As the women of Bratmobile whirled like tops across the stage of the Westbeth Theatre, singer Allison Wolfe kicked up her gym shoes and flipped a bandaged middle-digit salute. She bounced back to back with guitarist Erin Smith, half-apologized for dancing like a crazed kitten chasing its tail (“I think I had too much coffee”) and practically smacked her lips at having the last word on the broken relationships described in her lyrics (“That’s not a nice song,” she said of “Well You Wanna Know What?” “but I like to sing it anyway.”).
After a hiatus of five years, Wolfe, Smith and drummer Molly Neuman were welcomed back like conquering heroines at the CMJ music conference, which concluded last weekend. Back at last was the Olympia, Wash., trio that helped usher in a new era of consciousness-raising feminist rock a decade ago, with songs of giddy self-empowerment: “Girl germs, girl germs/Can’t hide out, they’re everywhere.”
With bands like Bikini Kill, Heavenly and Huggy Bear, Bratmobile made sure that “girl germs” infected a generation fed up with “boy toy” pop stereotypes. These bands were at the forefront of the riot-grrrl movement, a loose coalition of bands, fanzines and activists nationwide tired of seeing women treated like caricatures (victims, groupies, gold diggers) in a male-dominated art form. By the mid-’90s, women’s voices were strongly represented in every layer of rock, from the earth-motherish singer-songwriters of Lilith Fair to the folk-punk iconoclasm of Ani DiFranco. There was the designer-chic outrage of Courtney Love, the bad-girl-next-door complexity and calculation of Liz Phair, the theatrical savagery of PJ Harvey, the petulance and pout of Fiona Apple, the bluesy sincerity of Joan Osborne, the extravagance of Paula Cole, the rock classicism of Sheryl Crow, the mystic moonchildisms of Tori Amos.
Yet as Wolfe whooped and whirled at CMJ, one couldn’t help but feel that not only she and her band were starting over, but that the movement they championed needed to do the same. If Lilith put women at the center of pop culture by 1997, Woodstock ’99 effectively threw them back into the margins. The mosh pit once again became a boys club, and the women who dared to enter it were stomped, manhandled and, in several instances, raped.
Scan the modern-rock and mainstream-rock charts this week, and it’s aggressive male bands from top to bottom, meaning that female voices are rarely if ever heard on commercial rock stations nationwide — precisely the state of affairs that prompted singer Sarah McLachlan to create Lilith Fair in the first place. The women getting the most airplay are pop singers such as Britney Spears, Destiny’s Child and Christina Aguilera, whose images conform precisely to the pre-punk ideal: attractive, unthreatening thrushes delivering thinly coded songs about carnal knowledge designed to entice the boys and encourage the girls to buy tighter sweaters the next time they visit the mall.
“It’s frightening where we are right now,” said Caroline Frye, founder of the chickclick.com Web site, at a CMJ panel addressing the feminist-rock backlash.
Or perhaps it’s the male-dominated world of rock that’s frightened. As Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote in her recent book “Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women,” the problem is not a new one. “The world is profoundly scared of single women, they are loose cannons, the uncontrollable variable, hormones and pheromones afloat and adrift; much more frightening than the extra man at a dinner party. . . .”
It’s a phobia that pervades society; rock simply reflects and sometimes magnifies it. Pop culture is one of the few social arenas where sexuality is openly discussed, and the conversation between the genders has always bristled with accusation and misunderstanding. At CMJ the air was thick with verbal bricks.
“All the cool chick rockers have scurried back to the margins,” lamented filmmaker Sarah Jacobsen at the feminism panel. But there was a silver lining, she said: “I’m just so happy to be on this panel so I can say, `[Expletive] you, Fred Durst!'”
Durst, the singer and guiding force of Limp Bizkit, is the 800-pound gorilla of rock stars. His last album was a multimillion-seller, he is a vice president of Interscope Records and supervises his own boutique label, and Limp Bizkit’s just-released “Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water” is likely to debut as the No. 1 album in the country this week. Durst’s rabblerousing at Woodstock ’99 and the unrelenting sexist brutality of his band’s previous two albums have made him the poster boy for thug rock, and he was Public Enemy No. 1 at CMJ.
Daphne Carr, a New York University student, sees Limp Bizkit not as the future of rock, but as a symbol of a genre “scared of its own demise.”
“It’s rock with a big capital `R,’ a return to the men-in-scary masks era of Kiss,” she said. “It’s not new. It’s about grasping at straws.”
A fellow student, Liz Taubeneck, is more troubled by the female response to Durst-era misogyny: “I appreciate feminist content, but it needs to take into account feminine form.” Have women, she suggested, lost the pop moment because they haven’t figured out how to integrate politics and female sensuality consistently?
“What’s troubling is that we keep swinging from one extreme to another,” said Tracy Mann, a longtime publicist for DiFranco, “and now we’ve swung back to the Neanderthal at the expense of the feminine. I thought we’d get a synthesis after all these years, but it hasn’t happened.”
Joan Morgan Murray, executive editor of Essence magazine, said having a social consciousness will become fashionable only if it proves marketable. “The barometer is making it [a situation where] everyone wants to be invited to the coolest party,” she said. And in the pursuit of coolness these days, she added, “money rules.”
Even more chilling was the warning sounded by chickclick.com’s Frye: The sexist climate of pop culture “won’t change if you can’t make a great business out of doing it the other way.”
But there were glimmers of a dialogue taking shape. Le Tigre, led by among the most militant of the feminist rockers, former Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, played the festival, and the band’s music has opened up beyond Bikini Kill’s hard-line stance. In a song about filmmaker John Cassavetes, Hanna sings, “What’s your take on Cassavetes? Misogynist? Genius? Alcoholic? Messiah?” as if allowing for the possibility that the answer is not as clear-cut as it might seem.
Even Durst has tempered his stance. In the liner notes to the new Limp Bizkit album he writes what amounts to an apology to “all the girls in this world,” and the music is notably free of the violently sexist language of earlier releases. Instead, Durst tries to write us-against-them anthems that describe a generation of men and women united against those who “don’t give a [expletive] about us.”
Whether Durst’s newfound social responsibility proves to be as financially lucrative as his earlier outraged-pimp pose may determine how long his age of enlightenment continues. But the re-emergence of women’s voices in the pop mainstream doesn’t hinge completely on women. It depends on men who have loathed, and learned. It depends on men of influence speaking to other men about respecting women. Improbably, it depends on men like Durst.
