In Terms Of

Tag: Music

  • Good for a Girl

    This essay was partly written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Women in Music
    Thursday, November 19, 2015
    The Luminary, Saint Louis, MO

    April Fulstone (second from left) describes her experiences with sexism in the DJ world (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    How do you deal with sexism in the music industry, personally and professionally? This question from Liz Deichmann, operations and event coordinator at the Luminary, came halfway through the panel “Women in Music.” April Fulstone, known professionally as DJ Agile One, said that her experiences spinning records for fifteen years, specializing for a while in hip hop, have been plagued by “unintentional” sexism, such as comments about her ability to transport two Technics 1200 turntables, which weigh fifty pounds each with a case, by herself. At one venue, an older man was impressed that she was able to set up her equipment on her own.

    Syhrea Conaway, a black multi-instrumentalist who works under the name Syna So Pro, cannot separate sex and race: a white woman or black man is less likely to experience what she has. A case in point: after playing with a bluesy band at Ten Mile House, a man remarked to her, “You know what? When you first walked in here, I was like, ‘What’s this black bitch doing here?’ But now that I’ve seen you play, I respect you.” At a venue, she regularly needs to assert that she is actually in the band, that she isn’t the merch girl, and that she isn’t loading in equipment to get free admission to the show. Conaway acknowledged that she will always be “questioned by my mere presence.” The most devalued compliment of all, she said, is being told “you’re good for a girl.”

    Laura Sisal, a partner in the Ready Room, a mid-sized concert venue that can accommodate up to 750 people, must regularly persuade touring bands to accept her authority. “It’s extra pressure on you,” she said. “Do I bite my tongue or do I decide to fight this battle?” Often it’s a lose-lose situation when she stands up for herself—but why should she even have to? Christine Sanley, director of AAA radio promotion for co-sign, an artist-development agency for radio promotion, licensing, marketing, and brand strategy, is regularly asked “What does your boss think?” when she presents her company’s final decisions to others.

    Five successful women in music, from left to right: Christine Sanley, Syhrea Conaway, April Fulstone, Laura Sisal, and Liz Deichmann (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Deichmann stated that “Women in Music” was held in response to “The Future of Music,” a discussion that took place at the Luminary in February 2015. Like that event, “Women in Music” had a local focus on the Saint Louis scene, yet the five panelists—all women, unlike the earlier, all-male event—shared personal anecdotes and experiences that, for better and worse, many across the country can relate to. Deichmann, who is also a musician and a promoter for Secret Sound Society and St. Louis Arts Project, began the conversation by asking how each woman first got involved with music and about their professional role models. Her questions, while job interview-y at times, garnered interesting and diverse responses.

    Promotional flyer for a Clothesline event

    A former DJ at Washington University, Sanley came from the Omaha suburbs and entered the music scene surrounding the band Cursive and the record label Saddle Creek. Conaway began playing music at age seven, breaking free from her classical training at age twenty. Her mother played violin, which she took up herself, along with guitar, bass, keyboards, and now drums. A formative experience for her was watching TLC’s video for “Baby-Baby-Baby.” An Iowa City misfit, Fulstone lived for a while in Detroit and now runs a monthly party in Saint Louis called the Clothesline. A child of the 1990s, she admired Björk, Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Lauren Hill, and later M.I.A. “I love unique women who have cross-cultural sounds and backgrounds,” said Fulstone, who is Asian. Sisal has played in bands (organ, piano, guitar), worked for music labels, and studied audio production.1 Her peers include radio professionals, publicists, and entertainment lawyers. A foundational moment for her was watching the music video for No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” in which the singer Gwen Stefani looked feminine, tough, and beautiful all at once. Sisal also respects Sade for dropping in and out of the music business whenever she wants.

    What are your biggest successes and challenges? As a kid Conaway performed at Carnegie Hall twice as a choir member—she is an incredibly gifted vocalist. Another highlight happened earlier this year, when four members of the contemporary chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound performed as her backing band at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Saint Louis. Conaway claimed to be bad at promotion and social media, but her Facebook page looks up to date. Marketing is the fake version of you, Fulstone said. “I’m bad at being fake,” she added, noting that some music promoters actually want fakeness and femininity.

    Sanley doubted she can eclipse facilitating a collaboration between Boy George and the Black Lips—they covered T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” Her biggest challenge, going from college radio to AAA, has been talking on the phone to old white dudes, persuading them to change their programming. Mainstream radio, Sanley noted, plays about 30 percent music by female recording artists. I wondered how changes in music business—such as corporate media consolidation, the collapse of the record industry, and the decline of radio in favor of satellite transmission and digital streaming—have changed gender relations in the industry.

    Sisal, a self-described overachiever and perfectionist, pronounced that opening a concert venue—something she has wanted to do since seventh grade—was both an accomplishment and a challenge, especially for someone lacking an academic business or management background. “You don’t really have any type of instruction manual as to how to do this,” Sisal pointed out. Be patient and go with the flow, this Zen master advised. “If my thirteen-year-old self could see me now, she’d be freaking out.”

    Do the panelists self-identify as an artist or as a woman artist? “People are interested, a little more, if you’re a woman,” Fulstone responded. Conaway said the press perpetually touts her as a “one-woman musical enigma,” sends up the notion of a one-man band. “You want to be faceless, so to speak,” Sisal insisted. “You just want the music to do the talking for you.” But appearances matter. She explained two paths to success for female performers: “There are certain artists that are fighting hard to be recognized as an artist, not a woman artist. And then there’s other people taking the approach of ‘I want to use my sexuality to get noticed and then once I’m famous, once I have your attention, I’ll let you know who I really am.’” Sisal finds that approach to be counterintuitive—it doesn’t have to be this way.

    Conaway believes that “to slut it up a little bit” is a larger media problem that spills over into academic, athletic, and political life, where women’s achievements aren’t recognized or valued. Sanley argued that it’s transparent when a woman pimps herself, citing Du Blonde’s record cover for Welcome Back to Milk: “This woman, she’s like ‘Hey, it’s me with this banging merkin, and this really rad full coat.’” Du Blonde gets discredited, Sanley explained, for “doing her thing and embodying herself and being comfortable in her own skin.”2 Responding to Sisal’s comments, Sanley said, “It’s a clear line between someone going through the machine and getting oversexualized, and someone else just trying to take hold of their own body and sexuality and getting called out for it in a different way.” Look at Nicki Minaj, Fulstone quipped, “that’s what you have to do to be successful.” She also noted that fans of hip hop must often overlook a performer’s misogyny because of his talent. As a contrast, near the panel’s conclusion Deichmann recalled that she dressed masculine or androgynous on her band’s show days to make it easier to carry equipment, climb ladders, and kick stage divers off the stage.

    How does Saint Louis compare to other cities? New York is a competitive hustle no matter what sex you are, Sanley recalled of her three years there. On returning to Saint Louis, she expected to find a tighter-knit community of women but didn’t. In New York, she felt more connected to the scene, less so here—though she recognized that her job in radio has a national scope. Conaway bemoaned that indie rock is the only supported genre in town, especially by publications, at the expense of hip hop and R&B. Band ethics usually dictate that no performer leaves until everyone has played, she added, yet groups in Saint Louis don’t support the whole bill like they do in other cities. Fulstone found a strong scene in Detroit, where the music comes first, but in Saint Louis, it’s who you know. The racially segregated city is also a problem, she said. Sisal recalled that, in 2006 and 2007, you’d see members of other bands in your audience. They’re not there now. This may have to do with aging, the ebbs and flows of the scene, or both.

    Syhrea Conway (center) prefers to support musicians on their merit, not their sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Any mentoring advice? Sanley advised, “Don’t be afraid, make connections, reach out to people, and support each other.” Emphasizing hard work, Conaway advocated setting goals and being honest with yourself and why you’re doing this. The panelists agreed that programming kids differently—with toys, for example—will help reduce sexism and change the music industry in twenty to thirty years. Deichmann acknowledged the power in collective action and support and, on a personal note, realized that tonight was the first time she and Sanley had talked about these issues, despite being longtime friends.

    A male audience member noticed an increasing female presence in the noise, punk, and loud music scenes, identifying Savages, Melt Banana, and Pharmakon as examples. Sanley agreed but pointed out that a member of Perfect Pussy was ridiculed for writing a tour diary for Vogue—for some it’s not acceptable to be a badass punk interested in fashion and feminine things. Meredith Graves of that band wrote a tour diary for Elle in 2014, but maybe Sanley was referring to the “Thrift Diaries” that Emily Panic of Foxygen wrote for Jezebel. Progress is being made, she concluded, but there’s a long way to go—especially when she relayed a story about how an unnamed band’s management dropped an all-female four-person group after replacing two members with men. Fulstone proclaimed that seeing women in power positions in venues, as organizers of programming, demonstrates significant progress and a positive model for younger people.

    For further reading (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The contentious discussion of artist and woman artist resurfaced. Conaway brought up the quality argument often heard from men: “You’re not really that good at what you do, but you are getting a lot of support because you are a woman. That’s not okay with me. How about you support a person on the merit of what they’re doing?” Conaway opposed using sexuality to compensate for the lack of talent.3 From the audience, the artist (and former Luminary resident) Tori Abernathy found the staunch agreement of being an artist (and not a woman artist) to be surprising. If gender is removed from the narrative, she argued, history gets rewritten with men being in charge. Women should get documented and make history their own. Putting that aside, Abernathy was curious about how women communicate their strengths, such as the leeway (white) women have when dealing with police and fire marshals—using prejudice to their advantage. Sisal proposed empathy and compassion. Sanley noted that a person’s sex is more intrinsically related to music than to art: an artwork or style can more easily defy gender stereotypes, while a woman onstage or heard on a record cannot.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Laura Sisal and Syhrea Conaway played together in Stella Mara, a shoegaze-inspired band, in the late 2000s.

    2 Beth Jeans Houghton, who performs as Du Blonde, discussed the cover in Rachel Brodsky, “Du Blonde Pushes Dirt under Her Nails on ‘Welcome Back to Milk’,” Spin, May 12, 2015.

    3 April Fulstone said something similar about her DJ career a few years ago: “‘I think it was a big novelty,’ she says. ‘People were really pushing me to take gigs, even before I was ready. They really wanted to see a girl out there. But it was important for me to be respected for my skill and not thrown in there because I’m a female.’” See Kevin C. Johnson, “St. Louis Women in Hip-Hop Struggle to Break Through,” Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 26, 2012.

    Read

    Natasha Patel, “Gender Inequality in the Music Industry,” Music Business Journal 11, no. 4 (October 2015): 1, 3.

    Taylor Pittman, “This Is the Kind of Bullsh*t You Face as a Woman in the Music Industry,” Huffpost Women, August 27, 2015.

    Dianca Potts, “DJing while Female in NYC: ‘I Can’t Believe You’re a Chick…’,” Village Voice, October 8, 2015.

    Lindsay Zoladz, “Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl,” Pitchfork, November 16, 2011.

  • Needle on the Record

    Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution with Michael Denning
    Friday, September 4, 2015
    Interference Archive, Brooklyn

    “You might say that a people or a movement must be constituted musically before it can be constituted politically.” This was one argument among many declared by Michael Denning, a professor of American studies and English at Yale University, during a talk for his new Verso book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. Denning, however, made it clear that the music culture during the brief period of time studied in his book—from the widespread use of electrical recording in 1925 to the early years of the Great Depression—was not revolutionary politically.

    Denning’s words were well suited for the summer exhibition at Interference Archive, if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance, which explored intersections of music and politics through record covers, song books, and music memorabilia, all with a predilection for insurgency. Most prominent were three walls of record covers, some from popular music, such as Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire, Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, and Bikini Kill’s self-titled EP. Revolutionary-minded jazz players Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were represented, as were obscure proletariat titles like They’ll Never Keep Us Down: Women’s Coal Mining Songs.

    Drawing from the first chapter of his book, Denning provided ten instances of early electrical sound recordings from around the world. Before this technology, singers and musician performed live in front of a machine that cut grooves into a platter—the master recording of the session was a record. In the mid-1920s, engineers developed a more advanced method using microphones and amplifiers to electrically inscribe sounds onto a cylinder, disc, or film, which could be taken elsewhere for manufacturing. A son band was recorded in Havana in October 1925, followed by Louis Armstrong’s bands in New Orleans and Chicago a month later. In Cairo the legendary vocalist Umm Kulthūm recorded songs for a set of ten 78 RPM records in May 1926, and the Jakarta singer and dancer Miss Riboet laid down the kroncong classic “Krongtjong Moeritskoe” in November. Other recordings were made in Honolulu, Zanzibar, Accra, and Johannesburg—and Django Reinhardt in Paris. Denning played twenty to thirty seconds of each example to give the audience a taste of the explosion of music from back them. He also created a Spotify playlist for the book.1

    Michael Denning describes the early electrical recordings of Louis Armstrong (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Denning could not overstress the importance of colonial port cities, connected by steamships. After the invention of electrical recording, companies such as Gramophone in the United Kingdom, Victor in the United States, and Pathé in France, sent engineers around the world, usually twice a year, to port cities—Manila, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tunis, Bombay—to record the locals in order to sell products back to the local markets. It was a commercial enterprise relatively unconcerned with preservation. One British music reviewer, Denning said, noted that even though England produced the physical records, they were imported quickly and therefore hard to find. In the United States, homegrown music was marketed as “race records” and “hillbilly” music, often become trendy in the metropolitan cities. Though the recordings of the electrical era came from all over the world, they were mislabeled as jazz, a catchall term for syncopated music that might actually be tango, rumba, or rebetika.

    In those port cities lived professional musicians who could read music, as well as those learned by ear. “You see it in Havana, you see it in New Orleans, you see it in Shanghai,” Denning said. “The mix of these two sets of musicians” produced localized—I hesitate to say indigenous—music outside the formal, orchestrated scenes in London, New York, and Berlin. Creating makeshift studios in hotel rooms, engineers would sometimes put up a sign that essentially said “We are recording and need musicians.” Other times they would locate performers on the edge of musical culture—those musicians who were trained but were part of the community—who would become musical directors that recruited from the local scene and even registered (or assigned) a recording’s copyright. In colonialism, he remarked, a class of subordinate elites served as intermediaries between the ruling class and the general population, and musicians could be found there. These musicians, Denning revealed, are the “key protagonists or heroes” of Noise Uprising.

    Installation view of one wall of if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some might see exploitative capitalism at play here, Denning took a deeper look. “These musics are best understood not as an emergence of the music industry,” he said, “nor was it simple popular music.” Instead, “it was a vernacular revolution,” not unlike the effect of the invention of the printing press on language. The author called the emergence of these records a “decolonization of the ear,” sparking a political unconscious in music that later would become conscious. The young intellectuals in port cities, he said, were drawn to their local music. Denning stated, “Political decolonization—the decolonization of territories, of legislatures—depended on a cultural revolution.” The creation and circulation of records from the late 1920s onward supported enfranchisement, he claimed, serving a role that books and newspapers once did. Denning commented that the record covers on the wall of Interference Archive, such as those by the politicized Nigerian bandleader and politician Fela Kuti, exemplify the evolution.

    In Trinidad, a song by the calypsonian Raymond Quevedo, better known as Atilla the Hun, called “Commission’s Report” responded earnestly to the official government report on the Butler riots. After the British cracked down on dissent, he recorded two more songs that were sympathetic to the replaced colonial leaders, and a third, called “The Strike,” that cheekily avoided direct commentary. The knowing wink became powerfully prevalent. “Often the most innocuous songs,” Denning said, “carry anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the authorities and in the population.” In Hawaii, “the romantic lyric tribute to the land, built on the simple musicality of place names,” was a form a resistance. “What some understood as tourist picturesque actually signified colonial dispossession.”

    But what about the commercial exploitation and appropriation of the music? Many of the recordings were a mingling of Western and non-Western instruments, a hybrid evolution of styles that differed from music from isolated, rural locations, which relied on the oral tradition. Even though the folklorists find commercialism suspicious, Denning said, leading figures such as Alan Lomax came to realize the cultural and historical significance of the recordings. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Lomax claimed that the commercial companies did more of a service than the folklorists, who sometimes repackaged the old commercial recordings as indigenously authentic. Denning noted that much of Harry Smith’s celebrated collection , Anthology of American Folk Music, was drawn from early electrical records produced for the market.

    The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.

    Michael Denning gives the thumbs up (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some may prize the work of the anonymous collective over the individual or stars, the early electric recordings featured individuals who were stars. Denning argued that the cult of the popular bandleader was not dissimilar to those for charismatic political figures in the decolonization era. The leaders of newly free nations often sponsored the work of musicians to establish not only a national identity but also a national industry. Import substitution is the concept of manufacturing and selling goods within your own country to obviate the need to buy from others. Some musicians were even encouraged to sell their records in New York and London, not just in Lagos.

    Denning pointed out the social and sexual contradiction in music. The division of labor was traditional: men are instrumentalists and women are singers. At the same time, he said, women were able to perform in public for the first time. From 1925 to 1930, Denning told us, musicians were not trying to revolutionize music for politics. Records reinvented daily life, making music regular, not occasional. At the time, he continued, music was associated with vice (drinking, drugs, prostitution), with carnival and military marching bands, and with vaudeville and theater. In the port cities, Denning noted, working-class musicians played for working-class people.

    Denning compared the early electrical period to the dot com boom of the late 1990s: internet companies had no idea how to make money, but investors poured millions into ideas for websites. In the mid- to late 1920s, record companies recorded anything and everything, because the technology to produce and consume music was so new. Ten to fifteen years later, and after the Great Depression, they knew how to market music and make money. Denny, though, reminded us to focus on the music, not on the industry. The energy of labor precedes capitalism’s capture, Denning said. He urged us to transcend the leftist critique of industry and get to the powerful human impulses to make music—and also to have it heard and shared.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 During the audience Q&A, an attendee was curious about Denning’s relationship to archives. “In many ways I feel like my archives have been that world of collectors and discographers on the internet,” citing the blogs Excavated Shellac and Haji Maji. Record collectors are the true archivists, he said. Those who collected Robert Johnson records in the 1960s found that, by the 1980s and 1990s, these became too expensive. The collectors turned elsewhere, to the world music that Denning’s book is about.

  • Get Off the Internet

    Begun in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism
    Thursday, March 12, 2015
    Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.

    In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”

    Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)

    Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.

    “Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”

    Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.

    Narcissister as Little Red Riding Hood (artwork © Narcissister)

    A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.

    Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.

    Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.

    Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.

    Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress

    Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.

    “For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.

    During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.

    Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)

    An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.

    Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.

    Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”

    Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”

    Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 This band was Beirut Slump.

    2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.

    Read

    Osa Atoe, “I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism,” Shotgun Seamstress, March 24, 2015.

    Emily Colucci, “Big Sexy Noiseless: Lydia Lunch’s Silently Visceral So Real It Hurts,” Filthy Dreams, May 10, 2015.

    Nicole Disser, “Feminist Punk Panel Talks Zines, Radical Politics, and Race,” Bedford and Bowery, March 16, 2015.

    Samantha Spoto, “Punk Rock Needs Feminism,” Breakthru Radio, March 19, 2015.

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