I’m going to talk about every single Sleater-Kinney song
ever recorded. This won’t be an objective analysis. This is a labour of love
for a band that feels only secondary to breathing and water in terms of
importance for my existence. I cannot go a day without listening to
Sleater-Kinney and while favourite bands tend to come and go in waves I think
they are around for good. I’ve said that about other important artists in my
life, but then that’s the thing that’s so beautiful about music in particular.
It can fade as you mature and grow older, but in that moment those notes and
those words mean fucking everything to you. Music is like an attachment of soul
and the one art form that feels like it morphs you into the person you are and
who you want to be. It can lift you up in moments of need and fix all your
problems in 3 minutes or 15 if you’re into progressive rock, and it’s a kind of
magic. It's a rhythmic alchemy brought to the world out of nothing by
these god’s who stand on stage and produce life through sound. It’s powerful
and Sleater Kinney feels like a direct reflection of everything I am. I think favourite
bands always kind of feel that way. They belong to you right? When I’m
listening to them they feel like something vital to my life. There’s no way I
can ever repay them for the support they’ve given me so I’m just going to keep
on listening for the rest of my life.
First a little background information
Sleater-Kinney would hardly ever label themselves as a riot grrrl act during
their heyday (something they would discuss more openly after they went on
hiatus) but their genesis is very much steeped in that sound. After all Corin
Tucker and Carrie Brownstein are the Foremothers of riot grrrl acts like
Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17 and Heartless Martin. In 1994 the first Sleater-Kinney
music was released in the single You Ain’t
It/Surf Song for Villa Villakula Records. They would also record two other
songs for that label in Write Me Back
Fucker and a cover of Boston’s More
Than a Feeling. These first recordings reflect a band that already had
their sound set in place. It was just rougher around the edges.
You Ain’t It is
lyrically about as forwardly-snotty-fuck you-riot grrrl as this band ever got,
and it kind of rules. It’s the same kind of rock is not just for men attitude
that many riot grrrl bands possessed from this same time period. What I truly love
here is the wailing (I bet I’ll use this word a lot) braggadocio in Corin’s
voice of not giving a fuck about boy bands. In 1994, and still to this day
really, women are still seen as novelty acts in rock music. You’ll see the term
“Girl rock band” get thrown around a lot as a buzzword as if it was another
thing that needed to be gendered to the point where you had to separate women
from men just because it was unfair to compare the two, and it’s bullshit. The
riot grrrl movement in general was as much about feminism as it was about punk
rock, but it certainly broke down barriers and told girls they could do
anything in the world they wanted to
and be
better at it than men. In the sound of the song though it proved the band was
already working out their formula. The guitars are already twisting and contorting
around each other and Corin and Carrie are already using choruses to launch a
harmonic attack in vocal and guitar. It’s awesome for reasons that don’t just
align with my own punk rock feminism. It’s a hell of a start, and they’d get so
much better.
Surf Song is the
b-side to
You AIn’t It and it has the
same roughness of all the Villa Villakula recordings, but unlike
You Ain’t It’s brash riot grrrl
aggression
Surf Song feels absolutely
light. What song wouldn’t feel light with lyrics like “
Let’s go down to the beach today, Let’s go down to the water and play” ?
Sleater-Kinney would rarely go for the type of sweetness that is found in this
song, but it’s ultimately one of my favourites for that very reason. I searched
all over the internet for this song so I could somehow have it with me at all
times. I would complain to my boyfriend that I couldn’t ever find “The
Sleater-Kinney Beach Song” and I’m sure I whined about it constantly, but oh
the elation when I finally found it. I would download it (sorry you can’t find
the Villakula recordings anywhere anyway), and have it forever. Oh! And the pen
pal letter in the middle that Carrie writes to Corin where she complains about
the band name and talks about new wave bands? It’s like friends in the back of
a high school year book and my heart melts. The kind of friendship I’m lucky
enough to have with one person. You know who you are.
The other two songs on the Villakula set are
Write Me Back Fucker and
MoreThan a Feeling. Write Me Back Fucker (great title btw) is maybe the least
interesting song of these early recordings. The most notable thing about it is
the title and the bridge, which just soars due to Corin’s voice. It’s almost
kind of funny the previous song had an entire letter segment and this song is
actually about a break up via letter. I don’t think they are in any way
connected but I think that’s a neat fact. The first truly special moment in
Sleater-Kinney’s career is their cover of
More
Than a Feeling . The song has that same DIY sound as the others on this label. It’s
a sound I’ve grown to love in early riot grrrl recordings (especially Bikini Kill’s
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah), and followed Sleater-Kinney up through their first album
the following year. There are multitudes of things I love about this song. The
soft build up of the warm guitars in the verse, the harsh reimagining of the
chorus with Carrie’s primal screams that she would make even better use of on
Last Song the following year, and then
there’s the outro where the guitars just sing and Corin wraps her voice lightly
around the melody and it’s a thing of absolute beauty and cements this as the
best version of this song. Sorry Boston, Sorry Nirvana.
