Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Heavens to Betsy came across as the most serious of their peers. You stood up, you listened, and you were quiet. They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you’re in the library of rock right now.

When people gripe about girls’ rock camps or schools of rock, saying music, especially popular forms, can’t be institutionalized or taught, maybe part of that is true, but I always think about that night. How if the process had been demystified, less of a private club or a secret code, we wouldn’t have sat in the dark theater after we played, watching Codeine deliver a taut, deliberate set while we felt undeserving of having ever been onstage, blaming one another and ourselves, mad and heartbroken.

the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”).

If getting drunk to the point of vomiting is what it takes to be brave enough to put my mouth against an acquaintance and colleague in front of all our mutual friends, I’m going to say it might not be worth it.

An audience doesn’t want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness. Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening. When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.

Portland has a nurturing quality, a placidity. For better or worse, it’s a perennial but shyly hopeful city; if we had a gesture it would be a shrug.

But in the interim years we’d realized that 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 in a band, you’re surrounded by few demarcations of maturity in the traditional sense, because you’re perennially enacting fairly adolescent behavior. It’s an unconventional life.

A music career, especially for a woman, is so at odds with the assumed normative path toward maturity and aging.

A male loner is a hero of sorts, a rebel, an iconoclast, but the same is not true of a female loner. There is no virility in a woman’s autonomy, there is only pity.