{"id":2562,"date":"2014-04-01T11:22:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2014\/04\/01\/lets-call-it-love-part-1-a-look-at-the-music-of-sleater-kinney\/"},"modified":"2014-04-01T11:22:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T15:22:00","slug":"lets-call-it-love-part-1-a-look-at-the-music-of-sleater-kinney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2014\/04\/01\/lets-call-it-love-part-1-a-look-at-the-music-of-sleater-kinney\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Call It Love: Part 1: A Look at the Music of Sleater-Kinney"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019m going to talk about every single Sleater-Kinney song ever recorded. This won\u2019t be an objective analysis. This is a labour of love for a band that feels only secondary to breathing and water in terms of importance for my existence. I cannot go a day without listening to Sleater-Kinney and while favourite bands tend to come and go in waves I think they are around for good. I\u2019ve said that about other important artists in my life, but then that\u2019s the thing that\u2019s so beautiful about music in particular. It can fade as you mature and grow older, but in that moment those notes and those words mean fucking everything to you. Music is like an attachment of soul and the one art form that feels like it morphs you into the person you are and who you want to be. It can lift you up in moments of need and fix all your problems in 3 minutes or 15 if you\u2019re into progressive rock, and it\u2019s a kind of magic. It’s a rhythmic alchemy brought to the world out of nothing by these god\u2019s who stand on stage and produce life through sound. It\u2019s powerful and Sleater Kinney feels like a direct reflection of everything I am. I think favourite bands always kind of feel that way. They belong to you right? When I\u2019m listening to them they feel like something vital to my life. There\u2019s no way I can ever repay them for the support they\u2019ve given me so I\u2019m just going to keep on listening for the rest of my life. <\/div>\n
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First a little background information
Sleater-Kinney would hardly ever label themselves as a riot grrrl act during their heyday (something they would discuss more openly after they went on hiatus) but their genesis is very much steeped in that sound. After all Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein are the Foremothers of riot grrrl acts like Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17 and Heartless Martin. In 1994 the first Sleater-Kinney music was released in the single You Ain\u2019t It\/Surf Song <\/i>for Villa Villakula Records. They would also record two other songs for that label in Write Me Back Fucker <\/i>and a cover of Boston\u2019s More Than a Feeling. <\/i>These first recordings reflect a band that already had their sound set in place. It was just rougher around the edges. <\/div>\n
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You Ain\u2019t It<\/a> <\/i>is lyrically about as forwardly-snotty-fuck you-riot grrrl as this band ever got, and it kind of rules. It\u2019s the same kind of rock is not just for men attitude that many riot grrrl bands possessed from this same time period. What I truly love here is the wailing (I bet I\u2019ll use this word a lot) braggadocio in Corin\u2019s voice of not giving a fuck about boy bands. In 1994, and still to this day really, women are still seen as novelty acts in rock music. You\u2019ll see the term \u201cGirl rock band\u201d get thrown around a lot as a buzzword as if it was another thing that needed to be gendered to the point where you had to separate women from men just because it was unfair to compare the two, and it\u2019s bullshit. The riot grrrl movement in general was as much about feminism as it was about punk rock, but it certainly broke down barriers and told girls they could do anything in the world they wanted to and <\/i>be better at it than men. In the sound of the song though it proved the band was already working out their formula. The guitars are already twisting and contorting around each other and Corin and Carrie are already using choruses to launch a harmonic attack in vocal and guitar. It\u2019s awesome for reasons that don\u2019t just align with my own punk rock feminism. It\u2019s a hell of a start, and they\u2019d get so much better. <\/div>\n
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Surf Song<\/a> <\/i>is the b-side to You AIn\u2019t It <\/i>and it has the same roughness of all the Villa Villakula recordings, but unlike You Ain\u2019t It<\/i>\u2019s brash riot grrrl aggression Surf Song <\/i>feels absolutely light. What song wouldn\u2019t feel light with lyrics like \u201cLet\u2019s go down to the beach today, Let\u2019s go down to the water and play\u201d <\/i>? Sleater-Kinney would rarely go for the type of sweetness that is found in this song, but it\u2019s ultimately one of my favourites for that very reason. I searched all over the internet for this song so I could somehow have it with me at all times. I would complain to my boyfriend that I couldn\u2019t ever find \u201cThe Sleater-Kinney Beach Song\u201d and I\u2019m sure I whined about it constantly, but oh the elation when I finally found it. I would download it (sorry you can\u2019t find the Villakula recordings anywhere anyway), and have it forever. Oh! And the pen pal letter in the middle that Carrie writes to Corin where she complains about the band name and talks about new wave bands? It\u2019s like friends in the back of a high school year book and my heart melts. The kind of friendship I\u2019m lucky enough to have with one person. You know who you are. <\/p>\n

The other two songs on the Villakula set are Write Me Back Fucker<\/a> <\/i>and MoreThan a Feeling<\/a>. Write Me Back Fucker <\/i>(great title btw) is maybe the least interesting song of these early recordings. The most notable thing about it is the title and the bridge, which just soars due to Corin\u2019s voice. It\u2019s almost kind of funny the previous song had an entire letter segment and this song is actually about a break up via letter. I don\u2019t think they are in any way connected but I think that\u2019s a neat fact. The first truly special moment in Sleater-Kinney\u2019s career is their cover of More Than a Feeling <\/i>. The song has that same DIY sound as the others on this label. It\u2019s a sound I\u2019ve grown to love in early riot grrrl recordings (especially Bikini Kill\u2019s Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah<\/i>), and followed Sleater-Kinney up through their first album the following year. There are multitudes of things I love about this song. The soft build up of the warm guitars in the verse, the harsh reimagining of the chorus with Carrie\u2019s primal screams that she would make even better use of on Last Song<\/i> the following year, and then there\u2019s the outro where the guitars just sing and Corin wraps her voice lightly around the melody and it\u2019s a thing of absolute beauty and cements this as the best version of this song. Sorry Boston, Sorry Nirvana.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m going to talk about every single Sleater-Kinney song ever recorded. This won\u2019t be an objective analysis. This is a…<\/p>\n

Continue readingLet’s Call It Love: Part 1: A Look at the Music of Sleater-Kinney<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[357,424,274,398],"class_list":["post-2562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-music","tag-punk","tag-riot-grrrl","tag-sleater-kinney","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}