Revolution On Her Lips: On Power, Rebellion, & Art

REVOLUTION ON HER LIPS

ON POWE R, RE BE L L ION , & ART

NAT ALIE E AST MAN

I DECLARE THAT LATER ON, EVEN IN AN AGE UNLIKE OUR OWN, SOMEONE WILL REMEMBER WHO WE ARE. ―

- SAPPHO

A Ma n i fes to (4 )

Li vi ng Thro ug h Th i s Materi a l Worl d (7 – 8 ) an album review of Hole’s 1994 Live Through This

So l a nge & A Sp ace Fo r Su rv i va l (1 1 – 1 3 ) an album review of Solange’s 2016 A Seat at the Table

Whe n She Ta l ks , I Hear th e Revo l u t i on (1 4 – 2 5 ) a decentering of punk rock’s white male narratives

On Me di a Ma d n es s & St ay i n g Sa n e (2 6 – 2 7 ) an album review of Lorde’s 2013 Pure Heroine

1 0 Son g s o n Power (2 9 – 3 1 ) a playlist

A MANIFESTO [OR, TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE DISCOURSE]

“men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story” - Jane Austen

Albums—or at least the very best ones—advance coherent messages, and the artists behind them have points to make. And yet, we seem always to distinguish the art of music from the art of literary poetry and prose. The former, academia decides, is for the masses and their low culture, while the latter is the stuff of the educated aristocracy. Whether this exclusionary impulse comes from elitist self-interest or the desire to preserve privilege, I cannot say. But, the momentum behind this project is that of inclusivity and transformation, so I offer the following pages not to reject, but to expand, the canon.

In a 1997 interview, bell hooks argues that “whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.”

For hooks and her desire to see the preoccupations of critical thought broadened, pop culture is the best and most familiar place to “understand the politics of difference.” We don’t have to pretend that music is poetry; to do so would only perpetuate the idea that intellectual thought ought to be reserved for “literature.” We should instead celebrate the difference in music while approaching it with all the same rigor and respect we dedicate to the literary tradition.

This collection of writing aims to carve out a space for women’s voices in art, research, and theory. Because for too long our stories have been the property of those in power. Because for too long our stories have been appropriated, colonized, and marginalized. Because for too long our representation has been on the lips of others.

NATALIE EASTMAN

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I owe this to all the relentless women, visionaries and rebels whose art has truly made the world a better, more inclusive, space; to my dad, for instilling in me a radical love for the unheard music; and my advisor, Dr. Jeff Solomon, for supporting my labor.

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there’s something I got to ask you: I just wanna know, what are you gonna do for me?

I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?

LIVING THROUGH THIS MATERIAL WORLD: HOLE, CONSUMERISM, & VISIONS OF VIOLENCE More often than not, a feminist lens reveals the tendency to transform women into objects. There is, of course, a rhetorical danger in such objectification, but it also poses a more immediate physical threat to the female body. On Hole’s Live Through This, we see this tendency realized in the image of the “doll”—the collection of “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs / [and] … doll arms” that make up a woman. But, for all the attempts to reduce the female body, Courtney Love—Hole’s frontwoman—responds with fierce resistance.

Love seems to have a proclivity for labels. She readily brands herself a “kinder whore” and could often be seen with phrases like “witch,” “slut, “diva,” “butch,” or “mom” scrawled on her body in lipstick. Love seems to engage with such gendered stereotypes to not only provoke the sexist confirmation biases of the press, but to also destabilize and deconstruct the cultural narratives of femininity. With a biting irony, she presents herself in a package of femininity we’re comfortable with—one bound to familiar stereotypes and labels. What Love then accomplishes is not the willing reduction of her identity, but rather the weaponization of her body to effect a critique of the dominant culture.

For Love personally, as for Live Through This, the female body serves as a stage for a rebellion against systems of power and control.

Throughout the album, Love foregrounds the essentialist functions of the female body—the most base cycles of production and consumption—but she uses these biological processes to uncover a far more insidious cultural system. While early 1994 finds Courtney Love a widow, mother, and verified celebrity in her own right, the year also finds the country in a whirlwind of its own materialism and consumer culture, in the trenches of late stage capitalism and all its attendant anxieties. Love’s personal narrative and the nation’s broader cultural condition seem to converge in Live Through This, and the result is a work at the intersection of gender and economics. And, for Love, the commonality is violence and exploitation.

Films like Fight Club and American Beauty, both released in 1999, explore the effects of the decade’s consumer culture and hyper-materialism, identifying a capitalist system as a critical impetus for personal crisis. And yet, while these films locate a key sociocultural concern, they focus almost exclusively on the anxieties of and threats to contemporary

white masculinity. What Hole executes five years prior on Live Through This is a scathing exploration of the same culture with an important, and necessary, difference—an interest in the wellbeing of women in such a society. What the album points out is that a materialist culture does not end at the consumption of commercial products, but further extends into the ravenous consumption of the female body. Those 1999 films sparked an important national discussion on the consequences of excessive consumerism and the dangers of an implicit, passive trust in the capitalist system, but they come out with the wrong victims.

The threat posed to the middle-class white men of Fight Club and American Beauty is sedation, but, as Hole points out, the threat that women encounter is physical, sexual, and emotional violence.

The album concerns itself with many of the traditional motifs of femininity, and, written in the wake of Love’s recent motherhood, is particularly interested in the image of milk. Milk is a symbol of the nurturing woman, an essentialist confirmation that women are meant to provide sustenance and life, and yet here we see it poisoned and dried up. Milk makes Love “sick,” milk is “sour” and “dye[d],” and by the time we reach “I Think That I Would Die,” Love is violently screaming “there is no milk!” The album offers an intense focus on the female body as a site of production, but, for Love, there still remains a striking hollowness at the heart of modern femininity; we find a woman left so empty that there remains “nothing left to suck,” a woman who “eat[s] ether” only to “thr[ow] up all the time,” a woman who’s physically emptying herself. Pioneers of feminist criticism Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss the tendency of the woman writer to feel such an “emptiness” upon the “recogni[tion] that in an essential way she has been defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species.” Is milk itself not a symbol of a woman’s “biological usefulness”? A resource to be “empti[ed]” and mined from the body? But Live Through This goes further, extending the impulse to “suck…dry” the female body from a hungry child to an androcentric society. And here we edge closer to the album’s central contention: to a consumer culture, women, seen essentially as producers, are therefore meant to be consumed.

Love’s interest in the ways that the female body is consumed is not limited to images of motherhood, but extends morbidly into narratives of sexual desire and physical violence. On “Violet,” ostensibly a critique of male lust, she laments “when they get what they want / And they never want it again”; “Asking For It” opens with the admission that “every time that I sell myself to you / I feel a bit cheaper than I need to”; and the chorus of “Credit in the Straight World” recounts the exchange of a “leg” and an “eye” for the titular “credit in the real world.” These verses expose a commercial exchange, a transactional nature to modern gendered interactions. The economic implications of “sell[ing]” oneself, feeling “cheaper,” and pursuing “credit”—all at the cost of one’s body—are not accidental, but instead open into a more ominous assessment of modern culture.

Live Through This is fundamentally concerned with the ecosystem of the female body, but largely in that it reflects the socio-economic structure of American culture in microcosm.

In a sweeping historical review of body commodification, anthropologist Lesley Sharp points specifically to capitalism as an exploitative force. She argues that the human body “frequently emerges as a site of production, where the associated demands of capitalist labor rapidly dehumanize subjects; … female bodies in particular are frequently prized for their reproductive potential, rendering them especially vulnerable to commodification.” Live Through This seems to arrive at a similar conclusion, and the “doll” that we see on the album epitomizes Sharp’s vision of the “dehumanize[d]” and “commodifi[ed]” woman. In a culture infatuated with commodities, biological production becomes indistinguishable from economic production—and consumer culture becomes indistinguishable from a culture of gendered violence.

Such an existence as an object and a product then opens the female body to exploitation; under a patriarchal Western system, Hole sees this exploitation manifest in scenes of murder and rape. In the album’s most explicitly graphic track, “Jennifer’s Body,” Love offers a tragic distillation of her concerns. Possibly inspired by the kidnapping case of Colleen Stan, the song tells us of a woman whose body, before it is “found [in] pieces,” is “ke[pt]” in a box by the bed / alive, but just barely.” Again returning to the image of consumption—“you’re hungry, but I’m starving”—Love portrays a woman owned, used at will, and hacked to pieces. We never see Jennifer as a woman, but only as a body to be consumed in physical violence and sexual desire. The “now she’s mine” that concludes the song firmly establishes the track as a narrative of ownership, of a gendered power imbalance akin to the relationship between consumer and product.

Live Through This is about a lot of things. Though the album cover might suggest otherwise, the songs are not concerned with conventional beauty, but rather the ugliness that seems to define the mainstream: rape culture, objectification, eating disorders, drug abuse, and violence against women. And yet, what underpins a culture such as this is the capitalist structure: the system that views women as sexual bodies to be consumed, as inanimate collections of body parts, as bodies to starve into aesthtic conformity, and as objects to be owned and eventually discarded. And yet, though Love satirizes this culture, she does not succumb to it. She’s

“sick[ened]” by milk and by the cycles of fetishizes bodies and commodities that it represents.

Her unfiltered rage drives the album and, by the time Love screams “fuck you” on the final track,

it brings us a message entirely impossible to ignore.

For all the album art’s literal pageantry, it introduces us to an argument of forceful eloquence.

What we ultimately see on Live Through This is a rebellion against the use of women as ornaments, as producers and products there merely for our benefit. What we hear is a voice, as aggressive as it is intelligent, that speaks against exploitation. That screams because for too

long the body has been silenced.

THIS MIND, THIS BODY, AND THIS VOICE CANNOT BE STIFLED BY YOUR DEVIANT WAYS

In the heat of its cultural moment, 2016 was a time of unrest and uncertainty; in hindsight, it represents transition. Political campaigns characterized by conflict searched back through history to transform a dark, racist American past into a national plan for the future. It was in 2016, in this unsettled social condition, that Solange released A Seat at the Table. She too looked back into the past, not to resurrect atavistic notions of identity, but to revive a culture of strength and endurance. On the album, a magnificently coherent vision of self and community, Solange merges the domestic with the national, unites the personal and the political, elevates the vulnerable to the powerful. The album is masterful in that it is self-sustaining. It contains a woman and a community, it validates itself, it sifts through history to better envision the future. And above all, it carves out a space of beauty and power for her Black identity.

Under the shadow of centuries of French and British colonial rule, Dominica and its population exist for Kincaid on the “margins” of history. With this image we can better understand the relationship between history, story, and imperialism; for Kincaid, to be marginalized is to be “reduced,” to be deemed “foreign,” and to be excluded from the dominant white discourse.

In utilizing the methods of a postcolonial resistance, Solange engages with an understanding of marginalization that is not limited to the explicitly colonial efforts of, say, the British Empire. A Seat at the Table, with its own oral history, reveals the extent to which the white American mainstream colonizes and excludes a Black experience from its own national story. The interlude “This Moment,” delivered by rapper and entrepreneur Master P, expresses this large-scale marginalization as a feeling of invisibility. He describes being lost, so to speak, in the system: “You know, when they come here, you invisible. You know, you don’t even have a To take one’s seat at the table is to enter a discus- number in the system. Nobody cares about you.” What sion. And in its interest in the politics of identity, rep- he articulates—the image of total inconsequence, of resentation, and space, A Seat at the Table inserts itself being “foreign” to the government system and invisas a postcolonial voice into the white mainstream dis- ible in white spaces—is, at its root, an image of life relcourse. For as much as a postcolonial approach criti- egated to the margins. cizes imperial forces, it also seeks restoration and recuperation for marIn many ways, A ginalized communiSeat at the Table is a ties; it’s motivated journey. As she looks by a rightful anger, back through histories but it also seeks to of family and nation, reclaim suppressed Solange stretches forhistories because it ward to a future of sees them as worth hope and power. Even preserving and celthe album’s final worlds ebrating. This is conclude the work with where we merge with the album’s headspace: Solange a sweeping vision of history: “Now, we come here as has “got a lot to be mad about,” but she’s also searching slaves, but we going out as royalty and able to show for and reclaiming her “glory.” In her study of Haitian we truly the chosen ones.” To encapsulate such a jourauthor Edwidge Danticat, scholar Nadège Clitandre ney—from “slave[ry]” to “glory”—within a single album is provides a helpful framework for understanding the ambitious, but Solange sustains her message of empowaims of a postcolonial critique. She notes that a postco- erment and transcendence with grace. The album is not lonial lens “critique[s] the impact of European hegem- just about one woman finding “her glory” and advoony in colonized societies,” “dismantle[s] various codes cating “self care,” but is about an entire community and strategies of imperial domination,” and rejects the and an entire experience emerging from the margins “dominant discourses that continuously position the to assert its power. “Everybody always wants us to be post-colonial subject into a denigrated, subjugated, packaged and ready-made and healed instantly from and oppressed state.” these instances and these traumas,” Solange herself comments on the transitional nature of the album, “And Such ambitions largely inform Solange’s own that was about me saying, “Hey, I’m working through approach to contemporary American culture; she chal- this transition.”” It seems that it is precisely this limilenges a “hegemon[ic]” historical narrative, the quotid- nal state that affords Solange her power; from such a ian maneuvers of “imperial domination”—now coded vantage point, she can look back upon the past with as microaggressions—and the systemic attempts to knowledge and ahead to the future with hope. These “subjugate” Black culture and expression. comments suggest an awareness of space and time, and her own navigation of both, that allow Solange It’s not uncommon for us to think of history as a to so artfully articulate and celebrate her identity as a narrative, as something “written by the victors.” But Black woman in 2016 America. what it actually looks like for history to be a consciously written text is, albeit crucial within postcolonial disThe album’s consideration of such imperial forces course, remains more vague. The term ‘marginalized’—a from systemic racism in education, housing, and law helpful way to concretize the concept of a narrativized enforcement to Western standards of beauty reflect history—has recently found itself firmly set in the com- Solange’s own keen awareness of the way in which mon parlance of the nation, but its mere prevalence her body and culture journey through the spaces of a has perhaps diminished the full effect of its mean- white world. ing. Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid, in a 1996 novel, describes those who live on the island of Dominica as “the ones who…had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins.”

SOLANGE & A SPACE FOR SURVIVAL

The album is Solange’s recognition that Black women’s hair—is an attempted erasure of culher (hi)story has not been finished, and in tural expression. that there lies the power to write it.

Solange crafts a portrait of a Black experience that has been regulated so much that there exists nothing outside the purview of white control and criticism. This impulse to appropriate others’ culture and to silence divergent narratives is, at its heart, a colonial one. Nadège Clitandre later notes that “body and voice have been instrumental factors in the denigration and oppression of peoples of African descent. Because they are outward sites of cultural difference, the body and voice of Black people have been textualized as signifiers of Black barbarity and inferiority to validate the dogma of white colonizers.” Against a society that seeks to flatten any “difference”—whose melting pot ideal necessitates the merging, and thus the homogenization, of culture— Solange re-textualizes the “sites of cultural difference” in celebration. She does not repress the various modes of Black expression, but celebrates them; she does not reject her anger, but sublimates it. Solange is mad, yes, but what the album proves in its scathing century-spanning survey of American racism is that she indeed has “a lot to be mad about.”

As she works through transitions and traumas toward a new narrative of a Black experience, Solange must negotiate her personal identity against a backdrop of a predominantly white America. The album is plagued by questions of belonging, or the lack thereof, and is thus deeply concerned with the politics of space. As A Seat at the Table traces a journey, it grows preoccupied with the everyday navigation through literal and cultural white spaces. On “Weary,” Solange cautions her listener to be “leery of your place in the world” and sympathizes with the feeling that “you’re leaving not a trace in the world.”

Later, at the album’s midpoint, Solange opens up on the chorus of “Where Do We Go”: “And I don’t know where to go / No, I don’t know where to stay / Where do we go from here? Though the sentiments are shaped by uncertainty, they also reveal an awareness—of self, community, and the narratives that shape both. The Black community, particularly Black women, occupies a precarious position in American society; a dangerous disparity separates legal status and a discriminant social reality, and the rhetoric of It is in the face of this society that dicinclusion is discordant with reality of existence withtates what she is “allowed to be” that Solange out representation. The dominantly white spaces of carves out a space American culture impose various forms of regulation upon AND WHEN WE SPE AK WE ARE AFRAID for the celebration of her identity and the Black experience and the OUR WORDS WILL NOT BE HE ARD community.

Black body. The album’s considNOR WELCOMED eration of such imperial forces BUT WHEN WE ARE SILENT “Don’t Touch My from systemic racism in educaHair” is an ode to Black WE ARE STILL AFRAID tion, housing, and law enforcebeauty, but beneath ment to Western standards of this powerful acceptbeauty reflect Solange’s own SO IT IS BETTER TO SPE AK ance of self is an asserkeen awareness of the way in REMEMBERING tion of autonomy.

Her which her body and culture WE WERE NEVER ME ANT TO SURVIVE. use of imperatives, journey through the spaces of here and on “Don’t - - AUDRE LORDE a white world.

Wish Me Well,” serves as a much larger recWhile the policing of geolamation of power. graphic, cultural, bodily spaces is Specifically, her “hair” functions as a site of “outthe most immediate expression of control, the power ward…cultural difference” and thus a site which the of a dominant imperial culture resides in large part in dominant culture seeks to erase or, more accurately, the excess of its discourse—the ability to “know,” to seeks to mold according to a white Western standtalk about, and thus to represent the minority comard.

Solange recognizes that the pressure placed on munities. When on “Don’t Touch My Hair” Solange Black women to reject their natural hair in pursuit of asks again and again “what you say to me?,” she a Eurocentric beauty standard represents much more is confronting a white mainstream that constantly attempts to speak for and about her Black identity. than an aesthetic choice—it is a fact of imperialism.

Similarly, “Mad” challenges a girl who asks Solange, A similar attempt at colonial control comes when the “Why you always blaming? / Why you can’t just unnamed girl dismisses Solange’s anger and her right face it? / Why you always gotta be so mad? / Why to be “mad.” But Solange claims ownership. Solange you always talking shit, always be complaining?” In embraces her body just as she validates her right “to many ways, the album as a whole is a response to be mad.” She sees her body as her “glory,” her hair this “girl” and the society she represents, a society as her “crown,” and “the truth [as her] sound.” On with a pathological inability to allow Black women his interlude, Matthew Knowles describes feeling to be autonomous subjects with their own thoughts, “lost in this vacuum between integration and segfeelings, and expression. Just as the stereotype of regation and, and racism” during the 1960s. angry, the “angry Black woman” demonizes her thoughts very angry.” Solange too feels this anger, but A Seat and emotions, the imposition of Western standards at the Table allows her to sublimate it, for her father of beauty—on, in the case of “Don’t Touch My Hair,” and for herself.

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At its surface, the album is “an ode to self care” ; however, as Solange comes to represent broader places and populations, it also becomes a radical act of communal care. The album remembers past trauma—Master P’s upbringing in the Calliope projects and Matthew Knowles’ experience of Alabama’s desegregation—but such memory is precisely what allows for healing. The trauma of her community is intergenerational but so is the power. It is largely in such interludes interspersed throughout the album that Solange foregrounds a specifically Black history of America. Rapper Master P discusses his upbringing in the Calliope projects of New Orleans while Matthew Knowles shares his own experience of desegregation in Alabama. The album is a fundamentally polyvocal work, offering itself as a space in which numerous and diverse Black artists and thinkers can preserve their experiences. As if to locate the prime impetus for the inclusion of all these stories, Solange’s mother Tina Lawson at one point insists, “Well, all we’ve ever been taught is white history … That is to suppress me and to make me not be proud.” This tension, between history and pride, is a crucial one.

The primary threat that looms over Solange’s artistic undertaking is not just microaggressions from the random white woman on “Mad,” but is rather a needless shame in oneself and the “suppress[ion]” and loss of an entire history.

A Seat at the Table not only lifts a suppressed history out of the margins of the American narrative, but also designates a space in which Black identity can be rightfully celebrated.

On “F.U.B.U.,” Solange seems to directly address her white audience: “Don’t feel bad if you can’t sing along / Just be glad you got the whole wide world / … This shit is from us / Some shit you can’t touch.” Notably, this is the only track on the album where the n-word appears, the use of which seeks to prevent white consumption. As the title suggests, “F.U.B.U.” is for a Black audience because it is

by Black artists. Any feeling of exclusion experienced by a white listener is certainly purposeful, but—crucially—it is not belittling. This song encapsulates the album’s central point: to be different is not to be inferior. On “Tina Taught Me,” Lawson laments the fact that she is “not allowed to express that pride in being black, and that if you do, then it’s considered antiwhite.” She rejects the notion of “reverse racism” and insists that “because you celebrate black culture does not mean that you don’t like white culture or that you putting it down.”

There’s a quiet radicalism in this sentiment. It disrupts a colonial logic of binaries, an “us versus them” attitude that divides the world into “White” and “Other.” Solange celebrates difference in a culture with an imperial proclivity for homogenizing and erasing any variance from the white “norm.” “F.U.B.U.,” as does the album

as whole,” explicitly distinguishes itself from “the whole wide world” of whiteness, and, in thus creating a space “for…and by” members of the Black community,” elevates a Black history, identity, and expression out of the margins and shadows of American life.

The album is hard to classify. Solange likes to maneuver within and manipulate all preconceived notions of how she ought to act and appear in the world. She likes to embrace her hair and channel her anger when the dominant white culture insists that she change her image and repress her emotions. The album itself is even difficult to classify, and that’s the whole point. The white imperial discourse is fundamentally one that categorizes, classifies, rationalizes, and Others. To be impossible to “know” according to the standards of the dominant culture is to resist erasure. With its combination of songs and spoken-word interludes, with its numerous collaborations, and with its mingling of funk, soul, R&B, pop, and hip-hop, the album transgresses boundaries and defies a typical understanding of an album. As each song flows seamlessly into the next interlude which merges into the next song, A Seat at the Table demands to be taken not only seriously, but as a coherent work of expression. The album transcends its individual artist and becomes an ode to an entire community. A Seat at the Table is a communal and polyvocal experience; it is selfsufficient, existing outside of white discourse and convention, and it is whole.

The track “Weary” concludes with Solange being asked “Do you belong?,” to which she responds “I do, I do.” The sentiment is simple, but there resonates in it a profound assertion of being. If A Seat at the Table documents a journey of an artist, a human, and a community from out of the margins, then the destination is belonging. For, in the face of a world that sees no space for her or people like her, the most radical act Solange can commit is to place her power and her identity into the cultural narrative. In the face of “the whole wide world,” Solange simply takes her seat at the table and offers a new story.

WHEN SHE TALKS, I HEAR THE

REVOLUTION [A BRIEF RE-TELLING OF PUNK’S HISTORY]

IT IS WE SINFUL WOMEN WHO COME OUT RAISING THE BANNER OF TRUTH UP AGAINST BARRICADES OF LIES ON THE HIGHWAYS WHO FIND STORIES OF PERSECUTION PILED ON EACH THRESHOLD WHO FIND THAT TONGUES WHICH COULD SPEAK HAVE BEEN SEVERED.

– KISHWAR NAHEED

Punk is notoriously hard to define. The logic goes that to classify it would itself be a very unpunk thing to do. That the very act of defining—and thus limiting—punk would kill all that constitutes the anarchic spirit of the culture. As garage rock turned to punk rock which then diversified into countless subgenres such as hardcore, anarcho-punk, Oi!, Afropunk, riot grrrl, and queercore, it seems that the difficulty in determining what is and is not “punk” only increased.

But anxiety of authenticity—whatever that means—or being deemed a “poseur” aside, punk has always allowed new voices of rage and revolution into the cultural discourse. A mutual contempt for conformity, authority, consumerism, and conservatism unites the various strains together in a loosely-formed anti-establishment coalition. At its core, punk as both a subculture and musical genre rejects the mainstream—however one defines it. But what happens when we recognize the ‘mainstream’ not as something magically imposed upon society’s members, but as a product of those that dominate and gatekeep cultural expression?

What happens when a movement helmed by white males purports to despise and reject a mainstream that is itself shaped by white masculinity?

Even the white men of the punk canon feel the burden of their difference, of their place as society’s undesirables. White male punks position themselves as victims of late-twentieth century capitalist politics, and, while they are right to identify and resist the exploitation inherent in such systems, they often fail to see the irony in their stance. Their very ability to participate in “white riot[s]” derives from their position as historical benefactors of patriarchal and imperial hegemony. In a piece for The

Guardian, Alyssa Kai reflects on her own experiences of white masculinity and exclusion as an active member of the punk scene. “No matter how many dialogues we stage on anti-oppression, safer spaces, radical inclusivity and mutual aid,” she writes, “men in punk can still stand in front of a crowd and scream about almost anything they want or feel — just so long as they avoid a list of anti-oppressive no-no words.”

It’s far easier to rage against the machine when the machine is made up of people like you.

And this is more than just one woman’s anecdotal evidence. A 2004 study by Curry Malott and Milagros Peña reviewed 3,306 punk songs produced in the 1980s and 90s and found that 85% of them were sung by white males. Though the fluid definition of punk allows artists like Debbie Harry and Patti Smith to be consider foremothers of the movement, the culture—as both a social and musical phenomenon—finds in itself a replication of the mainstream in microcosm.

It is not that the white men who dominate the genre have no right to condemn institutionalized classism, greed, and corruption, it is rather that punk fails its own revolutionary ethos if it does not make space for those whom history has oppressed and for those whose voice and agency has been violently stripped by the establishment.

class ethos and marginalization of artists of color. Communities like the Sista Grrrls and zines like Bamboo Girl arose to combat this internal racism, but the narrative of the Riot Grrrl movement—the most widely-known of the female punk subgenres—and feminist punk more broadly remains centered on its white artists. To call the legacy of punk complicated would be to erase its explicitly racist and sexist impulses. The threat of punk’s death always looms large, but its essential spirit of anarchy and revolution is one that drives toward inclusion. The splintering of the punk label into untold subgenres represents a refining of intersectional consciousness and, perhaps paradoxically, an increase in representation. And on the chorus to “Manarchist, Brocialist,” the Filipina-fronted Material Support reminds us of the most fundamental and ever-urgent purpose of women-led bands: to “smash the patriarchy” and disrupt its androcentric narratives of belonging.

Kai laments the fact that the numerous bands led by women and/or artists of color are relegated to “marginalia in the “real history” while the boy-bands get to be “real punk.”” She admits that “if you want — and most people do want — you can retell the early history of punk exclusively by referencing white men.” But she also encourages us to look deeper—to look “in the gaps” of punk’s history because there we find a thriving spirit of resistance and rebellion. And that is what this essay will strive to do: to foreground the “gaps,” celFemale artists expand the punk com- ebrate those in the margins, and make space munity, but their feminist movement is by for the makers of punk’s revolution whom no means devoid of problematic or even the subculture itself has sought to erase. explicitly discriminatory politics. Scrutiny, for example, often centers on the Riot Grrrl movement’s exclusionary white middle-

WHEN YOU SEE YOURSELF DOES IT MAKE YOU SCREAM?: ON THE FEMALE MYTH

Blondie is now often associated with new-wave synthesizers, disco dance beats, or the Mean Girls soundtrack, but frontwoman Debbie Harry helped forge a punk persona amidst a desperately misogynist music industry. At the center of the mid-70s underground music scene—and what she herself terms the “beginning of female intervention”—Harry represented in many ways a paradox of female identity.

She’s at once the coy “Sunday Girl” and the unhinged stalker on “One Way or Another”; the sheltered girlfriend of “Out In the Streets” and the sapphic lover at the “Rifle Range”; an undeniably beautiful former Playmate and the nightmarish punk rocker gracing the cover of Slash. Cutting straight though the binary logic of the Madonnawhore paradigm, Harry is as much a threat to the male imagination as she is a vision of female allure. This impulse to destabilize a conventional femininity informs the women-led punk that followed for decades.

On “Rip Her to Shreds,” Harry presents a “composite” image of women in the underground music scene, alternating between a satiric take on gossip column scrutiny in the verses and a rejection of such sexist chatter in the chorus. Harry describes a woman who “thinks she’s Brenda Starr” but has a noticeable “nose job,” who is “Miss Groupie Supreme” but acts “like a soap opera queen.” She insists to her listener that “you know her”—this familiar two-dimensional female figure who is a mere amalgamation of stereotypes and gendered limitations. But in the chorus Harry calls us to “rip her to shreds.” Here we have a rejection of any prescribed notion of femininity. For Harry and the artists that followed her lead, this girl that “you [all] know” not only is nonexistent—a mere construct of cultural imagination—but is a harmfully unattainable ideal to impose upon women. Though her music may be bereft of the speed and aggression we have come to know as punk rock, the message Harry articulates in 1976 continues to resonate through the genre.

Her interest in “rip[ping] to shreds” the conventional image of womanhood is one that shapes the feminist expressions of countless artists to follow.

While Harry explores the media myths that shape female identity, bands like the Bags challenge even broader historical forces that enforce narrow definitions of femininity. Frontwoman of one of the earliest LA punk bands and featured prominently in Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization, Alice Bag serves as an indefatigable voice of Chicana revolution. On one track, with reference to the whore of Babylon envisioned in the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation and to the female gorgons of Greek mythology, Bag deems herself a “Babylonian Gorgon.” As she confronts the sweeping traditions of both Christianity and the Greco-West, Bag engages with millennia of female stereotyping. Whether as debauchery incarnate—the Babylonian “mother of harlots” who drinks from the “filthiness of her fornications”— or as a figure both monstrous and beautiful, the historical woman often finds herself a mere projection of the male imagination. Bag dons this identity with a tongue-incheek pride, insisting that she’s just “gonna babble babble on.” And it is perhaps here that we most clearly see the punk affirmation of identity and voice; where the male mainstream hears only “babbl[ing],” Bag attributes this to the blindness of conventional masculinity and, unfazed, continues to advance her message of rebellion.

M AGA Z I N E N A M E ( M A S T E R PAG E )

FACIMET VENDERIAM, QUI OD 18

In 1978, the same year that the Bags unleash “Babylonian Gorgon” onto the LA scene, the English band X-Ray Spex peers inward in a shift toward a now more familiar interest in identity politics. Though lead singer Poly Styrene, teeth still lined with braces, had only just emerged from her teens, she articulates anticonsumerist and intersectional sentiments as powerful as they are precocious. The debut single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” opens with the wry “some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard.” And thus begins an album- and decadeslong case for girls to be heard.

The track “Identity” stands at both the literal center of Germfree Adolescents and at the figurative heart of Styrene’s thematic concerns. She proclaims that “identity is the crisis” and ask her listener, “When you look in the mirror / Do you see yourself?/ On the TV screen? / Do you see yourself in the magazine?” These questions, the negative answers to which Styrene presumes to already know, confront a lack of diversity in representations on “TV screen[s]” and “magazines”; more interesting, however, is how Styrene explores the consequence of such media practice. Unlike the various stereotypes catalogued by Harry, Styrene’s listeners cannot even see themselves in the mirror. What Styrene presents here is an individual who encounters their own erasure outside a mainstream that entirely ignores their existence. Daughter to an Irish-Scottish mother and a Somali father, Styrene serves as a critical voice, presence, and representation in a space so heavily dominated by white male artists.

In both Bag and Styrene we see the fledgling of promisingly inclusive scene, but again, the dominant narrative tends toward whiteness. Styrene is perhaps more prescient than one would hope in recognizing identity—as the sum result of gender, race, class, and ability—as the “crisis” that defines a woman’s socio-cultural maneuvers within and without the punk movement. The goal of a female punk culture, however, remains clear in the work of these early pioneers: to represent a female rage, power, and nuance for which the mainstream leaves no space.

UP IN ARMS:

WEAPONIZING ANGER & TAKING ACTION Punk is often defined by its conventionally masculine elements—the speed, anger, and aggression of its sound and look alike—and doing so keeps the narrative centered on white males. But it is not that women and/ or people of color do not experience this same rage, it is only that they are not allowed to express it. Violence enacted and anger articulated by white men is more socially acceptable than that of women and people of color. Even rape is normalized as an outlet for male libido and aggression, and the conviction that “boys will be boys” epitomizes this casual cultural mainstreaming of fundamentally anti-social behaviors.

White men who act violently are positioned alternately as victims of consumer culture, of the country’s mental health crisis, of their bad mothers, of social isolation.

Think Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman, think Ed Gein and Norman Bates, think of the mass shooter profile. Meanwhile, angry and alienated Black men are deemed wild animals or diagnosed with a racial urban pathology, Black women are reduced to and dismissed as stereotypes, Asian women are limited by orientalist notions of natural subservience and politeness. For all women, anger is not lady-like, it is unbecoming, it is unhinged. And while the mainstream story of punk likes to focus on its white male artists, the subculture does create a space for these marginalized communities to sublimate a righteous rage.

The longstanding tradition of gender-relations dictates that men do things while women have things done to them. And for a woman to be angry or take action is to violate her role as passive object in this power dynamic. In her examination of the raperevenge plot of stories like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Johanna Schorn argues that the “common thread” between fictional and media representations of sexual violence is “the passive role it relegates women to.”

She posits that women “are passive victims of the violence that is enacted on their

bodies, first through the actual rape, and second through the mechanisms of a rape culture that generates responses (from disbelief to vilifications).” What’s notable in Schorn’s argument is her equation of the immediate physical violence of sexual assault with the rhetorical violence that follows. To silence—by censoring or discrediting—victims of violence is to both perpetuate the myth of submission that underpins a rape culture and further divest women of their autonomy. If we (and we should) see sexual violence as a microcosm of structural oppression, then we can understand retaliation against individual perpetrators as retributive justice.

And so the story goes that men are pushed toward aggression by a regrettable conf luence of genetics and social factors, and they can thus be positioned as the real victims of their own violence; women and particularly women of color, on the other hand, possess every right to be angry, yet they are still pushed into silence and inaction. Radical militant feminism posits a solution to this cultural narrative.

When those in power continue to enact violence against the exploited classes, violence becomes a legitimate, if not necessary, means of resistance for those in the margins.

In 1981, writer and activist Audre Lorde delivered the keynote speech at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference.

Her presentation, “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding To Racism,” offers a blistering response to the racism within the circles of white feminism. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being,” Lorde urges, “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

It is crucial then that anger does not remain in the narrow purview of white men.

Anger can translate to reckless destruction and violence, but it can also be a “precis[e]” tool for the dismantling of oppressive structures—a weapon against the structural violence that breeds it.

Punk is often violent in its lyrics and at its live shows, but the fed-up women of the scene suggest violence not as an expression of generalized angst, but as a justified weapon against their oppressors.

On their 1988 Track “Ms. 45,” L7 tells of an unnamed woman who “walks the streets at night / And they think she is a whore.” The rationale for the harassed woman is simple: “You fuck with her / She’ll blow your ass away.” We see a similar sentiment on 7 Year Bitch’s “Dead Men Don’t Rape” and Heavens to Betsy’s “Terrorist.” Both tracks threaten graphic violence from shooting to gutting and eye gouging, and both tracks construct rage-driven fantasies of female revenge. The violence here is anything but bratty—an epithet frequently applied to punk acts; it is graphic, brutal, and angry, but, above all, it is justified.

These stories of retribution function as outlets for female emotion that is otherwise not allowed to be expressed, and they work as tools for reshaping a modern feminist consciousness.

In the wake of #MeToo and Time’s Up, the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment is much clearer to contemporary audiences than it was to those in the 80s and 90s. But mere acknowledgment on the

cultural periphery does not translate to action. One 1984–1985 survey of women in college found that 42% of rape victims told absolutely no one about the assault; another survey in 2018 revealed that 2.6% of sexual assault victims reported it to the police. While feminist movements of the 20th century, including Riot Grrrl, focused national attention on the rampancy of sexual violence in the country, 21st century women are still faced with an inadequate criminal-justice system and a horrifyingly cavalier public attitude.

Material Support’s 2019 EP Specter clocks in at just over 10 minutes, but every second of it is bursting with the fury of its age. Driven by a revolutionary Marxist vision for the total transformation of American society, the album attacks the failing institutions of criminal-justice, healthcare, education, and welfare, to name a few. On “Me Too,” they confront institutions of sexual violence.

Though the majority of the track assumes the point of view of a sexual predator, the final lines return the power to the would-be victim: “I could end you / Send you to your grave! / I could end you / So you better behave!”

And so the story ought to go that women deserve justice. And when the bureaucratic channels of “justice” are ineffective and those with power only continue to wield violence as a weapon of oppression, then women have no choice but to abandon nonviolence and the status quo it reinforces.

Fairytales in the Supermarket and Other Stories f rom Modernity

In her essay “The Media and the Movement: A User’s Guide,” Gloria Steinem urges her fellow feminists to “monitor, infiltrate, replace, protest, teach with, create our own” various forms of media, insisting that if they don’t, they “will not only be invisible in the present, but absent from history’s first draft.” Punk aims, and in many ways succeeds, to do precisely this. The commitment to a DIY lifestyle that has come to be a central tenet of the punk subculture is, at its core, a way to offer new, radical alternatives of meaning-making. This means creating and producing content—whether it be music, art, journalism—outside of the mainstream. Communal living, independent record labels, and self-made zines abound in the scene; it’s do-it-yourself because no one else is going to. But there seems to be something more urgent in this dedication to a self-sufficient movement for the women of the scene.

Steinem penned her essay for the 2003 anthology Sisterhood is Forever, and it’s followed three chapters later by a contribution from Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. The Riot Grrrl movement, the most prominent of the female punk subcultures, didn’t technically have a leader; but if it did, it was Hanna. She and the broader movement alike epitomized this desire to create a cohesive alternative to the dominant society.

In her foundational Riot Grrrl manifesto, Hanna insists that “we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.” For these women, DIY ethics are not merely a way to resist corporate hegemony, they are indeed the only way to produce “meaning” for communities under- or mis-represented in mainstream media. The short-lived hardcore band G.L.O.S.S. recently came out of Olympia, Washington twenty-four years after Bikini Kill did. And their name, standing for Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit, offers the same radical anti-establishment message that Hanna did in the 1990s. But this rejection of the mainstream way of looking, thinking, acting, and living is not just a quixotic whim but an urgent necessity.

For, as we see, the society of the modern age is not one welcoming to women, and the urban spaces of violence and consumption prove to be dangerous landscapes for the modern woman to navigate.

The city as a looming figure in the literary consciousness oscillates between dreams and nightmares. For as much excitement and opportunity it can offer, it is verging always on its own filth and decay. The city is a space of freedom and fantasy and a space of violence, alienation, and sin. But even space itself is a vexed notion in the female experience. For the Victorian woman—confined to attics, domestic spheres, rest cures, her own body, and an entirely “separate sphere”—the city is inaccessible because she is alternately too unfit or too pure for it. The (flawed) logic insists that a woman by nature is angelic in her purity and the city, with its shock and speed, is a sullying force. With the rise of factory labor, then the two World Wars, then the women’s liberation movement and its successive waves of feminism, women began more and more to forge their own paths through the urban spaces. But, though they are allowed out in it just the same as their male counterparts, women still experience the city differently. Its defining modes of violence and materialism are, after all, gendered ones.

Punk, as a primarily urban movement, often considers the interactions between cities and their inhabitants. And for the female punk rockers, the city is unwelcoming. Brody Dalle of The Distillers imagines the “City of Angels” only as a “valley of unease,” and as a space of anxiety akin to the Los Angeles of X’s debut album. She envisions the city as one of glamor infused with predation—a neon-tinged nightmare that’s closer to hell than one would hope to be.

The urban despair that Dalle identifies is still a generalized feeling, but, through bands like The Raincoats and Bush Tetras we see a more specific and far darker cause of such apprehension. The Raincoat’s 1979 “Off Duty Trip” and Bush Tetras’ 1980 “Too Many Creeps” function as anxiety-fueled cousins, wary of the city spaces populated by violence. The former details a rape that takes place in the public and the subsequent sympathy that inevitably falls to the male perpetrator. Lead singer Ana da Silva describes the passers-by—“those who walk past her screams”—as “only [being] reminded of love’s young dreams.” The offhand nature of this scene description frames the violent rape as a commonplace experience for women out in public, and in this case, walking through a park. “Too Many Creeps” is less graphic in its characterization of urban unease, but it offers a message as clear as its delivery is abrupt: the city, with its streets and shopping centers, us an unsafe space for women subjected to constant harassment. Shopping is a traditionally feminized activity, but, ironically, the only capitalist transaction that takes place in this track’s mall is what frontwoman Cynthia Sley deems “pay[ing] the price of shopping around”—that is, being harassed by the ubiquitous “creeps.” Both tracks, leaning more on funk-influence quasi-dance beats than the aggression typically associated with punk, imply a degree of detachment. With their sparse beats and staccato vocals, da Silva and Sley alike seem almost to be remote viewers of the horrors of the city—as if a standoffish and exhausted demeanor is merely the result of such violent urban pressures.

“Too Many Creeps” bring us to a disconcerting, albeit familiar, intersection of the modern woman—shopping and violence. The relationship between consumerism and the female body is a complicated one, but the bulk of its history resides in the modern era. In her dissertation, “Made-Over: Consumerism, Desire and Feminine Subjectivity,” Kathryn Fraser studies the “makeover” trope in advertisements and film as it relates to broader late-capitalist concerns of desire, identity, and the consumerconsumed relationship. Upon tracing the history of a marketed femininity through print advertisements and magazines like Cosmopolitan, Fraser notes that “in a culture increasingly inclined toward spectatorship and display, cosmetics made possible the assertion of new selves and identities for women now solidly engaged in public activities.” Of particular interest here are the concepts of “spectatorship” and women’s entry into the “public” sphere.

As noted earlier, women were not always welcomed figures in public urban spaces, and their subsequent entry into these environments was one shaped by paradox and unease. (Think Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the emerging “New Woman” who finds herself simultaneously at the heart of London’s vitality and utterly, desperately alienated from it and those around her.) But when they do become, or are allowed to be, “engaged in public activities,” women find themselves still relegated to the domestic virtues of ornamentation and passivity. With the speed and “progress” of modernism comes only new, faster ways to construct the old models of female identity—namely, those of objectification.

THE MODERN WOMAN, AS FRASER PUTS IT, SEEMS ALWAYS IN PURSUIT OF HER OWN “SEL[F] AND IDENTIT[Y].” AND MATERIALISM IS WHERE SHE IS TOLD SHE CAN FIND IT.

The 1980s are often viewed as the decade of excess, of Gordon Gekko’s greed and Madonna’s materialism, but already in 1978 did X-Ray Spex release Germfree Adolescents and its thoroughly anti-consumerist messages.

“Art-I-Ficial,” a response to and rejection of the “consumer society” Styrene inhabits, functions as a more nuanced discussion of the media presence we see on Blondie’s “Rip Her To Shreds.” Styrene acknowledges that she’s “artificial,” but insists that the blame be placed on the “appliances” that “reared” her. She cries, “When I put on my makeup / The pretty little mask not me / That’s the way a girl should be / In a consumer society.” As a “mask[ed]” performer of femininity, Styrene understands the pressures of a capitalist society to be gendered and link links the epithets of being ‘fake’ to the command to conform to material standards of identity. She confronts a similar inundation of consumerist ideologies on “Plastic Bag.” Here, she compares her mind to a plastic bag filled with advertisements and media “rubbish”; her only consolation is to “eat Kleenex for breakfast” and “use soft hygienic Weetabix / to dry [her] tears.” With her brain a jumble of products, Styrene’s only refuge from the deluge of consumerist messages is in more consumption.

For Fraser, the media does answer the age-old question of “what…woman want[s]”: ““to consume, and so be consumed, endlessly.” Locked in this cycle of fetishization—first of commodities, then of self as another commodity—women like Styrene find in modernity a loss of identity where they were promised the discovery of one.

In 1961, working-class Viv Nicholson’s husband won an unexpected £152,000—translating to somewhere around $4,500,000 today–off betting in the football pools. Between her rampant spending and chaotic personal life, Nicholson transformed into a symbolic public figure of excess and consumerism. One obituary from The Daily Telegraph characterizes her life of newfound wealth as one not of “content” like her husband’s, but of alienation; it claims that “Viv often moped alone at home with little to do but watch television.” It is no wonder that Nicholson captured the imagination of global media and musical artists alike. The Smiths borrowed her likeness for album art and tour promotions, and The Slits’ titled a song with Nicholson’s (in) famous response to reporters’ questions of what she would do with her husband’s winnings: “spend spend spend.” The 1979 track articulates the same concerns as Styrene, describing the “want to buy” in an effort to “satisfy this empty feeling.” Once again, we see the “addict[ion]” to and implication in the capitalist notions of self-worth take hold of the female identity. Nicholson reifies the anxiety surrounding materialism as she is both a public representation of consumerism’s tragedy and a case study in the impossibility of female satisfaction in a capitalist system.

Two decades later, with the energy of the Riot Grrrl movement behind them, Sleater-Kinney released “#1 Must Have.” While the band was a seminal figure in the movement—a “bearer of the flag from the beginning”—the track assumes a more dismal, self-described “cynic[al]” stance. Released in 2000, the song looks back on the accusations of selling-out levied against the band and the movement as a whole.

Frontwoman Corin Tucker reflects, “they took our ideas to their marketing stars / And now I’m spending all my days at girlpower.com / Trying to buy back a little piece of me.” For a movement founded on a vision of an alternative to society, this sentiment reflects the ultimate encroachment of mainstream corporate ideals on a subculture that meant to reject them. On the chorus, Tucker confesses that “my inspiration rests / In-between my beauty magazines and my credit card bills.” With a sense of doom and yet another image of confinement, the song illustrates woman’s inevitable subjugation to consumer trends.

The search for identity, for “a little piece” of one’s self, in the marketplace proves as, if not more, futile in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.

Lead-singer Letty Martinez insists that “I’m not guilty or a whore / I’m not a bitch or a slut / I’m not alone, I’m not a bitch, I’m just a modern woman.” We return here to the familiar stage and rhetoric of the contemporary female identity—violence and degradation respectively—but the track offers a means of resistance. With its unabashed aggression and embrace of cultural intersectionality—as an ode to Riot Grrrl now informed by the band’s experiences as women of color—Martinez’s assertion of womanhood is itself a middle finger to the systems of violence and marginalization.

It would seem that modernity offers nothing but despair to its women. But these artists, though they suffer under the boot of the establishment, never cease The condition of the modern woman seems to to rebel against it. On “#1 Must Have,” we find a bleak vision of society, but we also find an alternative occupy a space somewhere between to it. Its outro addresses “all the ladies out there” to discontent and violence. encourage them that “culture is what we make it …. / Now is the time to invent.” If culture is constructed, Sleater-Kinney’s 2005 “Modern Girl” offers an updatthen women can shape it for the better—to be safe, ed, and still unnerving, glimpse into the anxieties that to be inclusive, to be different. If it’s anything, punk plague woman’s navigation of modernity. On the suris a fundamentally modern phenomface, the titular “modern girl” lives enon. It always pushes toward futurity, a life “like a picture of a sunny day,” boundaries and traditions be damned; in but lurking beneath is a deep-rooted fact, perhaps it’s so difficult to define ennui. The verses’ simplistic logic precisely because it’s always ahead of satirizes the capitalist insistence its time. To call punk dead is to minimize that identity can be constructed by the efforts, labor, and most importantly, what you own—that commodities can the rage, of the modern punk rockers. To fill the “hole the size of this entire call punk dead is to relegate it to a thing world” that sits within the modern of the past and to not allow the modern woman. “Mujer Moderna,” released woman to progress beyond these worn a decade later by the San Antonionotions of identity. What Sleater-Kinney based Fea, is a counterpart both tells us to do, and what all these women comforting and frustrating. While have done, is to “invent.” Because there its fierce rejection of regressive and are still those “living outside of society’s two-dimensional understandings of shit” with stories to tell. And because as female identity and sexuality is a relong as there is a war to wage, punk will minder of punk’s relentless energy, never be dead. the very fact that society still requires such a message is upsetting.

ON MEDIA MADNESS & STAYING SANE

Fame is a bee.

It has a song— It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.

It is not in spite of her youth, but likely precisely because of it, that Lorde is able to so articulately analyze the world. When she - Emily Dickinson released Pure Heroine at only sixteen years old, Lorde still stood as an outsider to the Often, we hear of adulthood presented as madness of adulthood. Even her vocals seem the “real world” or “real life”—that is, as to inhabit the space between adolescence distinct from the ease and shelter of youth. and adulthood, drifting between a breathless But Lorde rejects this discourse; instead, and light pop sound and the lower register she insists that the world and life of adults of her range that drags along with it the are mad fantasies. For her, after all, “riding weight and wisdom of the world. The social around on the bikes” is a good indicator that landscape she encounters on the album is she is “still sane.” one dominated by talking; the opening lines ask “don’t you think it’s boring how people In songs about monarchs, empresses, courts, talk?” while the closing refrain reminds and celebrities, the album has much to say us still that “people are talking, people are about power and those who wield it. These talking.” But somehow Lorde manages to larger-than-life systems of power take the cut through this buzz, this incessant chatter place of parents—the more obvious and imfrom the world, and make herself heard. It is mediate authority figures to the teens about between these lines of interminable “talkwhich Lorde sings—who only appear once as ing” that she manages to create a space for the “mom and dad” who are out of town. Left an unheard narrative. to herself, Lorde can only wonder if “maybe the Internet raised us.” And what we come Pure Heroine is an ode to adolescence, and to realize is that the Internet did not only as such, whether indirectly or directly, all of raise Lorde’s generation, but also reigns its songs deal with the experiences of youth. over the world of adulthood they will soon Lorde informs us on the opening track that enter; it is the source in which all power conshe is “only as young as the minute is” and, solidates and from which all reality f lows. in a later moment of frank vulnerability, admits that “it feels so scary getting old.” The Situating adolescence in a precise album seeks to preserve the small moments cultural moment inundated with of adolescent joy and fear, and yet Lorde also understands that youth always verges on its digital information and media, she recognizes the Internet as the ultiown collapse into adulthood.

mate source of control and power, and, ultimately, the source of our very reality.

The album’s record-breaking single, “Royals,” serves as both a catchy takedown of pop music’s material elitism and a scathing critique of mass-produced media images of reality. Lorde opens with the admission that she’s “never seen a diamond in the f lesh,” and she continues on into the chorus to catalogue the symbols of wealth and fame that we hear in “every song”—but that she fails to find in her own life. There exists a profound dissonance between the experience of the “f lesh,” the real, and that which she hears in the “song[s]” and sees on “in the movies,” “on the screens,” or “in the pictures.”

It’s not that the adult world threatens the innocence of youth—Lorde’s scenes of revelries and fist fights dissolve any notion of adolescent purity—but rather that it deals exclusively in fantasies and false realities.

The youth Lorde depicts is not without its f laws; it’s threatened by infighting, conformity, fame, and, above all, growing up, but she still presents it as a space that can resist the world of media-proliferated, mass-produced fantasy.

Images of dreams and fantasies appear on track after track, and before long the album begins to sound like the merging of dream and nightmare. Electropop synthesizers pulse beneath Lorde’s voice, at once haunted and haunting, and we find ourselves lost in a haze of nostalgia. A party taken too far turns her dream from “feeling sweet,” she and her friends live “in cities you’ll never see on screen…in ruins of a palace within my dreams,” and she feels as if she “live[s] in a hologram.” On “Buzzcut Season,” Lorde tells us she just “make believe[s] it’s hyperreal.” Her fraught relationship with reality—or “hyperreal[ity]” as fiction indistinguishable from lived experience—stems not from any sheltered life as a teen but from the world outside her adolescent suburbia that imposes its fantasies and falsehoods upon her.

For Lorde, to indulge in the f leeting moment of adolescence is to quietly deny the media its power over reality. On “Buzzcut Season” she contrasts the “explosions on TV” and “men up on the news / [who] try to tell us all what we will lose” with her life “beside the pool / where everything is good.” This isn’t mere ignorance or innocence that she’s describing, it’s resistance to massmediated visions of the world and a reclamation of personal narrative. It’s rejection of the talking heads’ endless chatter that manufactures media narratives of destruction and breeds discontent. Lorde presents youth as its own type of fiction; she asks to be allowed to “live that fantasy” of being “queen bee,” and she insists that she “sure know[s] how to run things” in the “palace within our dreams.” The album and its vignettes of adolescence becomes a world of Lorde’s own, and, though it may be a “world alone,” it is at least one in which she can exercise control.

Fiction itself is not nefarious, but the imposition of it is. Pure Heroine realizes Lorde’s own fantasies and dreams, but these are personal, lived, and far more real than any mass-produced nightmare she finds on the news, sees in the movies, or hears in the songs.

Lorde does not just want to talk about power, she wants to reclaim it for herself. The album doesn’t deny reality or wallow in ignorance; it creates an alternate reality that is, paradoxically, more real than anything constructed by mass media. The album is a “new art form showing how little we care” and an artistic vision we desparately need. In a digital world that dictates our very realities, Lorde’s fiction is restorative and, penetrating the media’s constant “talking,” is quietly powerful.

After graduation, Mary Anne went out lookin’ for a bright new world. Wanda looked all around this town and all she found was Earl. Well, it wasn’t two weeks after she got married that Wanda started gettin’ abused.

She’d put on dark glasses or long sleeved blouses or makeup to cover a bruise. Well she finally got the nerve to file for divorce, and she let the law take it from there. But Earl walked right through that restraining order and put her in intensive care.

Right away, Mary Anne flew in from Atlanta on a red eye midnight flight. She held Wanda’s hand as they worked out a plan. And it didn’t take ‘em long to decide that Earl had to die. Goodbye Earl! The cops came by to bring Earl in. They searched the house high and low, then they tipped their hats and said, “Thank you ladies, if you hear from him let us know.” Well, the weeks went by and spring turned to summer and summer faded into fall. And it turns out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all. So the girls bought some land and a roadside stand out on highway 109. They sell Tennessee ham and strawberry jam. And they don’t lose any sleep at night, ‘cause Earl had to die. Goodbye Earl!

“NAMELESS, FACELESS”

10 S O N G S ON P OW E R

COURTNEY BARNETT (2018)

With a chorus intertextually indebted to Margaret Atwood, this single recounts the all-too-familiar stor y of a woman who can’t even “walk through the park at night” for fear of physical harm. Barnett, with her characteristic causticity, assumes a position of superiority as she looks down upon the male aggressor with pity for his own fragility. Though she recognizes the anger and loneliness that shape modern masculinity, she by no means prioritizes the male experience. Rather, Barnett contextualizes the cycles of gendered violence to better humanize the countless “nameless, faceless” women.

“FOUR WOMEN”

NINA SIMONE (1966)

Although Simone’s characterizations of the titular four women are only six-lines brief, they span generations of violence and resilience. Each description begins with physical appearance, but Simone humanizes the various identities as she makes space for their intergenerational traumas, fetishized bodies, and legacies of sexual exploitation and ownership. In lending her voice to these oft-suppressed narratives of Black women, Simone’s eruption of righteous fur y that concludes the track is the result of centuries of suffering and the anticipation of centuries more of power.

“I KICKED A BOY”

“YOUR BEST AMERICAN GIRL” MITSKI (2016) What begins as a conventional ballad of starcrossed love ends as a scathing criticism of America’s melting-pot myth. In her attempted romance with an “All-American boy,” Mitski finds herself tr ying to whitewash, and thus erase, herself to meet standards of Americanness. In the accompanying music video, we see two love affairs—one between white culture with its own culturally-appropriating double and one between Mitski and the body she’s learned to embrace. The ultimate tragedy does not come in any lament for lost love, but rather from a society that both demands assimilation and yet will always define American identity as a quality skin-deep.

THE SUNDAYS (1990)

With her relentlessly playful cynicism, Harriet Wheeler could easily be likened to Morrissey; and yet, for all their shared sensibilities, Wheeler seems to have been largely forgotten in the shadow he cast over the UK’s indie scene. Here, however, we witness her discover y of a female strength and resilience that does not flounder in deference to self-doubt.

Though it sounds like a schoolyard scuffle, the time when Wheeler “kicked a boy ‘til he cried” resonates as an act of rightful self-defense against not a boy, but a man. She’s branded with the gendered epithet “hysterical,” but she cheerily accepts responsibility with a childlike sense of wonder at her own power.

“LIMP”

FIONA APPLE (1999)

Though Apple was only 22 years old when she released When The Pawn…, she delivers this single with the momentum of lifetimes of exhaustion. Delivered over instrumentation that itself sounds like simmering rage and anxiety is Apple’s refusal to be the damsel in distress against which her abusive partner constructs his own identity. Though Apple’s “fingers turn to fists,” the ultimate violence enacted here that of a toxic masculinity against itself.

We see here a subverted notion of gendered power in which, on her urgent quest for independence, Apple reclaims control of her narrative and her partner collapses into an impotence of his own doing.

As different ideological stances tend toward different, and at times contradictory, constructions of “power,” feminist theorists have never really been able to land on a single consistent definition of the term. Traditionally, the concept is figured into four modes: power over, power with, power to, and power within. It can look like coercion and control, solidarity and support, potential and production, or affirmation and actualization. But, as an intersectional approach recognizes that each woman occupies a unique space within “interlocking systems of oppression,” it’s important to conceptualize power as something dynamic, and as something fundamentally relative to every individual. And, while the need to understand what power looks like in the hands of oppressors is both urgent and crucial, it is just as necessary to envision what power can be as a weapon in the hands of women.

“EVERY WOMAN”

VAGABON (2019)

Vagabon writes her lyrics, plays her multiple instruments, and produces her own songs—and she taught herself to do it all. This particularly ethereal track serves as an ode to the women who are equal parts “tired” and “fired up.” Vagabon recognizes that ever y morning her personal battles begin, another woman’s are coming to a close after a long night. Tapping into this endless cycle of labor and relentless strength, she creates space for the experience of truly “ever y woman.”

“U.N.I.T.Y.”

QUEEN LATIFAH (1993)

With three studio albums out at 23 years old, Queen Latifah represented a dynamic and necessar y voice in the male-dominated rap scene. Though it gained mainstream momentum that culminated in a Grammy win, this song denounces the same mainstream that institutionalizes mistreatment of women. Latifah describes the various expressions of misogyny from normalized terms “bitch” or “ho,” sexual harassment of women on the street, and domestic abuse. She rejects a masculinity, or subsequent notions of being “hard,” built on rhetorical degradaTHAO & THE GET DOWN STAY DOWN (2013) tion and physical exploitation, instead de- manding a unity within the Black community. Disguised as a catchy folk tune, this song harnesses a powerful collective ethos that rallies against institutions of oppression and injustice. Singer Thao Nguyen dedicates the track to Valerie Bolden, a woman sentenced to life without parole for killing her abuser, after meeting her during advocacy work with the California Coalition for Women Although Simone’s characterizations of the Prisoners. Nguyen here literally gives a voice titular four women are only six-lines brief, to the voiceless—Bolden and the countless they span generations of violence and resilothers wrongfully incarcerated—and transience. Each description begins with physiforms her craft into a cr y for social justice. cal appearance, but Simone humanizes the Behind the youthful energy and urgency that various identities as she makes space for drives the song is the masses, the “common” their intergenerational traumas, fetishized people,” for and with whom Nguyen stands. bodies, and legacies of sexual exploitation and ownership. In lending her voice to these oft-suppressed narratives of Black women, Simone’s eruption of righteous fur y that concludes the track is the result of centuries of suffering and the anticipation of centuries more of power.

This song launched M.I.A. to international fame, and yet its meaning is anything but straightforward. With a complicated legacy intertwining a sample of The Clash’s anti-colonial “Straight To Hell” and M.I.A.’s own personal histor y as a refugee of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the track was initially meant to satirize Western stereotypes of immigrants as dangerous free-loaders. In a twist of truly capitalist irony, however, the song transformed into a legitimate anthem of uplift for the exploited classes. Under oppressive institutions that perpetuate and profit off of systemic inequalities, M.I.A.’s vision of a militant repossession of wealth remains a vision of hope and radical resilience.

“WE THE COMMON (FOR VALERIE BOLDEN)”

“50 FT. QUEENIE”

PJ HARVEY (1993)

“PAPER PLANES”

M.I.A. (2007)

NO, WE’RE NOT AFRAID OF THE WAR WE BROUGHT ON AND WE’RE STEADY HOLDING DOWN THE FORT

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10 Songs on Power https://open.spotify.com/playlist/18VPErUtZYUw9gI9SVpojl?si=RUwEcgCKS2K1JYHo_7Znhw Design Cover Art & Pg. 5 Design: Syren Bier, @syrenbier, https://www.instagram.com/syrenbier/ Pg. 2: Sappho. Sappho: Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments. Translated by Aaron Poochigian, Penguin Classics, 2009.

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Pg. 32: Vagabon. “Every Woman.” Vagabon, Nonesuch Records, 2019.

fear of a female planet?