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9 to Know This column highlights important stories, music, and more in the global female and nonbinary music communities. by Geoff Shelton
These three superb autobiographies tell the stories of women as they struggle with societal norms to find peace and happiness in embracing their truths.
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1. What Are You Doing Here?, Laina Dawes (check out our interview with Dawes on p. 50)
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Our musical preferences can offer a sense of community, a sense of belonging to a tribe. But what do we do when our musical communities exclude us? In Laina Dawes’ paramount book, she reveals a personal and incisive story of the “dual-outsider dilemma,” with which black women who love heavy metal, punk, and hardcore are forced to reckon. Mixing her own autobiographical experience with interviews and survey results from her peers, this book makes the personal political. Dawes elucidates the long ignored history of black women artists and fans in these genres. She builds strong and intimate arguments for why this aggressive music offers a perfect and safe catharsis in a world that suppresses black women’s anger. The book asks us to face the cultural norms and built-in racism inherent in our musical scenes. It also reaches out a hand to other black women facing this predicament to say, “You belong.”
2. Art Sex Music, Cosey Fanni Tutti What makes someone a pioneer? Is it how they were raised? Something they were born with? Or is it just being in the right place at the right time? Performance artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti gives us the chance to make up our own minds with this deeply detailed insight into her experiences, thoughts, and philosophies. As one of the
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game-changing forces behind the avantgarde musical group Throbbing Gristle, she helped open the boundaries of what was possible in music. Later, as one half of the duo Chris and Cosey (now Carter and Tutti), she helped define the electronic sound now called techno. She explores growing up on the rough streets of post-war Hull, U.K., with a repressive father and supportive mother, her work in performance art, stripping, pornography, and sound experimentation, the break-ups, the scandals, and the successes. Art Sex Music tells the story of a true artist that never let anyone tell her what was possible.
3. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein Before she went on to make a generation laugh with Emmy-winning TV show Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein was one of the three fierce musicians in the band SleaterKinney. In this beautifully honest and eloquent account of her life, Brownstein tells the story of an outgoing and precocious girl and the woman who decided to break-up the band at the height of its success. Brownstein’s book is a wonderful relief from typical rock memoirs and their self-aggrandizing reminiscences. At times almost self-deprecating to a fault, she uses masterful turns of phrase to illuminate the dark places of her experience.
