Rebel Grrrls

Hell is a teenage girl.

To be a young person in a female body at the moment is to be under constant attack. That girls would fight back and unleash Hell is the only honest and necessary reaction there is. And with that, I give you the Linda Lindas.

The band’s performance of their song “Racist, Sexist Boy” went gonzo gangbusters this week. Heralded by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and shared feverishly over social media, the song’s shredding guitar and shouted lyrics lit up the internet like a pyrotechnical display.

It’s about time.

If you type the words teenage girl into Google News, what you will get is a seemingly endless list of sexual violence, disappearances, attempted kidnappings, verbal and physical assaults. After suffering a world of hurt, girls are angry and all I can say is Hallelujah!

Even before their fire-breathing show at the Los Angeles Public Library, the Linda Lindas were tearing it up all over the place, performing a thundering cover of Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” in Amy Poehler’s directorial debut Moxie and opening for bands across the U.S.

Right now, the world needs some angry girls. They change history.

Before Rosa Parks was written into the history books for refusing to sit at the back of the bus, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did the very same thing.

The reason that George Floyd’s death was known around the world was because a 17-year-old girl named Darnella Frazier refused to stop filming the incident on her phone.

Teenage girls have been at the forefront of organizing some of the largest protests in recent history, whether for Black Lives Matter or against climate change.

But before you can change the world, you need a song. And sometimes the song comes first.

Revolution has long been tied to music. Clashes between authorities and teenagers propelled some of the greatest protest songs ever written. A new documentary about the seismic year in music that was 1971 states music can be a reflection of the times, but it can also create them as well. As the Rolling Stones’ singer Mick Jagger quips in an interview, “I don’t think you can really, really have a new thing until you’ve got new music.”

So, if music can set the stage for a revolution, are young women about to shift the world on its axis? I sure as hell hope so.

While the Linda Lindas are tearing up the West Coast, on the eastern side of the continent, bands like Montreal’s Dishpit are exploring the knife edge territory between vulnerability and fearlessness. Dishpit’s new album Dipshit, produced by Steve Albini who worked with Nirvana, the Breeders, PJ Harvey and the Pixies among others, is filled with dark, almost frightening songs enlivened by crunchy guitars, wild yipping calls and a good dose of razor-sharp humour.

I only wish there’d been bands like this when I was a teenage girl.

In the ’80s, there weren’t many options available. There were pliant and pliable sex toys like Madonna or a quirky kewpie dolls like Cyndi Lauper. All-female bands like the Go-Gos and the Bangles were poppy, peppy and almost painfully chipper. There was nothing that truly spoke to the feelings that made me rage against the spotty snarky boys that made my life hell in high school.

The only thing that even came close to the volcanic fury that thundered inside in my teenage self was the shrieking call and response of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. The riot grrrl movement was years in the future. It would be another decade before Hole’s leader singer Courtney Love screamed “Fuck You” like throwing down a spear.

The early ‘90s that saw the rise of bands like Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Peaches, PJ Harvey and Hole changed the paradigm for a time before girl power got co-opted to sell stuff. Another darker take on the riot grrrl moment was this explosion of female anger led in part to the rise of lad culture with its message of vitriolic misogyny.

The past few decades have been pretty thin for really ground-breaking stuff from women, even as female performers like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Adele and Britney Spears have dominated the pop charts. If anger was there, it’s was prettified, made palatable and cute. Former Disney star Olivia Rodrigo’s new album Sour is indicative of this trend. The record is a heavily produced collection that doesn’t stray too far from Taylor Swift territory. Anger-lite, you might call it.

I had high hopes that Poehler’s film Moxie might resurrect the Riot Grrrl ethos of old, but aside from the Linda Lindas burning down the house with their rendition “Rebel Girl,” the film was a toothless take.

Art that reflects the true reality of the experiences of young women is still pretty rare, which perhaps explains the viral phenomena of a song like “Racist, Sexist Boy.”

Even as current events have gotten more brutal and extreme, popular music hasn’t kept pace. There aren’t many bands that manage to capture the nuclear fission that explodes out of the expression of true and righteous anger. Genuinely cathartic stuff isn’t pretty or nice, it’s scary and unsettling but also great.

Never has there been a more critical moment for a new song of revolution.

Life for many girls is harsh, maybe even worse than when I was a teenager. Every day, there is some new story about the shitshow that young women face, whether it’s Matt Gaetz, Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. state senator running for national office while openly admitting that at 18 he impregnated a 14-year-old girl or an 11-year-old Florida girl singlehandedly fighting off a knife-wielding kidnapper. The stuff is so constant and so pervasive, both on a societal scale as well as a personal level.

The inspiration for the Linda Lindas’ song came from a classmate of the band’s drummer Mila, who explained its origins before the performance. “A little while before we went into lockdown, a boy came up to me in my class and said that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people…. After I told him that I was Chinese, he backed away from me. Eloise and I wrote this song based on that experience.”

As poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” In this way, teenage girls are leading the charge, creating space for things to be said or screamed.

James Gay-Rees, one the creators of the docuseries on music 1971, said: in a recent interview, “I love plenty of today’s music, I’m attuned to it through my wonderful teenage daughters.… But I think there’s a reason why the music in 1971 has stood the test of time. This music is adopted by each new generation. Parents pass it down, or kids find it on their own. But either way, it survives.”

The members of the Linda Lindas (Mila, Eloise, Lucia and Bela) ranging in age from 10 to 16, cite as their inspirations not only the Riot Grrrls, but the punk pioneers before that. Some of these women are only now being rediscovered, thanks in part to documentary films dedicated to exploring their life and work including the Dishrags, Fanny and Poly Styrene. That some of these women are still around and still making music is a testimony to their toughness.

That they are joined by a new generation of young women musicians is something to sing out. I think we’re more than overdue for something new, preferably raging, and hopefully female.