. It’s also my alma mater. And I count myself as one of them.
Olympia is the capital of Washington State. It’s small—the population only about forty thousand—and some of the only decent jobs available to graduates who want to stick around are for the state government. But it was (and still is) cheap enough that a bohemian existence can be fairly easily cobbled together with part-time day jobs conducive to the lifestyle of a fledgling band. In the mid-eighties, an all-ages punk scene cropped up in the city, buoyed by a club called the Fabulous Tropicana; the student radio station KAOS; the music fanzine Op; and Calvin Johnson’s label, K Records, and his band, Beat Happening.
To a certain kind of person, the Olympia lifestyle could seem ideal. The musician Tae Won Yu moved there from his native New York City in the spring of 1992 because it felt like “a paradise. I woke up every morning feeling like, ‘I can’t believe I’m in Olympia. It’s like Paris in the thirties.’” The singer Mirah Zeitlyn describes early nineties life in Olympia: “We were all making rock operas and we had this huge theater we could use when we wanted. There are certain kinds of energy that maybe can’t be replicated.” Naturally, she or ganized her college music collection not alphabetically or by genre, but by gender. “I didn’t think twice about it. Sometimes I want to listen to this stuff that men make and sometimes I want to listen to this stuff that women make.”
The Olympia musician Lois Maffeo grew up in the cultural doldrums of Phoenix, Arizona, and heard about Evergreen through a high school friend who was being hassled by her hippie uncle to go there. “I was like, ‘No grades? I’m so sold,’” she recalls. Maffeo had a by-the-books college paradigm shift: her first dorm mate was a punk girl with dyed blond hair and raccoon-like makeup. Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening helped Maffeo learn the guitar by drawing her a three-chord chart and saying, “People have done worse with more.” She went to art shows at a space called Girl City and hosted a radio show of music entirely made by women called Your Dream Girl on KAOS. “I locked into the fact that girls just run this town,” said Maffeo. “Going to an all-girl high school, there wasn’t that constant trying to vie for the attention of boys. I felt like girls were rad. I didn’t need to be convinced.” The writer Mikki Halpin lived in Los Angeles but knew the town by reputation: “There were a lot of people who really would make a very convincing claim at that point in time that Olympia was a matriarchy.”
On the other side of the country, Washington, D.C., was a city known for its punk bands. It was also where Calvin Johnson had lived during high school. He had befriended many of the bands in D.C., and in the years after he moved back to his native Olympia to attend college, a kind of cultural exchange developed between the underground music scenes in the two cities.
In 1991, Maffeo was living in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood when riots broke out following the shooting of a Salvadoran man by a black female police officer who had been trying to arrest him for disorderly conduct during a Cinco de Mayo celebration. “They went on for days. You’d run home from the bus stop hoping not to get hit by anything,” says Maffeo. Watching the physical confrontation between a community and the police was oddly energizing, she remembers. “We realized you can push back, it’s okay. It really was an exciting feeling.” One day during the riots, her housemate Jen Smith ran into the house and said, “What we need is a girl riot.”
Marisa Meltzer is author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music and co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. Yes, she really loves the nineties that much.
As a freelance writer, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Slate, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, and many other publications. She has covered such diverse topics from why Miley Cyrus is a good role model to which Pride and Prejudice adaptation has the best Mr. Darcy and she's reported on Parisian riots and overachieving New York City high school students.
She is a graduate of The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
I ordered this book after reading about it in Bust magazine. I was pretty excited that someone had written a scholarly book on the pop culture of my teenage years, but I was in for some serious disappointment. After a strong and interesting discussion of the riot grrrl movement in the first chapter, Meltzer's ideas quickly lose focus. Her lack of a concrete thesis becomes a glaring problem shortly into the book and she seems to try to be all things to all people-- for example, obviously idolizing the Spice Girls for personal reasons while still attempting to maintain some awkward feminist objectivity about them. Her lack of thesis leads her to vascilate wildly between personal subjective opinions and a rather contrived attempt at a scholarly feminist analysis. I mean, we all feel deeply and personally about the singers we loved growing up, but that doesn't mean that any of them had anything important to say about feminism. I my opinion, this book was poorly thought out and poorly written and had little interesting to say about women in music in the 90s. I was enormously disappointed and rather annoyed. Bust was touting the release of a book on riot grrrls this fall-- maybe that will have some better insight.
I've always enjoyed reading feminist and riot grrrl literature, and this book is no different. However, a thesis is glaringly missing. Fun to read, and I learned a lot, but I wish I got more intellect out of it and less history lesson.
I enjoyed reading about 90's riot grrls. I didn't appreciate her dismissal of older feminists, though, saying that we all listened to women's music that was "... impossible to separate from associations with the smell of nag champa." Who did she talk to? I was at the lesbian bar listening to Blondie, songs from Rocky Horror and Joan Armatrading. Sure, I loved Holly Near but there was much more. Later in the book she calls the Michigan Women's Music Festival a folk festival - a giant slap in the face to the bands who played jazz, salsa and many other styles.
