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Riot Grrrl exciting-ness

Ok, ok maybe I ‘m a little too interested in Tobi Vail…so my friends tell me anyway. But I can’t be THAT starstruck cos I only just found her blog yesterday, tabithasays.blogspot.com . Is Tobi short for Tabitha? I never knew!

The other Riot Grrrl related thing I’m obsessing over at the moment is the whole Kathleen Hanna/Evan Dando thing. What KH/ED thing you ask? Well!:

The song “I Wish I Was Him” on the Rock Stars Kill compilation is a cover by Kathleen Hanna of the original song by Ben Lee’s old band Noise Addict. (you might have already read about this part in my last Pony 4 Honey entry). It’s funny if you think about Ben singing sarcastically about big old Evan Dando, but I think it’s an even sharper critique when Kathleen Hanna sings the song (kind of maybe a precurser to “Deceptacon”?).

Anyway, not only did she cover that song, she also made a zine back in the 90s called “My Life With Evan Dando Popstar”. You can read bits from this zine here. She talks about her love/hate thing with Evan Dando, she wants to fuck him and kill him. She takes on the persona of a serial killer, like Mark Lepine who killed 14 women. She conflates herself with Lepine when she contemplates killing Evan Dando, while simultaneously imagining herself as Mark Lepine’s victim – a position forced on her and other female performers by the sexist assumption she is “a punk star who is a slutty feminist bitch”.

My understanding of this zine is she’s trying to illustrate that thing where women can never be THE rockstar, like, they can never attain the high exalted status of a man like Evan Dando: “Evan’s got eyes that squint in the sun when he talks about surfing”, because to the world, the very label of Rockstar is inseparable from Male. Not, of course that we want to be this kind of Rockstar anyway. In this zine, Kathleen is not saying she wants that bullshit “He earns his money the good old fashioned way. He takes it from sexually repressed little kids….in return for their allowances, he fills their heads with meaning — popsongs. Yeah.”
I wish I was Him – Yeah Right.
She knows it’s bollocks and yet there it is. I think I know how she feels

Oh wow, this zine is intense!! I can’t believe that I found a bit of it online.

There are other bits and pieces on this site, including an interview with Kathleen and Mike D from the Beastie Boys, in which I think he comes off as very annoying.

And of course, if you are seeking out Riot Grrrl artifacts, you can’t go far wrong with the Emplive Riot Grrrl Retrospective.

Posted Apr 4, 07:39 PM | By Melissa |
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