From grunge to riot grrrl to girl power

book-cover-1989Read back-to-back, Joshua Clover’s 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About and Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music stand to offer a view as to how music had a chance to radically shift as the eighties ended, but essentially lost their impact after corporate co-option.

Clover’s book offers up a dense polemic that proffers hip-hop, acid house and grunge as the genres which were to cause a sea change as the decade changed. While a little over-reaching, and owing much of its narrative thrust to Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?,” Clover still makes the point that “there are no novelty songs, only failed genres.”

From that phrase, one can extrapolate grunge as a genre that — and I paraphrase Clover here — takes the sword that punk had beaten from a plowshare and turns it upon itself. Grunge was so nihilistic that it was incapable of sustaining itself for an extended period of time. Grunge represented the general tectonic shift that Clover posits took place in the time around 1989: “a way of preserving antagonism in the very moment of its cancellation.” Essentially, grunge — while a movement that took the rage of punk — took none of punk’s politics, choosing instead to focus on that feeling.

book-cover-girl-powerFeeling is a distinct method of expression utilized by riot grrrl, and Meltzer’s book does a fine job of demonstrating how grunge provided an environment where riot grrrl had a chance at greater exposure. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would readily mention feminist writers like Susan Faludi, or play benefits for rape victims. The focus on the Pacific Northwest and the attendant male-dominated grunge acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, and the like also provided a chance for the riot grrrl acts of nearby Olympia to get signed and disseminate their music to a larger audience.

This dissemination did occur, albeit indirectly. Your actual, 100% riot grrrl acts didn’t end up signed to major labels, but those with similar values, or those fronted by women who came out of the riot grrrl scene were signed in the years following: L7, Babes In Toyland, the Gossip, Sleater Kenney, et al. However, these acts didn’t necessarily get the same push that their male counterparts did. Rather than being publicized as “bands,” they were publicized as “chick bands,” gaining “a ubiquity not in music but in marketing.”

Meltzer makes the point well that women who are “pretty and unthreatening” are much more acceptable than those “angry at the status quo.” Essentially, the female acts that tend to dominate the popular consciousness are not L7, Bratmobile, Sleater Kenney, or Bikini Kill, but Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, or Hole.

Now, I disagree with Meltzer when she makes the claim that Hole was never mainstream. While never achieving the level of success of the other female artists, the album Live Through This made it to #52 on the Billboard charts, and “Miss World” and “Doll Parts” still find their way into rotation on many alternative stations. Courtney Love may be more famous for her various train wreck celebrity moments than her music, but despite her “acceptance into the Hollywood and fashion community,” she’s still referred to as a musician.

To bring the discussion back around to the music, the way grunge and riot grrrl both went to shit was when the mainstream, pop music machine assimilated the sounds being presented by the underground, and stripped them of their specificity. Grunge, for all its angst, was originally about being ugly and unwanted and living in a damp, overcast corner of the country. When it was subverted into “alternative rock,” you end up with Bush, which has a man with the looks of a male model singing about alienation.

The same goes for riot grrrl. We go from Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill telling everybody to “suck my left one” to Avril Lavigne, who, despite being “marketed as a kind of tomboy who stuck her tongue out at cameras and wore heavy black eyeliner […] was all pop star at heart with the hot body, catchy songs, and major label handlers to prove it.”

Is there anything that can be taken from this? Aside from the fact that any musical movement devoted to saying something “real” can be subverted into generic, non-specific feelings that can be marketed to the nearest common denominator? Sadly, it doesn’t appear so.