Retelling the history of women in punk with ‘Hit Girls’

Plus, Tiny Desk meets globalFEST

View this email online Jan. 28, 2023 by Marissa Lorusso This week, we’re sharing an interview with the author of a new book about women in punk; plus, Tiny Desk performances from globalFEST artists. Courtesy of Feral House Books Women have always been essential to the sounds, styles and attitude of punk. That truth is inescapable in the pages of Jen B. Larson’s Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983, which came out earlier this month, and tells the story of local and regional all-women and mixed-gender bands who played pivotal roles in punk scenes across the country. In all, Hit Girls highlights nearly 100 artists — but if many of the names in the book aren’t familiar to you, that’s by design. (I was delighted to see a feature on Tiny Desk Unit, the experimental band that included my colleague Bob Boilen, along with singer Susan Mumford, whose name is the inspiration for a certain concert series you may have heard of). Many modern narratives of rock imagine women’s involvement in the genre as recent — starting with the riot grrrls of the ’90s, usually — and as the work of a small cohort of superstars. But Larson — who’s also a musician herself — wanted to preserve the legacy of the many, many lesser-known women musicians who carved out space in punk from the genre’s earliest days, and whose innovation made scenes like riot grrrl possible. I wanted to know more about how Larson put together this deeply researched and joyous celebration of women in punk, so for this week’s newsletter, I asked her a few questions about how Hit Girls came to be. NPR Music: In addition to being a writer, you’re a musician yourself. How did you get involved in the punk scene? How did your work as a musician inform the process of writing this book? Jen B. Larson: I started playing guitar in 7th grade after my family moved to a new town. I bought an acoustic guitar with money I saved up, and for Christmas, my parents gifted me an electric guitar I had circled in a Sears catalog. In terms of my musical output, I was only interested in songwriting. The songs I worked on weren’t confined to any particular genre, but once I started connecting with other people and figuring out who I could work with, the general vibe naturally leaned toward a raw, garage-y, punk sound, and so it just happened collaboratively. The scene is truly just a bunch of people doing things, like booking shows and putting out each other’s albums, so essentially it was about finding other bands and other bands finding us. Being a musician helped me understand and relate to the artists’ experiences, and I would even say it’s what led me to understand the importance of writing a book like this. As a musician, I see how music scenes contain a multitude of hardworking and creative people and how, for every 100 bands, one or two reach a larger audience, while many others — sometimes the most interesting and talented — get swept away. Hit Girls covers a very specific timeframe: 1975-1983. In the introduction, you write about the way our cultural narratives about women in punk usually start with ’90s riot grrrl bands, who are seen as having been the “first women to push their way through mosh pits, fists in the air.” But your research led you to understand, as you write, “how fundamental and integrated women were to the foundation of punk in the first place,” starting in the ’70s. What made you want to focus specifically on this era for the project? Women were involved from the beginning; many (not all) dipped out or avoided the scene in the mid-’80s when hardcore dominated a lot of spaces in nearly every scene; violence in the mosh pits and uniform fashions turned many off. By the late ’80s, the riot grrrls rightfully reclaimed punk in a handful of American cities and cities worldwide. Somehow though, the narrative was always like, “riot grrrls made space for themselves in the boys club,” when, in fact, they just took back a genre led by, or at least equally created by, women a generation before them.   Punk would never have been as cool or organized as it was without women at the helm. Yet there are all these punk narratives from all these scenes all over the world where like 100 men are interviewed and then there are three women. “Punk canons” include the same ratio. And this is not singular to punk. It’s true in almost every art form (for example, I was reading about this happening with female etchers) and every sense of history. People do talk about it — though some refuse to acknowledge it — so it is important to catalog these narratives. Believe it or not, hundreds of bands that fit my narrow criteria weren’t included, and tons more were probably never recorded or documented in the first place. You cover so many artists in this book — nearly 100 punk bands featuring women musicians! What was your research process for Hit Girls like? How many of these bands were you familiar with before you started this project — and did learning about any of these bands surprise you? ​​​​​​​Before I thought to write a book, I was familiar with a handful of the bands, but not all of them. I had lists of bands, either because I had found their songs somewhere (at record stores, on YouTube or included on compilations), or through word of mouth. The lists were unwieldy, filling up a notebook and index cards scattered all over my desk and taped up on my closet door. I regrettably had to cut some bands, and, as I learned about new bands, I got to add others. My decisions were always based on the amount of information I could find about the band, whether someone from the band was willing to talk to me, or how important I thought the story was in relation to the scene the band came from. There are quite literally enough bands to write another equally packed volume of bands from the U.S. from this period. And the amount of women in early punk worldwide is exponential.   I was always surprised and excited by my findings. One of the cooler revelations was the Seattle band Bam Bam, which my friend and record collector, Jen Lemasters, told me about. There are other artists I think people will be surprised to learn about, including Micky Metts of the Phantoms, another Black woman who the Boston scene forgot about.    Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and listen to This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its much-anticipated hearing into Live Nation and the lack of competition in the ticketing industry. Outside the hearing, dozens of Taylor Swift fans rallied around the Capitol and hundreds more joined in virtually. "I think Swifties have figured something out, they're very good at getting their message across,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said during the hearing. In 2018, Missy Mazzoli became one of the first women to ever have a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, alongside fellow composer Jeanine Tesori. Mazzoli’s instrumental works are routinely performed by the world's top orchestras and chamber ensembles; she also co-founded the Luna Composition Lab, which supports young women and nonbinary composers at the beginning of their careers. This week, Mazzoli had a long and thoughtful conversation with my colleague Tom Huizenga about equity in her field, the importance of role models and the unglamorous side of writing music every day. While writing their latest album, White Trash Revelry (one of our favorite roots releases of 2022), country singer-songwriter Adeem the Artist worked to understand their white, Southern, working-class, pansexual, nonbinary songwriting identity. If that sounds a little self-serious, don’t worry — Adeem’s music is infused with wit, compassion and a real sense of humor. “I am strictly a rodeo clown,” as they put it in an interview with WPLN’s Jewly Hight. At the 2022 Big Ears Festival, composer and saxophonist John Zorn shared his uncompromising vision in eight — yes, eight — distinct musical settings. This week, Jazz Night in America shared those magnetic performances, from solo piano to full-force electric ensembles. Ryuichi Sakamoto has been lauded for decades for his deeply affective music, from his work in the '70s and '80s as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra to his Grammy and Oscar-winning film scores and within his numerous avant-electronic solo experimentations — including 12, his new solo album. This week, NPR’s Elizabeth Blair spoke to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir and more about the impact and legacy of Sakamoto’s work. This week, our friends at WFUV shared a video of Margo Price performing “Change of Heart” live at Rockwood Music Hall. Tiny Desk NPR Every January, Bob Boilen attends globalFEST, an annual festival in New York that celebrates global and American regional music traditions. For the last couple years, to foster that same spirit amid pandemic restrictions, we teamed up with the festival for Tiny Desk meets globalFEST, a special virtual series that showcases exclusive performances from artists across the globe. This year, we brought back the series once again, with exclusive video performances from nine artists filmed in their respective homelands, on the road and in exile all over the world, presented over three nights. The first night of our series featured the music and theater project Dakh Daughters from Ukraine, the all-woman collaboration Khadija El Warzazia's Bnat el Houariyat & Esraa Warda from Morocco and Algeria and the rock band Cui Jian from China. The next session included the Cuban group Septeto Santiaguero, Brazilian singer and activist Bia Ferreira and the powerful Haitian singer Moonlight Benjamin. Finally, night three featured performances by traditional Romanian band Taraf de Caliu, Mauritanian legend Noura Mint Seymali and the British and Italian duo Justin Adams & Mauro Durante. One More Thing Never-before-seen Beatles Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? 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