Pussy Riot and the politics of grrrl punk

I wonder, as they sit in their separate cells, what songs the three jailed members of Pussy Riot sing to themselves to keep their spirits strong. My vote: “Resist Psychic Death” by the early 1990s punk feminist band Bikini Kill. The verse offers a four-word summation of the refusal to be mentally imprisoned: “Your world, not mine.” And the chorus provides a bullet-point mantra of determination and survival: “I’ll resist with every inch and every breath/ I’ll resist this psychic death.”

Yekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s resistance may be paying off: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has called for the artists’ release. He joins an ever-growing chorus of musicians, feminists, human rights activists and political leaders. Freeing the Pussy Riot trio would be an act of great relief for the young women, who have already spent more than five months in jail for their 40-second protest of Vladimir Putin in a Russian Orthodox church.

But in a sense it’s too late; this wild cat is out of the bag. The international spotlight on the punk protesters’ trial and sentence has not only raised awareness of Putin’s autocratic rule, it has helped resuscitate a semi-dormant strain of loud, provocative grrrl-powered direct action.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to picture Katya, Masha and Nadya humming this ferocious 1993 track by a band from Olympia, Wash. The Russian group derived its name from Riot Grrrl, the amorphous art and activist movement, for which Bikini Kill were considered the flagship group. Members of the collective have acknowledged the influence of Riot Grrrl in general, and Bikini Kill in particular, on their music, fashion, and political actions. “…we somehow developed what they did in the 1990s, although in an absolutely different context and with an exaggerated political stance,” a member identified as Garadzha told Vice magazine in February.

After all, it’s not the first time an obscure American band has influenced dissident movements in Eastern European and Soviet countries. Playwright Vaclav Havel was a fan of New York art-rockers the Velvet Underground before he lead the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

But the reemergence of female-driven, art-directed, media-savvy, in-your-face musical protest offers unexpected and gleeful validation to those who first articulated the symbolic gestures and angry art of, as Bikini Kill put it, Revolution Girl Style Now. “Now” turns out to have been an elastic term: While Riot Grrrl was much loved by some, it was also frequently misunderstood, widely ridiculed, and fatally self-destructive. Revolution Girl Style then, a generation ago, seemed to have been a temporary, temporal event – a subcultural, not a countercultural, uprising.

For a few years, women tasted the cathartic thrill of slamming bodies together, while such bands as Tribe 8, Bratmobile, Team Dresch and Fifth Column sang about the complexities of and need for “girl love.” Survivors of rape, or harassment, or of bad hardcore bands, shared secrets at meetings and artwork in fanzines. One year, I marched in the Gay Pride Parade down Fifth Avenue alongside Riot Grrrl NYC’s pirate ship – a pickup truck with a live band loaded in the back and a Jolly Roger flying up front. We smeared mud and wrote slogans on our torsos as we danced and banged drums.

Pussy Riot’s sudden resuscitation of this moment feels almost impossible. How did it happen, that music, art and activities made thousands of miles from Pussy Riot’s homeland, when today’s prisoners were small children, have enough valence two decades later to incite the most visible proponent of a major political movement? Riot Grrrls aimed their arrows mostly at the punk-rock boys whose moshing was shoving them to the back of the room. “I want to be your Joey Ramone,” the group Sleater-Kinney sang, not “I want to be your Che Guevera.” Pussy Riot aims its shots at nothing less than the centers of political and religious power in Moscow.

The sheer pith of Riot Grrrl’s agitpop slogans (“Cry in public!”) and catchy hooks were apparently built not just for speed but for distance. YouTube tributes to Bikini Kill, and online archives like the Experience Music Project’s Riot Grrrl Retrospective, keep the spirit alive. A series of books (Sara Marcus’s “Girls to the Front”) and movies (Abby Moser’s “Grrrl Love and Revolution: Riot Grrrl NYC”) have documented Revolution Girl Style. Somehow, all this trickled through to Moscow’s art and feminist communities, where a group of women began performing in brightly colored balaclavas. Pussy Riot is what might have happened if grrrls had flash mobs in the ‘90s.

The balaclavas echo the anonymizing masks of another Third Wave feminist group, the Guerrilla Girls. Riot Grrrls weren’t the only activists making funny, brilliant statements and public interventions in the ‘90s, but the Women’s Action Coalition and Women’s Health Action and Mobilization didn’t sling guitars. All of these groups were protesting very different conditions than Russians now face; none of them had to worry about spending two years in jail.

American art-activists are scarcely the only influence on Pussy Riot. The three women’s eloquent defense statements offer insightful lessons in the history of Soviet dissidence and protest art -- not to mention the revolutionary acts of Jesus Christ. Long before Riot Grrrl, English punk bands such as Sham 69 and the Crass used their microphones to advocate social revolt.

And yet Pussy Riot’s most specific antecedent is clearly an underground movement that had been thought long dead, if it was thought of at all. Members of Bikini Kill have spoken out in support of Pussy Riot. A group calling itself Pussy Riot Olympia staged a protest last month in Riot Grrrl’s hometown.

Here in Los Angeles, musical activists behind the Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls are forming a chapter of Permanent Wave, the national feminist group whose name pushes back against the concept that liberation movements have numbered stages. The Feminist Press is publishing an ebook collection of Pussy Riot’s songs and statements, with tributes from Yoko Ono, Karen Finley, and Le Tigre’s Johanna Fateman and JD Samson. The torch, blazing more strongly than ever, may be passed back to where it was first lighted.

Meanwhile, I have another suggestion for an anthem for the two Pussy Riot members who have fled the country for fear of prosecution. It’s also a Bikini Kill song, a girl’s empowered response to her oppressor, and its title says it all: “Suck My Left One.”

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