Sleater-Kinney: "Music has always been the playground of male sexuality" | The music

BAnd now, we know that the culture of the meeting is a con. The brief excitement of seeing a favorite band reform is quickly tempered by watching them crush the tubes successfully and confronting their mortality. In addition, the past is no longer a novelty, but our perpetual day of marmots of recycled franchises and brands restarted.

That's why Sleater-Kinney's surprise return in 2015, nine years after a break, was so refreshing. Not content to dwell on old glories, the feminist punks had a brilliant new album, the rebel, the new wavy No city to loveand vocalist-guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker and thresher Janet Weiss have been shamelessly stopping the lack of women in rock.

Better yet, it turned out that this is not an isolated case. In January, the news that St Vincent, also known as Annie Clark, had produced their new album "Breaking the Internet," said Pitchfork, an independent American actress, sounding slightly surprised by "the endless possibilities of what this collaboration could look like ". "Infinite possibilities" was about money: The center is not going hold It's the most diverse album in Sleater-Kinney, full of vaudevillian clashes about how women handle chaos, the industrial demands for carnal and spiritual satisfaction, Tom Petty's indebted ballad, which testifies to betrayal. and the thrilling excitement of choirs thrown to excess.

In mid-June, I have to meet the trio to discuss his second participation in Portland, Oregon, but I get an email several hours in advance to tell him that Weiss is sick. Tucker arrives first on the neighborhood, his striped earrings match his monochrome t-shirt. It's a shame for Weiss, I say. "Yeah," Tucker said with a sigh, looking up at the sky. "That's it." Appears Brownstein, small and glamorous glam in a gray felt jacket. We head to the restaurant, which comes straight from PortlandiaThe satire now concluded with the Emmy Awards on life in the craft town zealously that Brownstein has written and interpreted. She orders a fish stew, while Tucker orders a piece of corn bread and asks the server what their "zero food" certification means. We learn that it is a program that finances climate-friendly agriculture, while Michael Jackson plays on a stereo.

They make fun of ethical nonsense. Tucker and Brownstein are the songwriters of Sleater-Kinney and their 25-year-old friendship is attractive. They are as clumsy as deferential, less serious than you think – Brownstein's smile is half his face and Tucker often explodes an explosive laugh. This new album is a little risky, they explain. Last spring, Brownstein developed an adaptation of his 2015 memoir Hunger makes me a modern girl for television, a potentialPortlandia project. This slightly fictitious series would find her as well as Tucker's looking for a drummer in Olympia, Washington, where they would have met as students who would settle in the city to join the band. anti-riot scene of the early 90s.

At the time, in real life, the two men flew to Melbourne to meet their first drummer without hearing a single beat from him. They made two albums with Laura Macfarlane, until geographical logistics became boring. Then they found Weiss, who was "the best decision we ever made," Brownstein wrote in his memoir. Weiss joins for his third (and first big) album, 1997's Poppy, punchy Dig Me Out. They eclipsed the DIY Olympia scene and became one of the most innovative rock bands in the United States, subverting the convention of girls' groups and the excesses of clbadic rock, while Tucker's incredible gospel gave their work a powerful spiritual urgency. Once the fans discovered that Tucker and Brownstein had dated briefly, they also became strange icons.

Brownstein's driver for the series on their debut was not picked up. But if it was successful, she said, who knows when they would have time to make a new album. "I was like, why do I examine music through a historical lens? My relationship to music is right now. It's more important to me.

This relationship was invigorated when they saw youth who had missed them for the first time during their incendiary gatherings. I went to see five of these people to make up for lost time; at 16, I bought their single Jumpers at sight. It was on green vinyl and the credits indicated three women, which was enough of a USP in the 2000s. I was too late – it was their last single.

Brownstein recently began to think that the bar around his return in 2015 was too low. "There is this room for maneuver: oh, it's not terrible! And it was not even terrible, but you can navigate this momentum of enthusiasm soothed for a moment. Deciding to continue increases the stakes: the only goal, says Tucker, is to do something different. "Want to play with what we've done before, want to take risks."

Taking risks can be risky. Nine days after meeting Tucker and Brownstein, Weiss leaves Sleater-Kinney. "The group is taking a new direction and it's time for me to move on," she said in a statement. I find her and ask her if she wants to speak. she considers it, but declines.

Tucker and Brownstein sound crushed when we speak the day after Weiss's news. They admit she was not sick the day we met in Portland – it happened very recently and suddenly and they did not know what was going on. They tried band therapy. They will not speculate on Weiss's reasoning, although Brownstein stated that they thought "everyone was really happy with the record".

But the show will continue. Brownstein says that they are as determined to evolve as ever. "After these years, it may seem harder to take those risks, but that's why I invested. Corin and I headed to the other side of the world to launch Sleater-Kinney. This group has always had something impulsive and suspicious, and I feel that there is no other way to be part of this group, other than to adapt and evolve.

Suitably, The center will not hold is inspired by an unlikely source – at least for a punk band. They were driving while listening to Rihanna Stay's ballad when Brownstein said that she wanted to write a song like that. When they started writing seriously, she lived in Los Angeles, Tucker in Portland (Brownstein returned later), so they had to work remotely for the first time, giving them the opportunity to develop their individual visions.

Tucker's songs are darker than Brownstein's, full of research and isolation: "Darkness wins again," she sings in the stormy Reach Out movie. She was depressed. Tucker had worked for his father for years, in marketing and web design. When her company was bought by a big company, she was let go. "My brain is gone: argh, too," she says. She looked for drugs, which helped. She laughs: "It also gave me the freedom to be: you're supposed to be 100% an artist right now."

Brownstein presents with excuse a "super-psychobadytic" theory. Tucker became a parent before Sleater-Kinney made his 2002 A beat, one of the few albums of this period to be explicitly anti-Bush – Far Away, described her badfeeding while watching television war. "Do you remember your awareness of being a mother and having to protect your children?" Asks Brownstein. "Your son is 18, he goes to college. You're not like, "You're done!", But it seems like you feel much freer to express your anxieties. It may be more difficult when you stick so strongly to the notions of family. "

Tucker agrees. She feared that the music business would bother her children – her second was born after the group's break in 2006 – but with a child at the door, she feels relieved. "It really frees me to rage a bit more in my songs."

Not that she was optimistic in the meantime, she was unleashed on the last album. Also, what about his 11 year old daughter? "She gets up again," Brownstein deadpans.

Their relationships recorded the change. Now 46, Tucker says she was the person who took care of him while Brownstein, 44, was poorer. (Brownstein describes Weiss, 53, as consistently "no-nonsense".)

"Carrie really worked to become a very nurturing person," says Tucker, with comic generosity. "She is very caring."

"Speak louder!" Asks Brownstein laughing.

Tucker says she's become less kind, although she still insists on sharing her lunch. "J & # 39; I raised two kids, that's it, and now I'm more in touch with what I need, what I deserve. "

This need rages through Broken, the bluesy piano ballad that inspired Rihanna's inspiration in a very different place. It is a tribute to Christine Blasey Ford, who said that Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh badaulted her in 1982. "She defended us when she testified, too," Tucker sings. with sadness: "My body screamed when she spoke lines."

Kavanaugh was named anyway. But a result, Tucker said, was positive. "To tell me also means that it is important that you have ownership of what has happened to you. It's good to say that it had an impact on your life at any age. Men have lost their jobs. It's a big problem. Harvey Weinstein walking on the handcuffed field – it's a win. Always: "It's not enough and the legal part is slow to change.

Meanwhile, the reaction is fast. "White and heterobadual men are in a state of disempowerment of positions of power that they have badumed as their inalienable right," says Brownstein, who becomes academic when he is attracted to intellectual subjects. "When so many people fear losing power, they keep it in the face of the brutality in which we live. Adopt an anti-abortion law: there is such a retreat when progress is made. This is not a fatality. She sighs. "These reminders are very sorry."

But broken apart, The center will not hold is not explicitly political. "If people thought Sleater-Kinney was going to release a strong, anti-Trump record, they would be misguided," says Brownstein. The restaurant has closed, we will perch out. Sleater-Kinney has already written these songs, she laughs. "We have tackled the #MeToo movement and the patriarchal shyness injustice and subjection systems since 1995!"

On the contrary, the Trump presidency has forced a re-examination of what makes art "political". Rabies was the preserve of punk. Now this is the dominant discourse. "It's really hard to want to match that level of hyperbole," says Brownstein. "Even though I like the spirit of anger, this volume has been claimed by really terrible people." Composed of four women, the album is by nature "her own political statement," she says. Hillary Clinton recalls Hillary Clinton: "This crushing of older women is really part of our patriarchal culture, but it has been revealed. We said to ourselves, are not at all calm, take our music and see how far we can extend it, change it.

Hold on – to sing about the culture of rape in 1995 to the violence of capitalism on No city to love, Sleater-Kinney have never been fluffy. Brownstein is half in agreement: "That was all the creed from which we came – the 90s punk-rock feminism – but the older you get, the more scary it is to say you still want to do it. because there are fewer stories in popular music by women of a certain age. Doing this when we were younger was almost taken for granted. Now you really have to take some, be a little greedy and voracious.

Expansive and adventurous, The center will not hold made this statement boldly. It is also about the fact that Brownstein has the bare bad on the cover of the single Hurry on Home. She wanted the whole group to be naked. "It was a bad idea!" Admits Brownstein.

Tucker – and his daughter – agreed. "I read her texts aloud and she was like," MOM! You do not do that!

They sneer. They say that they were too shy to celebrate their baduality in their twenties. Brownstein says that someone already wrote an angry essay about a photo where his pants were visible. Moreover, says Tucker, "Music has always been the playground of male baduality. Women have really struggled to claim their own space. "(That's also why they think #MeToo has barely touched the music industry.)

Sexual empowerment is in a state of hyperevolution: it is now the writer who decrypts Brownstein's panties who would be considered a traitor. "Gender as construction is now like a net bag," says Tucker with relief. "It was very rigid before," says Brownstein. "The pedophilia of culture and the deconstruction of gender identity have unleashed a lot of things for women." She thinks her joke challenges the idea that the average age is a wasteland badual.

Everything is in the best lyrics of the album: "There is nothing more frightening and more obscene than a worn-out body that asks to be seen," Brownstein yells at the euphoric Love, a letter of love written by Sleater-Kinney to themselves and to the resistance. through collaboration. It sounds a little different now that Weiss is gone – a rallying cry has turned into a eulogy.

When Weiss resigned, it added a wave of growing skepticism among hardcore fans of the band who did not really want Sleater-Kinney to change. They criticized the group's new singles, claiming that Clark's production made them look too much like St Vincent. They blamed Brownstein for letting her down, concluding that she and Clark (with whom she went out once) should try to dominate the group. They accused the band of being sold for leaving the independent label Sub Pop for the independent label Mom + Pop. The departure of Weiss was taken as proof of all this. In the comments under his statement, people called Clark "Yoko Ono".

It was strange to watch – revealing a rather limited imagination about collaboration and female ambition. You may be able to understand why fans would want a reliable constant during a period of political chaos that has shown, as Brownstein has said, that progress is not inevitable. And when someone leaves a totemic feminist group – ideally a melting pot of shared politics – people inevitably wonder how they can believe in their mission if one of their members apparently does not do it. Scarier is perhaps the foolish way in which old friendships can simply end.

But the criticism was misplaced. In fact, it had been Weiss' idea to work with Clark, who was not afraid to push Sleater-Kinney as she adored the group as a teenager, whose posters were hanging on the wall of her room. After their farewell concert in New York in 2006, Clark was "so excited that I had an excited newsstand." "Now, she thinks, there are a lot of ways to stir people's hearts and make them turn things around and scream."

The group abandoned its initial collaborative venture with several producers after Clark's test week in Los Angeles. After that, Weiss did not return until the last two days of registration. She was busy, laments Brownstein in Portland. (Weiss works as head of film and television, a career that started at Brownstein PortlandiaThere is a personal cost to being in a group, especially when each member has a very different economic reality: Brownstein a celebrity, Tucker a working mom, Weiss developing a new career.

These disparities inevitably affect what Sleater-Kinney means to everyone. "It's tricky when it's not the life raft you're wearing," said Brownstein sadly. "It's not that the group has to be a lifeboat in the same way as in 1997, but it does require an urgency mingled with joy and appreciation from all of us. If this is not the case as well, it can be very difficult. "

As for the skepticism of the fans, this was not new. In 1997, Sleater-Kinney was accused of selling all his pieces by leaving the tiny label queercore Chainsaw for Kill Rock Stars. "From the beginning, people have knocked our ideas out of ambition," says Tucker. The point of changing the label, producer and sound was the change itself. "I just do not have that relationship with what we do. I think if we do the same thing, people will love us, "says Brownstein. "Then you work by consensus, this is the worst way to do art. She lacks a point of view. She is unshakeable: "Corin and I are very confident that everything we do in Sleater-Kinney is Sleater-Kinney. "

The departure of Weiss will affect the way people hear The center will not hold. But practically, Tucker and Brownstein write the songs. In our dark post mortem interview, Brownstein shows a flash of optimism. "Corin and I have created this group and we are going to finish it. It's a long and very special trip with Janet, but it's also something of Corin and me that sounds familiar and very normal. "

Tucker lights up. "I'm not going anywhere!"

Brownstein laughs. "Thanks for letting me know."

They say the split is not acrimonious – just bad timing from a person known for good timing. "We want Janet to be happy and healthy," said Tucker. "If someone is not happy doing this job, it would not be good for any of us." .

The Will Not Hold Center is published by Mom + Pop on August 16th. The band plays in London, Manchester and Glasgow in February 2020