Hey Grrl?

I feel like now that it’s a new year, people are starting to reminisce about the riot grrl movement: an appropriate amount of time has passed. Is it nostalgia, or is it that the nineties are becoming cool again? The proliferation of plaid hanging off hooks in my bedroom might argue towards the latter. Then again, that could just be fashion based on laziness and the simple fact that shirts at thrift stores can be really cheap.

I’m not sure when I discovered riot grrl, It was pre-iPod, back when I still had a Sansa, and probably before my Sansa got scratched up by keys and then worked better- a sign of true superiority, I think, but the 160 GB lure won me over to Apple. I’m certain it was through the internet. Was it when I was going through dozens of music blogs, looking for any legal and free song downloads I could find? Was it from a link in a blog, or through Pandora? It was definitely back in 2007, because I distinctly remember my eighth-grade history teacher bringing in a documentary about the movement, something I didn’t give him enough credit for at the time.

Actually, it might have even been through watching the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, as I seem to remember the scene where Patrick tells Kat he likes Bikini Kill and the Raincoats and I later Googled them. Er.

I don’t know why I first fell in love with the music, though. It’s pretty damn far from classical music, or the stuff I listen to on a day-to-day basis. The first Bikini Kill song I ever heard was Double Dare Ya, probably because it was the first thing that came up in an Youtube search. There was something about that song that struck as… I don’t know. There was something that said that I would be able to identify with the music, even though it was fifteen years later and a totally different political climate.

I mean, look at some of the lyrics for Double Dare Ya:

hey girlfriend
I got a proposition
goes something like this
dare ya to do what you want
dare you to be who you will
dare you to cry right out loud
“You get so emotional baby”
…
you’re a big girl now
you’ve got no reason not to fight
You’ve got to know what they are
‘fore you can stand up for your rights
Rights rights rights?
you have them, you know.

It’s easy to see why I connected with these lyrics, even though the music was something I didn’t love straight off the bat.  It was so different from the kind of music that I heard on the radio, and while I didn’t necessarily listen to that kind of thing, I felt its influence.  The message was something well-meaning teachers try to get across, but often got lost in other contradictory things, whether mandated by the state (abstinence-only education, I’m looking at you, though I have been lucky enough to be informed by my school) or simply lost in all of that middle and high school drama that can surround us, aided and abetted by Facebook.

It’s such a cliche to say the phrase girl power, and there’s something about it that I hate- probably has something to do with the implications and the common use.  But Double Dare Ya is provocative, not just saying: hey, you’re a girl, you can be a unique person even though everyone around you seems to fit in and you stick out, but, well, daring us to stand up for ourselves, to educate ourselves about our rights, and then to exercise them.  It’s a pretty kickass message, I think, and even though I listen to and enjoy Lady Gaga, it’s a message that proves that Kathleen Hanna is most definitely the winner.