Two Sundays Ago: Sleater-Kinney

June 18, 2000

Two Sundays ago, some 10,000 people gathered in Dolores Park in the Mission District here for Soupstock 2000, a day of music celebrating the 20th anniversary of Food Not Bombs. With chapters around the country and overseas, the anarchist collective was founded to fight militarism; more recently, in San Francisco, the group has organized tenants to oppose gentrification and often clashed with police over unauthorized, on-the-street food distribution to homeless people. But this was a sunny day. The riotously tattooed crowd was very young, no one was hungry (''Have you had any of the food?'' asked an announcer from the stage; ''It's free; everything here today is free''), and Sleater-Kinney, a three-woman punk band founded in Olympia, Wash., in 1994, was out of place.

The guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker and the drummer Janet Weiss—all three sing—put out their records on Kill Rock Stars, a small independent label that functions very well as the center of its own universe: its slogan used to be ''Olympia, Birthplace of Rock,'' which was a way of saying that rock 'n' roll can be born again and again, anywhere and at any time. ''There's nothing that we do that can be separated from where we're from,'' Ms. Weiss said four days after Soupstock: she lives in Portland, Ore., as does Ms. Tucker; Ms. Brownstein lives in Olympia. ''It's rainy. And it's gray. It allows you to be more internal than a place with an outdoor, extroverted climate. It allows for and fosters our ability to break out. To get away. To make a difference. And it fosters our ability to go home and regroup and rebuild.''