Grrrls rule the world
I’ve developed an appetite for rock bios and memoirs that has grown to Cookie Monster proportions. I find myself Hoovering up tell-alls by Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, Kim Gordon, Steven Tyler and Slash (though I stop short at other Guns N’ Roses members). Something about the rock performer arc just appeals to me: I enjoy reading road stories, about recording that first album, the idiosyncrasies of writing a hit song.
Though I never listened to Sleater-Kinney in their early heyday, it now seems you can’t escape them, or their second guitarist, Carrie Brownstein, who’s made an even bigger name for herself as a comedic performer on IFC’s Portlandia. That TV series lovingly satirizes everything you need to know about Brownstein’s home state (Washington) and adopted home city (Portland, Oregon), though if you want to explore the darker roots of those locales, check out her rock bio, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (available on Kindle, et cetera).
Brownstein, now 41, started Sleater-Kinney with Heavens to Betsy guitarist/songwriter Corin Tucker back when grunge was just starting to become “a thing,” meaning there were still frontiers to explore and claim as your own. Starting in Seattle, she acknowledges a debt to Bikini Kill and the general “Riot Grrrl” thrust, though what Sleater-Kinney seemed to be more than anything else for Brownstein was an alternate family.
This becomes clear a few chapters in, where Brownstein telegraphs her prickly distance from both her mother (who was anorexic) and her father (who “outed” himself to her in 1998, when he was 55). These two developments seem like keys to understanding Carrie’s upbringing and movement towards forming an all-female band, one in which she dated co-guitarist Tucker for a long time, until, suddenly, she didn’t. (Awkward, no matter what the gender makeup of the band.)
Brownstein is both clear about her LGBT leanings as well as unclear. She flirts with kissing girls at an early age, but also has relationships with guys, so it’s hard to put a pin in her sexuality — which, of course, is exactly the point of Sleater-Kinney’s take-no-prisoners, abrasive approach, a two-guitar, no-bass onslaught in which Brownstein and Tucker intertwine leads and vocals like a pair of entangled tongues. What Brownstein’s sexual experimentation mostly signals, it seems, is a desire to find herself a place in the world. Music — promising something bigger than her physical self and her real life — offered a path to reinvention. (“I wanted so badly to be taken to some special place, to be asked into some secret club that would transform my life. I felt like music was that club.”)
Sleater-Kinney seems like the perfect incubator for this self-fulfillment. With Tucker’s brassy, punky vocals and the chock-a-block rhythms of two guitars, the band tackled everything from sexual politics to fans to 9/11 and its aftermath. One of her lingering gripes though in Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (the title comes from one of Tucker’s lyrics) is the way the media pegs her band in the Riot Grrrl camp, falling into the same sexist traps in describing their attire and general look. (Brownstein, we quickly learn, leans toward “business casual” attire while performing, which sometimes leads to impractical choices for a guitarist, such as sporting large bows over blouses.)
Mostly, Brownstein the narrator is spunky and funny, though occasionally prone to academic language to describe things. (Sample sentence: “Regionalism — and the creative scenes therein — played an important roles in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic.” True, but wonky. And no, “spunky” is not a sexist descriptor; she simply seems driven, from an early age, to become a performer, and on some level, a “star.”)
Brownstein’s narrative walks a tightrope between several dualities — between being famous and hating the idea of fame; between being careerist enough to dump two drummers for being sloppy (because the band won’t get to “the next level” otherwise) while still caring deeply about feminist concerns and causes. There’s a moment where she discovers, opening for Pearl Jam, that her preconceptions about their “mainstream” music have been erased by their skill in connecting with audiences. And there is also that moment when, having created an all-women music festival in Olympia, Washington (called “Ladyfest”), Sleater-Kinney finds itself pilloried for bagging all the media attention. “I felt like I had been thrown under the bus and betrayed by my own gender,” she writes. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, even for an alt-indie band.
Tensions mount and, years before Metallica does the same, Sleater-Kinney calls in a pair of therapists to help them work out ways to communicate as band members — things along the line of “always say you’re sorry after a fight.”
The dualities come through, too, in her ambivalence towards her parents. In fact, her visceral feelings surface to almost primal, Sylvia Plath levels when describing a photo of her anorexic and sunburned mom at a beach. (“Bags of white pus forming on her sternum, bones for days.”) Ouch.
It’s not that her middle-class upbringing was outwardly difficult — not the kind of squalor you’d find in John Lydon’s back story, say, or the decadence of Slash’s teen years. It’s just that inside, it was all completely messed up and alienating to her. No wonder she sought a home in an alternate society composed, mostly, of women.
The other duality is between the often-confrontational nature of Sleater-Kinney’s music and the goofy, lighthearted parody that she and co-creater Fred Armisen bring to Portlandia. There, she and the SNL writer and regular play multiple characters in skits, from feminist bookstore owners to goth partners. Brownstein notes the disconnect between her new Portlandia fans and her old Sleater-Kinney existence in an interview with Bust magazine: “They just see me as this person they know from television. And then they listen to Sleater-Kinney, and they think: ‘What is this scary music? You seem so happy on the show. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?’”
After taking a hiatus in 2005, Sleater-Kinney have now reformed, released a new album, and Brownstein has written this book. She is an interesting mix of contradictions — both fierce and self-aware, yet marked by bouts of severe fragility and self-doubt: she opens the book with desperate thoughts of slamming her hand in a door during an ill-fated European tour; she suffers back stress and the very non-rock-bio condition of hives while on the road; she has panic attacks and slaps herself repeatedly during a particular moment of distress. It’s as though the weight of the female rock ‘n’ roll mythology she and Corin have been constructing all these years threatens to crash down all around her and crush her.
* * *
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir is available on Kindle, Amazon, iTunes Books, etc.
