What is Riot Grrrl?
A quick look at a genre with many offerings on eMusic.
Riot Grrrl was never about the where. It was all about the person. While you might hear people discuss LA punk or Boston hardcore, Riot Grrrl seems against such differentiation. Riot Grrrl resembles a fine art movement, like Dada or Fluxus, more than a musical genre. Riot Grrrl resides inside the world of each and every Riot Grrl who gets it.
A few years ago I was at a Sleater-Kinney concert at New York’s Terminal 5. It was psyched to finally see what had become one of my favorite bands (I was never cool enough to be into Sleater-Kinney during their first phase, 199–2006), but honestly their performance wasn’t the biggest surprise of the night. It was their opening act that had my jaw dropped.
Friends who’d been to the previous night’s show warned me about Lizzo. “It’s such a different kind of music that Sleater-Kinney, but it totally works,” said one friend. “I don’t usually like rap, but I like Lizzo,” said someone else. I love rap, and I totally get the connection to punk rock, but not even that could prepare me for Lizzo.
First her DJ came out to greet the audience from behind the turntables. I recall her shouting, “What’s up, New York? Are you ready for some Riot Grrrl 101?” Screaming crowd blended nicely into “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill, but only a five-second clip that began a mix of several other Riot Grrrl songs. The clips only lasted a few seconds each, but that was enough for this crowd, raised on Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and third-wave feminism. This was an important moment for that crowd, and also my understanding of Riot Grrrl. Riot Grrrl is not a genre. Riot Grrrl is a feeling.
Lizzo has grown to prominence wider music circles, but at that point she was a local Midwestern act, releasing her first album on the Minneapolis label Totally Gross National Product and self releasing her second. Surely, that independent spirit is what brought Lizzo to the Sleater-Kinney stage, and it’s what made a song like “Batches and Cookies” a hit with the Sleater-Kinney fans. While rapping, she wore an apron and threw out cookies to the audience. Riot Grrrls are smart and they appreciate irony. Lizzo’s performance felt reminiscent of the stunts Kathleen Hanna pulled onstage as lead singer of Bikini Kill, whose 1998 album The Singles is stop number 1 on any exploration of Riot Grrrl.
From that album, “Rebel Girl” is perhaps the biggest hit, and the single many would look to for the definitive Riot Grrrl statement: a girl who admires another girl for her independent spirit and doesn’t care how others have labeled her. For my own daily dose of Riot Grrrl, I tend to put on “In Accordance to Natural Law,” a 30-second song with lyrics you can barely hear through the fuzz and the speedy delivery. They start:
“All men are evil
Except my boyfriend”
Said the sound of the spectacle
The song paints a picture of a girl alone in her room reading a fanzine (which is how many original Riot Grrrls connected and shared music) and feeling frustrated by the Women’s Movement for not allowing her to be attracted to men. More than that, though, it’s another ironic pride anthem, like “Batches and Cookies” and “Maket America Great Again” by Pussy Riot. If Hanna holds contradictory opinions, it’s not because she’s a hypocrite. She contains depth and she’s proud of it. She knows there are many, many more like her.
And the Riot Grrrl narrative keeps going. There are Riot Grrl groups coming out with stuff all the time. L7, Dream Nails, The Tuts, White Lung, and Dream Wife are all descendants of the Riot Grrrl rock tradition, with the Pussy Riot playing up the performance art aspect with more of a poppy sound. The message is more important than the image, and that sound resonates across generations. All girls to the front. Riot Grrrl is everywhere.
