Pussy Riot Protests Bring On Resurrection of Riot Grrl Culture
There have been a couple of posts in this space over the last few months lamenting the lack of powerful, opinionated and angry women on the alt-rock scene. (See Where Have All the Riot Grrls Gone? and They Don’t Make Rock Chicks Like They Used To.)
Maybe everything was waiting for the right conditions. And it looks like Pussy Riot has created those conditions. The New Yorker has an article entitled Pussy Riot Grrrls.
In the alley outside The Smell, an all-ages punk venue in Los Angeles, I chat with Katy Goodman, the bassist in the indie-rock band Vivian Girls. She had cut her finger earlier that day while making stencils for the “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirts they’re selling inside, and she’s worried that it’ll affect her bass playing. The band is headlining tonight’s benefit show for Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist performance-art group whose members were recently sentenced to two years in a penal colony for “hooliganism” after reading a “punk prayer” inside a Russian Orthodox church.
I ask Goodman what made her want to perform. “Here in America, we can sing about anything we want,” she says. “And because of, like, riot grrrl and stuff, it’s not even weird that Vivian Girls is a band. Girls can get together and sing about anything, whether it’s political or about flowers or something. Being in prison is not something we ever consider when it comes to our music.”
