Monday October 22, 2001

Jessica Suarez

I used to think the word "chick" was a word that meant, "young woman or girl." Now I think it must be a prefix meaning "boring, stupid or embarrassing."

Chick movies, chick rock and chick lit (that's literature, of course) have mostly been, at best, uninteresting and, at worst, insipid - to the point that I wish I was swinging a penis instead of carrying around this box.

Although there isn't much that interests me in the way of female-authored film or books, there is a lot of good girl-made music out there. The problem is that girl bands, good or bad, push the fact that they are female so much that whether they are actually good or not seems unimportant.

I can't get into a lot of feminist theory, because frankly, I don't know much. But this isn't about feminist theory - it's about aesthetics. I want girls to make good music, and I want to be able to respect them as well. I just can't feel that great about a girl band, even a good girl band, if being girls is the main thing they're pushing.

Girl bands seem to substitute sex appeal for talent, or, when they really are talented, use their gender as a rallying point instead of just playing music.

Two things triggered my outright dislike. The first was the breakup of one of my favorite bands, Elastica. Although it had been on a decline for a while, its first album was good enough to make it my favorite band, enough to make its breakup disappointing.

The thing I always liked most about Elastica was that although it was all-female (almost - the drummer was male,) it never made a big deal out of it.

Its lead singer said in an interview before Elastica broke up, "We're not writing songs for women or things women might feel. We try not to marginalize ourselves. You have a different set of problems if you're a woman with an instrument, but they're not necessarily greater - just different."

Not only did Elastica never make being female a big point, it never made it a selling point.

The second anti-girl trigger I had was at Zia the other day. I came across Clovenhoof's two albums. Clovenhoof is a local band- a local all-girl band - whose members were wearing Catholic schoolgirl outfits on one album (with white panties showing underneath their plaid skirts) and assless (that is, their pants had holes where an ass would be), cowboy outfits on the back of its other CD.

The band is pretty terrible, but surprisingly, its shows are well-attended. (If you'd like to know whether a girl band is more style than substance, follow this rule: A girl band's lameness is almost always directly proportional to how well their outfits match.)

Good or bad, female-led bands seem to want to make it obvious that they are a girl band. Bad chick bands will still always get an audience - a mostly male audience, just because they're girls - and especially if they wear something tight. Even good, intelligent girl bands seem to marginalize themselves by using the fact that they're female to distance a male audience. I'm almost as embarrassed by this as I am by girls in assless pants.

While Elastica let its medium be its message, other bands have to use femme-coded references, slide shows and other peripherals to create their audience, which then tends to be mostly female.

Kathleen Hanna, the former lead singer for Bikini Kill and current force behind Le Tigre, is an example of how female-driven music can and can't work. Le Tigre is a good band- good enough that it can appeal to male and female audiences with (maybe even in spite of) its marginalizing lyrics. Julie Ruin, Hanna's solo project, didn't succeed because the music wasn't that good and the lyrics were girl-exclusive to an embarrassing degree.

But like I said, her new band, Le Tigre, is really good, and lots of girl bands are really good, even though they only appeal to a mostly a female audience. But as long as girl bands make sure everyone focuses on their being girls, through appearance or message, they'll never be seen as anything else. People will always think girl first, band second.

Mostly, I guess I just miss the early '90s of female rock, when Elastica, The Breeders and Liz Phair were the best examples of what girls with guitars could do, and they didn't have to be girls to prove it.

At least that's what my boyfriend said.