Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"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."

Musicians,especially those who r women,r often dogged by assumption that they r singing 4m a persnl perspective...When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative,listeners&watchers must acknwledge tht she’s nt performing as herself,if she’s nt performing as herself,thn it’s nt her who is wooing us,loving us...An audience dsn’t wnt female distance,they wnt female openness&accessibility,familiarity tht validates femaleness.

As I looked down at my divided circle, it was the first clue I had that the band was something that represented a fair bit of anxiety for me as compared to Janet and Corin.
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Therapy wouldn’t diminish the number of times we’d get angry with one another, but now we at least knew we had to apologize.

Everything was exactly how I had left it, yet I felt like a stranger.
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The first thing we did was make a pie chart. We were each asked to illustrate how much of our life we wanted Sleater-Kinney to occupy, so we could understand how each of us might be approaching the band and its importance in our lives differently.

"She needs her own version of a life, to be her own protagonist."

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.
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So, instead of getting back to the room and throwing her on the bed, or her throwing me on the bed, or us mutually throwing ourselves onto the bed, we talked.

I consciously worked on being not just a creative partner but also a friend to Corin, a dependable ally and a confidante. Eventually, when Corin and Lance got married, I was the one she asked to give their wedding toast.

In subsequent years when I kicked my legs out toward the crowd or swung my guitar close to the heads in the front row, it was about trying to physically harness the moment, to crash into strangers in a horrible but ecstatic impact, a shared bruising..

Being in a band with an ex, both being songwriters and lyricists,takes a lot of compassion and understanding.Sometimes I think Corin and I fell back into a kind of platonic love by learning about each other through the songs we were writing.
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Those nights with Janet and Corin,it felt like being in the band had become its own version of family.
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We were on our way to finish our record—we had dug ourselves out.

Protecting your group and ethos required a rigidity. The tacit agreement you entered into when you became part of an underground or indie music scene was that to go mainstream had the potential to water down—or be an inevitable compromise—of your art.
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So if you did wish for more, you had to keep it a secret.
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One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.

Nowadays, leather jackets don’t predict a love of Marlon Brando or the Ramones any more than skinny jeans indicate an affinity with Johnny Thunders...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.

Whether quiet or loud, fast or slow, pretty or ugly—it was not about a sound or look—punk was about making choices that didn’t bend to consumptive and consumerist inclinations and ideologies, that didn’t commodify the music or ourselves.

My persona would not be about artifice or flamboyancy, it would not be alien or otherworldly, it would be about kineticism, it would be about movement. Again I returned to the notion that my salvation was to be in motion. I would be galvanic onstage, so that offstage I could try to figure out how to eventually live with a stillness, with myself.

My external persona was open and mercurial, and internally I was something far more complex, at least more multifaceted than a profile could capture or that I wanted to share.

There are no definitions as prescribed by outsiders, strangers; you feel capricious, full of contradictions, and areas of yourself feel frayed or blurred. Other times you feel resolute or whole. But it’s all a part of you, it doesn’t feel fractured, just mutable.

Books grounded me, helped me to feel less alone.
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We were monsters, we weren’t like you. We might have been movers but we were coming to steal what you thought was yours.

To this day, because I know no other way of being or feeling, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band—I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?”

I feel that this meta-discourse, talking about the talk, is part of how it feels to be a “woman in music” (or a “woman in anything,” for that matter—politics, business, comedy, power).

I set out from a place where I never assumed that those were acceptable choices or that I could be anything but an accessory to rock ’n’ roll. The archetypes, the stage moves, the representations of rebellion and debauchery were all male.

So much of working customer service is about self-erasure, subjugating and then selling yourself in order to sell the product, merging with the commodities until you feel like one.

One of the best aspects of Riot Grrrl was that anyone could adopt the term as their own—it wasn’t prescriptive. However, this ambiguity left room for a lot of interpretation. It was on this tour that I witnessed a girl with a tampon as a hair accessory and another with the word “Hippo” written across her T-shirt with a Sharpie. Reclamation had no bounds.

They found themselves in our songs, saw themselves, felt safe enough to let go only because we’d given them solid ground from which to step off. I’m not being self-aggrandizing—it meant the same to me.

the mystery was in the plainness, the starkness.
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Once you have to explain, or overexplain, what you’re doing, it’s hard to be larger than life. Every time you have to talk about it, you feel smaller, more accessible perhaps, but certainly not mythic.

Put me in a situation and I will find my way out of it or through it, I will hustle and scramble. I hate losing.

There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself. When you’re entrenched in a community of people who know you, it’s scary to proclaim wanting to be different and wanting to experiment.

I wanted to see my friend Miranda July before she went back home to Portland. Her neck was covered in hickeys. Who are those from? I asked. You, she answered. For days after, everyone walked around with a cold.

Perhaps because so many of us toured or played music,the hours were not structured around traditional industry or business, around mornings or lunch breaks. In those days, I hung out all the time, traveled in groups to group houses to eat group meals. We were amoebic. I was impressionable, open.

It felt like everyone was queer, that our sexuality and desires had less to do with our physical selves and more to do with music and art. Lust was part of the creative process, but the desire was often ambient. We did pair off into couples and date, but there was a fluidity to all things corporeal and quotidian.

Olympia was the quintessential “in” crowd versus “out” crowd.
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discord. I think part of the uniqueness of our sound is that we rarely land on a basic chord—the music stays somewhere in between, it’s always not quite right, which of course can sound more right than anything, or at least like nothing else.

I could find appeal in the sway of a bass player or the cocky head bop of a drummer, in the musculature, in the posturing, in the daring hint of sexiness that you’d never witness offstage, in a glance or glare, in the reveal of a fang, in a singer’s spit in the act of screaming, in sweat forming on a chest or hairlines, in a dropped pick somehow reclaimed mid-song, in a smile between two band members.