I really, really need more women and girls to make punk/punk adjacent feminist music like the Bleeders or S.C.U.M.
I need to see "SCUM Punk"/"Gash Rock" spread as the new dominant political/feminist movement in alt scenes (I think S.C.U.M. are using Gash Rock like the Bleeders instead of SCUM Punk now, but I still figured I should inlude it for those unaware, I know it was SCUM Punk in the zine, but obv it's not possible to retroactively edit a zine). I'm tired of liberal-ass Riot Grrrl music that's just like "I somehow "reclaimed" the status-quo and now I love it!!! I'm mainly going to yell about other women and personal occurances!! I will materially change nothing and only defend things I like without questioning why I even like them!!! Yay western hyper-individualism!!!!" etc. All while claiming to be radicals and leftists. Alt scenes are so filled to the brim with misogyny, and Riot Grrrl does genuinely nothing to challenge that.
It is so frustrating to listen back to a lot of my past Riot Grrrl favs sometimes now, but I do think that they were right about fighting for their beliefs with loud and angry music. It is such a solid avenue to build a movement out of. There's no better way to get people interested than artistic expression that they think is cool.
So, just like the Riot Grrrls of yesterday and the Gash Rockers of today, grab instruments and start yelling. Make a band. It doesn't have to be all women/girls to start. You don't need to know how to play when it comes to punk or music like it, you just need to be angry and have the ability to google basic chords or beats. Start yelling. Start screaming. Make it so that they can't ignore the voices of women and girls suffering in this patriarchal hellscape system anymore. There's already a couple bands literally doing it, so now is the TIME for you too!!
“We’re all here at a concert together, and this is really special because it’s a really fucked up time in our country, and the only good thing I can take out of it is that these motherfuckers are SCARED AS HELL. Because they know that (inaudible) and they know that the fight for each of our bodies is a fight for ALL of our bodies. So we just wanna thank everyone for sharing space tonight, and I hope that we all have a really great time and celebrate the things that we HAVE accomplished.”
- Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill
This definitely meant a lot to all the femme, trans, queer, and nonbinary folks in the audience, many of them just kids.
I also loved - and I wish I’d gotten this on film - what she said about “cancel culture”. She called being corrected on things a gift, scoffing at people who resent being asked to just be more conscientious. I wish I’d remembered her wording because it was better than that. A progressive person stays so by listening to the voices on the margins and accepting critique graciously.
I think “punk wasn’t political at first” is erasure of women, particularly women of color and queers who created and spearheaded the movement to go against their daily discrimination upfront and without apology and only for their contributions to the scene and their distinct leftist, feminist, anti racist and anti capitalist viewpoints to be erased and rewritten by yt posers who favored bands that had their apolitical or conservative viewpoints that still gets to some degree accepted by other yt punks in discourse to be pretty insulting.