Refusing to talk to journalists is always a risky strategy, as any Old Labour heavyweight will confirm.
Withholding the official line as “punishment” to newspapers for inconvenient stories may be tempting, but it’s always best to get your point across. The alternative - assuming that “no comment” will mean no story - is laughable. Like it or not, if the subject is newsworthy enough, journalists will write about it, with or without you. You lose.
The long-forgotten Riot Grrrl movement of the early 1990s made this mistake, at least in the UK. It was hopeful and admirable, albeit shambolic. It was useful if only as a means of enabling women to go to gigs without getting squashed. It wasn’t afraid to label itself as feminist. The D-I-Y music was of questionable quality, but was spiky and good-natured enough to be passable, which was OK because the message, rather than the music, was the point.
But the bands took themselves too seriously. Grrrls’ favourite Huggy Bear refused to talk to the music press and even took the totalitarian step of trying to ban journalists from gigs. For all their sloganeering and posturing, the band’s silence made them (and in turn, the entire Riot Grrrl movement) appear paranoid, humourless and inarticulate.
Women of a more outward bent, though initially receptive to Riot Grrrl, soon lost patience. The Grrrls suffered the indignity of Courtney Love dismissing them as them as “a little pack of oestrogen lemmings”.
Niki from Huggy Bear eventually offered this explanation for the band’s self-imposed silence, in a 1994 interview to journalist Amy Raphael: “We recognised early on that the journalist/popstar dialogue is a complex system of mythologies and identifications to do with fake hierarchies which connect preferences of desirability via the kinds of photos which are used to represent you or how much space is given to each member of a band in an interview”.
Well that explains it, then. Or at least, it demonstrates why non-journalists need journalists. It also explains why the Spice Girls didn’t bother getting to grips with Riot Grrrls’ weighty philosophy before getting started on their big adventure.
Towards the end of 2007, Black Dog published what it hoped would be the definitive history of Riot Grrrl. In journalistic terms, the movement is ripe for re-examination, not least because its original members are coming up to comfortable middle age. The book’s arrival should have seen a flurry of features about Riot Grrrl in the broadsheets and the music press – a mini retrospective – but it was met with a deafening silence.
Riot Grrrl was feminism’s greatest missed opportunity. Thanks, Grrrls, for nothing.
1 comment:
There must be a few contenders for feminism's biggest missed opportunity. But Riot Grrrls weren't alone in the pop world in their attempts to control their media appearances via fanzines and bypassing mainstream publications. It's true that their self-imposed obscurity was self-defeating, but then much of the music was impenetrable too, if that's not too inappropriately patriarchal a word.
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