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Bratmobile
Ladies,
Women and Girls
Lookout!
Records
The
Experience Music Project assembled some riot grrl
principals for a historical symposium on the subject last
year. The results, along with suggested reading and listening
lists, can be found at: http://www.emplive.
com/explore/
riot_grrrl/index.asp
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Bratmobile,
Aisler's Set, Glass Candy and the Shattered Theater
Meow
Meow
527 SE Pine
St., 230-2122
9 pm Friday,
Dec. 1
$8; all ages
In 1916, a few hundred Irish rebels took over the General
Post Office in Dublin and repelled a British siege for a week.
It has been suggested that if every Irishman who later claimed
to have fought from the roof of the GPO had actually been
there, the building would have collapsed under their weight.
You could say something similar about the early '90s punk
mini-movement known to posterity as "riot grrl." Only a
few hundred people, mostly from the terminally cool inner-circle
scenes of DC and Olympia, actually participated in the feminist
music uprising, but the brief overthrow of rock's ever-reigning
boys-club assumptions snagged tons of ink at the time and
has become one of indie rock's more celebrated episodes.
Long before Greil Marcus could blithely drop riot
grrl references as backstory for winding New York Times
thumbsuckers, there was Bratmobile. If the abrasive
and didactic Bikini Kill was the movement's propaganda
arm, Bratmobile was its playful and combative conscience.
Plus, the trio, split between the two coasts, really seemed
to live the old-school punk ethos of learning to play as
you went along.
Bratmobile broke up in 1994 after a New York show of near-legendary
(in certain circles) intra-band contention. Now, however,
singer Allison Wolfe, bassist Erin Smith and
drummer Molly Neuman ride again, reunited and much
improved. While the band's new album retains the old pop
spunk and sing-song taunting, B-Mob can now back its aggression
with some real musical brawn and scrub the finished product
to a near-perfect sheen. Some of the songs on Ladies,
Women and Girls even have more than one guitar track!
Bratmobile's Erin Smith rang from her job at Lookout!
Records in the Bay Area.
Willamette Week: So, the obvious question: 'How
was it to reunite with Bratmobile?'
Erin Smith: Basically, the minute after we broke up we
became a lot better friends. As soon as we didn't have to
deal with each other in a business aspect, things became
a lot more relaxed. And then, years later, our other bands
sort of dissolved at about the same time. We were all at
a Donnas show in DC, and it was so inspiring. We
were all feeling a little frustrated with what was going
on in music generally--one wave had totally ended, there
was nothing that exciting going on in our worlds. It seemed
to me that the best way we could fight that would be to
get back together again.
Bratmobile Mark I played to a pretty small, well-defined
audience of DC and Olympia scenesters, at least initially.
What are your audiences like now?
The audience is pretty interesting, because there are a
lot of young kids in it. In many cases what they're saying
is, 'Oh, I'm so glad you got back together because I never
had the chance to see you back then.' And then there are
kids who come with their parents, and the people who show
up wearing the T-shirt that we only sold on one tour, back
in 1992.
In its day, the 'riot grrl' movement became a minor
media cause célèbre, and in many people's
minds that was something of a kiss of death. Looking back
now, what do you take away from that era?
I wasn't ever one of those people who was afraid of the
media. In fact, I was a student of the media, and I was
working for Sassy magazine at the time. They
were the first people to write about riot grrl, and they
did it because I told them about it. And then, even when
it was all happening, I knew that it wasn't going to be
around forever. A lot of the problems happened when people
refused to talk to the press, and the press wrote about
them anyway, or when the press would end up talking to people
who had no right to act as the spokesman for anything. The
thing is, I get so many letters from girls who say, 'Oh,
I'm so glad I found out about this, I found out about it
reading 17, or reading Sassy.' At this point,
so many years later, it's not like we can just pretend that
the work is all done. I mean, we were just in Europe with
the Donnas, and people were like, 'You're all girls? And
you don't have a bass player?' It was like going back in
time.
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