Saw Le Tigre last week and have been procrastinating on posting about it. T’was fun, though I was at my peak of liking their music and Kathleen Hanna in general in high school, so I guess I was going in with more jaded eyes. Case in point: in between songs at one point she was talking about making “spaces” “safer” for non-”straight, white, cis” people. Which…kind of bummed me out for a few songs. Just a few weeks prior I’d been to a show in my town where one of the openers was a bunch of local kids, the oldest of which had just graduated high school. 3/5 of the members were girls, one of them sporting a super sick afro. The pit was all female at one point (and much more existent than crowd action at the Le Tigre show, where everyone danced tamely in place until they ended the night with “Deceptacon” and spontaneously everyone started mauling each other). But the main takeaway that I got from those kids’ show wasn’t some message of “inclusion”. My takeaway was that they kicked ass. Their music wasn’t sanitized; in fact, it was actually pretty vicious. And they didn’t ask permission from anyone to do what they did. They didn’t read some book that told them how to do it, either. They were playing because it was something they loved to do, and it was their passion towards kicking ass that defined them. It would be a disgrace to that passion to try and apply tokenism to them or that night. I thought it was cool seeing a lot of fellow young women in the crowd, but I also thought it was cool that, finally, my little town has a cool little ~space~ where all kinds of people can indulge in some Maximum Volume Kick Ass Rock-N-Roll. I wasn’t consciously scanning the crowd to see how many people looked like me or didn’t. I didn’t give a shit, because I was living in the moment. Concerts are events where all different kinds of people can become one with great music. And in that moment, when you’re losing yourself in guitar feedback and physical interaction, “female representation” and “visible queerness” don’t really matter. What the hell constitutes being “visibly queer”, anyways? Certain patches or pins? Certain styles of hair? Certain facial structures? Why can’t people just be people?
Maybe I would’ve been a little more impressed if I had less life experience and more of a grudge against the concept of men. And this is coming from a physically small female from the suburbs. If anyone should have a grudge against men, shouldn’t it be me? Too bad I try not to judge people based on features they can’t really change. I just judge them on whether their taste in music is good or not. Because the superficial construct doesn’t matter much. It’s the gray matter that matters.
Kathleen ended her spiel by saying we should consider solution-based approaches to the problems in our world. Which is totally correct. But she seemed unaware that the solution is already unfolding in gritty little scenes across the country. Hence why I was…a little bummed.
Tags: concerts, FEMINISM, Le Tigre
This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2023 at 09:33 and is filed under Reviews & Commentaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Riot Grrrl Shizz?
Saw Le Tigre last week and have been procrastinating on posting about it. T’was fun, though I was at my peak of liking their music and Kathleen Hanna in general in high school, so I guess I was going in with more jaded eyes. Case in point: in between songs at one point she was talking about making “spaces” “safer” for non-”straight, white, cis” people. Which…kind of bummed me out for a few songs. Just a few weeks prior I’d been to a show in my town where one of the openers was a bunch of local kids, the oldest of which had just graduated high school. 3/5 of the members were girls, one of them sporting a super sick afro. The pit was all female at one point (and much more existent than crowd action at the Le Tigre show, where everyone danced tamely in place until they ended the night with “Deceptacon” and spontaneously everyone started mauling each other). But the main takeaway that I got from those kids’ show wasn’t some message of “inclusion”. My takeaway was that they kicked ass. Their music wasn’t sanitized; in fact, it was actually pretty vicious. And they didn’t ask permission from anyone to do what they did. They didn’t read some book that told them how to do it, either. They were playing because it was something they loved to do, and it was their passion towards kicking ass that defined them. It would be a disgrace to that passion to try and apply tokenism to them or that night. I thought it was cool seeing a lot of fellow young women in the crowd, but I also thought it was cool that, finally, my little town has a cool little ~space~ where all kinds of people can indulge in some Maximum Volume Kick Ass Rock-N-Roll. I wasn’t consciously scanning the crowd to see how many people looked like me or didn’t. I didn’t give a shit, because I was living in the moment. Concerts are events where all different kinds of people can become one with great music. And in that moment, when you’re losing yourself in guitar feedback and physical interaction, “female representation” and “visible queerness” don’t really matter. What the hell constitutes being “visibly queer”, anyways? Certain patches or pins? Certain styles of hair? Certain facial structures? Why can’t people just be people?
Maybe I would’ve been a little more impressed if I had less life experience and more of a grudge against the concept of men. And this is coming from a physically small female from the suburbs. If anyone should have a grudge against men, shouldn’t it be me? Too bad I try not to judge people based on features they can’t really change. I just judge them on whether their taste in music is good or not. Because the superficial construct doesn’t matter much. It’s the gray matter that matters.
Kathleen ended her spiel by saying we should consider solution-based approaches to the problems in our world. Which is totally correct. But she seemed unaware that the solution is already unfolding in gritty little scenes across the country. Hence why I was…a little bummed.
Tags: concerts, FEMINISM, Le Tigre
This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2023 at 09:33 and is filed under Reviews & Commentaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.