Share577 Comments (40) Jessica Hopper guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 January 2011 23.30 GMT Article history. Iconoclasts … Huggy Bear. Photograph: Erica Echenberg/Redferns
Nearly 20 years after its zenith, Riot Girl, the fiery flash of a feminist movement born of the American punk rock scene, is living on – its legacy playing out in the sound and ideas of a new crop of young female musicians. "If it wasn't for Riot Girl, right now I would be in a godawful heavy blues band." Marissa Paternoster is laughing, but she is totally serious. At 22, Paternoster, the front woman for Screaming Females, is the imminent guitar heroine of the American underground – a monster of talent and skill, she shreds with confidence – and it's hard to imagine her owing anything to anyone, let alone a short-lived movement that came and went when she was still a child. Nevertheless, she is hardly alone in crediting Riot Girl for introducing her to ideas and bands that helped shape the musician she is now.
One of Riot Girl's fundamental tenets – that girls' ideas and visceral creative impulses are valuable – has proven to be as instructive now as it was in 1992, when the movement was at its peak. It was that idea that helped encourage Paternoster and, she jokes, "liberated" her from the idea that there was only one right way to play music. At 14, Paternoster was an avowed Smashing Pumpkins fan, just learning guitar. "Their music made me think, why bother?" Paternoster then discovered the Olympia, Washington-based independent label Kill Rock Stars and began excitedly exploring their catalogue online, downloading songs from bands that had been at the centre of the movement, whose incendiary slogan was "Revolution Girl Style Now!"
Riot Girl's musical mainstays – Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy in the US, and their UK counterparts Huggy Bear – had been broken up for years, but their sound and messages made them iconoclasts. Their mere existence retooled feminism and punk for new generations of music-obsessed girls, showing young women they could start bands and put their lives, frustrations and inspirations into song – and that you didn't have to be a virtuoso for it to be powerful.
"When I finally heard [all-girl bands] Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile, it was a revelation – it was instantly relatable, musically – it made me not want to give up. I had never been into political ideology, but I got really excited when I read about their ideals." It was also the first time Paternoster heard openly gay women sing about being queer. "At 16, I had no gay peers and a lot of gay shame. Hearing that made me realise that there were people out there who were cool and they were queer, and unbeknownst to me, it wasn't a big deal. That was the most important part for me."
While Riot Girl's particular values varied from girl to girl – the movement was a loosely organised network of thousands of women worldwide – its adherents were united by their shared feminist beliefs, and by outrage. It began in the early 1990s in Washington DC with informal conscious-raising meetings, where young women – including members of Bratmobile and Bikini Kill – gathered to talk and support one another amid a rock scene that was very much a boys' club. Personal testimonies and manifestos were spread through photocopied fanzines – the precursors to blogs – and distributed by hand or through the mail. The message in the zines and the bands lyrics was "You Matter" writ large, flying in the face of mainstream and underground culture that denied the value of their ideas and art.
Over the span of two short years, Riot Girl was built into a network, with chapters meeting in cities, and isolated girls identifying as Riot Girls, then connecting with each other through the mail or at shows of all-girl bands. There was no particular hierarchy, or rules – the universal mission was to offer a sort of radical feminist camaraderie – but the bands, particularly Bikini Kill, operated as the party organ, spreading the you-can-do-it gospel of the girl revolution.
Almost as fast as Riot Girl arose, it dissolved and fractured, and by the mid-90s, so had the associated bands. While Riot Girl had been life-changing for the people who had been inspired by it, the primary evidence of the movement's existence were contained on the records and lyrics sheets of its bands, so it's natural that its legacy would dovetail out of the recordings it left behind, even though it wasn't a musical movement so much as a social one.
Yet, for Annie Clark, the singer-guitarist who performs as St Vincent, what she found within those songs was more than just empowerment. She was a burgeoning musician in her early teens when she discovered the remnants of Riot Girl through online forums and mail-order 7in singles from Kill Rock Stars, and the ideals spurred her even more than the music. "It was an outlet for me, growing up in this conservative Dallas, Texas landscape. I didn't know there was a big world out there, or what it looked like. It was very exciting to me, to know there was this pocket of culture happening, and it was super-subversive, or so it seemed to me at 14. Seeing that empowerment made me really want to escape Dallas." While Clark was well versed in female classic rock icons – Janis Joplin, Grace Slick – the stance of Riot Girl bands was something else entirely. "It seemed like they were trying to own rock in a new way."
Perhaps more than own rock, Riot Girl bands sought to decimate the old model, and to make a space for their own bands. Riot Girl's earliest post-mortem iteration was Ladyfest, an all-female band festival that celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, and which, like Riot Girl, has been adapted and franchised across the globe, with concerts taking place everywhere from Chicago to Seville.
While Ladyfest sought to support and hew together girl bands and their fans, Girls Rock camps, which followed a few years later, are perhaps the most visible and successful representation of Riot Girl's aim, at least musically. Girls Rock camps – which now number around 30, internationally – are girlifying the future of rock'n'roll. Over the span of a week, girls aged between eight and 18 learn rock instrumentation, form a band, get lessons in music history and get to play a show. The camps' instructors are older female musicians themselves (Beth Ditto of the Gossip, former Hole drummer Patty Schemel and Mary Lou Lord are some of the more notable names), many of whom were former Riot Girls or were themselves inspired by Riot Girl bands.
Beth Warshaw-Duncan, director of Girls Rock Philly, the Philadelphia-based camp, found Riot Girl's idea of self-created community to be especially powerful. "It was the first time that I saw women and girls creating their own media, and their own communities, outside of established channels. That meant a generation of women working out their own definition of success and empowering each other. Girls Rock camps continue the work of Riot Girl through mentorship and empowerment, sharing that if you don't like what you see in the media, or don't see yourself represented, you can make your own. That idea is so rewarding, I'm not at all surprised at the huge rate of expansion of rock camps around the world."
For women who came up during Riot Girl, who struggled to be taken seriously as musicians, rock camps are a measure of how much has changed. For Bratmobile drummer Molly Neuman, seeing the camps and wave of young rocker-girls they are turning out is especially gratifying. "My motivation to start playing music and start a fanzine – a lot of it was to fill a lack. There were of course women musicians and bands, but their relative success was small compared to their influence. We craved information about girl bands, their records and their shows. There was very little encouragement at the time to start our own bands. I can't fathom what it would have been like to have had the opportunity to find like-minded girls from a younger age, and a network of support in place to encourage creativity with them."
While Riot Girl may not get shorthanded as a musical movement, it's impossible to disentangle its social, cultural and ideological components. Its most generous and lasting gift to the legion of girls and women whom Riot Girl has shaped is perhaps its sense of permission. Sara Marcus, author of the new book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution agrees. "Riot Girl didn't invent that, but it spread it, and in hitching it to feminism Riot Girl channelled DIY's liberatory potential toward the purpose of saving girls' lives. So I hear Riot Girl's legacy in any project of people picking up instruments and making noise without worrying about being marketable or cool, without worrying about having the right gear or the right training."
For Marissa Paternoster, it was permission to play how she wanted and be who she was. For Annie Clark, it was the permission to dream of a life bigger and louder than what she knew. For the founders of rock camps, Riot Girl bequeathed the idea that they could change the shape of rock and empower 12-year-old girls' rock star dreams. And for the young girls at the camp, wailing away behind the drums with abandon, the measure of Riot Girl's legacy is how blissfully unaware they are of what it was like before.
[Jessica Hopper is the author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking, out now on Workman Publishing.]
[O Guardian inclúe Sevilla (si si a península está aquí abaixo, oeo!) no artigo dos 20 anos das riot!!! Bravo!!! (grazas intrépida teclista por enviarme a nova)]
Riot siempre!
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