Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

We wanted to protect one another, to be inoffensive, inclusive, aware of our own shortcomings and faults, to improve and evolve, to make radical changes. Yet there was so much pressure on this single indie and punk movement, one that clearly couldn’t address all forms of personhood or inequality.

Like so many aspects of my life up until that point, the only remarkable thing about that night was that it was a small version of letting go, which I sort of detested, and definitely feared.

With access to everything, we can dabble without really knowing. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it’s easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance and predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease.

Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.

The role of a woman onstage is often indistinct from her role offstage—pleasing, appeasing, striking some balance between larger-than-life and iconic with approachable, likable, and down-to-earth, the fans like gaping mouths, hungry for more of you.

But for a creator, it’s so easy for the discussion surrounding a phenomenon to usurp the phenomenon itself. It’s worse, of course, with comment sections on websites and blogs, particularly anonymous comments, or the incessant chatter and opinions on social media. Everyone gets to write a headline, and when you or the thing you do is being talked about, you get to feel like a headline—an addicting feeling for sure, but also a pernicious one. The discourse builds its own body, and it’s usually a monster.

Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don’t care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON’T CARE.

denial is its own form of compliance and self-erasure. Plus, it’s exhausting. We would go out on the road and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.

If you’re wondering how sad I was, you’d never know by talking to me, but you would know it by the fact that I won the Oregon Humane Society Volunteer of the Year Award in 2006, the year of Sleater-Kinney’s demise.