Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective. Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience’s part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary. When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she’s not performing as herself, and if she’s not performing as herself, then it’s not her who is wooing us, loving us. We don’t get to have her because we don’t know exactly who she is. 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.

We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly.

I think cultural criticism and long-form critique have their place and their purpose. But for a creator, it’s so easy for the discussion surrounding a phenomenon to usurp the phenomenon itself.

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.

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.

To me, it’s the perfect distillation of the disparity between being onstage and being off. For all the power you command in a live context, all the myth and mythmaking that goes into that moment, elevated by the agreement between performer and audience, when you’re offstage, you’re shrunk down to human size, to the humility it takes to endure the quotidian.

I love being a new onlooker, a convert. To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Touring with Pearl Jam allowed me to see how diminishing and stifling it is to close yourself off to experiences. It was a tour that changed my life.

With music, I had been working in a populist medium, whereas academia felt insular and impenetrable. I wanted my work to be found, discovered, available. And I was fooling myself thinking that I could or would give up the one thing, music, that, although peripatetic and jolting and full of vicissitudes, had also brought me the most joy, the most highs, the most connection I had ever felt.

Tour is a precarious nexus between monotony and monomania—a day of nothingness followed by a moment that feels like everything.

Like many aspects of our career, it nearly worked. It almost succeeded. That could be our band biography. Almost, by Sleater-Kinney.

Be still this old heart Be still this old skin Drink your last drink Sin your last sin Sing your last song About the beginning Sing it out loud So the people can hear Be still this sad day Be still this sad year Hope your last hope Fear your last fear I could barely get the words out. When we finished the song, Corin and I were both crying. It’s when and how I said my own good-bye.

All we ever wanted was just to play songs and shows that mattered to people, that mattered to us. Music that summed up the messiness of life, that mitigated that nagging fear of hopelessness, loneliness, and death. That night, we played for a roomful of the people who understood that very thing. Once again, I felt privileged, lucky.

There is no virility in a woman’s autonomy, there is only pity. I was floating. I had created my own abandonment.