This Lady’s More Riot Grrrl Than Lilith

When Bratmobile singer Allison Wolfe yelled during the band’s performance here, “I’d like to dedicate this next song to all the dumb boys in the world,” her fans screamed in agreement.

The Riot Grrrl movement may have long ago been declared dead by the media, but a revival looked to be afoot judging from the couple thousand teen and twentysomething women who swept into town last week for the first-ever Lady Fest. The event, which ended Sunday, was a sold-out, six-day music, art and film festival with a feminist twist.

Though the baby-doll dresses were pretty much gone, the Bratmobile and Bikini Kill T-shirts were out in full force, only marginally worse for wear since the bands first burst onto the scene.

Almost 10 years have passed since this small capital city 70 miles south of Seattle gained national recognition as ground zero for the left-leaning identity politics and punk-pop movement known as Riot Grrrl. And while some of the bands in the scene (notably the critically acclaimed Bikini Kill) have broken up, moved on or otherwise faded from public view, Lady Fest’s founders feel that their message may be even more relevant today than it was in the groups’ heyday.

“Where we were at in the early ‘90s was a reaction to how things were in the mainstream music and society,” Natalie Phillips, 26, one of Lady Fest’s 50 organizers and a marketing manager at Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars record label, said Friday. “I feel like we’re back at that point. It’s cool to offend people again . . . but it’s setting this tone in society that it’s OK to be degrading toward women because that means you’re a guy.”

Though not officially affiliated, in many ways Lady Fest mirrors the Riot Grrrl movement. In the early ‘90s, when platinum-selling hard-rock bands were belting out their own brand of misogynist boy-pop, the Riot Grrrls learned to play guitars and dish it all back in ways that were politically powerful, musically fresh and, ultimately, influential. Today, some of those same women are banding together in response to the 1999 Woodstock rapes and the testosterone-driven rock that is once again topping the charts and co-opting the radio airwaves.

“I think the whole . . . thing is backlash,” said festival attendee Tammy Rae Carland, founder of Mr. Lady Records in Durham, N.C. “You have the ‘woman in rock’ year, so then you have to have the ‘woman haters in rock’ year.”

Lady Fest was born last January when some of the original Riot Grrrls met to help create a retrospective of the movement for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, a multi-million-dollar museum that opened in June in Seattle.

“When they got together they felt, ‘Why end it here?’ They were all active as individuals but didn’t feel there was a cohesion anymore in terms of activism,” said Carrie Brownstein, a Lady Fest organizer and singer-guitarist for one of Olympia’s best-known bands, Sleater-Kinney. “They thought, ‘Maybe we should do something that’s giving people political tools to create culture, not just consume it.’ ”

From the zine-like, photocopied and stapled program guides to the line drawings of women’s lingerie that served as tickets, Lady Fest had the look and feel of Riot Grrrl, even down to the logo.

Just as Riot Grrrl reclaimed and empowered the term “girl,” the founders of Lady Fest have engendered its operative word with a new meaning by turning the “A” in “Lady” into an anarchy symbol.

Throughout the week, musical performances were sprinkled between documentary films, art openings, workshops on such topics as creating alternative menstrual products, and panel discussions on everything from domestic violence to sex work. True to the do-it-yourself ethos, the festival also included a series of workshops to teach bass, guitar and drum basics so women could start “taking feminism out of an academic context and putting it into something [they] could relate to--music,” said Brownstein.

Lady Fest’s organizers did not see Lilith Fair, the annual all-woman music festival that ended last year, as empowering. “It was this notion of trying to prove that women’s music was marketable,” said Teresa Carmody, 26, chair of Lady Fest’s budget committee. “Why even engage in that?”

Lady Fest’s diverse roster of predominantly female bands included few nationally known acts, but what it lacked in mainstream name recognition, it made up in diversity.

Musical styles ranged from the go-go punk fun of the East Coast-based Rondelles and the whispery wails of the Southern-rooted Cat Power, to the charming childishness of Olympia’s Bratmobile and heavy-metal bent of I Mudder Accordion, a Vancouver duo who dressed in lederhosen and head-banged their way through Metallica and Black Sabbath tunes.

Noticeably absent was the overtly made-up and sexualized female performer. “Everybody here can represent themselves how they want to look and how they want to be portrayed, and be in control of their own image, which is really lax in the mainstream,” said Phillips.

The scene’s refusal to conform is part of what has prevented its bands from ever penetrating the mainstream. It is widely believed in music critics’ circles that Bikini Kill, the now defunct Riot Grrrl group fronted by singer Kathleen Hanna, could have achieved national success, but “they didn’t want to, so they shouldn’t have,” said Carland, whose label roster includes Hanna’s new band, Le Tigre.

“The watering down and the simplifying that would have had to happen to get that mainstream contract would have completely changed it, so when people say, ‘Well, the message would have reached more people,’ I don’t think that’s entirely true, because it would have been a different message.”

In a way, Hanna’s message did reach the masses, and through an unlikely source--the Spice Girls. The “girl power” slogan so widely attributed to the easy-on-the-eyes English pop confection was first coined by Hanna in a 1990 Bikini Kill zine. Had that message been disseminated through its original source, the musical vehicle would have been dramatically different. Bikini Kill was spoonful-of-sugar-makes-the-medicine-go-down, feminism-punk ear candy in the tradition of England’s X-Ray Spex and Los Angeles’ the Runaways, with liberal doses of profanity, powerful (if sometimes hysterical) vocals and heavy, rhythmic guitars.

Hanna, who was not at Lady Fest, does not talk to the mainstream media. She hasn’t since the mid-’90s, when the Riot Grrrl movement as a whole discontinued its relations with the press, which it felt was invading, misinterpreting and sensationalizing it.

But that doesn’t mean she’s stopped making music or that any of Olympia’s past or present girl bands have become any less relevant.

The presumption that every artist hopes to achieve commercial, mainstream success irks Calvin Johnson. “There are other models,” said the owner of Olympia’s K Records and leader of the band Dub Narcotic Sound System. “It’s not like, ‘Someday when we make it, we’ll be able to do what we want to do.’ We are doing what we want to do.

“[With] generic industrialized culture sort of taking over and destroying indigenous culture all over the world,” he added, “the fact that we can retain our own regional communities is what we live by.”

Unlike Seattle’s grunge scene, which was roughly concurrent with the Riot Grrrl movement but burned out, the Olympia scene has been quietly percolating. Happy to be out from under the thumb of media scrutiny, its bands are producing some of today’s most inventive indie rock.

Two weeks before Lady Fest, local band the Need staged a rock opera called “The Transfused” that members of the Olympia music community could not stop talking about.

“Things are more exciting now than they were 10 years ago, than five years ago,” said Johnson.

Why Olympia?

“It’s a small town. People have to seek out ways of entertaining themselves,” said Brownstein. “In larger cities, there’s less of a drive to start their own thing because it already exists. It’s amazing what people can do when things aren’t handed to them.”

But despite the debut success of Lady Fest, its organizers will not be hosting another one next year. “This was just a group of women who decided to create this festival themselves, and I am really encouraging groups of women and girls to create their own festival somewhere else,” said Lady Fest coordinator Carmody. “I would love to go to Lady Fest Minneapolis next year.”