How has art been a form of protest? The story of Riot Grrrl

Listen to the story of Riot Grrrl on The Art of Resistance Podcast!

Can art be a form of protest? Does art really work as resistance? And how can you make protest art?

In times like these, it's natural to wonder if art is really important. If writing, music, performance, and other creative work really matters.

I find hope and inspiration from looking at stories of artists using their work to resist the status quo. The story of Riot Grrrl is a super powerful example to show the way.

In the college town of Olympia, a core group of women’s punk bands emerged in the early 1990s, grabbing guitars and pushing their way to the male-dominated stage with raging sounds and razor-sharp lyrics. The music was loud, brash, and powerful, like the girls themselves.

But it wasn’t just the music. It was groups of girls that sprung up around the country.

Riot Grrrl was a living, breathing network of zines and conscious-raising groups and punk shows. And it scared the shit out of parents and politicians.

PART 1: PUNK PRIMER

Punk is often narrowly defined as a movement of music that flourished in the late 1970s in England and NYC. But more broadly, punk music is about rebellion. And it lived long after the 1970s.

The punk sound is aggressive and loud, made by some talents but also many amateurs. The lyrics rebel against anything and everything, and they’re paired with performances that are visceral, destructive, and representational.

What’s usually assumed in any description is the musicians and fans being aggressively male. This, despite the fact that David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop, all cited as godfathers of punk, were highly fluid in their sexuality and gender representation. This, despite the existence of female-dominated punk bands like The Runaways, Blondie, The Slits, The Raincoats, X-Ray Spex, and many more, performing before or alongside The Sex Pistols and The Ramones.

Punk lived on past its genesis in the seventies, and this aggressively male stereotype took firmer hold as punk morphed in the 1980s. In some places, punk devolved into mosh pits and bloody fists, like the hardcore scene in LA. Elsewhere, punk evolved into strident political acts, like the DC scene.

Of course girls and women liked this music, and wanted to see this music. They had a lot to be angry about, and so many more rules and traditions to rebel against. But many found themselves literally pushed aside in pits, and maybe bloodied in the bargain.

In many ways, this bruising was indicative of the general climate for girls and women in the 1980s.

PART 2: FEMINISM UPDATE

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s won significant gains for women. The wins were big, like Roe V Wade, granting women the right to an abortion (at least until today). And the wins were somewhat small but huge in their impact, like being able to get a credit card on our own.

But quickly, the second wave of feminism led to backlash.

And whether right or wrong, young women in the eighties and early nineties often felt constricted by the idea of what a feminist should be, Walker said. The definition of empowered women that had made its way through these decades had somehow been transformed into this capitalist superhero. It was an 80s ideal: the superwoman who HAS IT ALL. And that woman is white, skinny, middle class, heterosexual.

So these kinds of thoughts about what a feminist was… were just as limiting as old-fashioned gender roles.

By the early 1990s, second-wave feminism, at the very least, needed an update. Enter the punks.

PART 3: PUNKS ON THE STAGE, PUNKS ON THE PAGE

Bikini Kill formed in 1990. Kathleen Hanna, lead singer, had volunteered with a rape shelter before forming the band. She’d also worked at a strip club. These experiences created a very practical, complicated and urgent feminism that informed her writing. She partnered with Tobi Vail, a student of black feminism and gender theorists, to form the band.

The music they created was fierce and unhinged, raw but precise. Their songs were complaints, commands, and chants at top volume.

The band made their representations part of their performance. Hanna would write “slut” across her bare midriff, strip down to her underwear, wear pigtails and girly skirts, all while scream-singing about rape, sex, and power. She’d demand that male fans move to the back and girls come to the front, creating a safe space free of moshing for girls to rock.

Ultimately, the band’s goals were more than music. So they also produced zines for each show, including their song lyrics and manifestos on sexism and sexual assault.

This was the beginning of Riot Grrrl. That term came from the title of a zine, and came to embody a movement with unlimited permutations and no clear definitions. Just like girls themselves.

Girls and young women wrote zines, attended shows, came together in consciousness-raising groups, and got political and active. They were practical and personal, yet deeply informed by the political battles raging in the country. They organized festivals and conventions. Riot Grrrl activities were extremely varied, but consistent in one central theme.

As Sara Marcus says in her book, Girls to the Front:

“The girls were furious about things like parental-consent abortion laws, bikini-clad women who hawked beer and cigarettes on billboards and TV, and the archaic gender roles that pervaded the cartoon section of the Washington Post. They were ready to revolt over things like hallway gropes and sidewalk heckles, leering teachers, homophobic threats, rape, incest, domestic violence, sexual double standards, ubiquitous warnings against walking certain places or dressing certain ways…they were mustering for battle against the idea that to be a girl was to be in grave danger that you could never fully escape, only manage by narrowing your life, your range, your wardrobe, your gaze.”

And for these girls, their soundtrack was women’s punk.

Soon, Bikini Kill was joined by other bands, inspired to take up instruments, and write zines, and break all those infuriating rules.

There was Bratmobile, the self-described “dorky” girls that played messy and lo-fi, with lyrics that sounded like schoolyard chants and taunting.

There was Heavens to Betsy, a band whose sound was pained and poetic, with collapsing or escalating song structures.

And then there was Sleater-Kinney. When Heavens to Betsy disbanded, Corin Tucker formed a new band with Carrie Brownstein, and later, Janet Weiss. Their sound was chaos and control, with two guitars instead of a guitar and bass.

There were other bands, of course, in the U.S. and outside. Together, these bands sang about all the inequities and frustrations of being a woman in modern society. They sang about female bodies and their needs. They put highly transgressive subject matter front and center, in their songs and their performances, and called for a revolution.

As the 1992 zine What is Riot Grrrl, Anyway? said, “Riot Grrrl is a hand to hold & a fist in his face…Riot Grrrl is whatever I want it to be. It’s whatever you want it to be”

And the image of the “girl” rather than a woman was deliberate: Riot Grrrl celebrated the loud and uncontrolled force that is girls before society steps in to box them up.

PART 4: BACKLASH AND GIRL POWER

The moment of punk, zines and activism expanded quickly, but buckled under crushing media pressure that depicted the bands as a silly fad, competing with one another, and Riot Grrrl groups as sophomoric, focusing on fashion and catfights.

There’s no way to know how many Riot Grrrl groups existed across the country. But it seemed like wherever girls were angry – and where were girls not angry? – a Riot Grrrl group was there to listen and to act.

The main bands morphed and disbanded by the late 90s, or took new forms. And corporate capitalism seized on the main messaging. They turned Girl Power, which had been a rallying cry for Riot Grrrl, into poppy, light confection from the Spice Girls and elsewhere. The zines transformed into online forums for conversation and empowerment.

But all of this had laid the groundwork for a new feminism, and for a new artistic aesthetic.

PART 5: IMPACT

How do you measure the impact of art? Number of groups? Laws changed? Minds changed?

The numbers aren’t there for Riot Grrrl. They never were, because they were never designed to be. There was never any tally of the groups across the US, or the UK, or wider. There was never any checklist to achieve. There was never any main goal of lobbying or advocacy. Because when it came down to it, it was all just girls, young girls, still living at home, still living in dangerous situations.

And the impact for these girls could be considered life saving. Girls who had never told their secrets before, girls who had never told anyone what happened when the lights went out at night. Or what happened in the halls of their school, or the bathroom stalls. Girls who had never heard anyone talk about feminism… or the right of women to be fucking angry. For those girls the impact of Riot Grrrl meant survival. It meant maybe there was a future for them.

And isn’t that really the goal of art? To make us all feel like we’ve been seen. To make us feel like our voice matters. To make us feel like we should, we can, survive even in thee midst of horrific things.

Do you measure the impact of art in the long term? In the staying power long after the particular moment? In that case, we can look at the impact of Riot Grrl in the dozens, maybe hundreds, of bands formed in their wake.

The bands themselves have reunited. And the art lives on as a soundtrack to rage then, and rage now.

That’s one of the beautiful things about art as resistance. It’s of a moment, yes. And sometimes you can measure it, in all the measures that a capitalist society wants you to use. But it also lives on. It inspires resistance now, 30 years later. It reminds us aging GenX punks of where we are and where we need to be. And hopefully it shows young, yet-to-be-named generations, that there’s a voice out there like theirs.

And it’s just fucking good music.

CONCLUSION

What can we learn from Riot Grrrl? What can we do as creative people in this fucked-up world?

Because we are all creative. We can all finds ways to resist.

And here’s the thing – Riot Grrrl didn’t involve experts. There were no political advocacy consultants. There was no one guiding these young girls into how to resist. And – there were no artistic virtuosos here, at least not at first. None of the girls in Bikini Kill, for example, had ever picked up instruments before starting their band. They’d never wrote songs, never played in front of others. They had never published things. They had no idea what they were doing.

But they did it anyway. They taught themselves. And the girls who came to shows, they picked up instruments too. They wrote zines for the first time.

There was no barrier for entry. There were gatekeepers, but the Riot Grrrls ignored them.

For me, the lesson from Riot Grrrl is this: Make the art. Write the thing. Learn as you go. Because we all have a voice, and things to say. And someone needs to hear it. Someone is confused, hurting, scared because of the fuckery of today. And the power of a song, a book, a zine, a video? Life-changing.

So here’s what we do from here:

• We tell our stories. Tell your stories. The ones you’ve been putting off, the ones you think are too weird or loud or scary.

• We tell them in our way. Think zines and blogs, think audio and visual, think social and analog. Get creative and get weird, and work to reach the person and people who need to see it and hear it.

• And don’t think of this as short term. Even if we get a new administration down the road, even if we miraculously come out of this terrifying, tyrannical moment, there is so much to fight against and for. This is a long-term commitment to making art for a better world.

If our work, if our art, if our voice reaches one person, even just one, who really needs to hear it, who sees themselves for the first time, who realizes they’re not alone, who then goes on to make their own art and keep pushing against the powers that be: that’s resistance.

Listen to this story of Riot Grrrl on The Art of Resistance Podcast!

 SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

• Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna

• The Punk Singer, directed by Sini Anderson, 2013

• Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

• Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

• ‘90s Riot Grrrl on Sexual Harassment, Boy-Imposed Ideals and More | The Oprah Winfrey Show

• Riot Grrrl Retrospectives | Bikini Kill - Revolution Girl Style Now! | MoPOP | Museum of Pop Culture

• Bikini Kill, the Linda Lindas and a 30-year riot – PBS NewsHour