Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis

By Ryan Moore
New York University Press

Punk, hardcore, and alternative rock music scenes have been for years the almost exclusive realm of teenagers and youth in their twenties. Not only have they been areas of creative expression, but such subcultures have given young people a place to challenge beauty standards, political boundaries, and cultural norms.

In Sells Like Teen Spirit, author Ryan Moore documents the music scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as their evolutions today. From metal to Riot Grrrl, Moore talks about the players and the stories that made youth music cultures what they were during these times. Moore also delves into the sociopolitical moment to relate how the dominant cultural debates directly and indirectly shaped youth music cultures. Generations-old struggles, such as sexism, also played prominently in many subcultures.

Most notable in this book, Moore explores an interesting subtext in youth music cultures that other writers in the midst of feminist research and study on race further explore. Namely, a wave of "post" approaches ("post-racial," "post-feminist") take a role in youth culture that, in spite of pretensions to the contrary, only replicates and supports traditional roles and power in white, patriarchal American society. For instance, the alternative fashion model Suicide Girls trend of a few years ago presents women from youth subcultures (e.g., punk and goth) as different, empowered female pin-ups. Such images intended to impart a view of women as self-assured, independent, sexually liberated creatures; however, the essential conversation of this image—women fitting into a male perception of beauty presented primarily as objects for male consumption—remains intact.

Men, in virtually all alternative youth music cultures, assume a position that fundamentally affirms the patriarchal position: strong, individualistic characters navigating a world in which white male hegemony is crumbling amid globalization. Moore points out the revival of swing, ska and rockabilly imagery harkens back to times in which men were the makers of their fortunes whereas today corporate power and economic uncertainty dimmed hopes and dreams of millions.

Yet many outgrowths of youth music subcultures offered refreshing challenges to the worlds in which young people grew up. Bands like Bikini Kill and the women’s zine scene are explored in Sells Like Teen Spirit, to give another perspective of young people committed to challenging power, as others before them, through their talents and passion.

Though not as expansive as similarly themed books like There’s A Riot Going On or Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, for those interested in intersections of youth culture, music, and politics, Sells Like Teen Spirit is a good text to understand or reminisce about music subcultures that were special, though could not overcome the conundrum that stymied subcultures before them: how to use the youth music subculture make substantive political, cultural, and social change.

Review by Ernesto Aguilar

Le Tigre: On Tour

Directed by Kerthy Fix

“What’s the status of Le Tigre?” an eager—albeit slightly angst-ridden—fan asks Kathleen Hanna during the Q&A session after the screening of Le Tigre: On Tour. I, too, had been wondering the same question—because this band, who has proven so formative to women young and old everywhere, seems to exist only in our collective lesbo-feminist consciousness at the moment. For myself, in particular, I was introduced to Le Tigre’s music a year before they performed their final show in NYC, on 18 September 2005, so I never had the opportunity to witness their awesomeness in concert. Their existence to me, in other words, was always to me like a memory, an extant pastness that is real but not actual in that particular moment. I think their existence, for me, is kind of like how people understand Jesus or Santa Claus: he’s touched their hearts, and therefore he’s real… at least they think he’s real, but they’ve never actually seen him.

Which is why this documentary is so utterly amazing: the film, comprised of compiled concert and backstage footage from their final tour for the album This Island in 2004, and including more recent interviews with the trio—Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, in addition to Kathleen Hanna—is essential to the band’s continued existence in our collective lesbo-feminist consciousness. Seeing footage of live performances made me dance in my seat, and it brought tears to my eyes, particularly during the scene in which Hanna turns to Samson and gives her an acknowledging look—the “this is it” moment—of it being the last performance (“Deceptacon”) of their final show.

Director Kerthy Fix did a brilliant job creating this documentary in a way that proves attractive to all audiences: her attention to the trio of characters, and their feminist, queer ethics that embody the desire that each person be her “own lost hero,” as Hanna professes, speaks to everyone who wants to cultivate themselves as strong, powerful, and unique individuals. The documentary-as-archive is so crucial not only to preserving the band’s music, but also Le Tigre as a seminal part of the riot grrl movement, which has been built by the enterprising musical endeavors of the band collectively and separately, as each has her own individual pursuits.

Here we can think, of course, of Kathleen Hanna’s previous band, Bikini Kill, as the foundational component of this movement. And, as we Bikini Kill fans know so well, there is a scarcity of Bikini Kill footage out there—they existed before the explosion of the Interwebs, of the social media sites and blogs—so having this documentary is a welcomed addition to the steadily growing archive of the feminist and riot grrl movements.

Kudos to Fix for providing feminists young and old with this filmic insight into the iconic band—from Hanna’s deadpan explication of dressing room snack items (i.e., a bowl of fruit fit for the pope) to Fateman’s detailed vitamin regiment and Samson’s coming to terms with her Casanova status—and their raw lyrics and hot dance moves (“West Side Story meets Jazzercise,” to be precise).

Le Tigre: On Tour does not yet have a distributor; indeed, it’s still in the processing stages, pre-color correx and sound fix. Hopefully, by the end of the year, this film will be picked up and shown in theatres across the world for all the Le Tigre fans who, like me, long to connect with the band that filled their hearts and heads with sweetness and light.

Review by Marcie Bianco

Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics

Edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg
Saturnalia Books

The problem with books with two introductions is that one can inevitably doom the other and, at worst, the entire book. This just might be the case with the contra(dictory)dance of introductions to the anthology Gurlesque, edited by poets Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg. According to Glenum, Gurlesue poetry “assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.” Both editors relate this poetry to cultural movements like riot grrrl, burlesque, kitsch, camp, and more.

For Greenberg, Gurlesque is “not a movement or a camp or a clique.” (Okay, so what is it then?) It is “just something [she] saw...born of black organza witch costumes and the silver worn-out sequins mashed between scratchy pink tutu netting and velvet unicorn paintings and arena rock ballads…” Her list continues and is reminiscent of the sub/counter culture detritus that has wound up at mall stores like Hot Topic. I really wanted to love the idea of Gurlesque and was looking forward to some in-depth and sophisticated rendering. Unfortunately, Greenberg sounds like a chatty scenester at a party, making the anthology seem little more than a self-serving, self-validating effort.

Luckily, Glenum’s introduction is more intellectually sound and includes some interesting theory; however, both seem resistant to lay any more than spotty groundwork about what Gurlesque is or isn’t, at the same time that they see the selected poems as being exemplary of this “idea”. From Greenberg: “Being in this anthology doesn’t mean anything about the poets in particular: we are just trotting these poems out on our sideshow stage because of what we see in them.” And from Glenum: “I am not insisting that this genealogy forms a common knowledge base for Gurlesque poets…I intend the above merely as a loose sketch of aesthetic tendencies and impulses, an artistic and theoretical heritage from which the Gurlesque draws its manifold, relentless energies.” Yet wouldn’t the artifact of the anthology prove more than a loose sketch?

So what about the actual poetry? What does Gurlesque poetry look and read like? I asked a poet friend who said “pile on the cum, pile on the vomit, heap on the porn.” Poet Ariana Reines doesn’t disappoint with lines like “First he spit on my asshole and then start in with a middle finger and then the cock slid in no sound come out only a maw gaping, grind hard into ground.” While this might seem like a performance of pornographic crassness, it could be seen (and I tease this from the Exoskeleton poetry blog) as skillfully employing the savvy irony of our cultural moment: self-consciously using played out shock-for-shock’s sake.

These aren’t easy poems to read. They aren’t your grandmother’s poems, and they aren’t Hallmark greeting card poems. They aren’t like most poems you would read in a book grabbed off the shelf in Barnes & Nobles, or even the library. If you make it through the bric-a-brac of the introductions, you get a good sense of some very new and innovative (if not all that good or likable) poetics.

Readers might be jarred by Chelsey Minnis’ excessive use of ellipses, to the point of frustration. The visual disorientation of the work gives the reader the sense that so much else is going on around and outside the poems, they become part of a much wider extended dialogue in which the reader is invited to imagine the activity in the pauses. Excerpts from Geraldine Kim’s “Povel” recalibrate our sense of poetry, prose, and the quotable. Lines like “I was barn./I was razed./I was mot this flame with no’s sum else blue’s blame noir yearning down the house” from Heidi Lynn Staple’s “Fonder a Care Kept” are going to test even the most adept readers of contemporary poetry.

There is a great deal of variety in this anthology, and as a woman of color, while I was happy to see Asian American women represented, I was strongly disappointed by the apparent lack of work by African American, Latina, or Native American women. While I suppose it is possible (though unlikely) that such women of color aren’t writing Gurlesque, it seems more plausible that when it depends on one’s field of vision that this is an effect of “just something I saw.”

Review by L