P.J. O’Rourke (RIP) Explains Why You Can Never Win Over Your Political Adversaries by Mocking Them

Don­ald Trump, as his sup­port­ers and detrac­tors alike can agree, is immune to humor. All the par­o­dy, satire, ridicule, and insult with which he was cease­less­ly bom­bard­ed dur­ing his four years as the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca had, to a first approx­i­ma­tion, no effect what­so­ev­er. If any­thing, it just made him more pow­er­ful. “There has been tremen­dous scorn for and fun made of Trump, and indeed Trump sup­port­ers,” says the late humorist P.J. O’Rourke in the clip above from a 2106 Intel­li­gence Squared event. But “when you are angry at the estab­lish­ment, and you see the estab­lish­ment not just dis­agree­ing with your can­di­date but mock­ing your can­di­date, there is an ele­ment that says, ‘They’re mock­ing me.’ ”

As a result, “every time you went out to make fun of Trump, you increased his sup­port, because peo­ple were feel­ing scorned.” The result of the 2016 elec­tion, which hap­pened the next month, would seem to have borne this out. “When peo­ple feel they are out­siders,” O’Rourke says, “you can­not con­vince them by mock­ing them.” This may, at first, sound some­what rich com­ing from a writer who spent half a cen­tu­ry turn­ing every­thing that so much as approached the world of pol­i­tics into joke mate­r­i­al. But O’Rourke did­n’t engage in mock­ery, per se; rather, he straight­for­ward­ly observed that which came before him. “Humor isn’t about being fun­ny,” he once said in anoth­er inter­view. “It’s about putting emo­tion­al dis­tance between your­self and the pat­terns of human behav­ior.”

I’ve long kept that obser­va­tion in mind, as I have so much else O’Rourke wrote and said. If any one thing made me a writer, it was all the fif­teen-minute breaks from my high-school job at the Gap I spent read­ing his books at the Bor­ders on the oth­er side of the mall. I took a rebel­lious plea­sure, at that age and at that time, in get­ting laughs from the work of a writer who was clear­ly not a man of the left. Or rather, a writer who was for­mer­ly a man of the left: a self-con­fessed 1960s hip­pie, he like many of the Baby Boom gen­er­a­tion under­went a polit­i­cal con­ver­sion after notic­ing the deduc­tions from his pay­check. “I’d been strug­gling for years to achieve social­ism in Amer­i­ca,” goes one of his oft-quot­ed lines, “only to dis­cov­er that we had it already.”

Yet O’Rourke was nev­er a doc­tri­naire right-winger. Forged at the Nation­al Lam­poon (for which he wrote the well known piece “How to Dri­ve Fast on Drugs While Get­ting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”) he emerged as a 1980s lib­er­tar­i­an-lib­er­tine. In recent decades, dur­ing which he often appeared as a con­vivial polit­i­cal out­sider on shows like Nation­al Pub­lic Radio’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, he shift­ed to the ter­ri­to­ry ref­er­enced in the title of his last book, 2020’s A Cry from the Far Mid­dle. In the video above he reads its intro­duc­tion, a dis­patch from a time of not just “moron pop­ulism and idiot par­ti­san­ship” but also a “griev­ous health cri­sis, lock­down iso­la­tion, eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and mate­r­i­al depri­va­tion.” Once a wise­crack­ing cor­re­spon­dent from the world’s trou­ble spots, he knew to bet that even in Amer­i­ca, “human nature will tri­umph over adver­si­ty and chal­lenge. And I don’t mean that in a good way.”

You can read O’Rourke’s obit­u­ary here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Come­di­ans Speak­ing Truth to Pow­er: Lenny Bruce, George Car­lin & Richard Pry­or (NSFW)

Kurt Von­negut Pon­ders Why “Poor Amer­i­cans Are Taught to Hate Them­selves” in a Time­ly Pas­sage from Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese Wor­ries That Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness Will Lead Us into a Humor­less World, Rem­i­nis­cent of Orwell’s 1984

Bill Hicks’ 12 Prin­ci­ples of Com­e­dy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Organized Chaos!: Watch 33 Videos Showing How Saturday Night Live Gets Made Each Week

Who do you think of when you think of Sat­ur­day Night Live?

The orig­i­nal cast? 

Cre­ator Lorne Michaels?

Who­ev­er host­ed last week’s episode?

What about the guy who makes and holds the cue cards?

Wal­ly Fer­esten is just one of the back­stage heroes to be cel­e­brat­ed in Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live, a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the long-run­ning tele­vi­sion sketch show comes togeth­er every week.

Like many of those inter­viewed Fer­esten is more or less of a lif­er, hav­ing come aboard in 1990 at the age of 25.

He esti­mates that he and his team of 8 run through some 1000 14” x 22” cards cards per show. Teleprompters would save trees, but the pos­si­bil­i­ty of tech­ni­cal issues dur­ing the live broad­cast presents too big of a risk.

This means that any last minute changes, includ­ing those made mid-broad­cast, must be han­dled in a very hands on way, with cor­rec­tions writ­ten in all caps over care­ful­ly applied white painter’s tape or, worst case sce­nario, on brand new cards.

(After a show wraps, its cards enjoy a sec­ond act as drop­cloths for the next week’s paint­ed sets.)

Near­ly every sketch requires three sets of cue cards, so that the cast, who are rarely off book due to the fre­quent changes, can steal glances to the left, right and cen­ter.

As the depart­ment head, Fer­esten is part­nered with each week’s guest host, whose lines are the only ones to be writ­ten in black. Bet­ty White, who host­ed in 2010 at the age of 88, thanked him in her 2011 auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

Sure­ly that’s worth his work-relat­ed arthrit­ic shoul­der, and the recur­rent night­mares in which he arrives at Stu­dio 8H just five min­utes before show­time to find that all 1000 cue cards are blank.

Cos­tumes have always been one of Sat­ur­day Night Live’s flashiest plea­sures, run­ning the gamut from Cone­heads and a rap­ping Cup o’Soup to an immac­u­late recre­ation of the white pantsuit in which Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris deliv­ered her vic­to­ry speech a scant 3 hours before the show aired.

“A cos­tume has a job,” wardrobe super­vi­sor Dale Richards explains:

It has to tell a sto­ry before (the actors) open their mouth…as soon as it comes on cam­era, it should give you so much back­sto­ry.

And it has to cleave to some sort of real­i­ty and truth­ful­ness, even in a sketch as out­landish as 2017’s Hen­ri­et­ta & the Fugi­tive, star­ring host Ryan Gosling as a detec­tive in a film noir style romance. The gag is that the dame is a chick­en (cast mem­ber Aidy Bryant.)

Richards cites actress Bette Davis as the inspi­ra­tion for the chick­en’s look:


Because you’re not going to believe it if the detec­tive couldn’t actu­al­ly fall in love with her. She has to be very fem­i­nine, so we gave her Bette Davis bangs and long eye­lash­es and a beau­ti­ful bon­net, so the under­pin­nings were very much like an actress in a movie, although she did have a chick­en cos­tume on.

The num­ber of quick cos­tume changes each per­former must make dur­ing the live broad­cast helps deter­mine the sketch­es’ run­ning order.

Some of the break­neck trans­for­ma­tions are han­dled by Richards’ sis­ter, Don­na, who once beat the clock by pig­gy­back­ing host Jen­nifer Lopez across the stu­dio floor to the chang­ing area where a well-coor­di­nat­ed crew swished her out of her open­ing monologue’s skintight dress and sky­scraper heels and into her first cos­tume.

That’s one exam­ple of the sort of traf­fic the 4‑person crane cam­era crew must bat­tle as they hur­tle across the stu­dio to each new set. Cam­era oper­a­tor John Pin­to com­mands from atop the crane’s coun­ter­bal­anced arm.

Those swoop­ing crane shots of the musi­cal guests, open­ing mono­logue and good­nights (see below) are a Sat­ur­day Night Live tra­di­tion, a part of its icon­ic look since the begin­ning.

Get to know oth­er back­stage work­ers and how they con­tribute to this week­ly high wire act in a 33 episode Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night playlist, all on dis­play below:

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From Sat­ur­day Night Live

Sat­ur­day Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in Octo­ber, 1975

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Back in col­lege, I spot­ted A Peo­ple’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States in the bags and on the book­shelves of many a fel­low under­grad­u­ate. By that time, Howard Zin­n’s alter­na­tive telling of the Amer­i­can sto­ry had been pop­u­lar read­ing mate­r­i­al for a cou­ple of decades, just as it pre­sum­ably remains a cou­ple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zin­n’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. his­to­ry through non-stan­dard points of view remain wide­ly influ­en­tial. Just last month, Rad­i­cal Reads fea­tured the read­ing list he orig­i­nal­ly drew up for the Social­ist Work­er, pitched at “activists inter­est­ed in mak­ing their own his­to­ry.”

Zin­n’s rec­om­men­da­tions nat­u­ral­ly include the work of oth­er his­to­ri­ans, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peo­ples of Ear­ly Amer­i­ca (“a pio­neer­ing work of ‘mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism’ deal­ing with racial inter­ac­tions in the colo­nial peri­od”) to Vin­cent Hard­ing’s There Is a Riv­er: The Black Strug­gle for Free­dom in Amer­i­ca (an “excel­lent start on Black his­to­ry”) to Samuel Yel­len’s Amer­i­can Labor Strug­gles (which “brings to life the great labor con­flicts of Amer­i­can his­to­ry”).

His sug­gest­ed books cov­er not just the 20th cen­tu­ry but eras like the Civ­il War, and even, exten­sive­ly, the time of Christo­pher Colum­bus. For those who take their analy­ses of the past in com­i­cal­ly illus­trat­ed form, Zinn also high­lights Lar­ry Gonick­’s The Car­toon His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States as “fun­ny and remark­ably rich in its con­tent.”

Cer­tain Zinn picks stand out as being of spe­cial inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers. These include Noam Chom­sky’s Year 501, in which “the nation’s most dis­tin­guished intel­lec­tu­al rebel gives us huge amounts of infor­ma­tion about recent Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy”; Richard Hof­s­tadter’s The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Tra­di­tion, with its “icon­o­clas­tic view of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal lead­ers, includ­ing Jef­fer­son, Jack­son, Lin­coln, Wil­son and the two Roo­sevelts, sug­gest­ing more con­sen­sus than dif­fer­ence at the top of the polit­i­cal hier­ar­chy”; and W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Recon­struc­tion, “a direct counter to the tra­di­tion­al racist accounts of Recon­struc­tion, pre­sent­ing the nar­ra­tive from the Black point of view.” Zinn also prais­es The Six­ties, “a vivid his­to­ry, well-writ­ten, thought­ful, by one of the activists of that era”: Todd Gitlin, who died ear­li­er this month.

Despite its under­stand­able incli­na­tion toward non­fic­tion, Zin­n’s list also has room for sev­er­al clas­sic Amer­i­can nov­els like John Stein­beck­’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God. You may remem­ber some of these books from your own high-school and uni­ver­si­ty days, but what­ev­er you got out of them back then, you’ll expe­ri­ence them more rich­ly by revis­it­ing them now, deep­er into your own intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney. As Zin­n’s own life and work demon­strat­ed, you can always find more angles from which to view the polit­i­cal, social, and cul­tur­al his­to­ry of your coun­ty — the far­ther removed from those you were shown in school, the bet­ter.

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture, From the Begin­nings to the Civ­il War: A Free Online Course from NYU

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Adorn Your Gar­den with Howard the Zinn Monk

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Google App Uses Machine Learning to Discover Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Classic Works of Art


Does your cat fan­cy her­self a 21st-cen­tu­ry incar­na­tion of Bastet, the Egypt­ian God­dess of the Ris­ing Sun, pro­tec­tor of the house­hold, aka The Lady of Slaugh­ter?

If so, you should def­i­nite­ly per­mit her to down­load the Google Arts & Cul­ture app on your phone to take a self­ie using the Pet Por­traits fea­ture.

Remem­ber all the fun you had back in 2018 when the Art Self­ie fea­ture mis­took you for William II, Prince of Orange or the woman in “Jacob Cor­nelisz. van Oost­sa­nen Paint­ing a Por­trait of His Wife”?

Sure­ly your pet will be just as excit­ed to let a machine-learn­ing algo­rithm trawl tens of thou­sands of art­works from Google Arts & Culture’s part­ner­ing muse­ums’ col­lec­tions, look­ing for dop­pel­gängers.

Or maybe it’ll just view it as one more exam­ple of human fol­ly, if a far less­er evil than our predilec­tion for pet cos­tumes.

Should your pet wish to know more about the art­works it resem­bles, you can tap the results to explore them in depth.

Dogs, fish, birds, rep­tiles, hors­es, and rab­bits can play along too, though any­one hail­ing from the rodent fam­i­ly will find them­selves shut out.

Mash­able reports that “upload­ing a stock image of a mouse returned draw­ings of wolves.”

We can’t blame your pet snake for fum­ing.

Dit­to your Viet­namese Pot-bel­lied pig.

Though your pet fer­ret prob­a­bly doesn’t need an app (or a crys­tal ball) to know what its result would be. Bet­ter than an ermine col­lar, any­way…


If your pet is game and falls with­in Pet Por­traits approved species para­me­ters, here are the steps to fol­low:

  1. Launch the Google Arts & Cul­ture app and select the Cam­era but­ton. Scroll to the Pet Por­traits option.
  2. Have your pet take a self­ie. (Or alter­na­tive­ly, upload a saved image.)
  3. Give the app a few sec­onds (or min­utes) to return mul­ti­ple results with sim­i­lar­i­ty per­cent­ages.

Down­load the Google Arts & Cul­ture app here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Free App Ana­lyzes Your Self­ie and Then Finds Your Dop­pel­ganger in Muse­um Por­traits

Con­struct Your Own Bayeux Tapes­try with This Free Online App

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Ivan Reitman’s First Film “Orientation” (1968)

Last night, we sad­ly learned of the pass­ing of Ivan Reit­man, direc­tor of many beloved come­dies–Meat­balls (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghost­busters (1984), and beyond.

Born in Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1946–his moth­er an Auschwitz sur­vivor and his father an under­ground resis­tance fighter–Reitman moved to Cana­da as a young child, where he even­tu­al­ly attend­ed McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty. And there he “pro­duced and direct­ed Ori­en­ta­tion [in 1968], the most suc­cess­ful stu­dent film ever made in Cana­da,” writes Macleans. “Pro­duced at a cost of $1,800 while Reit­man was pres­i­dent of the McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty Film Board, Ori­en­ta­tion — the sto­ry of a fresh­man dur­ing his first week at uni­ver­si­ty — was acquired by Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry­Fox of Cana­da as a “fea­turette” to accom­pa­ny John And Mary in first-run engage­ments across the coun­try.” “It earned $15,000 in rentals and con­tin­ues to be in demand…” You can watch it above, or on McMas­ter’s web­site.

For any­one inter­est­ed in hear­ing Reit­man dis­cuss his devel­op­ment as a film­mak­er, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to his 2014 inter­view with Marc Maron.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

Bill Mur­ray Explains How a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Paint­ing Saved His Life

 

The First Illustrated Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gets Published, Featuring the Work of Spanish Artist Eduardo Arroyo

This year will see the long-delayed pub­li­ca­tion of a ver­sion of Ulysses that Joyce did­n’t want you to read — not James Joyce, mind you, but the author’s grand­son Stephen Joyce. Up until his death in 2020, Stephen Joyce opposed the pub­li­ca­tion of his grand­fa­ther’s best-known book in an illus­trat­ed edi­tion. But he only retained the pow­er actu­al­ly to pre­vent it until Ulysses’ 2012 entry into the pub­lic domain, which made the work freely usable to every­one who want­ed to. In this case, “every­one” includes such nota­bles as neo-fig­u­ra­tive artist Eduar­do Arroyo, described by the New York Times’ Raphael Min­der as “as one of the great­est Span­ish painters of his gen­er­a­tion.”

At the time of Ulysses’ copy­right expi­ra­tion, Arroyo had long since fin­ished his own set of more than 300 illus­tra­tions for Joyce’s cel­e­brat­ed and famous­ly intim­i­dat­ing nov­el. Arroyo not­ed in a 1991 essay, writes Min­der, that “imag­in­ing the illus­tra­tions kept him alive when he was hos­pi­tal­ized in the late 1980s for peri­toni­tis, an inflam­ma­tion of the abdom­i­nal lin­ing.”

The ini­tial hope was for an Arroyo-illus­trat­ed edi­tion to mark the 50th anniver­sary of Joyce’s death in 1991, but with­out the per­mis­sion of the author’s estate, the project had to be put on hold for a cou­ple of decades. When that time came, it was tak­en up again by two pub­lish­ers, Barcelon­a’s Galax­ia Guten­berg and New York’s Oth­er Press.

“Some of Arroyo’s black-and-white illus­tra­tions are print­ed in the mar­gins of the book’s pages, while oth­ers are dou­ble-page paint­ings whose vivid col­ors are rem­i­nis­cent of the Pop Art that inspired him.” His draw­ings, water­col­ors and col­lages include “eclec­tic images of shoes and hats, bulls and bats, as well as some sex­u­al­ly explic­it rep­re­sen­ta­tions of scenes that drew the wrath of cen­sors a cen­tu­ry ago.” For Ulysses’ “710 pages of inner mono­logue and dia­logue, stream of con­scious­ness, blank verse, Greek clas­sics, and the venues and byways of Dublin, 1904,” as the Los Ange­les Times’ Jor­dan Riefe puts it, are as well known for their for­mi­da­ble com­plex­i­ty as it is for the pow­er they once had to scan­dal­ize polite soci­ety.

Arroyo, who died in 2018, stayed faith­ful to Ulysses’ con­tent. (“Of course there are graph­ic nudes,” Riefe adds, “espe­cial­ly in lat­er chap­ters.”) He also suc­ceed­ed in com­plet­ing an ardu­ous project that the most notable artists of Joyce’s day refused even to attempt. “Joyce him­self had asked Picas­so and Matisse to illus­trate it,” writes Galax­ia Guten­berg’s Joan Tar­ri­da, “but nei­ther took on the task. Matisse pre­ferred to illus­trate The Odyssey,” Ulysses’ own struc­tur­al inspi­ra­tion, “which deeply offend­ed Joyce.” What Joyce would make of Arroy­o’s vital and mul­ti­far­i­ous illus­tra­tions, more of which you can sam­ple at Lit­er­ary Hub, is any schol­ar’s guess — but then, did­n’t he say some­thing about want­i­ng to keep the schol­ars guess­ing for cen­turies?

You can now pur­chase a copy of Ulysses: An Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion of James Joyce’s Clas­sic

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Read the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

Every Word of Joyce’s Ulysses Print­ed on a Sin­gle Poster

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How the Riot Grrrl Movement Created a Revolution in Rock & Punk

The Riot Grrrl move­ment feels like one of the last real rev­o­lu­tions in rock and punk, and not just because of its fem­i­nist, anti-cap­i­tal­ist pol­i­tics. As Poly­phon­ic out­lines in his short music his­to­ry video, Riot Grrrl was one of the last times any­thing major hap­pened in rock music before the inter­net. And it’s espe­cial­ly thrilling because it all start­ed with *zines*.

Women in the punk scene had a right to com­plain. Bands and their fans were very male, and sex­u­al harass­ment was chron­ic at shows, leav­ing most women stand­ing at the back of the crowd. Some zines even spelled it out: “Punks Are Not Girls,” says one.

Alien­at­ed from the scene but still fans at heart, Tobi Vail and Kath­leen Han­na, already pro­duc­ing their own fem­i­nist zines, joined forces to release “Biki­ni Kill” a gath­er­ing of lyrics, essays, con­fes­sion­als, appro­pri­at­ed quotes, plugs for Vail’s oth­er zine “Jig­saw”, and a sense that some­thing was hap­pen­ing. Some­thing was chang­ing in rock cul­ture. Kim Deal of the Pix­ies and Kim Gor­don of Son­ic Youth were heroes, Poly Styrene of X‑Ray Spex was a leg­end, and Yoko Ono “paved the way in more ways than one for us angry grrl rock­ers.” Anoth­er zine, “Girl Germs,” was cre­at­ed by Alli­son Wolfe and Mol­ly Neu­man.

Biki­ni Kill the zine led to Biki­ni Kill the band in 1990, and their song “Rebel Girl” became an anthem of a new fem­i­nist rock move­ment focused main­ly in the Pacif­ic North­west, around the same time as grunge.

Wolfe and Neu­man, joined by Erin Smith, formed Brat­mo­bile in 1991. K Records founder Calvin John­son had asked them to play sup­port for Biki­ni Kill, and out of necessity—Wolfe first admit­ted they were a “fake band”—they grabbed rehearsal space and became a “real” band on the spot. “Some­thing in me clicked,” Wolfe said. “Like, okay, if most boy punk rock bands just lis­ten to the Ramones and that’s how they write their songs, then we’ll do the oppo­site and I won’t lis­ten to any Ramones and that way we’ll sound dif­fer­ent.”

The bur­geon­ing scene need­ed a man­i­festo, and it got one in “Biki­ni Kill” issue #2. The Riot Grrrl Man­i­festo staked out a space that was against “racism, able-bod­ieism, ageism, speciesism, clas­sism, thin­ism, sex­ism, anti-semi­tism and het­ero­sex­ism” as well as “cap­i­tal­ism in all its forms.” It ends with: “BECAUSE I believe with my whole­heart­mind­body that girls con­sti­tute a rev­o­lu­tion­ary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.”

The man­i­festo (and the very healthy Pacif­ic North­west live scene) spawned a move­ment, even bring­ing with it bands that had been around pre­vi­ous­ly, like L7. Riot Grrrl set out to ele­vate women’s voic­es and music, with­out capit­u­lat­ing to male stan­dards, and return to the DIY and col­lec­tive ener­gy of the ear­ly punk scene. It also brought fem­i­nist the­o­ry out of the col­leges and onto the stage, and with it queer the­o­ry and dia­log about trau­ma, rape, and abuse—everything main­stream cul­ture would rather not talk about. Like the orig­i­nal punk scene in the 1970s, it burned bright­ly and flamed out. But it inspired gen­er­a­tions of bands, from Sleater-Kin­ney to White Lung, as well as non-rock music like the Elec­tro­clash move­ment.

Read a zine from the time, or lis­ten to the lyrics of Riot Grrrl bands and you will hear the same dis­course, and rec­og­nize the same tac­tics, as today. In some ways it feels even more rad­i­cal now-—that hum­ble, pho­to­copied zines could affect a whole scene and not be atom­ized by social media.

To delve deep­er, check out the New York Times’ Riot Grrl Essen­tial Lis­ten­ing Guide.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All 80 Issues of the Influ­en­tial Zine Punk Plan­et Are Now Online & Ready for Down­load at the Inter­net Archive

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The Great Courses Is Now Running a Big Spring Warehouse Clearance Sale

FYI: The Great Cours­es (for­mer­ly The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny) is run­ning its Spring Ware­house Clear­ance Sale, offer­ing a steep dis­count on a good num­ber of its cours­es. If you’re not famil­iar with it, the Great Cours­es pro­vides a very nice ser­vice. They trav­el across the U.S., record­ing great pro­fes­sors lec­tur­ing on great top­ics that will appeal to any life­long learn­er. They then make the cours­es avail­able to cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent for­mats (DVD, Video & Audio Down­loads, etc.). The cours­es are very pol­ished and com­plete, and they can be quite rea­son­ably priced, espe­cial­ly when they’re on sale, as they are today. Click here to explore the offer. The Spring Ware­house Clear­ance Sale ends on March 10.

Note: The Great Cours­es is a part­ner with Open Cul­ture. So if you pur­chase a course, it ben­e­fits not just you and Great Cours­es. It ben­e­fits Open Cul­ture too. So con­sid­er it win-win-win.

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.