There's a Pussy Riot Goin' On

Nothing ever happens in this town, and then, BAM, Pussy Riot shows up. That’s what I thought when I saw their names on the marquee at the Capital Theater. That, and, “is it the REAL Pussy Riot?”

A short amount of research revealed that yes. Yes, it was. They were in America to go to SXSW, and these gigs – from Seattle to New Mexico – were rehearsals. What wasn’t clear was what the performance would be: a film? A talk? Some kind of musical thingamajig? In the end, it was all three of those things, and something else entirely – Pussy Riot Theater, they called it, and that pretty much describes it. Nothing ever sells out in Olympia but I bought a ticket online anyway, just in case. $20.

All day Thursday it rained like hell, and I was not very up for a show by evening. The faculty was having some kind of drinks night at the brewery next door, so I stopped by for a freebie, and not only was no one going to see Pussy Riot, they didn’t believe me when I said I was. “Is it like a Pussy Riot cover band?” one befuddled academic wondered, and what surprised me most was that they’d even heard of them. Pussy Riot has had better publicity than 99% of indie rock these days. If I said I was going to see the XX or Wilco, they’d have been blank.

Meanwhile, right around the corner, the longest and most excited line of people I’d ever seen in Olympia snaked past the theater and round the corner on to Capital Ave…well, the longest line but one. There was that time in 1991 when Fugazi was playing there during the International Pop Underground Festival. That line was longer. And that line may have been more excited. And if I think really hard about that line, I can see myself and Isabelle in it, wearing our babydoll dresses and combat boots, me with a backwards baseball cap on and my Clifford the Big Red Dog stuffed animal purse over my shoulder, surreptitiously peeking at all the tattoos on the people around us.

“If I was going to get a tattoo,” I told Isabelle, “it would be of Hello Kitty and I’d get it on my ankle.”

“That’s a great idea!” said Isabelle. “Then you should get some platform shoes stapled permanently to your feet as well.”

Point taken. Today I am literally the only person in my entire  hot yoga class in Oly that does not have one, but at the time, having a tattoo was still transgressive.

That night, some twenty five years later, there were many tattooed people as well – and many were girls who looked like the descendants of Is and I, wearing homemade shifts and torn tights and hair in pig tails, and, of course, a new wrinkle: pink pussy hats. There were also a ton of old people, like the over talkative hippie-dip guy behind me who struck up an unpleasant conversation with me about seeing some Elvis impersonator and the greatness of the blues. I read somewhere that Pussy Riot was playing Olympia in homage to the riot grrl movement, and I wondered if they were disappointed at what Olympia has on display instead now.  

Still, the point is that ghosts live in the Capital Theater though, and one of them is the ghost of me. She haunts the balcony, where I sat long ago with Isabelle staring intently down at the stage as Fugazi tore down the building: “Why can’t I live…free of SUGGESTION???”Today that song would be labeled performative feminism by my more enlightened students but at the time, Fugazi shook us and made us free: I date my feminism, such as it is, from that exact moment. It was in the air that night, because Girlie Night and Bikini Kill and all the young women that surrounded me there were infectious with fury -- girls that I didn’t know then but that came to dominate all the kinds of things that I care about, Miranda July and Kathleen Hanna and Carrie Brownstein…and when I say that they surrounded me, I mean that quite literally, like, they were sitting there, right next to me, doing what I did, thinking what I thought.

Of course, I had thought I was a feminist before that. I went to UC Berkeley. I read Simone De Beauvoir. And – more importantly though I didn’t understand it at the time – my whole life was lived in obeisance to Title XI: I was on the swim team and the diving team and I benefited entirely from its rulings. But I wasn’t really a feminist except in name. I was too square.. My daughter recently read something I wrote about being on tour with Metallica, and she said that I was sexist  because I was girl-shaming when I described the women backstage as sluts and made fun of a girl who had come up to one of the band members and asked them to  sign her tits. But I don’t know. Was I sexist, or was I just reporting? Was it important to put that in there? Was it perpetuating groupie-dom, or trying to undo it? If a man wrote it, would it have read differently? How could I have shown solidarity with those women backstage, the women I saw as somehow creating such a bad environment for me, personally, when of course they weren’t responsible for the atmosphere anymore than I was.

I think I’d probably write it the same today – OK, well maybe not using the word ‘slutty’ – but I have thought a lot about Caitlin's comment and how right she was: how deeply, embeddedly sexist I was – sexist in the blame-the-victim way. Being the only female rock critic west of the Rockies at the time, I felt like I wasn't, but I was.

Looking back, I see I was constantly, constantly, being victimized one way or another – body shamed (the most frequent comment I used to get in the mail was how ugly I must be), mansplained, talked over, belittled – and I did not even notice. I mean, I noticed, but I didn’t have the vocabulary, or the space in my mind to see what was happening: being asked to wear nylons. Being told by an editor that he needed to run my story ideas by his 17 year old son to see if they were “cool.” Being denied a story by Musician because ‘it wouldn’t be a good story for a woman reporter.’ Being laughed at. It wasn’t until the IPU – ‘ GIRLS TO THE FRONT!’ – that I got that men were the ones that needed to change their behavior to fit the situation, not me. I felt like the IPU gave me some kind of permission to bitch. And although it changed nothing in reality, if anything it made things worse, at least it gave me a justification for some of the things that had puzzled me in my life.

The year after the IPU, inspired by the movement, I led a panel on women in rock journalism at SXSW, with Claudia Perry,, Karen Schoemer and Sue Cummings. That’s right, there were four of us, and we weren’t all white! Amazing, isn’t it? It was insanely well attended and empowering; at it, literally hundreds of young women stood up and testified to experiences we all knew we were having at the same time but had never really discussed with one another. It was great. But twenty five years have passed since then and I noticed that at this year’s SXSW they have a panel called “Does Rock Criticism Still Matter” and all the people on it are white, older, men. When I looked into it, it turned out they had asked a woman, Ann Powers, and she had to cancel, so they replaced her at the last minute with another woman. But still – only one? And no critic of color? It seems incredible to me that they couldn’t see that the reason rock criticism doesn’t matter is because of whom they’ve chosen to write about it all along.

Pussy Riot are feminists of course. But first and foremost they are anti-Putin revolutionaries.. Their performance consisted of an hour long film describing their detention in Siberia and the events leading up to it,, with the collective dancing and shouting in Russian over a dance musical soundtrack. Their situation isn't really comparable to anything that's happened in America, but the takeaway was very clear; use your rights to protest having your rights taken away, and do it now, before it's too late. It was cool and inspiring, although not in a musical, Fugazi-ish way: to me, what stood out was the way that Pussy Riot’s experience of political repression has taken on sinister relevance in the age of Trump. While watching them, I had this constant nagging sense of foreboding and dismay, as I thought, throughout, about our government’s weird new alliance with Russia, and what it could mean for all of us. I was a punk rocker in the age of Reagan, but I have never thought punk rock could change any real conditions of our existence: I knew, deep down, that all us little suburban kids protesting against what we thought was repression were utterly privileged members of society to even pretend that it could.

Pussy Riot have lived and worked and protested in a different cultural context, but theirs might become ours before too long. As for feminism: today, it has to be a walk, not just a talk. It's taken too long and talk is too cheap. After the show, there was a Q and A with the band, and one questioner, an older woman who walked with a cane, came to the fore to say, “Here in America we had a woman’s march the day after the inauguration, and many people mad hats we call Pussy Hats.”

Then she hobbled haltingly toward the stage. “So I made you one.”

She handed it up to the panelists, and one of the men leaned over to take it from her. Then he put it on, which made me a little angry. But then Masha took it from him, and put it on herself. And she didn’t say anything. She just stood up. She walked forward. She hopped off the stage, and just hugged the woman tight.