In the Spring of 2010, when I was general manager of the University of Washington's student-run radio station, I collaborated with the campus' Committee Organizing Rape Education to host a "Riot Grrrl" concert featuring three local bands, with proceeds going to the Eastside Domestic Violence Program's women's shelter. I recall struggling to book the show; the bands we ultimately chose were hardly what you'd call Riot Grrrl, but they had the right kind of spark and spirit (Eel Eater was a grimy girl-girl-gay guy trio; NightraiN are an all-black all-female feminist rock group; and TacocaT are a cheeky Seattle punk band with a 9:1 ratio of X to Y chromosomes).

The difficulty I faced finding ideal groups for the gig boiled down to a combination of my own ignorance and the relative scarcity of contemporary local bands with that distinctively barbed Riot Grrrl sound. Almost a year later, I still wonder: are there any new Riot Grrrl bands out there? Who is carrying on the sonic and ideological legacy of Olympia's raucous punk feminist forebears, and how?

Spark to fire

To appreciate its modern day inheritors, we should first look back at the origins of the term "Riot Grrrl" - a phrase predominantly used to describe a cluster of Cascadian bands from the early '90s that were entirely (or at least mostly) staffed by women. They had confrontational frontwomen like Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile, and their discordant punk riffing, DIY ethic and outspoken feminism netted them legions of fans, but also made them the target of the mainstream media's scrutinizing leer. Though the term has engendered a few different interpretations, this much is definite: it originated with a postcard Bratmobile vocalist Allison Wolfe received from friend and onetime bandmate Jen Smith in 1991. In her correspondence, Smith reacted to the 1991 Mount Pleasant race riot by calling for their own punk feminist uprising, a "girl riot." The "grrrl" spelling was probably lifted from one of Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail's "Angry Grrrl" zines, or incorporated as a shout-out to the Go Team song "Grr Tiger Grrr". The provocative two-word term was slapped on the cover of a zine (clandestinely Xeroxed after-hours in the office of a U.S. Senator), and suddenly the burgeoning musical movement - ostensibly a form of cultural activism, with roots in the defiant performances of blues songstresses like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and others - had an eye-catching, slogan-like name.

While the basic milestones in the history of Riot Grrrl - the ideological wake of the Mount Pleasant riots, the first Riot Grrrl meetings, the "Girl's Night" that kicked off K Records' International Pop Underground Convention in '91 - are sacrosanct, some of the details of Riot Grrrl's inception differ from telling to telling. These kinds of slight discrepancies sometimes lead to mythologizing (and Northwest music in the '90s is nothing if not mythic).

Renowned rock critic Everett True, who once sang with the Go Team and was present for Riot Grrrl's groundswell, maintains that while "mythology is important, so is demystification. The story of Riot Grrrl varies because the people telling it vary."

One year after Mount Pleasant, the press got wise to Riot Grrrl's growling, and the attention that was foisted upon the musicians and zine authors by everyone from Seventeen to Newsweek (much of it snarky or downright negative) prompted the movement's de facto leaders to call for a "media blackout." The future of "Revolution Girl-Style Now" (Hanna's rallying cry, and the name of Bikini Kill's first cassette release) seemed uncertain, especially as capitalist forces conspired to commodify Riot Grrrl's infectious alt-energy. As Hanna recalls in Daniel Sinker's We Owe You Nothing, "The things that I was saying back then were very easily co-optable by capitalism and the mainstream media." 

"They were co-opting our images, our language, our words," remembers Bratmobile's Allison Wolfe.

What's in a name?

This period of post-blackout deceleration led to the current lack of consensus on the term "Riot Grrrl": is it a genre, a set of ideals or a way of describing a particularly charged moment in time? 

"I feel like in many ways, the term ‘Riot Grrrl' refers to sort of an era of a type of feminism," says Wolfe. "It was, like, punk rock feminism from the early '90s. I feel like it's a valid strain of third-wave feminism."

In the 2005 documentary Don't Need You, Hanna seems to hedge toward Riot Grrrl as genre, but in a 1996 interview, she stated that "part of the whole idea about Riot Grrrl was that you couldn't define it. ... We didn't have a mission statement we could pass out, we didn't have a sentence that encapsulated it, we didn't have one unified goal, we didn't have one way to dress or look."

In 1996, K Records co-founder Candice Pederson told Andrea Juno, author of Angry Women in Rock, that she was certain Riot Grrrl was "not over," and True also sees Riot Grrrl as an ongoing phenomenon and more than just a moment in time. Many of the bands I interviewed for this feature think differently. Though inspired by Riot Grrrl, they decline to identify with it.

"I attach that name to a specific movement of a specific time. Riot Grrrl definitely helped clear a space for us, and I think to use the disembodied name without its historical movement would be diluting the message," says Stephie Cristol, lead vocalist for Olympia punk band Hysterics, whose insignia is the Black Flag logo redone with bloody tampons - their way of "messing with the macho hardcore paradigm."

Jigsaw youth

While the first wave of Riot Grrrl bands was ostensibly a reaction to Washington, D.C.'s testosterone-soaked hardcore scene, they based themselves mostly out of distant cities like Olympia (Bikini Kill), London (Huggy Bear) and, in the case of Bratmobile, Olympia, Eugene and D.C simultaneously. Of those hotspots, it's Olympia that's specifically remembered as the birthplace of Riot Grrrl, and Washington's capitol city remains the go-to destination for radical girl punk, with awesome acts like Hysterics, Weird TV, Hell Woman, Son Skull, Blood Bones and Morgan and the Organ Donors (in their own words, "a garage band fronted by a feminist full-time librarian") calling it home. Few of these bands sound very much like the seminal Riot Grrrl groups of yore, and it would be dangerous to make too many generalizations about these inspired, diverse musicians. Writers in the '90s heyday were fairly liberal with their assertions about Riot Grrrl groups, and, as True reminds us, "Riot Grrrl was never a fixed set of ideals. All ideals and values are necessarily fluid over time."

Whereas the original Riot Grrrls dug on pop and New Wave in their adolescence before having punk revelations later in life, Oly's current crop of aggro alt-creatives rocked along to Bikini Kill as teens, internalizing its feminist philosophy before moving on to craft their own varied, self-wrought sounds as adult musicians.

"A Riot Grrrl mixtape was a major gateway for me into feminist thought and feminist thought now impacts my perspective on everything," reveals Sara Peté, frontwoman for Morgan and the Organ Donors.

"I definitely listened to Bikini Kill when I was 14," says Anna Kinderman, vocalist/drummer for the hard-rocking all-girl quartet Hell Woman, "but I think musically we're more, like, into metal and stuff." Kinderman adds that she definitely considers herself a feminist ideologically, which is not entirely surprising, considering that the artwork for Hell Woman's demo tape features a naked woman standing over the corpse of a decapitated man, a bloody butcher knife in one hand and the man's dismembered member in the other.

Bikini Kills' "Rebel Girl" could be seen as a locally specific antecedent to Hell Woman's "Eastside Honey," but Hell Woman's sound rocks more than it riots, with Kinderman and bandmates Christina Gemora and Emily Lindseth citing Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and buttrock like Diamond Dave-era Van Halen as  primary influences. For them, the Riot Grrrl label has some serious drawbacks.

"I guess I have a weird relationship with it, because I don't like that we get pigeonholed as a Riot Grrrl band ‘cause we're all girls," Kinderman says. "I feel like it's a really easy way to pigeonhole female-fronted or female-focused bands."

Hell Woman have had to contend not only with stereotyping, but also with condescension. "People are like, ‘Oh, you're girls and you're playing music. Good job!'"

Wolfe echoes the sentiment: "I think sometimes it's still also treated as a gimmick or as a genre, as if girls playing music together is a genre or a type of music."

"I do (feel adversity in the Olympia punk scene), as a singer," says Lizet Ortuño of the four-piece Weird TV. "There are definitely times that I feel with some dudes in the hardcore scene, with their arms crossed, and just, like, their posture ... it's not inviting. It definitely feels like I'm being excluded sometimes, and I shouldn't be excluded because I'm a woman. I'm tough, and I'm, like, a strong lady, and I'm not scared of those dudes. I think they should be scared of me." While she faces many of the same obstacles that emboldened early Riot Grrrls, Ortuño doesn't associate the term with Weird TV. "I've loved Bikini Kill since I was 14 years old. I think it's really amazing, but it's not something that I feel a part of. ... We're a punk band. Riot Grrrl already happened, and I'm not on that boat, but I'm glad it happened."

Weird TV bassist Erika Santillan-Marquez adds, "I don't consider myself a ‘Riot Grrrl,' but I am, y'know, kind of a descendent of that generation. If it wasn't for Riot Grrrl, I'm not even sure I would be playing. Seeing other women play guitar and basses and stuff was totally empowering."

Like Hysterics, Weird TV are also largely inspired by Black Flag. The band (which also includes NUTS zine author Ben Trogdon on drums and John Root on guitar) are currently in Mexico, wrapping up the tail end of an ambitious West Coast/Southwest tour. The band's skuzzy sound, as heard on their self-titled demo and 7-inch for Perennial records, has the doomy and disorienting vibe of a mescaline trip during Día de los Muertos; it's also not entirely without grrrly-ness. "Noise," from their demo, juxtaposes recordings Root copped from a session of channel-surfing at the group home for mentally-disabled adults where he once worked. Though the song is totally aleatoric, some of the fleeting TV snippets have sarcastic grrrly resonances: a micro-sample of 2001's "Lady Marmalade" redux, someone denouncing "sexual immorality" and a woman cooing "OK ladies, your time is up - put your make-up brushes down."

The girl-style revolutionary attitude of Hysterics' songs is less oblique, and their lyrics directly address some of the same issues tackled by Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. In "Arm Candy," Cristol sardonically sings "I'm just here to decorate / pick me up in your car / I hope I look nice on your arm / when you're chilling with your bros / when we go out to the shows." "Dirty" is about the beauty industry, but could be interpreted as commentary on the marketplace's absorption and dilution of Riot Grrrl: "commercial market / I'm your target / sell me shit / not buying it."

It's fitting, then, that these bands prefer to stick to short-run physical mediums like cassettes and zines, many of them eschewing any online presence entirely.

"MySpace and whatever - that shit is so ugly, and I don't want to be a part of it because it looks so bad. There's just so much more to art," says Weird TV's Root.

This aversion to the digital frontier syncs with the prevailing DIY mindset, but hinders the bands' chances of circulating their material or expanding their fanbase outside of the Northwest. Of course, this wasn't even an option in the pre-internet era, as Wolfe recalls. "Sometimes I look back and think it's amazing how we networked and communicated like we did, without any of these tools like social networking," she says.

Bratmobile drummer Molly Neuman agrees: "It's hard to fathom what we would have done with access to the communication tools available today."

"It's important to remember that (Riot Grrrl) bands were only a part of (a) much larger movement and many people involved didn't play an instrument," says Morgan and the Organ Donors guitarist James Maeda. "They shared information, which is even more powerful."

An ongoing (r)evolution

So what does Riot Grrrl mean now in this globally-wired, high-tech world? Its figureheads have more or less moved on, though they continue to stoke the flames of revolutionary spirit. Tobi Vail's Jigsaw zine lives on in blog form, Hanna and Wolfe have new bands and other projects, Neuman is a chef and nutritional consultant. Other grrrls like Corrin Tucker (Heavens to Betsy, Sleater-Kinney) continue to perform, providing an example for the latest generation to aspire to.

If I had to book another Riot Grrrl benefit concert tomorrow, I'd set my sights directly on the South Sound's hotbed of awesome girl-fronted rock groups. These young, energized punks may not call themselves Riot Grrrls, but clearly they embrace the movement's core values, underscoring the vital impact of those first, fearless rebel girls.