Rock Girls

Liz Phair Hits the stage at 9:45 and strides toward the mike with a world-weary grin born of months of fawning reviews and crowds of drooling PIB (people in black). Her debut CD, Exile in Guyville, made many critics' lists of 1993's best albums and this live tour, she says, is to prove she's not just a studio wonder. She wears a clingy white turtleneck and a pleated short skirt. Her legs are bare. She looks like a good girl and sings like a bad one, the physical incarnation of a voice that has seduced thousands with lyrical threats to take the listener doggy style. Even at her most macho, she is no inflated, crotch-grabbing braggart like Mick Jagger or Madonna. She's more like a graduate student moonlighting as a phone sex operator. The roles that she plays--the jilted lover, the temptress, the scornful ex--never slip into parody. It's as if she were speaking aloud the thoughts of someone you might find at three in the morning down at the end of the bar--admittedly a safe bar, on a campus.

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There's a good case to be made that today's most interesting music is coming from women. A new generation of no-nonsense, mostly boy-fucking female musicians is singing frankly--and graphically--about two important subjects: sex and gender.

They don't want to be called girl bands. They are not the Bangles. Nor are they the first--Mo Tucker, Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull, Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Tina Weymouth, Exene Cervenka and Kim Gordon were in front, laying down important tracks. They don't even want to be grouped together; they're musicians who happen to be women. Their styles include the arty minimalism of Phair, P.J. Harvey and the Spinanes, the hard-driving pop of the Breeders and Belly, the hardcore thrash and grunge of Hole, L7, Babes in Toy-land, Bikini Kill and 7 Year Bitch, and the rap of Salt-N-Pepa and Hoez With Attitude. They can be grungier than a pair of Anthony Kiedis' underwear or nastier than Luther Campbell. But as women--writing songs as women, playing loud and electric as women--they are subverting a male-dominated business. Obviously, they're not stereotypical rock stars with cucumbers stuffed in their pants. They can do and say things guys can't do and things that older women never had the chance to.

Because hard-rocking, tough, aggressive women are new to the biz, they are, for the most part, able to make their own rules. They are not governed by MTV--they challenge the narrow sexpot and baby-doll video roles that prevail on the music channel. They cultivated followings, then dressed up their tamer stuff for the world of maximum television. We know that Liz Phair wants to be a blow-job queen and that she thinks men fuck and run. She told us so without video. Just as P.J. Harvey can sing about a Celtic goddess with splayed labia. Or Hole can put out a single called Dicknail. Or Hoez With Attitude can give Az Much Ass Azz U Want. Or seminal riot grrrls Bikini Kill can call their latest release Pussy Whipped and be labeled revolutionary for doing it. Or hard-core Seattleites 7 Year Bitch can cry Dead Men Don't Rape without sparking Senate hearings.

What these women share is anger--and anger, as we all know, is nine tenths of the energy in rock and roll. They also are crossover (continued on page 161)Rock Girls(continued from page 100) queens: Some of their most rabid fans are men. And that's what separates them from Joni Mitchell or Joan Armatrading. Joan Armatrading shows attract some beautiful women, but the few clever guys there are superfluous. Many women simply make out with each other. But, hey, when Babes in Toyland played Lollapalooza, there were provocatively pierced teenage love thangs aplenty, looking around for like-minded guys. And the most compelling figure was their idol, Kat Bjelland of Babes. (Babes as in "in the woods," not as in "chicks," as she loves to point out; get it wrong and she will call you a prick.) Garbed in an undersized kinderwhore dress--the demented-little-girl look she and on-again-off-again friend Courtney Love each accuse the other of stealing--guitarist and lead singer Kat introduced the band in a sweet voice and then ripped into a shriek to start Bruise Violet. Like a gorgeous cracked-out cheerleader, Kat played hard and hard to get. The sightly and sonic combination of the flashes of Kat's panties and Lori Barbero's tribal drumming inspired some macho moshing. As Butt-head said of the song's video, "Whoa! These chicks rock!"

Courtney and Kat worked as strippers when they were younger, less famous and in need of cash. Whether or not they admit it, both women seem to understand the physical dynamic between a woman on a stage and the anonymous, horny guys in the audience. And they use it to their advantage, just as Liz Phair manipulates the contradictions between her collegiate look and candid lyrics. Or take the electric guitar, the traditional phallic prop of male rockers. In the hands of virtuoso Polly Jean Harvey, the guitar remains a symbol; as she warps, twists and wrings sound from her Strat, you can't help but admire the strength and facility of her hands. It adds to her sex appeal, even when she's singing about a dry vagina.

The ironic love songs of today's supercharged chanteuses entice the male listener. There's just the slightest hint of romance--it's like electric pillow talk or a lovers' quarrel turned up to 11 on the volume knob. It starts each guy in the crowd to thinking, Sure she's mad at men--but she ain't pissed at me. It's those other bums who fucked her over. Even when Courtney Love--in all her low-rent, tousled beauty--complains of adolescent rejection in Teenage Whore, she arouses the pride and desire of each guy in the audience: I'll make her happy. I bet I can give her what she needs. Salt-N-Pepa seduce in a more overt way, by describing what they're capable of as lovers and what you're missing. When Salt brags, "You have no beef/Cause when the bugle is blown/It's all tongue and no teeth," she has every guy reaching for his instrument. The thing is, all she wants us to do is reach for our wallets and buy CDs.

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It's as if for years we've listened in mono and then, suddenly, a few women turned up the speakers on the left. Even at the local club level, female musicians are taking to the stage. Many of the new bands, such as New York favorites Barbie Complex and Die Monster Die, are sexually integrated--it's shrewd marketing to enhance the gate. Those bands that make it big are equipped with heavy-metal howls, salacious raps and enough feedback to power a small town. They wear their parental advisory stickers with pride.

When Nirvana came to New York for the last time a few months before Kurt Cobain's suicide, Kim Deal's crackling and lighthearted band, the Breeders, opened for them. It symbolized, in retrospect, the passing of the ax from Cobain to the Deal sisters. Nirvana was on automatic: Tight and loud, it put out a trademark heavy sound with brontosaurus beats. Cobain seemed detached, unemotional and uninspired; he sat on a stool for much of the show, hunched over his mike with his hair obscuring his face. Fans moshed because they were supposed to. The gig lacked the joyful energy that had driven the Breeders an hour earlier. The closest to female angst singer Kim Deal got was on Divine Hammer--a quest for satisfaction that she describes as "just like a big fuck." When she finds that sacred tool (after all, her body is a temple), she's going to bang it all day.

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Although Phair's band hits chest-squeezing decibels only three or four times, the Phairophiles are psyched. It's a glasses-friendly environment; there's no real mosh pit. In fact, if you tossed your specs 50 feet away, you could retrieve them from the floor unbroken. It's a crowd of serious New York scenesters who have a few years on Phair. They're the kind of music nuts who used to hang out in Hoboken listening to unassuming minimalist stuff by such now-defunct bands as the Feelies or the dBs (who actually reached back to the clangy garage sound of the early Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground). Phair is a part of this unassuming branch of side-street rock. Musically, she's derivative, but she's polished enough to refute last year's word-of-mouth rep for being stiff and dull in concert. It's her lyrics that count and the guys in the audience know them all.

There's a yabbo up front who can't quite control himself. In between songs he's whooping and wailing like Phair holds his heart in a box. Phair is not amused. In fact, she appears to be a bit repulsed by such slobbering adulation. In a pique of girlish disdain that contrasts nicely with her milk-and-honey looks, she glares down and says, "I don't think you should be yelling like that!" Then she kicks into the next song--just her voice, her electric guitar and her drummer. The two other guys in the band flank her in the shadows, rattling tambourines. It's a quintessential scene for the Nineties: Female rockers have taken center stage

"Motherhood means mental freeze"--The Breeders, "No Aloha" "She lost all her innocence/Gave it to an abscess"--Hole, "I Think That I Would Die" "Don't try to fun that you don't like to drink/Open up the lips so you can lick the pearly pink"--H.W.A., "Great Tazte, Less Fillaz" "I only ask because I'm a real cunt in spring/You can ram me by the hour"--Liz Phair, "Dance of the Seven Veils" "I'm almost coming. ... Why don't I ever get mymine?"--Bikini Kill, "Sugar"

Courtney and Kat worked as strippers. Both understand the dynamic with the horny guys in the audience."