The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: yglg
September 1992
Not long ago I came across a proposal for a documentary film on great rock concerts. The concept was simple. Starting with the greatest concert of all time—Woodstock—you'd show all these legendary gatherings, most involving at least one dead hero, and each segment would end with its host, a current movie or music star, grinning into the camera: "You shoulda been there, man." Recently people who weren't there have been having fun replying to this tyrannical imposition of ‘60s nostalgia, which is really a way for middle-aged '60s people to protect their own identity by discouraging others from making their own history. In the strangled lines from the Youngbloods ‘67 anthem, “Get Together" that open Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings," you can hear unmitigated contempt for this project, along with a gleeful realization of how stupid it is. Comeonpeoplenowsmileonyourbrothereverybodygettogethertrytoloveoneanotherright-now—Chris Novoselic sounds nuts, completely Mansonoid, and also thrilled to deliver a new punch line to a bad joke.
Even better is a moment in "Liar," a tune by Bikini Kill, a three-woman, one-man (all in their early twenties) band from Olympia, Washington. A furious march through the song suddenly breaks off, and instead of railing curses singer Kathleen Hanna is crooning: "All we are saying/Is give peace a chance..." Behind her, though, are the most amazing female screams—wrapping around the old words like snakes. They're the screams of a talking doll under torture. You get the feeling you'll never hear that bit of pop holiness again.
Trumpeting the Bikini Kill slogan REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW—also the title of their homemade eight-song cassette—this group's way of making their own history is to act as if they have no ancestors, musically or politically. Of course, there's a way in which Hanna, drummer Tobi Vail, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and guitarist Billy Karren are starting from zero. The plain-speech feminism in their Bikini Kill fanzines ("It is not our responsibility to explain how boys/men are being sexist any more than it is our responsibility to 'prevent ourselves' from getting raped") might not have been surprising in 1972; after twenty years of I'm-not-a-feminist-but, talk like this communicates directly. People who've heard it before might find it depressing that the list of ten favorite male put-downs of feminism in the Bikini Kill fanzine Girl Power could have appeared in the '70s in the feminist journal Off Our Backs: "1. You Take Things Too Seriously... 3. You Know, Some Women Manage to 'Go Beyond' Sexism… 9. But I Know a Girl Who Lied About Being Raped.... 10. Complain, Complain, Complain… At Least You Don't Have It As Bad As a) women used to b) people of color c) women in other countries." But read the Bikini Kill analysis that follows each heading and you'll find an energy, a sense of delight, that only comes when it seems like you're doing something for the first time.
It's the same with Bikini Kill's music. It's the purest, crudest punk, and testament to a crucial cultural truth: when you get down to the bones and teeth of the punk form—the desire of people who can't to do—punk is never "revived," but always rediscovered. Kathleen Hanna may not high-step with the same force Poly Styrene of X-ray Spex found in London in 1977 with "Oh Bondage Up Yours!"—a record that defined punk as a new kind of free speech accessible to anyone with the nerve to use it—but the sense of a person finding herself is just as strong. The two women are speaking the same language. In the background of "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" teenage saxophonist Lora Logic trips, stumbles, and falls, and seizes the music; Bikini Kill set "Daddy's Li'l Girl"—a vocally complex song about incest—to what is more or less "Batman Theme." In both cases you wonder what's going on, why it's so hard to keep up, why the dumbbell can't-play simplicity can support such a rich conversation.
"Candy," a tune about sex and degradation, opens with a chant that's on the verge of collapsing into a whine ("Complain, Complain, Complain"). Just as you might be ready to dismiss what you're hearing as secondhand noise, yesterday's papers—some kid's mother's old issue of Off Our Backs—a fuzztone solo rises out of nowhere and invests every word of Hanna's can't-sing drone with irrefutable emotional credibility.
After a while, then, you begin to hear what is new in Bikini Kill's music: a certain harshness, a blank ugliness, a disgust you can find as well in Mary Gaitskill's fiction, or Jayne Anne Phillips's, but that you might not have heard before in music. FUCK DAD OR DIE runs a line on a page of lyrics in Bikini Kill's Color and Activity Book: song by song, the band takes that as a manifesto in reverse, a negative principle. You can hear the line—really, it's no less a slogan than REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW—in the voice Hanna finds for the song "Suck My Left One," the first female equivalent I've ever heard to the worldwide chart-topper "suck my dick." It's a gurgling, vomiting, triumphant croak, Medusa in sound. But it's not merely a no: sometimes Hanna snaps off the last word, "one" hitting the wall, and sometimes she makes a world out of the word, drifting off into whatever melisma she can find in it. Maybe it's a protective fantasy ("Daddy comes into her room at night/He's got more than talking on his mind/My sister pulls the covers down/She reaches over flicks on the light, she says to him/Suck—"); it sounds like freedom.
Listening now to X-ray Spex—unavailable for years, all sixteen of their 1977-79 recordings have just been reissued by Caroline on an augmented CD version of their sole album, Germfree Adolescents—what's surprising is how far they got. X-ray Spex and Poly Styrene were unusual in that their music grew stronger, more fierce, and funnier as they went along. The world they took on got bigger; more detail emerged. So many bands arrived with one great shout, a fabulous clatter—the Au Pairs with "You" and "Kerb Crawler," the Raincoats with "Fairytale in the Supermarket," the Slits with "A Boring Life"—and though they became more musical, more accomplished, more self-referential, they never again made such a grand claim on anyone's attention.
Bikini Kill practice a kind of public clandestinity. They sing about forbidden things; they fill their fanzines with suggestions of a "secret society" ("Each separate yglg sect will have its own particular reading list") and coded gestures ("Okay," runs an infinitely suggestive passage in a sheet from the Bikini Kill-aligned outfit Riot Grrrl, "so I propose that those girls who wanna change things start writing stuff on their/our hands... it will just be a way for pro-revolution girls to identify each other"). Bikini Kill cannot simply get bigger any more than they can simply get better. To make the music, to talk the talk, to make the history still only implied on the Revolution Girl Style Now cassette, they may have to get more extreme.
Thanks to Gina Arnold for sharing her riot grrrl zines.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, September 1992.
Thoughts on Get Together
As a member of the septuagenarian generation, I’m probably considered old and in the way. That said, your piece reminded me of a concert I attended in the Sixties, not a big one and probably remembered by few.
I was in high school and went with friends to visit some other friends who had run away from home. They were living in a tent in a town called Canyon or maybe a community is a better way to describe it. It’s in between Oakland and Moraga. We heard the Fish were playing there.
It seemed like no one owned most of the land in the steep canyon and people were essentially squatting there, living in tree houses and other creative dwellings, but my young friends just had a camping tent.
We smoked a bunch of hashish and when concert time was nearing we headed off high on the hillside to the baseball field by the school and post office that were pretty much the whole town.
That song you mentioned came floating through the trees, first the guitars, then Jesse singing...
“Love is but a song we sing
Fear's the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why”
It was the perfect song for that moment in time, for my somewhat lost g-g-generation. My runaway friends were on the wing without knowing why. I suppose it was for “peace and love,” or “freedom” to do whatever. But as Janis and Kris said, “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.”
I’m told my friends ended up living in the Haight eventually, starting on the streets and moving up to a Victorian. I lost track and don’t know where they are now.
Looking Canyon up on Wikipedia I found word of the concert, so maybe it isn’t forgotten: “In the late 1960s, Canyon became a center of political and social protest and creative alternative lifestyles… In the summer of 1967 Country Joe and the Fish with the Youngbloods played a benefit for the Canyon School.”
A Wikipedia mention is something, so I guess we were actually part of history. "You shoulda been there, man."