Girl Germs

Scene...

"We're not anti-boy, we're pro-girl" Molly Neuman

Riot Grrrl started when girls attended punk gigs in the 70s and 80s and felt threatened by the rough nature of the gigs, and the violence that came hand-in-hand with punks. Scared, passive and neutral - perhaps not. But girls wanted their own version of a particularly dominant male social group. Let's look at the name. "Riot" suggests that there was rioting involved in the scene, and there was... not in the traditional term, but women wanted to riot against what was placed on them - they were expected to be learning how to cook, not how to play guitars.

One of the founding bands of the Riot Grrrl scene was Bratmobile. A band that started as an underground Washington band. Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman started their own feminist fanzine Girl Germs which progressed by picking up two more members, Jen Smith and Christina Billotte and produced a casette called Bratmobile DC, in 1991. However, the band broke up early on after the pressures of succumbing to the typical Riot Grrrl groups. Fights started, the band became angry and they broke up.

Riot Grrrl as a term began in the Bratmobile era of 1991, when Jen Smith wrote a letter to bandmate Allison Wolfe when race riots started in their hometown of Washington DC in an appropriately named area called Mount Pleasant. Smith wrote in the letter, "it's going to be a girl riot summer..." Bratmobile gained a following, and the letter was reported to be one of the founding articles that began the obsession with Riot Grrrl.
Riot Grrrl groups were punk-activists who made the female rock industry take off from it's nothingness by its hard fast rant about being a powerful woman who could take control of men, and the surrounding situations.



One, if not the most popular original Riot Grrrl groups was, believe it or not, early days No Doubt. Yep, pop queen sensation Gwen Stefani was one of the original movements of the movement. Although Stefani was the only girl in the group, the band was classified as Riot Grrrl because Stefani had the persona of being a punk, an individual, and talented. In 1995, the abdn released Tragic Kingdom with the hit single "I'm Just a Girl". Blatant enough was the song, so were the lyrics, "I'm just a girl living in captivity"..... there, in that single sentence, was exactly what Riot Grrrl was attempting to prove. Stefani also ranted around this topic in her track "Ex-Girlfriend." ..."I always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend". Even in the filmclip, Stefani is determined to portray herself as a powerful and independent woman. Blatant, obvious... and kind of dicky...




Another of the more popular acts that emerged from Riot Grrrl was PJ Harvey. In 1991 Harvey released the single "Dress" to huge political acclaim, and still today remains one of the most popular of female songs. In 1992, Harvey made a huge political statement by posing naked on the cover of British publication New Musical Express (NME). An interesting quote from Harvey is " I don’t ever think about [feminism]. I mean, it doesn't cross my mind. I certainly don’t think in terms of gender when I'm writing songs, and I never had any problems as the result of being female that I couldn't get over. Maybe I'm not thankful for the things that have gone before me, you know. But I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time." So Harvey, unlike a lot of the women involved in this movement, wasn't actively seeking out being marketed as a woman, but instead, was trying to put herself out there as a talent - I give her props for this, perhaps Stefani should have taken a leaf out of her book?

PJ Harvey - in all her sexual glory.

Riot Grrrl didn't last long as a 'genre' or scene. In 1992 Riot Grrrl was accused of bringing feminism into the moshpits. This was apparently a negative thing for the music industry. I have to question whether or not the male majority felt threatened by this newly introduced scene that glorified women, and made them not just sex symbols - but a voice for the powerful woman.
Although many of the Riot Grrrl bands contained male members, it has been commonly reported that these bands were initially not received well by a male audience. New York had it's own "Pussystock Festival". Bands like Bikini Kill would often actively invite members of the audience to talk about their personal experiences with sensitive issues like sexual abuse, pass out lyric sheets to everyone in the audience girl and boy, and almost always demand that the mosh boys move to the back or side to allow space in front for the girls in the audience, a controversial decision which sometimes led to booing, and often violence.
The band members bit back at this, and they started writing the names that they were called loudly on their chests in lipstick, "Cunt", "Slut", "Bitch" and "Dyke" being the most common of the name calling (original, hey?) However, it was the males who were also involved in the music industry that supported the growing scene. "I was totally into the riot grrrl music, I see it as a very important form of expression. I learned a lot from that, way more maybe than from 'male' punk rock." Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot said.

"It was also super schizo to play shows where guys threw stuff at us, called us cunts and yelled "take it off" during our set, and then the next night perform for throngs of amazing girls singing along to every lyric and cheering after every song" - Kathleen Hanna