Punk rock was one of the most important social movements of the 21st century. Punk artists pushed radical social agendas and changed music, film, fashion, and really all aspects of culture. However, as it grew in influence, punk rock became fractured and toxic in many ways.
And one of the groups that the movement was most toxic towards was women, who would be assaulted at shows and not taken seriously as artists. Male punks became household names while... females faded into the underground.
And so in the early 1990s, a group of women came up with a vision that would change punk rock and musical history forever. Riot Grrrl. Let's take a closer look. When women's frustrations with the punk scene began to spill out in the early 1990s, it didn't actually start as music. Many women felt that they had no voice within the scene, so they created a space where they could speak freely.
Fan zines. Zines had been adopted by the British punk scene in the 1970s as a do-it-yourself way of perpetuating punk culture and sticking it to the establishment. However, some of these early fan zines set the stage for the sexism that would dominate punk rock over the next two decades. As far back as 1976, the London punk zine Sniff and Glue wrote, Punks are not gay. girls.
So it was perhaps fitting that women like Toby Vail started to use zines to respond to that very same sexism. Check out this passage she wrote in Jigsaw, a zine of her own publishing. I feel completely left out of the realm of everything that is so important to me, and I know this is partly because punk rock is for and by boys. And Vail wasn't the only woman that felt like this about the punk scene. Kathleen Hanna had similar feelings when she and Vail formed their own zine together called...
Bikini Kill. Around that time, two women named Alison Wolfe and Molly Newman were also collaborating on Girl Germs, a seminal feminist zine. With zines having brought them together, these women decided that if they really wanted to get a message to the punk community, the best way to do it was through punk's main vehicle, music.
In October 1990, Vale and Hannah teamed up with Billy Karen and Kathy Wilcox to form Bikini Kill, named after their zine. Then in February 91, Aaron Smith joined Wolf and Newman and together they became Bratmobile. These bands were two of the driving forces behind Riot Grrrl. You can hear this drive and determination in their music.
Just listen to Rebel Girl, arguably Bikini Kill's most famous song, and one that became an anthem of sorts for the movement. Bratmobile used satire to jab at the punk scene and the expectations of women in society In their early days Bikini Kill would encourage women at their shows which put off men in the punk scene. They regularly got heckled on stage and sometimes men would even try to physically assault Hannah who would fearlessly go into the crowd to personally see hecklers and out of their shows. In the second issue of Bikini Kill, the band set out a manifesto for their movement and gave it its name.
Riot Grrrl was officially born. The name came from a number of sources. Jen Smith used the words Girl Riot in a letter to Alison Wolfe when she was talking about the Mount Pleasant Race Riots. She was saying that women needed to have a similar riot.
The girl part of the title was just as pointed. It came from the fact that these women remembered feeling most empowered as children. children, as girls, before they were forced to face the demands of society and the male gaze.
Bikini Kill and Bratmobile were far from the only Riot Grrrl bands too, just listen to Huggy Bear who had an infamous performance on Terry Christian's youth show, The Words. L7 were also a political punk band that existed before Riot Grrrl and became associated with the scene for a period. It's important to note the aesthetic of Riot Grrrl too.
While it draws from punk rock, it's unabashedly female. Riot Grrrl bands wore their hair in ponytails and performed in makeup and dresses. Kathleen Hanna even sung in a Valley Girl accent frequently.
The Riot Grrrl Manifesto laid out some of the key aspects of their movement. They wanted to create a place for a woman to hear and see each other, and they wanted to do it without assimilating to male standards. Furthermore, they wanted to revive and rejuvenate punk rock's DIY culture, which they felt had grown stale in the face of commercialism.
That same commercialist world often misconstrued Riot Grrrl, creating controversy around the spectacle of their performance, rather than focusing on the substance behind it. However, press attention was never really the goal of Riot Grrrl. The movement wasn't concerned with fame and success, but rather with effecting real change on a ground level. And they did just that.
The thriving zine community provided resources for queer youth as well as women who had been sexually abused or who were struggling with mental illness. It became common for people to hand out pamphlets at shows and foster a community of people respecting and loving women. It also provided a new space for feminist thought, moving it from the high halls of academia onto the dirty stage of punk rock. In a lot of ways, the sharing of resources, experience, and art between women was a precursor to what we've seen more and more recently with the internet.
Riot Grrrl also had a lasting impact on music. Slater-Kenny formed in Washington towards the end of the movement, and went on to become massive in the American indie rock scene. After Riot Grrrl, woman discussing female empowerment was more accepted in the mainstream too, with acts like Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette having huge success throughout the rest of the 90s.
The original Riot Grrrl movement had mostly burned out by the mid-90s, but many of its tenets continued. Kathleen Hanna went on to create Le Tigre, another feminist band that had success throughout the late 90s and 2000s. And even today, bands like Pussy Riot and White Lung draw from the Riot Grrrl movement and some of them even identify as Riot Grrrl themselves.
So the impacts of Riot Grrrl still last to this day. Riot Grrrl was the last stand of the true punk ethos. It was smart, badass and free, and it was unabashedly feminine.
And it affected real change in the music culture. While Riot Grrrl helped make big strides, we still have a long way to go when it comes to getting female voices into the music world. And that's why I want to give a big shout out to the Women's Audio Mission. The audio around us fundamentally shapes our perceptions of the world in which we live. But of all the people shaping the sounds, messages, and media that make up the soundtracks of our lives, less than 5% are women.
And the Women's Audio Mission is trying to change that. Their goal is to encourage young women and girls to use technology to help empower themselves and make a mark on the audio world. If you want to see more, please go check out their website at womensaudiomission.org.
And if you really want to help, I've left a link in the description where you can donate and help give women more of a voice in the audio world. Thank you so much for watching this video.