Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015), musician, writer, and actor Carrie Brownstein recalls her tempestuous childhood, her years as a singer, guitarist and songwriter for rock groups such as Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag, her role in forming the "riot grrl" movement of the 1990s, her life as a bisexual, and a little bit about her work on the critically-acclaimed hit television series, Portlandia. The title is a song lyric from the Sleater-Kinney track, "Modern Girl."

Brownstein grew up in the town of Redmond, Washington outside of Seattle. She writes of her anorexic mother, who abandoned the family when Brownstein was a teenager. She also describes her father, a corporate lawyer and closeted gay man, which he doesn't recognize, Brownstein writes, until around the age of fifty-five. Shortly after her mother leaves, Brownstein begins to get serious about music and particularly the guitar. She takes guitar lessons from Sunny Day Real Estate front man Jeremy Enigk, who lives in the neighborhood adjacent to hers. During this time, she becomes acutely and physically aware of her status (or lack thereof) as a woman in rock music.

Following a stint at Western Washington University, Brownstein studies sociolinguistics at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. There, she starts her first major band, Excuse 17, with classmates Becca Albee and CJ Phillips. She becomes close with Corin Tucker, who plays with another all-woman rock group Heavens to Betsy. The two bands, with their low-budget DIY punk approach and lyrics emphasizing the tenets of third-wave feminism, become pioneers of a music movement later dubbed by rock critics as "riot grrl."

While playing with Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy, respectively, Brownstein and Tucker start a side-project together called Sleater-Kinney in 1994, named after a street in nearby Lacey, Washington. In addition to playing together as Sleater-Kinney, the two women are also dating. The band's early releases are put out by Chainsaw, a "queercore" record label. Starting with the group's second album, Call the Doctor, Brownstein and Tucker are joined by drummer Janet Weiss. During the 1990s, the group releases four albums to a huge amount of critical acclaim. Prominent rock critics, such as Robert Christgau, consider Sleater-Kinney to be one of the most important groups of their era.

Of the label riot grrl, Brownstein seems to have mixed emotions, particularly about the word, “girl.” She writes, “‘Girl’ felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitar was a tourist, an interloper.” Brownstein also discusses the difficulty as a teen of elbowing her way into the male-dominated rock scene in the Pacific Northwest. She writes that she couldn't just watch the bands play from the back of a bar, she had to get down in front and suffer the bruises of being in a mosh pit full of much larger men in order to fully experience the music she wanted to make and the heroes she wanted to become.

Brownstein talks a lot about these seemingly ancillary experiences around music as opposed to focusing on the dry theory of scales and chords. Being a part of a scene and having those attendant experiences is arguably as important to making great music as practicing one's guitar.

She also discusses in detail her immediate feelings about becoming a feminist icon. In particular, Brownstein is torn between the importance of identifying as a female, in order to be a part of a broader, impactful feminist movement, and the desire to simply be viewed on the same terms as her male counterparts. Of this seeming contradiction, she writes, “We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of ‘female’ should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly.”

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is at once a telling memoir, a reflection on feminism in the late twentieth century, and a faithful depiction of a special mini-era in the evolution of rock music in the 1990s.