marin reads

quote

"We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly."
– Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein

hunger makes me a modern girl

2015 was such a good year for me when it comes to music non-fiction, because several books came out about things/people I loved in high school. Carrie Brownstein and her band Sleater-Kinney (with Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss) would definitely be in this list. I can remember the first time I listened to SK; someone on the Witchbaby list recommended them and the Kill Rock Stars site was streaming their songs.

Unfortunately, our awful dial-up meant that I could only hear the first 20-30 seconds of each song before the connection timed out. Didn't matter. The first 20 seconds was all I needed to fall in love with "Get Up", "One More Hour", and "Burn, Don't Freeze". I reached out to the witchies and some of the girls sent me mixtapes with SK songs, and after that they've become one of my permanent favourites. This book is really more about Carrie Brownstein than SK, but because so much of her life was SK, it reminded me of high school, and that time when everything was exciting and new. It also renewed my love of Corin/Carrie/Janet dynamics, and the band as a whole!

* originally posted on my wordpress on July 24, 2016 and in my superfairyanimal zine

** the witchbaby list was an egroup for fans of Francesca Lia Block – it really was a lot more than that at one point. (think nerdfighter, but much smaller and without the involvement of the author) and then, like all nearly perfect things, it disappeared.

book details

Riverhead Books, October 27th 2015, 9781594486630

non-fiction, music