“Feminism,” “punk,” and “feminist punk” can have many definitions, culturally and personally. In attempting to capture the spirit and story of this lineage, we had to narrow down these enormous fields. We looked for songs that make their feminist messages clear—not just songs by punks who are feminists, and not songs that were “punk” or “feminist” in spirit alone. In this context, we defined punk as some kind of raw expression, not only an attitude. We looked for rallying cries that have questioned, explored, and destroyed stereotypes, in which the form of the music has mirrored the message. We believe they are classics that cross canons, set precedents, and uphold virtues for the idea of feminism in punk, and the artists who wrote them have moved punk forward.
We’ll let a true punk vanguard take it from here....
Party Like a Punkette
It’s punk, not spunk. So loaded towards males is the English language, though, that we may have to reinvent our whole vocabulary. Because some of the best words to describe our female punks are phallocentric: “spunky,” “ballsy.” Start calling us “cunts” or “pussies,” though, and it won’t go down so well. Why is a comparison to our vaginas not considered a compliment? Dunno, but try asking some dickhead who won’t book your female band on his festival bill because “we’ve already got our girls.”
Punk is now acknowledged as the global music of rebellion, alongside hip-hop and reggae. But punk wins because it is the simplest to master… uh-oh, there goes that loaded English language again! So if we still have to armbend English to express ourselves freely (hello, Midwest Wimmin’s Festival!), how much more did first generation punkettes, my generation in fact, have to (wo)manipulate our society to get heard at all? Resistance to our existence was an acknowledged fact of life. Punk was born in violent times, though less violent than now. And it took a volcanic social eruption to propel women into their own bands. They could be mixed—like the Slits with their boy drummer, Bruce Smith—but the crucial difference was that females were doing the hiring.
When I started writing in the rock press in the mid-1970s, girl musicians were so rare that, in what may have been the first Women in Rock article, I described a long-haired female guitarist as if she were a unicorn. Prior to punk, with its passport to a new normal for guys who wore kilts and girls who didn’t look like Stevie Nicks or Karen Carpenter, we could only look to Heart and Suzi Quatro. They were good rockers but, musically, they styled themselves after the very lads who were trying to block us.
Punk’s open door finally let in self-directed girl artists; in reality, many punkettes first learned to play on their boyfriends’ instruments. Some of us lot were curious to see if we could make a very new sound, being women and all. There arose a very British arrhythmia, often molded more by dub and free jazz than punk itself: hence the Slits, the Raincoats, the Delta 5, the Mo-Dettes etc. And myself. Though I was raised singing in harmony with my two big sisters at home—my father started out as a violinist—I might have stuck with writing and never made music. But I slid into it so naturally by singing with my girlfriends from those bands.
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Because women’s contributions are so often hidden from herstory, when the riot grrrl movement began in America, those women were virtually unaware that their UK sisters had been fighting parallel battles two decade earlier. But the Americans were way better funded and organized than we had been, lurching through no-woman’s-land to make ourselves heard. It took awhile before Kurt Cobain championed the Raincoats and Sonic Youth bonded with the Slits.
But the first generation punkettes really were something new. Rock was a real laddist boystown right before punk. Editorial meetings could be a minefield for me, even when I was Features Editor at Sounds, with scribes snarling, “Why write about women? Women aren’t interested in music. Women don’t make music. Women don’t buy music.” These were the groans of a totally male-owned structure under attack by rampaging female hordes. The groans led to fissures and cracks, some crumbling walls…but not a collapse.
Don’t be fooled, even though feminism is in the charts courtesy of Beyoncé (she’s got her punkette side!) and some of the industry’s top earners are female. Most shot-callers are still male and they can have a reductive view of what they consider fuckable (i.e. commercial). It was punk’s embrace of the unorthodox and the unpretty that enabled our heroines to create. Digitization and the devolution of the old-school music industry has made traditional income streams dwindle for artists, but it has cleared the way for some females who are prone to starting out solo, in their bedrooms. Now, more than ever, self-starters like Little Boots and Lorde have successfully parlayed home recordings into global careers. In principle, this has enabled individual girl artists to access their audiences without having to be approved by patriarchal industry gatekeepers.
Where possible, please create a community with complementary skills. Nowadays, it often starts online. Still, try and find a way to actually, physically be with your new creative cohorts.
Because nothing beats jamming and singing with your sisters.
That is punk. Punk freed female musicians. It is yours. Sing it, play it, live it now.
VG
Patti Smith: “Land” (1975)
It started small, like some of punk’s most unsettling songs do. They need room to grow big—and Patti Smith's nearly 10-minute fever dream at the heart of Horses expanded enough to hold a sea of possibilities. In that way, “Land” became a self-fulfilling prophecy; what Smith and the women who followed would achieve was unimaginable before she came along, with her sharp edges and her Rimbaud worship.
Smith’s nascent version of punk was influential in its attitude more than anything, and it made her the natural link between the Velvet Underground (whom she quoted on “Land”) and the Ramones in the continuum of downtown New York rock. Her presence at the forefront of the scene was a statement in itself, and “Land” was her theme, ever-evolving as she played it out around town. To this day, Smith tweaks the song’s spoken-word intro onstage to reflect the era; “Land” can mean what we need it to mean.
So while the protagonist of “Land” was a boy named Johnny who was raped and presumably left for dead in a “sperm coffin” during Act One, change his story to her story and “Land” starts to feel a lot more familiar, though no less surreal. After a brief intermission in which Smith broke into ’60s dance fads (via a garage-rock take on “Land of 1000 Dances”), we plunged back into Johnny’s struggle to live. The angels were taunting him: “Oh pretty boy/Can’t you show me nothing but surrender?” But as Smith depicted it—heavy with cosmic incoherence, sexual innuendo, and Lou Reed swagger—death might be the end, or it might be the beginning. Once Johnny finally slit his throat, it became clear: When no one can hear you scream, you’re no longer “one who seizes possibilities.” For punk’s early heroines, there was no other way to be heard. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Patti Smith, “Land”
X-Ray Spex: “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” (1977)
Poly Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish secretary and a dispossessed Somalian noble, in the summer of 1957. With X-Ray Spex, she became one of the most original figures in pop history—trained in opera, acutely anti-authoritarian, braces cemented across her teeth—and one of the sharpest punk lyricists Britain ever saw. “I chose the name Poly Styrene because it’s a lightweight, disposable product,” she told the BBC a few months after the release of 1978’s dystopian classic Germfree Adolescents. “It sounded alright. It was a send-up of being a pop star: plastic, disposable. That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, so therefore, I thought I might as well send it up.”
Like all of Styrene’s songs, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was dizzy with ideas and outrageously ahead of its time. “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I want to be a slave to you all,” she wailed with guttural, soul-cleansing force. “Chain store, chain-smoke, I consume you all/Chain gang, chainmail, I don’t think at all.” “Bondage” was all punch and bounce, from the scorched riffs to Lora Logic’s siren sax runs, to how Poly’s voice skyrocketed into the red to cap each line of the chorus. It was liberationist music of the highest caliber. It is the ultimate punk song in any context, but this is feminist scripture: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard/But I say oh bondage, up yours!” –Jenn Pelly
Listen: X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”
The Bags: “Survive” (1978)
The Bags emerged among the O.G. wave of ’77 punk in Los Angeles; they're proof that women built its slashing sounds. Fronted by Alice Bag—who was born Alicia Armendariz into a traditional Mexican household in East L.A.—and bassist Patricia Morrison, the band only ripped through one single, “Survive,” during their lifetime, but it contained considerable power and cemented their legacy. (That’s Alice Bag in the definitive punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization alongside Germs, Fear, X, and Black Flag.)
“Survive” was resilient, hardboiled, and utterly cool. Its noirish finger snaps and jazzy drum fills evoked a detective's theme song with its magnifying glass pressed up against the entire world. Its titular sentiment cut to the most irreducible truth of all this: That feminist art can save you. —Jenn Pelly
Listen: The Bags, “Survive”
The Slits: “Typical Girls” (1979)
“All the guys around me were forming bands, and they had heroes to look up to, but I didn’t have anyone,” the Slits’ Viv Albertine told Sounds in 1976. “Then it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to have a hero. I could pick up a guitar and just play. It’s not so much why I started playing as why I didn’t play before.”
The Slits waited three years after forming to record their masterful debut, Cut, which fused punk, dub, and reggae with more poise and intelligence than any of their punk comrades. Sounds zipped in and out from all sides: flecks of piano, rattling spoons, splashes of minimal noise guitar. “Typical Girls” wound up and unraveled so many times that the whole song seemed to spin in circles. It protested female stereotypes with pure magic, Ari Up incanting over its spindly spirit: “get upset too quickly,” “don’t think too clearly,” “buy magazines,” “worry about spots,” “don’t create,” “don’t rebel.” The Slits defied all of this.
The most pressing question of “Typical Girls” is right at the heart of the song: “Who invented the typical girl?” At a time when the widespread image of a feminist was unfairly dour and militant, the Slits were funny and playful—and though they rejected the tag of “feminist” at the time, they were. “Typical Girls” was the Slits doing exactly what they wanted. It was a sprint with a smirk. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: The Slits, “Typical Girls”
Crass: “Walls (Fun in the Oven)” (1979)
In their seven years together, the British anarcho-punk collective Crass sang about several conflicting ideologies, from militaristic fascism to vegetarian pacifism. However, while their messages were mixed, the band remained staunch in their allegiance towards feminism. “Walls (Fun in the Oven),” off 1979’s Stations of the Crass, was a sing-song mantra of feminine autonomy.
Singer Joy De Vivre’s hypnotic delivery—claustrophobic, falsetto yet monotone—was as hollow as the reproductive course she described. “Desire, deny, deny, desire/Have a child to justify/Images that you apply/I won't bow my head in shame,” she chanted, sounding dispassionate to the point of lobotomization. “Walls (Fun in the Oven)” was a strict refusal to accept the familiar path of matrimony and the nuclear family: “I won’t play the game…without your walls, I am alive.” –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Crass, “Walls (Fun in the Oven)”
Bush Tetras: “Too Many Creeps” (1980)
Gestated in dark clubs and cramped DIY spaces, New York’s no wave movement wasn’t just an oddball response to the macho energy of the previous decade’s punk scene. It marked a palpable shift in rock circles in the city and beyond, and became a hotbed for the musical expression of feminist ideals. Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch are frequently credited with pushing its postmodernism into the spotlight, but due is also owed to Bush Tetras, the freak-funk outfit formed by guitarist Pat Place (a founding member of the no wave icons the Contortions).
Bush Tetras occupied an uneasy new space, balancing spry bass and guitar with singer Cynthia Sley’s deadpan, frequently political mantras. Their biggest hit, “Too Many Creeps,” was a funky rebuttal to street harassment. “I just don’t wanna go out in the streets no more,” Sley insisted airily, “because these people give me the creeps.” Her lyrics laid bare a sense of exhaustion all too familiar to most women—who hasn’t been the target of a wolf whistle or undressing glance? Coupled with the dancey arrangement, Sley’s monotonous tone signaled that within the Tetras’ newly staked safe space, misogyny wasn’t a threat: it was just a boring, predictable damper on the party. Like the rest of their peers, this band was over it. –Zoe Camp
Listen: Bush Tetras, “Too Many Creeps”
Neo Boys: “Rich Man’s Dream” (1980)
Neo Boys were young and frighteningly smart when they began rising through Portland’s early punk scene in the late 1970s, when singer Kim Kincaid was just 14. Their oblique yet succinct lyrics expertly captured the hypocrisies of Reagan-era cultural politics; “Rich Man’s Dream,” from their self-titled 7”, poked and prodded the listener, asking questions that actually merited reflection. “Will you stand when they come for the rich man?” Kincaid slurred over chiming guitar and restless yet focused percussion. “Are you an answer to the rich man’s prayers?”
“Rich Man’s Dream,” released on Greg Sage of Wipers’ Trap Records, best defined Neo Boys’ particular charisma. These four young women made music that seemed to veer toward unhinged, but really followed deliberate patterns; their instrumentation was expansive and preternaturally balanced, each part pushing and pulling without drowning out another. Well ahead of their time, Neo Boys started a map they were never supposed to draw. K Records’ Calvin Johnson cites them as a key inspiration. –Jes Skolnik
Listen: Neo Boys, “Rich Man’s Dreams”
The Brat: “Attitudes” (1980)
The Brat may have only released one EP before disbanding, but they set the Los Angeles punk scene on fire during their short run. (Exene Cervenka of X was such a fan, she offered to hand-letter the lyrics for their artwork.) The group, which formed in the barrios of East L.A., melded punk and New Wave with the rhythms of their parents’ music—ranchera and reggae—and helped birth the Chicano punk scenes that still thrive in L.A., New York, and Chicago.
Much like their contemporaries the Bags and the Plugz, the Brat celebrated the virtues of being on the outside. Their defiant song “Attitudes” championed women making their way in the world despite extreme double standards, and relied heavily on frontwoman Teresa Covarrubias’ dry, flip delivery. “Everything I say is wrong/Everything I do is wrong/It’s just my attitude,” she sang, reveling in the words’ ridiculous nature, as the brothers Rudy and Sidney Medina added punchy, catchy instrumentation. The Brat’s short career embodied a punk truth: that even the smallest moment can help ignite a movement. –Jes Skolnik
Listen: The Brat, “Attitudes”
Kleenex: “Hitch-hike” (1980)
The Swiss quartet Kleenex were punk in the fiercest way: punk as possibility. Active in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and a touring partner of the Raincoats, the group made their own aesthetic before punk had congealed completely and developed its current cycle of self-reference. (However, the band could not escape larger pressures entirely; after hounding from a certain tissue manufacturer, they changed their name to LiLiPUT).
“Hitch-hike,” the group’s finest song, may have sounded joyful with its pop hook and jingle-like chorus, but its lyrics contained multitudes. They reflected the dread women feel constantly in public spaces, and the menace that lies beneath so-called polite society. (“She had no money to pay the train…Don’t touch me, let me be!”) And the jaunty whistle punctuating the melody? A rape whistle. They took a fresh pop inversion to punk, making “Hitch-hike” a statement of sly insurgence; it should come as no surprise that Kleenex were one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite bands. –Jes Skolnik
__Listen: __Kleenex, “Hitch-hike”
Vivien Goldman: “Private Armies” (1981)
In the summer of 1981, Britain was on fire. Mining communities were rioting, and in South London, racist police abused stop-and-search tactics against the West Indian community. This state-sanctioned aggression only enabled the indiscriminate violence of neo-Nazi thugs, which did not escape Vivien Goldman, a child of refugees from wartime Germany. “Vernon and Norman/Just sat in their Mini/While the skinheads beat shit/Out of a person on the pavement/Blood everywhere,” she charged on “Private Armies.”
Released that August, “Private Armies” arrived two months after the Specials’ “Ghost Town” outlined youth disenfranchisement at the hands of Thatcher’s government. “Private Armies” went even further, with Goldman daring to connect insecure toxic masculinity with violence. “If the heavy metal boys or the boys in blue/Don’t like the look of you/You’d better watch out,” she warned, outlining the outsider’s precarious existence and sense of foreboding she knew intimately. Over a skittish, glowering dub backdrop (courtesy of producer Adrian Sherwood and the Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall, whose sawed violin circled like a vulture), Goldman turned fear into yelped provocation: “If you can’t get a hard-on, get a gun!” –Laura Snapes
Listen: Vivien Goldman, “Private Armies”
The Raincoats: “No One’s Little Girl” (1982)
The Raincoats were a self-described feminist punk band when there was no precedent for such a thing. To say they were polarizing in the British music weeklies for having a song like 1979’s lurching “Off Duty Trip,” about rape culture, would be a colossal understatement. And yet, in their original incarnation from 1977 to 1984, the Raincoats never stopped being themselves. Perhaps that is what makes the sleeker, disco-tinged “No One’s Little Girl”—written in ’77 but not released until ’82—so inspiring. It was the first song bassist Gina Birch ever wrote, a thesis for what she was doing, performed at the band’s debut gig.
In the lyrics, Birch detached from her past, cutting herself out of the family tree, forging an uncharted path. To take on life as an act of improvisation—to embrace the Beat-inspired, don’t-look-back stance—was typically a male project. The bohemian female wanderer remains an underrepresented figure in art, but “No One’s Little Girl” was the tale of a woman at the beginning of an adventure. And often, still, it seems the world doesn’t want women to have adventures.
Like the very existence of the Raincoats themselves, “No One’s Little Girl” was the point of punk. Birch’s sing-song chorus—“Try it out! You can do it/If you choose it, try it out!”—implored you to see the light. Once you’d heard the song, you had. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: The Raincoats, “No One’s Little Girl”
Vulpes: “Me Gusta Ser una Zorra” (1983)
While the early ’80s saw D.C. punks on a morality kick, on the other side of the Atlantic, Las Vulpes were all about promoting the pleasure principle. Founded by a group of teens in Basque Country, Vulpes (“foxes,” and sometimes styled as Las VulpeSS) would become Spain’s first all-girl punk band. The band’s claim to fame was “Me Gusta Ser una Zorra”—which translated to “I Like Being a Slut,” and was their cheeky, hyper-sexual take on the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” As outlined salaciously by frontwoman Mamen Rodrigo, love was a con, a diversion from the carnal satisfaction they so desperately craved.
Released eight years after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Vulpes’ anthem for sexual freedom was far too much for a country still stinging from Franco’s staunchly Catholic, authoritarian regime (in which contraception, abortion, and divorce had been outlawed for decades). The band made their television debut in the spring of 1983, on the Spanish program “Caja de Ritmos” (“Drum Machine”). Their performance of “Zorra” was the show’s death knell, prompting protests and a newspaper editorial that condemned the program. Despite an amiable defense from Televisión Española reps, “Caja de Ritmos” was canceled, and the network was sued by the Attorney General. Vulpes disbanded mere months after the performance, but would reunite briefly in 2005 to record their only studio album, Me Gusta Ser, which shed some overdue light on their significance to the first wave of Spanish punk. –Suzy Exposito
Listen: Vulpes, “Me Gusta Ser Una Zorra”
Sonic Youth: “Flower” (1985)
Talk about a dirge. Sonic Youth were never much of a punk band in sound—instead, they took the main tenets of the genre and turned them inside out. But in ethos, they fit in seamlessly among the scene's heaviest bands via their shared interests in wildness and aggression. Take “Flower,” from the period when Kim Gordon took her bass influence from the ceaseless pounding of jackhammers. Her musical contribution to the song is mainly one staccato note, repeatedly plonked into your brain; it ultimately lands somewhere between hypnotizing and decimating.
The same could be said for her vocals, which she drawled first in a slurred drone, then honed in sharper: “Support the power of women/Use the power of man/Support the flower of women/Use the word/Fuck.” By the end of the song, it sounded like she was spitting. There was no chorus, no verse, just a plodding train moving ahead until it crushed whatever dumb obstacles were in the way. It wasn’t subtle, and that’s why it’s still such a good anthem. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Sonic Youth, “Flower”
Mecca Normal: “Man Thinks ‘Woman’” (1987)
Mecca Normal break rules like they never noticed them in the first place. The Vancouver-based duo of singer Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester are anarchist-feminist activists and constant experimentalists, implying a rhythm section with negative space alone. Always an intense presence onstage, they've become the most tenacious of D.I.Y. road warriors, touring and recording for 32 years now. In the early ’90s, they popped up on most of the biggest American indie-rock labels (Sub Pop, K, Matador); by their 25th anniversary, they were on the road with a performance-and-lecture project called “How Art & Music Can Change the World.”
Smith’s lyrics often foreground her political perspective; their anthem “Man Thinks ‘Woman,’” released in 1987, started out as a barbed dissection of gender normativity: “Man thinks ‘woman’ when he talks to me/Something not quite right.” The song kept expanding its radius from there, encompassing both bitter poetics and a disarmingly funny account of a drunken makeout gone weird. Kathleen Hanna has cited Smith as an early inspiration: “When I saw her,” she told The Fader, “I was just like, that’s it. I’m done. I’m sold.” –Douglas Wolk
Listen: Mecca Normal, “Man Thinks ‘Woman’”
Fugazi: “Suggestion” (1988)
A man singing from a woman’s perspective was never going to be embraced wholly by the feminist punk community—even if that man was Ian MacKaye, an artist of rare social empathy, raging about the aggressive objectification of women’s bodies. “Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?/Is my body the only trait in the eyes of men?” demanded MacKaye over a staccato guitar stomp reminiscent of clacking stiletto heels. Soon, he wasn’t just angrily cosplaying as the harassed women he knew; he was condemning the inert masses of his gender. “We blame her for being there/But we are all guilty,” he raged, indicting himself.
Some leaders of the ’80s D.C. punk groundswell remained unimpressed by his good intentions; some heard “a self-righteous white boy appropriating a girls’ issue,” as the riot grrrl history Girls to the Front suggests. Others heard the song as supportive; Kathleen Hanna later said, “I have issues with Ian MacKaye—who I love—singing as if he was a woman. But that song changed my life, because it was the first time I ever heard a man singing about something that was predominantly a woman’s issue.”
Whether or not it was MacKaye’s narrative to sing, his words remain the tentpole for male feminism in punk, and cracked a discussion of oppression as men’s burden to lift. Other men would follow suit—Propagandhi in “Fuck Machine,” Nirvana in “Rape Me,” Green Day in “She”—and “Suggestion” opened those floodgates. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Fugazi, “Suggestion”
Fifth Column: “She Said ‘Boom’” (1990)
When the women of Fifth Column came together in early ’80s Toronto, there were no bands like them in their city—film-schooled, queer, Warholian, explicitly feminist. Fifth Column were inspired by the post-punk bands they read about in imported UK music papers, like the Raincoats and Kleenex, even when they couldn’t find those records; with drummer GB Jones’ legendary zine, J.D.s, she planted the seeds for the cut-and-paste queercore scene that would later inspire riot grrrl.
Fifth Column were an essential piece in this lineage and their signature song, “She Said Boom”—which opened All Time Queen of the World—was a scorching, psychedelic rave-up. The lyrics were about a guy who can’t make sense of his self-empowered girlfriend out tagging graffiti in the street. (Jones herself was a prolific tagger, particularly on the façades of Canadian banks, as evidenced in the Bruce LaBruce video for “Like This.”) As Fifth Column’s Caroline Azar put it, “‘She said boom’ are three simple words that, for us, mean being responsible for your own pocket-sized revolution, and that one’s exasperation with what is false can be said aloud: ‘I say boom, you say boom, she said boom!’” –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Fifth Column, “She Said ‘Boom’”
Bikini Kill: “Feels Blind” (1991)
To truly understand why music is empowering—to get how it can be a hand pulling someone up from rock bottom in three minutes flat—you have to recognize why its intended audience might have reason to feel powerless in the first place. “Rebel Girl” became Bikini Kill’s signature anthem in its call for female solidarity, but it was the slow rumble of “Feels Blind” that offered this essential grounding. One of Bikini Kill’s earliest songs, it contained some of the most affecting poetry Kathleen Hanna has ever written: “All the doves that fly past my eyes/Have a stickiness to their wings/In the doorway of my demise I stand/Encased in the whisper you taught me.” (Its subtle, mesmerizing melody is a reminder that Bikini Kill and Nirvana were drinking the same water then.)
Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney has written about the great impression these lyrics made on her young soul: “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry,” “Your world has taught me nothing,” “We might even eat your hate up like love.” Each line of “Feels Blind” is survivalist, like its own manifesto. It’s one of the most timeless punk songs we have. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Bikini Kill, “Feels Blind”
7 Year Bitch: “Dead Men Don’t Rape” (1992)
All blood and black bile, “Dead Men Don’t Rape” remains as gripping today as it was in 1992, when it arrived both on a collection of this Seattle punk band’s singles and on the queercore EP compilation There’s a Dyke in the Pit. Its buzzsaw guitars and gruff vocals were a necessary salvo for women enraged by constant physical intimidation, especially those who had survived sexual assault: “I don’t have pity, not a single tear/For those who get joy from a woman’s fear,” Selene Vigil barked through what sounded like thick wire mesh. “I’d rather get a gun and just blow you away/Then you’ll learn firsthand/Dead men don’t rape.”
The song’s release was delayed by the substance-induced death of 7 Year Bitch’s first guitarist, Stefanie Sargent–and it gained new, painful poignancy one year later, when the Gits vocalist Mia Zapata was raped and murdered. (Zapata was a labelmate and close friend of the band’s.) Then, even more so, “Dead Men Don’t Rape” became a cri de coeur in the purest form. –Jes Skolnik
Listen: 7 Year Bitch, “Dead Men Don’t Rape”
L7: “Pretend We’re Dead” (1992)
L7 scored one of grunge’s earliest crossover successes with “Pretend We’re Dead,” a Top 10 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock charts that barely missed similar success in the United Kingdom.
On initial listen, the track was as bright as the Los Angeles streets it sprang from, with a hummable chorus and crunchy riff; once that façade was peeled away, though, a grim and very punk subtext emerged.
Singer Donita Sparks lamented the political and socioeconomic structures that marginalize women, depriving them of both community and individuality. (“Cramping styles is the plan/They’ve got us in the palm of every hand.”) Then she proposed her solution: that women unite, harnessing their power at long last. “Turn the tables with our unity/They’re neither moral nor majority,” Sparks sneered. “Wake up and smell the coffee/Or just say no to individuality.” It was an appealing package with torches ready to be lit—a feminist Trojan horse. Don’t let the track’s simplicity fool you—L7 calculated a sly sabotage and pulled it off winningly. –Zoe Camp
Listen: L7, “Pretend We’re Dead”
Slant 6: “What Kind of Monster Are You?” (1993)
Monsters were a favorite conceit of Slant 6’s, from the “Famous Monsters” house parties they hosted to their homemade movie Inzombia, and their headlong 1993 debut single unpacks that metaphor. The lurking beast here is a jerk who seemed sweet at first, and guitarist Christina Billotte—a longtime D.C. punk fixture who’d played in Autoclave and shared an orbit with Bikini Kill and Bratmobile—is only pretending she’s frightened of him. “Why are you creeping up behind me?/Where did you get those claws?” she sings with weary annoyance, before delivering the title hook with a dry snap.
“What Kind of Monster Are You?” emphasized that Slant 6 was a guitar band—its opening scrawl of feedback hovered for an audaciously long time before the riff kicked in—and it drew crowds to their first tour before they'd released anything else. The song's real fangs were bared in its quietest lyric: “Why should I be scared of you?” That tiny line was a challenge to a creep and a critique of gender relations, as well as a wicked little joke. After Slant 6 broke up in 1995, Billotte went on to play in Quixotic and the Casual Dots; her old bandmate Mary Timony's group Ex Hex covered "What Kind of Monster" in 2013. –Douglas Wolk
Listen: Slant 6, “What Kind of Monster Are You?”
Bratmobile: “Cool Schmool” (1993)
In the history of punk—hell, in the history of the world—the rules of cool have almost always been dictated by powerful men: what you’re supposed to wear, how you’re supposed to act, which bands you’re supposed to like. Cool usually means privileging taste and status over emotion and connection (traditionally “masculine” over “feminine” values), and its pursuit can be oppressive, disenfranchising, exhausting.
Bratmobile said fuck all that, literally. “Fuck you too! Cool schmool!” frontwoman Allison Wolfe declared exuberantly on “Cool Schmool,” the centerpiece of their debut album, Pottymouth. Like X-Ray Spex howling “Oh bondage! Up yours!,” it served as a rallying cry for women fed up with the rules of their scene. One of the foundational riot grrrl bands, the Olympia/D.C. trio made lo-fi punk that crackled with the defiant joy of girlhood. “Cool Schmool” embodied the way the riot grrrls got in the faces of their contemporary grunge bros: “I don't wanna sit around and talk about the Wipers/Weren’t those the good old days?” Wolfe taunted over Erin Smith’s rapid B-52’s-ish guitar line and Molly Neuman’s gleeful drumming. “I don't want you to tell me what's so cool/I don't wanna go back to junior high school.”
The irony, of course, is that in creating their own punk universe in which girls were celebrated in their complexity rather than punished, Bratmobile and their fellow riot grrrls became, well, pretty damn cool. –Amy Phillips
Listen: Bratmobile, “Cool Schmool”
PJ Harvey: “50 Ft. Queenie” (1993)
Long before she stepped out as the world’s most fantastically feathered, sax-wielding diva, the young PJ Harvey subverted rock patriarchy with a bone-raw blues-punk attack and graphic, skin-chafing lyricism. Her Steve Albini-produced second album, Rid of Me, didn’t just reorient rock ‘n’ roll’s lusty, predatory id through a female gaze; it treated the bedroom as a battleground and sex as bloodsport. Traditional gender power dynamics were violently upended throughout, from the title track’s sinister post-breakup revenge plot to the Zep-heavy “Rub ‘Til It Bleeds,” in which an acquiescent lover takes matters (ahem) into her own hands.
Harvey turned the tables most aggressively on the mid-album rave-up “50 Ft. Queenie,” which was almost certainly the only song about pegging to get played on 120 Minutes. (“You bend over, Cassanova/No sweat I’m clean/Nothing can stop me!”) At a time when the world was tuning into the unvarnished voices of Kathleen Hanna and Liz Phair, Harvey resisted being lumped in with her more openly feminist peers, pledging allegiance instead to male icons like the Rolling Stones, Nick Cave, and Howlin’ Wolf. But on “50 Ft. Queenie,” she wasn’t paying tribute to her wang-dang-doodlin’ idols—she was crashing their cock-rock world wielding a strap-on with no lube. —Stuart Berman
Listen: PJ Harvey, “50 Ft. Queenie”
Huggy Bear: “Her Jazz” (1993)
By 1991, the UK had already sustained 15 years of feminist punk. Yet with the riot grrrl movement picking up steam stateside, England was primed to deliver an equally brazen response in Huggy Bear. Comprised of both men and women, the Brighton group toured extensively with American groups such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the Frumpies, and their 1993 split LP, Our Troubled Youth, complemented Bikini Kill's airtight feminist thesis, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah. Their most rousing manifesta, “Her Jazz,” was released as a single in 1993 and lambasted the predatory habits of male so-called “radicals,” calling for a more egalitarian, “girl-boy revolution.”
Soon after that release, the band wreaked havoc on the late-night variety show The Word, during which their blazing performance of “Her Jazz” was followed and undermined by an appearance from the Barbi Twins, a pair of Playboy models. Members of Huggy Bear began to heckle the hosts on-air, only to be manhandled and thrown off the set by security. (According to Amy Raphael’s zine Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, a network representative accused a band member of biting a production assistant in the face.) The melee was reported in Melody Maker with a line from “Her Jazz” emblazoned on the cover: “This is happening without your permission.” –Suzy Exposito
Listen: Huggy Bear, “Her Jazz”
Hole: “Violet” (1994)
At times, Courtney Love has been written out of feminist punk history, for different reasons: Hole became an alt-rock commercial juggernaut, Love derided riot grrrl and Kathleen Hanna, and, of course, there are still sexist truthers out there who want to believe that Kurt Cobain wrote Hole's best songs. But it’s worth remembering that Hole started as an L.A. punk band, with Love screaming about her stint as a teenage whore, and she’s never lost her indelible punk sneer.
In hindsight, the mainstream success and continued legacy of 1994’s Live Through This—with its constant talk of mother's milk and not being beautiful enough for this world—is a testament to Love as a feminist voice. The album's only overt mention of feminism may be Love quoting another woman decrying the once-divisive label, but those themes dominate throughout: “Asking for It” was inspired by Love having her clothes ripped off and being groped while crowd-surfing, and several songs explore what’s lost on the inside when we obsess over women’s outsides (“Doll Parts,” “Plump”). But it’s “Violet,”the brutal opener and third single, that sets the tone for Live Through This. Though written about Love’s nasty pre-Kurt breakup with Billy Corgan, lines like “When they get what they want/They never want it again” take on larger meaning in the context of female sexual exploitation. And when Love snarls through the chorus, “Go on, take everything/I dare you to,” you have to wonder: Has anything felt like more of a thesis statement for Love herself? –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Hole, “Violet”
Spitboy: “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (1995)
When Spitboy penned the title of this sludgy, dissonant track, they turned a facile nursery rhyme on its head. Their answer to the question was unexpected: “I am what’s left over.”
The first track on the San Francisco band’s split LP with the Latino punks Los Crudos, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” enumerated the Madonna/whore complex in a fresh, slightly frightening way. “I am pink, I am weak/I am red, I am whore,” singer Adrienne Droogas screamed, growing increasingly staccato. “Swaddled in red like a target/I am your sacrifice.”
Formed in 1990, Spitboy paved the way for women in hardcore as they railed against structural sexism. They toured extensively in their six years together, much of which is documented in drummer/ lyricist Michelle Cruz Gonzales’ excellent recent memoir, The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. –Kate Wadkins
Listen: Spitboy, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”
The Julie Ruin: “Crochet” (1998)
In 1998, following the breakup of Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna released a self-titled solo record under the moniker Julie Ruin. The album was in a room of its own—less abrasive and more aesthetically inquisitive, a home-recorded collage of samples, drum machines, punk riffs, DIY ballads, and genius one-liners. (Julie Ruin seemed to dream of Grimes.) Hanna was inspired by the French feminist writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous’ concept of “writing through the body,” and this played out in the record's nonlinear, lo-fi structures.
“Crochet” was one of its best punk blasts. Hanna used corrosive power chords and shredded vocals to tease out how a traditionally feminine activity like crocheting, which seems so calm, may actually have something more intense boiling below the surface—how a hobby like crocheting could actually distract women from interrogating the conditions of their lives. Her delivery was pure joy: “You make me want to go away/You make me want to CROCHET!” she snarled. In another frantic section, she grunted through the line, “Just another book about women in rock” to embody the infuriating way women are often written out of proper canons. Ahead of its time, Julie Ruin should be in many of them. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Julie Ruin, “Crochet”
Le Tigre: “Hot Topic” (1999)
At the turn of the millennium, artists like Peaches, Tracy + the Plastics, and Chicks on Speed made electronic music the new sound of feminism. But does dance-punk really qualify as punk? Only when Kathleen Hanna’s at the mic, bringing radical politics to the club with her clarion wail. After trading Bikini Kill’s power chords for the Julie Ruin’s samplers, she dragged her new electronic gear out of the bedroom, formed a trio, and embarked on her most extroverted project yet.
Le Tigre could be biting, but their brand of dance-party feminism usually emphasized encouragement over critique. No song epitomized that philosophy more than “Hot Topic.” Built around a bouncy drum sample that lent it a marching vibe, the song was a parade of feminist and queer artist shout-outs. Yayoi Kusama, Marlon Riggs, Eileen Myles, and even the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak earned spots on this essential syllabus. Eventually, Hanna dropped any pretense of singing, and everyone in the band began throwing out names in a giddy game of one-upwomanship. “Don’t stop,” Hanna begged her heroes. “I can’t live if you stop.” Thanks to an earworm melody and the convenience of Google, thousands of Le Tigre fans still feel the same way. –Judy Berman
Listen: Le Tigre, “Hot Topic”
Sleater-Kinney: “#1 Must Have” (2000)
In December 1999, Sleater-Kinney were less concerned about the Y2K bug than the cultural virus turning back progress. The ’90s began with the radical possibilities of pleasure, which marketing men defanged and repackaged swiftly as female “empowerment.” Violence and virginity dominated the year, with maximum hypocrisy: 17-year-old Britney posing for Rolling Stone in her bra was more decried than the alleged gang rapes at Woodstock ’99.
As Sleater-Kinney breached the mainstream, they were urged to drop their political stances if they wanted to make it. And yet the Pacific Northwest trio were done denying their truth, and ditched their desire to be your Joey Ramone with singer Corin Tucker’s torching of the rock establishment: “I’ve been crawling up so long on your stairway to heaven/And now I no longer believe that I wanna get in.” Her pointed wail indicted rape at concerts and reclaimed the capitalist terminology that had infested her politics: “The #1 must have is that we are safe.” As Sleater-Kinney rallied for change, they resisted diluting their message while creating their most accessible record yet, for their widest audience to date. “Are we holding onto our pride a bit too long?” Tucker asked on All Hands on the Bad One’s opener. You only need search “rape music festivals” today to know the answer is still no. –Laura Snapes
Listen: Sleater-Kinney, “#1 Must Have”
New Bloods: “Oh, Deadly Nightshade!” (2008)
Portland’s New Bloods were one of the most interesting and vital punk bands of the mid-2000s, a time when most acts on the scene offered exhausted, color-inside-the-lines genre worship. The trio of Osa Atoe, Cassia Gammill, and Adee Roberson made dense, twisting songs that nodded to Southern gothic imagery, raw Appalachian folk recordings, and the minimalist rhythms of late ’70s art-punk. (Atoe has cited the Raincoats as a favorite group.) “Oh, Deadly Nightshade!” was an elegy and a warning, opaque and shivering; its overlapping lyrical lines sidestepped political didacticism to flesh out a woman’s rich internal life, with references to poison, darkness, and Persephone’s journey (the Greek myth of female abduction often favored by feminist writers).
Underrecognized and underappreciated during their run, New Bloods now stand as one of the few groups of the Aughts who had something new to say for themselves. Today, Atoe continues to impart insight; she chronicles black punk artists in her excellent zine, Shotgun Seamstress. –Jes Skolnik
Listen: New Bloods, “Oh, Deadly Nightshade!”
White Lung: “I Believe You” (2014)
According to the Department of Justice, two-thirds of sexual assault cases go unreported, and for every 1,000 incidents of rape, only 13 cases will ever be prosecuted. And in those few instances, it’s often not the actions of the perpetrator that are put on trial, but the victim’s credibility: What was she wearing? How much did she drink? Why didn’t she just run away? Why didn’t she call the cops right after? Why did she maintain a relationship with the accused? What’s her motive?
For those sexual assault survivors who were—privately or publicly—thrust into the additional pain of doubting their memory and sanity, White Lung’s Mish Way offered three simple but powerful words: “I believe you.” It’s the sort of phrase that a friend tells another in a moment of quiet confidence, while offering a shoulder to cry on. But in the storming, 102-second centerpiece of White Lung’s breakthrough album, Deep Fantasy, it also became a tonsil-shredding battle cry against a culture more concerned with a postponed swimming career than a life left traumatized. Way has said the song was inspired by Runaways singer Cherie Currie and the fortitude she exhibited in the wake of being raped by a crazed fan. But her words of admiration—“God, you’re so strong”—can apply to any survivor who’s had the courage to speak up.–Stuart Berman
Listen: White Lung, “I Believe You”
Priests: “And Breeding” (2014)
Text-driven collage artist Barbara Kruger once described her work as a comment on issues of “power and control and bodies and money.” Really, what aspect of life is not dominated by these themes? In particular, when is the female body not a battleground? The Washington, D.C. band Priests amended Kruger’s phrase for the title of their 2014 debut LP, which nodded to acts like Fugazi and Slant 6.
“And Breeding” was that album’s fiery conclusion, a seething tour through disillusionment, restlessness, and the attempt to “procreate without fucking and breeding.” Singer Katie Greer deftly painted a picture of a world about to slip over the edge, a Handmaid’s Tale–like crisis in which sexual pleasure had been cheapened for the greater good. What should women be doing to combat it? “Trying to explode the upper hand!” Greer screamed. Priests understood that the relationship between politics and the media was complex. “And Breeding” insisted that it’s not time to kill our idols; rather, it’s time to force them to step up to the political plate and inspire revolution. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Priests, “And Breeding”
G.L.O.S.S.: “G.L.O.S.S. (We’re From the Future)” (2015)
“G.L.O.S.S. (We’re from the Future)” was a treatise by and for trans punk women, a track that demanded rebellion down to its acronym (“Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”). The crux of the Olympia, Washington group’s searing 2015 demo, it raged against the violence that trans women have endured both in society at large and within punk communities. “Our femininity doesn’t fit/We’re fucking future girls/Living outside society’s shit!” insisted frontwoman Sadie Switchblade.
Spat out through powerful chord progressions and frenetic solos, the G.L.O.S.S. demo was a five-song ripper that tore into patriarchy early and never let up. Its title track remains the most powerful in its indictment of phobia and ignorance. As Switchblade refused to live up “history’s ass,” and declared her stance against the status quo, she effortlessly envisioned a new future that centered on the “faggots and femmes.” –Kate Wadkins
Listen: G.L.O.S.S.,“G.L.O.S.S. (We’re from the Future)”
Downtown Boys: “Monstro” (2015)
Since forming in 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, Downtown Boys have set their sights on dismantling privilege and promoting equality. Halfway through their debut, Full Communism, “Monstro” laid into societal injustices in Spanish and English with the assistance of wailing, rallying saxophones. “Why is it that we never have enough/With just what’s inside of us?” frontwoman Victoria Ruiz demanded, her vocal cords near fraying. “Today! Today!/We must scream at the top of our lungs/That we are brown, we are smart!”
Why must those qualities still be yelled by women of color today? Ruiz offered one answer to Democracy Now: “It’s because we’re about to change something. We’re about to take something back with a joyful noise.” “Monstro” was a feminist anthem from a band that billed itself as a “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party.” Here, that party was frustrated yet full of irrepressible hope. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Downtown Boys, “Monstro”
