There Was A Time...

Julianne Shepherd of the City Pages has written a prose ode to watching the sun rising over the Atlantic from a beach on the Barrier Islands, the morning after she found she'd recovered fully from advanced cancer.

Sleater-Kinney's 2002 album, One Beat, was a "flash of clean white hope," as its opening track put it--a big-bang sparkler that reveled in singer/guitarist Corin Tucker's postpartum electricity and toiled in America's post-9/11 discomfiture. It was also the final record of the old Sleater-Kinney, the Sleater-Kinney where the friction came from within and from three separate parts, manifested by Tucker's barre chords and birdy warble butting Carrie Brownstein's clipped snarl and guitar spikes. Drummer Janet Weiss, who hits hard while singing harmonies honed in her pop band Quasi, held it together, but even on poppier albums like The Hot Rock (1999) and All Hands on the Bad One (2000), the band was still heavy on their trademark disjointedness. Always the music was informed by the warring slow burn of 1996's Call the Doctor and '97's Dig Me Out, albums made back when Tucker and Brownstein were frustrated, intelligent young exes evolving the riot grrl tradition of Olympia's Evergreen College, where the two met and formed S-K in 1994.

Quite an experience. I was awestruck...

...huhwhah? I had to read it twice before I realized the piece had nothing to do with recovery and sunrises; it's a review of Sleater-Kinney's new album!

I should mention that there was a time when I liked Sleater-Kinney.

Then I sort of stopped paying attention. Life moved on and all, y'know.

After reading this especially vacuous review, I might revert to overt hate.

I know. It's not the band's fault.

Oh, you haven't heard of Sleater-Kinney? They're an all-chick punk band from the mid-nineties that's in mid-comeback; they have a grownup publicity machine backing them now, which is why they're everywhere, on dozens of magazine covers and in every newspaper. Only a hasty marriage to Kevin Federline could make them bigger, it seems, within their incestuous retro-punk world.

Wait - I did say I used to like them, right? (Ruffle ruffle) Gadfy. Yes, I did. I used to like them, but I'm on the brink of hate.

Blame Ms. Shepherd.

-----------------------

Back when I was playing in bands in the Twin Cities, I knew the two immutable rules of the Twin Cities' music scene.

1. If you could play an instrument - sort of, at least - the road to success was paved by partying with, buying drugs for, or screwing a City Pages or (at the time) Twin Cities Reader writer.
2. If you couldn't fake it on an instrument, but you had a flair for breathless prose and lock-step trend-adherence, and spent enough time with the partying, drug-supplying or indoor sports-providing, you could make it as a City Pages or Reader music critic. For a while, anyway. Both tabloids turned over staffs as often as they turned over favored genres

.

Which is not to cast aspersions on Ms. Shepherd. I'm sure things have changed since 1989. I'm sure she got her job the old-fashioned way.

Through raw writiing talent (emphasis added):

None of this friendly separation was bad, but now that we have The Woods, Sleater-Kinney's seventh album, a fresh perspective on a 10-year-old band is like, whoa.

My sentiments exactly. Like. Whoah.

That's what I said when I read Ms. Shepherd's description of the band:

...the ladies sound as unified as if they'd linked arms (as in their inspiring, Miranda July-directed video for the 1999 single "Get Up")...seething and 50 feet tall...arcing and filling up the sky...Sleater-Kinney is the only band on earth worthy of, and experienced enough for, Led Zeppelin's reins...Monster riffs blast like surround sound...exposing Sleater-Kinney for the rock icons they are...voices are(...) cohering in the album's perpetual ebb.

Not only that, but...

...pissed and pissed about being cynical, they indict our information society and lament its attendant alienation, inside their anger as opposed to looking in on it...introducing to an island of progressives the tragedy of red states versus blue states...though despairing and even a little jaded, leaves us with a carpe-diem plea for hope...Sleater-Kinney is a dare and a promise. As Tucker sings on breakup track "Steep Air," "Who's to say I don't have wings?"

Like, whoah.

I used to think they were a pretty good band. But indeed, they have transformed from human into a form of pure energy. Sleater Kinney have become love incarnate. Indeed, excarnate.

And the reason is:

That's because Sleater-Kinney is the kind of band that fans become attached to, to the point of using the group to help narrate their lives. I moved to Portland in 1999, not long after a brief profile in Rolling Stone convinced me that if they could realize their dreams in the Pacific Northwest, so could a disenfranchised, small-town lady like me.

Another disenfranchised lady with a (presumably) paid writing gig in a major-city newspaper. Of sorts.

(By the way, Ms. Shepherd sends a shout out to J.B. Doubtless:

Special to riot grrl: You were wrong about the media blackout. For girls in suburbs and remote locales without the internet, friends, or fanzines, the mainstream coverage saved our lives.

Another special to "riot grrl": don't ever change!

The Woods is Sleater-Kinney as I'd hoped they'd become--and what I hoped to become with them: women, I guess, stronger than in youth and spitting in the face of the dictum that one must become softer, deader, and/or less political with age. And even though so much of The Woods is about rage, despondence, and disconnect--red states, blue states, [Again with the red and blue states. I wonder about the likes of Ms. Shepherd. Do her eyes bolt open while taking a dump, "I bet this would stink less if I were in a bluer state!"? Could it be that it never really leaves Ms. Shepherd's mind? More on that later - Ed.] TV, consumption--it's also a dare and a promise. The Woods is Sleater-Kinney, the greatest rock band in America, with wings.

And lasers that shoot out their eyes, apparently.

Posted by Mitch at June 16, 2005 06:50 AM | TrackBack