riot boyyy

riot boyyy

{Diego Ruiz} My connection with riot grrrl began when I was 15. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I was figuring out I was gay and I didn't really know what to do. I was pretty socially isolated the entire summer. Another boring day at home rummaging through my parents' CD collection, I found ‚"Dig Me Out‚" by Sleater-Kinney and heard what would be my first riot grrrl-influenced song.

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[Dig me out, dig me in...]

So, what is riot grrrl? Riot grrrl was a feminist punk movement in the early 90's centered in Olympia and Washington D.C.

{Sarah Markus} My name is Sarah Markus, and I'm writing a history of riot grrrl. I attended weekly meetings at a punk activist collective house in Northern Virginia. Every week, for about my last year of high school, if you were in a band, it felt like a music scene. If you were someone who was really into political organizing, it felt like a political movement. If you were in a town where the riot grrrl chapter was a group of 5 friends getting together to talk about your lives, then that's what it felt like to you.

{Diego Ruiz} I liked riot grrrl at first simply because it's good rock music. I'd like the general ethics of other punk bands but was turned off by the macho nature of the typical guy bands. It wasn't really something I could really connect to. Punk with female voices and women playing instruments was something totally new.

[MUSIC]

[Where we gonna go, and we want revolution, girl style!]

The more I learned about riot grrrl, the more I was intrigued. Suddenly, I was totally obsessed. I bought as many albums and learned as much as I could. Then, I even did an independent study at school.

[Girl you do watcha want, girl, girl you the be who you will...]

Riot grrrl fell into my life at the perfect time. Hearing about others who were vulnerable, different, and pissed off was exactly what I needed. The people involved with riot grrrl were really different from me but I related to them because they too were not the norm.

{Cookie Woolner} My name is Cookie Woolner and from 1992 to 1995, I wrote a fanzine called Girl Fiend and was very involved in the riot grrrl movement.

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Riot grrrl for me was where the first time I felt part of a community and that I felt that people really wanted to hear what I had to say, and maybe only like, 500 people had ever read my 'zine and knew who I was but sometimes I would go to shows and meet somebody, and they knew who I was already.

And it just felt so great. It just felt like it was this way that had like, this tiny tiny tiny little speck of like, stardom or fame on like the most obscure subcultural level. But it still made you feel like you were somebody in the world. And it gave a lot of disenfranchised young people that feeling that they were connected to something.

[You look different... so different today;
Holding your eyes in the hardest stare; Running around like you wanted me there; Lookin' at me like I'm the hottest in town]

I think a lot of women are kind of really working out their issues with men through riot grrrl and some people really felt strongly about it being a women-only space. And some people didn't feel that, and wanted to talk more about the ways that men have been oppressed as well. So, it was really, you know, it really varied depending on who you asked about that aspect about riot grrrl.

{Diego Ruiz} The media has many riot grrrl bands as being reactionary man-haters but I didn't see them that way. The head of Kill Rock Stars, one of the main record labels of riot grrrl, the guitarist of Bikini Kill, the lead singer of Huggy Bear, were all male. Although riot grrrl was mainly about women doing things for themselves, men also organized to discuss what they could do about sexism in the punk community. Even though riot grrrl focused a lot on gender issues, many of the themes and scenes in song lyrics are applicable to everyone.

Here's an excerpt from Jigsaw Youth, one of my favorite riot grrrl writings:

{Sarah Markus} Jigsaw Youth, I don't know what this means to anyone...only what it means to me. Standing proud and saying "I don't know who I am, I wanna know more, I am not afraid to say things matter to me... Jigsaw Youth by Kathleen Hanna, Jigsaw zine #4, 1991.

{Diego Ruiz} Hearing someone way that it was okay to still be in the process of figuring out who you are, that was the message I wasn't getting from anywhere else. And accepting that I didn't know who I was was the first step to figuring it out.

{Cookie Woolner} The zine was kind of this place to understand kind of my gender identity and kind of figure out what my gender identity was outside of what the media taught me.

{Diego Ruiz} Now I'm eighteen. I'm way less angry, in large part thanks to riot grrrl, and have a way better grip on my identity. It's funny, I don't even listen to riot grrrl much anymore, but the message still influences me. Maybe the most inspirational thing I take from riot grrrl was how it came about, as put by Sarah.

{Sarah Markus} We were just like you. We were just teenagers who were pissed off and confused, and it just so happens were getting and giving one another messages at the right time. You know there was nothing special about us except that we were all the most special people in the world, exactly like, anyone else is, and that everything we did mattered intensely. Just like, everything that anyone does matters intensely if they decide that it does.

I hope that message from riot grrrl endures, and I hope I can pass it along to other pissed off teens. Everything we do matters. Our actions really will cause profound change. Seeing how the actions of a bunch of angry youth helped me so much gives me faith that the message is true.

For outLoud Radio I'm Diego Ruiz.

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