“It’s an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.” - Lady Gaga
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hen she was a little girl … “I was very lonely, actually. The few friends I had were gypsies. When I was eight I tried to commit suicide to get noticed by my parents. I used to do things like fall on the floor upstairs so that they’d think I’d fallen downstairs, and I’d have bottles of pills in my hands. I’ve always felt on the outside, really.” She, like the rest of the group, admits to being a loner. They don’t really like people. A thing they have in common. Their reason for existing is to perform noise with meaning for people to share and benefit from. They could be the last “rock” group. The only “rock” group. They are not a “rock” group. They are 20th-century performers. Friday night at the Nashville. An incongruous/ traditional venue, it would seem, for Siouxsie and the Banshees. Isn’t anywhere? It is “an occasion”. Names/faces are scattered, to be noticed and not to be noticed, perhaps admiring the path of individualism. Wayne County, Billy Idol, Marianne Faithfull, Andy Czezowski, Howard Pickup, Jordan and on. It is a sell out. People straggle outside, hoping for admission. Some, absurdly, produce five-pound notes in vain attempts at bribing the doorman. What is this? Calm down and reflect on a bewildering reputation. It’s now 15 months since the Banshees, in a spirited, impulsive shot of audience participation, went on stage at the 100 Club and set their precedent for
the unique, shocking, honest. That’s a dark, distant past, perhaps the only period that the Banshees have actually felt that they belonged to something. Felt part of anything … a movement that pressed selfdestruct early on, a movement whose successful ones were, with odd exceptions, the shrewdest, the most adaptable to the business as opposed to the most creative, challenging, changing and committed. For their first “performance” at the 100 Club, the Banshees were Sid Vicious on drums, Marco (now in the Models) on guitar, Steve Havoc on bass, Siouxsie singing. In March/April of 77, a concentrated Siouxsie and the Banshees appeared, playing their first real gig at the Roxy, Siouxsie singing, Steve on bass, Kenny (who was one of the original “punks”) looking different, dancing around, on drums, PP Barnum on guitar. They were poor and unformulated, but intense. From about this period, they appear in Don Letts’s flicker-movie, bad-mouthing the owner of the Roxy, having small fun at others’ expense. About May they began to move out into the provinces, speculative but never boring. In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
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n May of 1989, a junior at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, named Kathleen Hanna travelled to Seattle to meet Kathy Acker, a forty-twoyear-old author she admired. Acker, who had written about abuse, incest, and other forms of sexual extremity, was conducting workshops at the Center on Contemporary Art. Hanna, then nineteen, bluffed her way into an interview. As reported in Sara Marcus’s carefully documented history, “Girls to the Front,” when Hanna explained that she was interested in spoken-word performance and in writing, Acker told her that she should be in a band: “There’s more of a community for musicians than for writers.” Hanna felt rebuffed at first, but she ultimately took the advice. In 1990, after touring with a band called Viva Knievel, she formed a new group, eventually called Bikini Kill, with a drummer named Tobi
Vail, whom Hanna knew from Olympia. Vail had been publishing and writing a feminist zine called Jigsaw, which Hanna admired. Hanna and Vail found bandmates in the bassist Kathi Wilcox, who had never been in a band before, and the guitarist Billy Karren. This led to both a small catalogue of recordings and the birth of the very sort of community that Acker was referring to. People often use the phrase “riot grrrl” as shorthand for the feminist music activism of the nineties, but sometimes they use it simply to refer to Bikini Kill. The group’s first two vinyl recordings are being reissued, twenty years after their initial release, on a label set up by the members to preserve their output. Even though the riot-grrrl community has come to dwarf the songs in historical memory— that was the point, really—the music is still a pungent tonic. Bands like Gossip, who became
pop stars (in England, at least), cite the influence of Bikini Kill and the riot-grrrl movement. Members of the Russian political collective Pussy Riot, two of whom are currently in prison for hooliganism, also cite the band’s impact. (Pussy Riot is known for wearing balaclavas during public actions; is it coincidence that Hanna wore one in “No Alternative Girls,” a short film, from 1994, by Tamra Davis?) Although Hanna helped put together the first issue of the zine riot grrrl, in July of 1991, and was a member of the scene’s most intensely discussed band, she bristles at the suggestion that she was the movement’s leader. Collectives are like that—designed to create community—while the historical record often insists on seeing a
generative process, with a single source, like the starter’s pistol that kicks off a race. Throughout the decade, riot grrrl thrived between two poles—Olympia and Washington, D.C., Bikini Kill’s second home, where consciousness-raising meetings were held. Discussions often focussed on nonmusical issues: sexual abuse, feelings of insecurity, the lack of a female cohort.
It wasn’t until someone made a comment that I looked like Karen O with my fringe bangs, red lipstick, and almond-shaped eyes that I realized she was like me—part Asian. While I’d already heard her slow seductive vocals and high-pitch screams on a mix CD a friend made me, at that point I’d never actually seen what the frontwoman for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs looked like. When I finally did, the revelation was transformative. For most of my childhood, I tried to hide the fact that I was Filipino, because in my extremely white suburb I always felt like an outsider and being Asian only made that otherness worse. Even when I turned to rock ‘n’ roll, I didn’t find many people who looked like me, which is why Karen O was so
important. When I would watch her unapologetically slink across the stage and stuff microphones down her throat to make guttural squawks, I felt empowered. My girlfriends and I would spend hours with songs like “Art Star” and “Y Control” on repeat as we drove around the winding roads of our town, talking about how we would form a real rock band one day. Looking at the landscape of indie rock today, it’s obvious I wasn’t the only one Karen O had this effect on. “Karen O was a role model to me, because she is also half Korean, and is basically everything an Asian parent tells you not to be,”
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never fulfilled my dreams of starting a rock band and following in the footsteps of Karen O. I used the money I had been saving up for a drum set on a new wardrobe form Hot Topic. But Zauner did what I didn’t do. The Oregon native started playing guitar and writing music at the age of 16, after years of piano lessons. Now she performs her experimental lo-fi tunes about love and life all over the world. As Japanese Breakfast, she is part of a broader wave of Asian American women from my generation who are now at the forefront of indie rock. Zauner’s sisters in arms are artists like Jay Som, a one-woman band by 22-year-old Melina Duterte from San Francisco’s Bay Area who’s pushing the boundaries of “bedroom pop” with her multi-instrumental work and dreamy vocals; Mitski, a renowned songwriter who pens passionate ballads and plays them with a ragged abandon; Leslie Bear of Long Beard, the singer who is building a buzz with her soft and haunting indie rock; and Thao Nguyen of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, the frontwoman whose powerful genredefying songs can be personal and political at the same time. All of these musicians, along with several other up-and-coming artists across the nation, are
making room for Asian American women in a genre that has long been dominated by white dudes. While it’s not often talked about, Asian American women have been involved in rock ‘n’ roll for decades. Fanny, one of the first all-girl rock groups to sign to a major label in 1969, was fronted by two Filipino women, June and Jean Millington. The band earned two top 40 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on a world tour, performing its unique blend of funky, soulful rock music. In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them. In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
In 1970, Japanese immigrant Yoko Ono also released her debut album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. At the time, the influential avant-garde rock album, which incorporated a Japanese vocal technique called hetai, was overshadowed by her involvement with John Lennon, but it has been credited for influencing dozens of female rockers like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley. When the riot grrrl movement formed in the 1990s, Emily’s Sassy Lime, an all-girl group from Southern California, was one of the first bands comprised of all Asian American women. The teens came up in 1993 and disbanded before the decade was over. Other bands led by Asian women followed, like
Blonde Redhead and Deerhoof, having a significant impact on indie and alternative music. But until now, it never felt like the preeminence of Asian American women in rock could break through novelty and create a new normal within mainstream rock. “By and large, the music industry hasn’t done a great job cultivating Asian-American talent,” music critic Jon Caramanica explained to the New York Times in 2007. “Because there’s no significant tradition in the mainstream, it becomes that much harder to become that breakthrough artist.” It’s also been hard for Asian American women because cultural expectations for them don’t often include joining a rock band.
Along with the traditional roles often pushed on women by Asian parents, society is quick to typecast us as quiet and submissive. “It’s so funny because I was just talking to Leslie [Bear] from Long Beard and was like, ‘Isn’t it funny that your Asian parents push you into learning an instrument when you are really young, and then when you are a teenager and want to do something creative with it, they are like, no, no, no,’” Zauner said to me with a laugh. “That was very much the case for me. My mom was just like, ‘I am waiting for you to get over this.’ But I never got over it.” Despite the past expectations for many Asian American women, more and more are breaking into the music industry. Last year, Japanese Breakfast and Jay Som joined Mitski on her North American tour, which was an important moment for Asian American women in indie music. “I think that one thing that is really cool about that tour is that me, Jay Som, and Mitski are all very different,” explained Zauner.
I meet Julie Edwards and Lindsey Troy of Los Angeles garage-blues duo Deap Vally at a bourgeois Mexican restaurant in Silverlake to talk about their much-anticipated sophomore release Femejism. As soon as we sit down and order drinks, Edwards, who recently became a mother, is looking around the candlelit patio stuffed with working professionals and millennial couples staring at their iPhones. A Los Angeles native, Edwards is shaking her head. This place is not what it used to be. But what part of Silverlake is? When the food arrives, Edwards notes the pomegranate seeds on top of the guacamole. “These are [the restaurant’s] apology,” she jokes. “For turning into what it did.” It’s been three years since Deap Vally’s debut album, Sistrionix,
saw them climb to celebrity heights almost overnight. Most diehard fans know the story: Edwards, who is seven years older than Troy, met Troy in 2011 when Troy walked into The Little Knittery, a knitting shop in Atwater Village that Edwards once owned and ran classes out of. Troy was curious about learning how to crochet. She and Edwards hit it off immediately. Edwards had been drumming in another twopiece called The Pity Party, while Troy, who spent her teenage years in the pop industry chasing a career at the behest of her parents, had taken a step back from music. She gave Edwards a demo she had made years back and the two decided they wanted to play together. At their first gig, an A&R person from Universal happened to be in the crowd. She fell in
love with Deap Vally and advised them on their way to stardom. They went to England and sold out all their shows, stunned to see their faces on huge billboards. The press loved them, especially overseas. Not only were Deap Vally a refreshing blast of gritty garage blues, but they were charming, fashionable, and an excellent live show. Edwards plays her drums with her entire body, while Troy’s voice embodies the strength and dexterity of Janis Joplin. Deap Vally played huge festivals like Coachella and Reading in Leeds. Eventually, they signed to a major label, Island Records, to release their debut. “I knew the dangers of being on a major label,” explains Troy, who was no stranger to the greasy pitfalls of the music industry. “I guess I thought that because I was older, wiser, and in a different type
of band with great management, that it would be a different a situation. Being on a major label means you are in business with a major corporation. It was a constant fight for us. It was exhausting. For example, the label wanted us to co-write with some people to make bigger hits [for Sistrionix] and neither of us wanted to do that. The message of our music is about selfempowerment. And that is when the relationship started to take a turn.” In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
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hen thinking back about the origins of Dum Dum Girls, frontwoman Dee Dee Penny recalls how her jangle-pop project humbly began in her bedroom. “This was very much a personal recording project, just me figuring out how to do music on my own,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I had played in a series of other peoples’ bands for five or six years at that point and was really burnt out on that experience.” Six years and three albums later, Penny’s onewoman project has grown into a full-on band with her at the helm and famed songwriter Richard Gottehrer (Blondie, the Go-Go’s) as her go-to producer. Penny writes the songs on her own and then brings them to Gottehrer, who fills them out instrumentally. Sonically, the pair are a perfect match. “I grew up with a lot of Sixties music...a time when you had songwriters whose jobs were to crank out hits,” she says. “I came to regard those songs as a high bar in terms of songwriting.” Nowadays, though, Dum Dum Girls’ influences mostly hail from later eras: the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Madonna, Patti Smith. Gottehrer helped Dee Dee open up her sound from scrappy garage rock to the glossy, Eighties-tinged guitar pop of her
most third LP, Too True (out now on Sub Pop). But the album still relies on Gottehrer’s deep knowledge of the past. For instance, “Are You Okay?” was a track Penny was planning on writing for Ronnie Spector until Gottehrer intervened and encouraged her to keep it for herself. “That song is more personal than I would write for myself,” she says. “But because I had the security of thinking somebody else would be interpreting it, I wrote it a little differently than I might have otherwise.” So far, the Dum Dum Girls have gained a cult following in garage-rock circles, but the tracks on Too True could change that. Songs like the misfits anthem “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” the 19th-century libertine poet-referencing “Rimbaud Eyes” and the angsty love song “Too True to Be Good” sound more like timeless pop songs than the lo-fi fuzz rock of her earlier work. Dee Dee’s aspirations extend beyond the underground. In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
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ock outfit Stonefield have been described as the female equivalent of Deep Purple, won this year’s triple j Unearthed High competition and supported the likes of Cat Empire and Tex Perkins. But when the four-sister band from the tiny town of Darraweit Guim in the Macedon Ranges were invited to tour New Zealand this month, they were forced to say no. Hannah Findlay, who at 17 is the second oldest member of the band, had to sit her VCE exams. ‘’It was pretty annoying but we have more things now that have come up,’’ said Hannah, who will sit her music performance exam today. She will play a 25-minute set on the electric guitar including single notated works, chordal works, Flor de Luna by Santana, For the Love of God by Steve Vai and the American folk song Oh Shenandoah. And despite having played at music institutions such as The Espy and The Prince of Wales, Hannah admitted she was more intimidated by a panel of judges than hundreds of people at gigs. ‘’I don’t get that nervous when I am playing to an audience, I just get excited. But to go into a room with no audience and not much atmosphere is going to be pretty hard.’’ Hannah and her sisters Amy, 20, Sarah, 16, and Holly, 12, grew up listening to old-school rock such as Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. In 2006 each sister picked up a different instrument, jammed in a shed in the hills and formed the band Iotah, with a ‘70s-inspired soulful rock sound. They changed to Stonefield for legal reasons after being unearthed by triple j and discovering there was a cabaret performer called iOTA. Despite juggling her VCE with playing at events such as the One Movement Festival in Perth - where Stonefield were spotted by Glastonbury’s chief band booker Martin Elbourne and invited to play at the 2011 festival - Hannah said she had managed not to miss ‘’unseemly amounts of school’’. In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
“There are so many great men in the industry that treat women as equals, but we have certainly experienced our fair share of sexism.�
“Being an all female band but I think for us we kinda just take it as fuel for the fire and it makes us wanna go harder and achieve more.�
After more than a decade making music together, Warpaint wanted to have a bit more fun. The quartet, formed in Los Angeles in 2004 and after numerous lineup iterations (currently consisting of vocalistguitarist Theresa Wayman, vocalistguitarist Emily Kokal, backing vocalist-bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg, and drummer Stella Mozgawa), decided to take a different approach for their third studio album, Heads Up, which released on September 23 via Rough Trade. Unlike with previous records, including 2014’s unanimously lauded sophomore album, Warpaint, and their breakthrough EP, _Exquisite
Corps_e, in 2008, the fuzzy indiepop group flushed the filters from their vocals and guitars, making for a much more accessible and forward sound, and clutched pop structures closely, yielding the liveliest, most mature record of their career. “I think that we are, in general, in sort of lighter spaces emotionally with each other and individually,” says Wayman during a phone interview from the road, freshly embarked on a fall tour with dates through November. “We wanted to make something a little more upbeat and a little more dance-y, and [something that] had clarity and felt propellant and optimistic, maybe.” For Heads Up, that meant going back to basics, tapping producer Jake Bercovici who has performed with Julian Casablancas+The Voidz and worked with Warpaint on Exquisite Corpse. Unlike previous releases, where they built on ideas in the studio through jamming, their third full-length album was largely demoed independently or in pairs throughout 2014, with all members coming together to finish the tracks without belaboring the process. The move toward a bolder sound, evident in the tangentially mainstream lead single “New Song,” In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
On a photo shoot along the Merri Creek to promote her band’s new singles, Cosima Jaala couldn’t have picked a better day, weather wise. So nice was the day, in fact, she even got the fishing rod out. “We’ve just been fishing down along the Merri Creek and it is raging right now! I caught lots of buoys… and cyclists! They weren’t too happy,” the enigmatic frontwoman jokes. Melbourne four-piece Jaala have been on the rise since releasing their debut record Hard Hold in 2015. Touring it in major cities, as well as playing at BIGSOUND (amongst various other summer festivals), the band supported Hiatus Kaiyote last year, giving their music a whole new level of reach. Cosima reflects on the journey that’s followed. “Well yeah, they were our first gigs pretty much as a band, and that was really scary. But we’ve supported the Internet and Methyl Ethel this year, which has been really good. We’re sort of in this strange position with our music where it can kind of just slot in to a whole bunch of different vibes, which is handy.” One of these vibes includes headlining Sad Grrrls festival at the Reverence Hotel in Footscray at the start of this month, alongside a whole host of talented female fronted bands and artists. Cosima describes the experience.
“That went great! There should be more things like Sad Grrrls, ’cause we’re all sad. We’re all weeping for the injustices of the world. Things are changing though, which is good.” With a sound affectionately dubbed ‘shed,’ a combination of alt/ indie-rock and art-pop, Jaala’s music is stop-start, complex and never settled, ostensibly reflecting the messy but beautiful nature of life. Cosima illuminates by keeping it simple. “I wouldn’t consider myself a session muso. I’m not an academic and I’m not a philosopher. I just make tunes. I’m not thinking about music when I’m writing music. I’m thinking about life, pretty much.” Delving a little deeper, she explains the inner workings of her chosen craft. “I think the point of any art…” she pauses, “if you feel comfortable you haven’t really gotten there yet. If anything, I’m gonna be the one who’s questioning it the most cos I’m making it. I’m not comfortable with the music that I’m making, at all.” In a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, David Bowie called them “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time...” He went on to say, “They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.
“I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.” - Patti Smith