THERE WAS SOMETHING DIFFERENT about the crowd gathering outside the London studio of Channel 4’s late-night youth program The Word on the night of Valentine’s Day 1993. It was to be the TV debut of Huggy Bear, a five-piece band who represented the British wing of the feminist rock movement known as Riot Grrrl. Hosted by the aggravatingly laddish Terry Christian, The Word was, for want of anything better, the best possible British showcase for a young alternative rock band, its live recording allowing for attention-grabbing spontaneity. For Huggy Bear, who had thus far released only limited-edition cassettes and seven-inch singles, the booking was a major coup. The queue outside the studio was packed with supporters. Inside, someone from the production crew instructed them as to on-air etiquette: “Look like you’re having fun” “Don’t make stupid faces at the camera” “Look cool.”
During the first half of the show, the Huggy Bear fans were restless. “You could barely move, they’d let so many kids in,” remembers Gary Walker, whose Wiiija label released the band’s first records. “A group of girls were like, ‘What do we do? Is there going to be an opportunity for us?’” With a wail of feedback, Huggy Bear introduced themselves to a national audience. The song, “Her Jazz,” was a fractured lurch which exploded into a joyous squall, spraying wonderfully overheated boasts and accusations like a splinter grenade: “Post-tension realization / This is happening without your permission / The arrival of a new renegade girl-boy hyper-nation.” “The performance was so mind-blowing that for me that was the statement,” says Walker. “How could you top that?”
But after the performance the lights went down while the monitors screened a prerecorded interview with two glossy, plasticized, self-pro-claimed bimbos called the Barbi Twins. It seemed like a calculated affront to everything Huggy Bear represented. In the darkness, several girls maneuvered themselves into position in front of Christian, so that when the lights came back on at the end of the item, they were ready. “So, Terry,” guitarist Jo Johnson addressed the host, “you think all fucking women are shit do you?” The women beside her struck up a chant of “Crap! Crap! Crap!” The audience applauded.
The situation turned nasty as security guards waded in, manhandling protesters out of the studio and striking Johnson in the face. Outside in the parking lot, the band and their friends excitedly debated what had just happened. According to Huggy Bear’s Chris Rowley: “It wasn’t our plan. It was one of those star-crossed things. At the time, I felt quite euphoric. We’d caused a ruckus and it seemed to be for a good reason. But obviously in the days that followed it became a huge thing, like we were trying to tarnish the nation’s youth with our ugly feminist politics.”
This minor commotion became the event that defined Huggy Bear for the rest of their short existence. A band which had arrived in a tornado of ideas, theories, arguments, and contradictions was suddenly reduced to a group of girls shouting at a TV presenter. “They screech, they spit, they snarl, they swear,” sneered Anne Barrowclough in the right-wing Daily Mail. “Meet the Riot Grrrls, the latest, the nastiest phenomenon to enter the British music scene.”
Less than two years later, Huggy Bear had disintegrated, as had Riot Grrrl. The American Riot Grrrls had experienced their own media mauling only a few months earlier, one from which they never fully recovered. Riot Grrrl thrived only for as long as it inhabited an underground of fanzines, pamphlets, small shows, and intimate meetings—as long as those involved maintained control over their own message. As soon as it became fair game for journalists, it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. And though Riot Grrrl was an imperfect movement which deserved close scrutiny, there was still something alarming about the viciousness and intensity of the backlash, and what it meant for any future bands who might want to make a political statement. “We started off quite ebullient and unbeatable,” says Rowley. “But three years is quite a long time to maintain that level of ‘we don’t care,’ because we did care. We didn’t mind being outsiders, but we didn’t want to be hated.”
“The most bizarre aspect of the…backlash has been its niggling, nit-picking nature,” argued NME’s Steven Wells. “[Huggy Bear] have had their ideology combed over, examined, misinterpreted, rewritten and kicked to death a hundred times. Talk about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. If the Clash or Dylan or Bob bloody Marley had suffered such intense scrutiny they would all have failed the examination.”
IN THE UNITED STATES, Riot Grrrl had two epicenters: the small college town of Olympia, Washington, on the West Coast, and Washington, DC, on the East. Olympia was home to both the liberal Evergreen College and a thriving all-ages coffeeshop gig scene. In 1982, Calvin Johnson—a charismatic student DJ who loved such off-the-wall, female-dominated British bands as the Slits and the Young Marble Giants—founded K Records and, three years later, his own band, Beat Happening. Instead of codifying punk as hard, fast, and aggressive, à la hardcore, Johnson embraced its DIY ethos—the sense that anyone could join in, even if their technical skill left much to be desired—and reclaimed it for geeks, women, and others who didn’t fancy screaming with their shirt off. Drinking nothing stronger than tea, he favored vintage cardigans, businessman haircuts and other cutesy throw-backs to the whitebread 1950s: a previous generation’s conformity remade as outsider chic. Johnson, and the acolytes whom Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain called “Calvinists,” quickly defined the Olympia scene, creating a nurturing, if somewhat cliquey, environment.*
Shortly before establishing K, Johnson had been inspired by a trip to Washington, DC, where he met Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye. As the decade progressed, MacKaye’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, Dischord House, became a hub of punk-rock activism concerning such causes as abortion rights, gun control, and the anti-apartheid movement, especially during the 1985 series of events they called “Revolution Summer.” Dischord’s example inspired the Embassy, home to a radical new group called the Nation of Ulysses, who pinched ideas from the Black Panthers and situationists, dispatched tongue-in-cheek revolutionary communiqués about bringing down the adult world, and called their debut album 13-Point Plan to Destroy America (1991).
Johnson’s visit to DC was the start of regular, cross-country traffic between the two scenes, playing gigs and exchanging ideas. Around the turn of the decade, feminist punk fanzines (commonly known as zines) began to spring up, including Sharon Cheslow’s Interrobang? in DC and Tobi Vail’s Jigsaw in Olympia. Vail was so thrilled by a Nation of Ulysses performance in Olympia that she determined to form her own band, an alternative to “punk rock…for and by boys.” With Kathleen Hanna, a singer who was working in a domestic violence shelter at the time, she formed Bikini Kill and released a debut EP with the brilliant, sloganeering title Revolution Girl Style Now! (1991).†
Two young women were particularly inspired by Jigsaw. Allison Wolfe, the Olympia-raised daughter of a “super hard-core, 70s era, second-wave feminist,” and Molly Neuman, the daughter of a DC-based publicist for the Democratic Party, became next-door neighbors and fast friends at the University of Oregon in Eugene in the autumn of 1989. Wolfe and Neuman published their own fanzine, Girl Germs, while mounting “guerrilla” a cappella performances at parties. “We had already named our band Bratmobile and we were going around telling people we were in a band, but we weren’t really,” says Wolfe.
Wolfe vaguely knew Hanna from seeing her around Olympia. “She had a shaved head so she really stood out. I remember being scared of her because she always looked like she was glaring at everyone.” When Wolfe saw Hanna’s pre–Bikini Kill band, Viva Knieval, “she was yelling at the top her lungs: ‘Boy poison! Boy poison!’ And her face was bright red and the veins were popping out on her neck. Most of the bands were more tra-la-la, sweetie-pie and that was the first confrontional girl I’d seen on stage. I was really intrigued by that.” So when Calvin Johnson asked her and Neuman to support Bikini Kill at a show on Valentine’s Day 1991, the two women formalized Bratmobile. “When we formed a band we didn’t know how to play,” says Wolfe. “So for me, expressing and voicing my politics were actually the most important part of being in a band.”
Wolfe and Neuman spent their spring vacation at Nation of Ulysses’ Embassy in DC, which was “much more of a guy town” than the female-dominated Olympia scene. It was a turbulent time in the city. On May 23, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Rust v. Sullivan that it was constitutional for the Bush administration to prohibit federally funded clinics from offering advice regarding abortion. The decision stoked fears that the right to abortion itself, as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, was under threat. Earlier the same month, three nights of rioting broke out in the city’s Mount Pleasant area after a Hispanic man was shot and wounded by a female police officer, the city’s worst unrest since 1968.
Though unrelated, the two incidents intensified the sense of urgency and imminent confrontation in the city’s punk scene. Zine writer Jen Smith wrote a letter to her friend Wolfe containing a memorable phrase: “We’re going to have a girl riot this summer.”
AT THE TIME, Wolfe and Neuman were thinking of launching a new weekly zine and needed a catchy title. Working in Neuman’s dad’s office one night, they combined Smith’s language with the playful spelling of grrrl in the latest issue of Jigsaw (a riff on such 1970s feminist coinages as womyn) and printed off the first copies of Riot Grrrl. In the third issue, Hanna raised the idea of all-female meetings to discuss issues relevant to the scene. “She used to have problems relaxing,” says Wolfe. “She constantly needed to do things and say things. So a lot of the time she was the catalyst.” The first such gathering took place at the DC branch headquarters of punk activists Positive Force in July, where women including Wolfe, Neuman, Hanna, Vail, and Cheslow discussed anything from sexual abuse to aggressively macho slam-dancing at rock shows.
The birth of Riot Grrrl coincided with the arrival of a new generation of feminism. In October, an attorney called Anita Hill testified to the Senate that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had made graphic sexual remarks to her when she worked for him during the 1980s. Thomas’ nomination was narrowly confirmed, but debate over the truth of Hill’s allegations boiled for months afterwards. It was in response to the Thomas hearings that writer Rebecca Walker coined the catch-all phrase “third-wave feminism,” referring to a new generation of thinkers who focused on reproductive rights, language, and identity politics.
Whereas second-wave feminism emphasized economic issues such as workplace equality and child care, Riot Grrrl was more concerned with self-expression. “Theory didn’t always seem to have a place in our lives outside the classroom,” says Wolfe. “Our goal was to try and make academic feminism more punk, while also making punk rock more feminist.” Riot Grrrls sought to reclaim pejorative terms such as bitch and slut as well as supposedly nonfeminist imagery. “We can be cutesy and girly and whatever we want but we should still have rights and we should still be taken seriously,” argued Wolfe. While still exercised by such brass-tack political issues as abortion rights and sexual harassment, Riot Grrrls believed in opening up new cultural spaces for young women. One version of the ever-mutating Riot Grrrl manifesto claimed: “We seek to create revolution in our own lives every day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit Christian capitalist way of doing things.”
The joyous apex of Riot Grrrl’s own Revolution Summer came in August 1991, at K Records’ International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the like-minded Heavens to Betsy played on the opening night’s all-girl bill. “I think we all felt like we were in this together and all politicized,” says Wolfe. “It really felt like a crucial time. That festival was covered in Rolling Stone and,” she sighs as a less happy memory pokes through, “that really felt like the beginning of the onslaught.”
Even before the media attention, Riot Grrrl’s attempts to be flexible enough to accommodate different ideas was under strain. There was a utopian quality to the movement. “There is no editor and there is no concrete vision or expectation,” wrote Molly Neuman in Riot Grrrl. “We Riot Grrrls are not aligning ourselves with any one position or consensus, because in all likelihood we don’t agree. One concrete thing we do agree on so far is that it’s cool/fun to have a place where we can express ourselves that can’t be censored.” But such an open-ended attitude created its own problems. “There probably were some tensions starting to arise,” admits Wolfe. “Some of us felt more politicized than others and some people seemed like they just wanted to look cute. There did start to be divisions. Sometimes things got weird.”
GARY WALKER FIRST LEARNED about Riot Grrrl while working behind the counter at London’s Rough Trade record shop, the nexus of the UK independent music scene. He noticed two couples—Jo Johnson and Jon Slade, and Niki Elliot and Chris Rowley—coming in regularly to ask for releases by Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Johnson and Slade shared a flat in Brighton with their longtime friend Everett True, an influential Melody Maker writer who brought back records and zines from his regular trips to Olympia. Just as the Olympia Riot Grrrls had K Records and Beat Happening, their British counterparts had the so-called C86 scene, which was similarly bookish, unpolished, and sometimes twee. Gary Walker says of bands like Tallulah Gosh, Heavenly and the Pastels: “They were really influential because of the DIY attitude and making non-macho-sounding music and having girls in the band on an equal footing.”
Huggy Bear began, somewhat ironically, as a male duo comprising Slade and Rowley, but Elliot and Johnson, plus drummer Karen Hill, joined during 1991, the same year they learned about Riot Grrrl and hit upon a tougher, more politicized sound. One day in early 1992, they popped into Rough Trade to give Walker a fuzzy demo cassette, wrapped in a handmade sleeve. Walker ran his own small label named after the shop’s postcode, Wiiija, and released a compilation of Huggy Bear’s first two cassettes under the title We Bitched. A single, “Rubbing the Impossible to Burst,” followed in September, with a polemical fold-out cover laying out the group’s ideas. “I remember the guy at the printers laughing so hard: ‘What the fuck’s all this about?’” Walker laughs himself. “What seems so natural to you is so alien to everyone else.”
Huggy Bear, says Rowley, were about “mystery, romance and preciousness.” “We were all a bit refusenik. We didn’t want to do the easy thing. We wanted to be a band you could celebrate being into. We were very aware that people needed to be shaken up.” He was inspired by bands from the Pop Group to Nation of Ulysses: “Things that seem charged and make you want to run around afterwards and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ or, ‘What were they talking about?’” They had a very clear idea of the music they were against: “blokey, scruffy, apolitical, borderline misogynistic. We were a bit snooty and snotty but we didn’t want to reduce everything to lazy ideas and getting wasted and things being just entertainment. That was horrible.” They also cultivated a sexually ambivalent image: their first press photograph depicted Rowley kissing Slade, and Johnson kissing Elliot.
Huggy Bear set out to empower fans who felt that the mechanisms of protest were discredited and second-hand. “This generation seems to have been convinced that it can’t do anything for itself, that it’s all been done before,” Jo Johnson told NME’s Steven Wells. They conceived their own British version of Riot Grrrl, called Huggy Nation, fostering an informal network of fanzines, bands, and labels. “Prime movers doesn’t imply hierarchy,” emphasized Chris Rowley. “It’s people going out to do stuff and networking and letting us know about it.” In fact, the Leeds-based fanzine writer Karren Ablaze was just as significant in establishing Riot Grrrl’s British identity, via her 1992 newsletter Girlspeak. Like Tobi Vail, she had been inspired by Nation of Ulysses’ provocative approach, though not their poker-faced militia chic. “They fight the adult world, and we fight the man-world,” Ablaze wrote.
Because of their friendship with Everett True and Sally Margaret Joy, Huggy Bear were confident that they could make the press work for them. Their first Melody Maker feature, in October 1992, was less an interview than a collaborative splurge of ideas. “You need to rest after talking to Huggy Bear,” wrote Joy. “It’s like you’ve been out in a thunderstorm.” They discussed the joys of not being proper musicians, the power of zines and homemade cassettes, the idiocy of major labels, and, prophetically, the perils of negotiating the media. “The media always tries to pick something from the underground and make it powerless,” said Elliot. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
She must have been thinking about recent upheavals in the American scene. In July, LA Weekly’s Emily White had written the first mainstream story on Riot Grrrl, sparking a feeding frenzy which sucked in the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and even Playboy. In the months since Bikini Kill’s old friends Nirvana had found mainstream success as huge as it was sudden and unexpected, punk rock was major news and Riot Grrrl had Next Big Thing appeal. Unfortunately, the coverage was at best simplistic, at worst patronizing or hostile. “Better watch out, boys,” chirruped USA Today’s Elizabeth Snead. “From hundreds of once pink frilly bedrooms comes the young feminist revolution. And it’s not pretty. But it doesn’t want to be. So there!” Riot Grrrls were variously portrayed as trivial (“feminism with a loud happy face dotting the i”), tiresome (“serious and somber and self-absorbed”), and pampered (“their somewhat privileged lives have given them the time and the freedom to express their rage”). Meanwhile, Kathleen Hanna’s confessions of childhood abuse and a spell as a stripper were quickly sculpted into a titillating caricature. “I do think that people want to stare at my tits, want to see me put my foot in my mouth, to see us fuck up,” Hanna complained. She predicted that someone would soon manufacture “Riot Barbie.” “She’ll come with a little beat-up guitar, some miniature spray paints that don’t work, and a list of dumb revolutionary slogans like ‘Riot Coke just for the taste of it.’”
“It was a total shock,” says Wolfe. “Even though [Riot Grrrl] felt like the biggest thing in the world to us, it still just felt like it was our world, and to have that knocked out of our hands….” She trails off. “A lot of what was important about Riot Grrrl was the idea of taking over the means of production: putting out our own media and maintaining control over our images and words. So it was a shock to have other people throw up a mirror that was all distorted. We didn’t understand it at all. There was so much disinformation.”
What really twisted the knife was the fact that the harshest coverage came from female writers and musicians. Hole’s Courtney Love, despite being an early fan of Bikini Kill, dripped disdain: “They’re mostly strippers, they all have flat stomachs and they wear hip-huggers. They write their own fanzines, which are kind of like SCUM manifestos for twelve-year-olds…. It’s all about girls, not women.”* “I felt like the media ended up pitting different girls against each other—‘Well, so-and-so hates Riot Grrrl,’” says Wolfe. “Why can’t we all coexist?”
Hanna, already wary of the press, responded by imposing a media blackout on Riot Grrrl. If mainstream publications could not be trusted, the message would have to trickle out as it had before, via the fanzines and records. But this new siege mentality exposed further fault lines within both the community and individual bands—Riot Grrrl, after all, wasn’t meant to have leaders or rules. “I agreed with it because I couldn’t believe the way our ideas and words were being twisted around, but my bandmates definitely did not agree,” says Wolfe. “Their idea was: what’s best for Riot Grrrl isn’t necessarily what’s best for our band. So a lot of fights had to do with that. I think all the bands were having those issues.”†
Riot Grrrls saw the movement as an ongoing debate, which in time would resolve, or at least embrace, its discrepancies and explore more fully such neglected areas as race and class, but it was never allowed that time. Just a year after the heady possibilities of Revolution Summer, it was frozen in the media glare: a rough draft dissected as unforgivingly as if it were the finished article. This was the fate that, in October 1992, Huggy Bear were confident they could avoid.
ALTHOUGH RIOT GRRRL WAS THE FIRST full-fledged feminist rock movement, the bands, like previous generations of politically aware female musicians, expressed themselves more eloquently in their actions than in their songs. Their lyrics were more often personal than polemical, and some of the period’s best overtly feminist protest songs came from outside of the scene. New York’s Sonic Youth, a good decade older than the Riot Grrrl bands, almost predicted the movement on 1990’s “Kool Thing,” on which Kim Gordon (the band’s only female member) asked, wrily, “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?” and guest Chuck D paraphrased himself to discuss “fear of a female planet.” In 1992 they struck out at sexual harassment on “Youth Against Fascism” (“I believe Anita Hill / Judge can rot in hell”) and “Swimsuit Issue.” The same year, Seattle’s L7, prime movers behind the Rock for Choice abortion-rights concerts, recorded a crunchingly tuneful attack on political apathy, “Pretend We’re Dead.” But 1993 gave Riot Grrrl two radical anthems to call its own: Bikini Kill’s chugging, celebratory “Rebel Girl” (“When she talks I hear the revolution”) and Huggy Bear’s “Her Jazz.”
“Her Jazz” was an article before it was a song. In a 1992 issue of Huggy Nation, Huggy Bear talked about “GIRL-JAZZ SUPREMACY, a state of mind and a way of life that transforms and redefines itself daily.” The band’s prose, like its identity, was in constant flux: declamatory yet opaque, prizing energy over clarity. Their appetite for knowledge was prodigious, their inspirations ranging from Patti Smith to Joan of Arc, the Last Poets to Virginia Woolf, Debbie Harry to Hélène Cixous. “HER JAZZ is fierce and uncompromising and will not fit into the square world’s puzzle,” they promised. Their third single wrangled all of these writhing ambiguities into the most invigorating three minutes of the band’s career.
“We wanted a revolution you could dance to. It was like a call-to-arms.” says Rowley, who remembers such diverse influences as rockabilly revivalists Thee Headcoatees, Sonic Youth’s 1988 slacker anthem “Teen Age Riot,” and LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Rowley’s original lyric was about outgrowing a charismatic but manipulative mentor in a blinding flash of realization (“struck by lightning”), but Johnson turned the last verse on the band’s doubters (“This is happening without your permission”), transforming it into a two-fisted declaration of intent which ended up surprising its creators. “It became the only song that anyone talked about,” Rowley says with a sigh. “We had a feeling people would love the record, though not to the extent they did. We were quite bad at dealing with compliments. We were quite into being a sour, acquired taste.”
Huggy Bear’s mercurial polemic was just one voice in an unusually political period for British music. The ongoing recession, the shock reelection of John Major’s Conservative government and the troubling rise of the far-right British National Party (successor to the National Front) contributed to a mood of impatient dissent. The NME’s John Harris proposed a tracklisting for a cassette he called “1993: THE YEAR THAT MUSIC GOT APOPLECTIC AGAIN.” It included tracks by Anglo-Asian indie groups Cornershop and Voodoo Queens; antifascist dance-punks Blaggers ITA and Senser; radical Islamic rappers Fun-Da-Mental; London MC Credit to the Nation; LA rap-rock outfit Rage Against the Machine; and the fiercely intelligent Welsh rock group the Manic Street Preachers.*
None of this added up to a unified movement as such, but it planted politics firmly in the pages of the music press, via such well-read and inquiring writers as Steven Wells and John Harris at the NME and Simon Price and Simon Reynolds at Melody Maker. Sometimes, their own combative, analytical prose was more rewarding than anything their interviewees came up with. When former Smiths front man Morrissey, whose recent lyrics and comments regarding race and British identity had been troublingly ambiguous, swathed himself in a Union flag at a gig in May 1992, NME took him to task across five closely argued pages. But not every reader was impressed with the music weeklies’ growing interest in issues of race, gender, and class. One, calling himself “Sid the Manager,” wrote sarcastically: “Manager seeks four pro-gay Asian Riot Grrrls to form band. Guaranteed Melody Maker blanket coverage. No experience necessary.”
Much though the music weeklies considered themselves the voices of a left-leaning counterculture, to the Riot Grrrls they were pillars of the establishment. “NME AND ITS ‘RIVAL’ MELODY MAKER ARE OWNED BY THE SAME COMPANY—IPC,” blared DIY publication Terrorzine. “HATE WOMEN, GIRLS, NON-WHITES. WE EXPOSE!!! THEIR WRITERS AND EDITORS.” Their attitude to the press was summed up in Bikini Kill’s “Don’t Need You”: “Don’t need you to say we’re good / Don’t need you to tell us we suck.”
The Riot Grrrls saw engagement with the mainstream media as a zero-sum game: if the weeklies didn’t print interviews unedited and without judgement, then they were the enemy. But they could not stop the music papers from writing about them, so the debate carried on without them. No female musician could avoid being asked about Riot Grrrl, and some seemed to attack it only because they were tired of the question. “It’s a load of bollocks,” said Lesley Rankine of Silverfish. “I’m sick to death of hearing about it.”
“I think everyone was dealing with it on the hoof,” says Gary Walker. “On one level it was amazing that some teenage girl reading the Daily Mail may actually be inspired by this, but it did introduce a lot of paranoia and wanting to retreat back into a world where they felt comfortable.” Chris Rowley remembers: “We did credit people with intelligence because we were listening to intelligent music. It didn’t quite work out like that. You’re dealing with political smear tactics that influence everyone that you credited with intelligence in the first place.”
With press attention at its height, Huggy Bear released a split album with Bikini Kill, Our Troubled Youth / Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, and the two bands set out on a national tour together. Journalists were not welcome. Before the Manchester show, Niki Elliot told the NME’s Gina Morris to “fuck off,” and a subsequent attempt at an off-the-record conversation ended in a walkout by the group. “They’ve fed a political monster and it’s grown too big for them to handle,” Morris decided. “They’re scared.” At a notorious concert at Newport TJ’s in Wales, the band was derailed by male hecklers, many of whom had come along simply to goad the latest media sensations. “Huggy Bear, being less experienced as a band, would get into arguing with the audience members, and that’s where the politics got separated from the art,” says Walker. “Kathleen [Hanna] was a master of one-liners. She could cut anyone down and move on to the next song.”
“They perceived us to be snotty, southern, pampered friends of the music press who needed a good hiding,” says Rowley. “Bricks got thrown, people would scream out stuff from the crowd, equipment would be destroyed. There was always ugliness, but there were always amazing shows.”
After a poorly organized summer tour with Bratmobile, Huggy Bear went to play the United States, where they could perform with kindred spirits away from the media glare. Back in Britain, the mood was increasingly hostile. Alex James of Blur repeated a joke that was doing the indie-scene rounds: “How many riot grrrls does it take to change a lightbulb? None, because they’re never gonna change anything.” Melody Maker’s Sarra Manning rubbished the whole movement, attacking the “rigid and formulaic” music and “grubby little fanzine[s].”
Huggy Bear’s decision to break up after 1994’s hardcore-influenced Weaponry Listens to Love, was, says Rowley, always the Crass-style plan. “Huggy Bear was a three-year project from the beginning. It had to end. Because all the bands we used to like were only three years at their best. There were days prior to the last year when we wanted to give up, and there were days prior to when we did give up when we were like, ‘Oh, we should carry on doing this.’ But we kept it like an art project. We had three years to do it and if we didn’t we were being lazy.”
Some members quit music altogether for careers in childcare and social work. Other British Riot Grrrl bands, Mambo Taxi, Pussycat Trash, and the Voodoo Queens, fell in quick succession. Bratmobile didn’t survive either. They had been booked to play a prestigious party hosted by Sassy magazine in New York, their first show for six months. “We hadn’t really been talking,” says Allison Wolfe. “I felt like Riot Grrrl was kind of eating itself. There were a lot of newer girls getting involved. I don’t know what their problem was but they were trying as hard as they could to tear people down to make themselves feel better—a contest to see who’s more oppressed than who. I was taking it very personally. I felt like the weak link was bound to break under pressure and that’s exactly what happened.” In front of such luminaries as Sonic Youth and Joan Jett, Bratmobile “just completely imploded on stage.” She laughs. “[Sonic Youth’s] Thurston Moore did say it was some of the best performance art he had ever seen.”
As an idea, though, Riot Grrrl survived the backlash. Many zines endured, finding a new platform online. Riot Grrrl ideas flowered in the records of Sleater-Kinney (featuring Heavens to Betsy’s Corin Tucker) and Le Tigre (featuring Kathleen Hanna), whose “Hot Topic” (1999) was a joyous roll call of feminist icons. A generation of young female music fans was introduced to feminism and inspired to learn more and to find new means of creative expression. But the initial optimism and camaraderie of the scene on both sides of the Atlantic was blown apart by the end of 1994, and with it the last significant musical movement to have a political agenda at its core.
“It was never on a firm foundation,” reflects Wolfe. “I can see what a lot of the flaws were and why it couldn’t survive. I just wish it could have run a little longer or maybe not have ended so negatively because afterwards there was such a backlash and I felt like the guys especially welcomed that. So much seemed like it was at stake that I think a lot of people hid under a rock after that.”
With the dissipation of Riot Grrrl and the rise of a potent new scene, Britpop, the music press also became less politically astute and questioning with each passing month. For many disparate reasons, 1994 appeared to represent the protest song’s last gasp.