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Overwhelming hardcore sounds reverberate off graffitied walls. Angry female vocals and distorted guitars explode in small, seedy, and sweaty DIY venues. A horde of rowdy, misfit girls wearing Doc Martens and platforms pile onto one another, their bodies slamming and colliding into each other as raging music booms from a makeshift stage. A girl in metallic underwear and a yellow baby tee screams into a mic as spikes on leather-studded clothing indent flesh. Bruises, cuts, partial hearing loss, and a ferocious community of rebellious female friends are the coveted souvenirs brought home from these shows.
This chaos and female rage were the hallmarks of the Riot Grrrl movement, which ignited flames in the ’90s punk rock scene. Legends Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, Allison Wolfe, and Molly Neuman are credited as the mothers who gave birth to this disruptive and revolutionary feminist subgenre. The soundwaves of Riot Grrrl continue to echo into the music of modern female musicians including Fiona Apple, Olivia Rodrigo, and even the Spice Girls, who now carry on the mic of the female empowerment and edgy angst of ’90s punk rock.
Today, it’s easy for the deep history of the Riot Grrrl sound to be lost in the mix of trendy “female rage” Spotify playlists and TikTok sound bites. In an age of subculture appropriation and aestheticization, it’s important to recognize the tumultuous history and work that it took to create the Riot Grrrl genre, as well as what it represented for feminism and young girls at the time. Long before the ’90s, punk was seen as an aggressively male space, unwelcoming and hostile for women. While all-male bands in the underground genre became household names, women were often heckled on stage, assaulted in crowds, or brutally pushed to the back of venues. Anger against this anti-female sentiment was channeled by Vail, who founded the feminist punk rock zine “Jigsaw.”
Zines like “Jigsaw” were a vehicle in the punk rock community, used as a social and artistic outlet for youth. “Jigsaw” capitalized upon the zine’s inventive form to oppose misogynistic zines like “Sniffin’ Glue,” which wrote , “Punks are not girls,” in 1976.
It was thanks to “Jigsaw” that a young Hanna and Vail joined forces to create the “Bikini Kill” zine — which, with the addition of Billy Karren and Kathi Wilcox, formed the band of the same name that would define the Riot Grrrl movement. Simultaneously, Wolfe and Neuman crafted the “Girl Germs” zine, later forming the band Bratmobile with Erin Smith to drive Riot Grrrl forward.
These women wanted to unify the rebellious experience of girlhood without caving to male standards. Their style, fashion, and sound did just that. They rejected misogyny with sexually liberated lyrics, angry screams, loud guitar, hard drum beats, and satirical lyrics targeted at patriarchy. Riot Grrrl was unabashedly female and established itself as a fearless, brash, and blunt scene for girlhood. Riot Grrrl style claimed its own empowered sense of femininity, with rockers often wearing babydoll dresses with ripped tights, plaid skirts paired with bras, and anything else that encouraged female autonomy. Bikini Kill embraced nonconformity and balanced the liberation of their girlhood with an articulation of the soul-crushing oppression of womanhood.
Bikini Kill’s 1992 song “Rebel Girl” became an anthem for the Riot Grrrl movement. The song’s empowering lyrics unified girls and embodied the genre’s fast, distorted, chunky, sharp, and catchy sound. In the chorus, Hanna screams the lyrics, “Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world,” and adds, “I wanna try on your clothes.” Such lyrics praised a girl’s perspective on the female world. Specifically, the imagery of girls trying each other’s clothes created a unity surrounding female adolescence.
Another song that characterized the movement’s aggressively liberated vibe was Bikini Kill’s 1991 release “Carnival,” which includes a cheeky narration by Hanna about girls at carnivals: “This is a song about the 16-year-old girls giving carnies head for free rides and hits of pot.” Such songs were upfront with their rebellious tone, but beautifully and playfully displayed female autonomy with the simplicity of their blunt lyricism.
Riot Grrrl provided a new stage for feminist dialogue, bringing the movement from academic lecture halls to the dirty, crammed walls of punk shows. Riot Grrrl has historically been associated with the rise of third-wave feminism, as it created a space for female sexual assault survivors and queer women to engage in progressive conversations about identity, politics, and abortion. That said, it’s important to retrospectively acknowledge that Riot Grrrl possessed shortcomings when it came to racial and gender inclusivity. The movement has been noted as lacking the drive to tackle challenges for all women, including trans women and women of color. However, it was the movement’s work in the seedy underbelly of outsider music that helped open the doors for a more liberal understanding of female identity.
Today, Riot Grrrl inspires female musicians to proudly honor their gender experience in a male-dominated industry with fervor and loudness. It reminds young girls to fearlessly, boldly, and unapologetically live out their youths and embrace wholeheartedly their own definitions of rebellious femininity. We can thank pioneers like Hanna, Wolfe, Vail, and Neuman for fighting from the back walls of house shows to open up the circle for new generations of mosh pit queens to finally have their moment in the limelight.
