0069

0069
from Bikini Kill: Girl Power (Issue #2)

Tabatha says death to all fuckhead fanzine editors who dare to dis the Bratmobile/Bikini Kill/RGSN/Girl Day/International Pop Underground Revolution Summer 1991 Riot Grrrl Style Now even!!! To so completely miss the whole point of everything, yeah well I'm sure he's a "nice guy" and "harmless" anyways, and besides, I hear he's had a "rough" life---yeah, so have most sexist fuckheads and I feel so badly for them, NOT. But what I'm even more distressed about is that he is a total square, irreconcilably so, and that it is squares like this that seem to have the say so about the current state of "punk rock" and the like: FUCK THE FLIPSIDE FANZINE GUY, and I don't wanna hate the kids which is just to say what to do what to do? about NONREVOLUTIONARIES misrepresenting the underground to hundreds of potential cool kids, we're gonna have to fight, well alright!!! um...it's just unforgivable really, so if you wrote me before and I never wrote you back, you should write again and say so and I'll try and do better this time. In fact, what with the new riot grrrl press scene that's about to start up (see this fanzine somewhere on another page for more information on this scene phenomenon) maybe I'll even get all four issues back in print, yeah so write me a letter at the address listed for Riot Grrrl in dc...and hopefully the number five will be available soon, although I have my doubts about this, to tell the truth because I have been writing letters into infinity and thinking about all these feminist theory questions to do with punk rock & don't feel as if I am making any progress in sorting any of this out and maybe it's gonna take forever to even formulate the questions that I want an answer to and that kind of sucks because I feel as if things are stagnating which is why it's so important to ask some of those questions here in the Bikini Kill fanzine number 2, but before you go on to read the rest of it...have you noticed that there is this weird phenomenon that happens to do with naming something and having it turn into something else once it's had a chance to assimilate into understanding---like for instance hardcore is an example of how an aesthetic that was originally fierce and powerful and in the vein of fucking shit up became the essence of conformity in punk rock, what with the generic drum beat/song structure/vocal tricks, etc. not to mention the rigidity of the style code of nonconformity and this all becomes a total end in itself, apart from inciting any kind of strong revolutionary agenda that could be happening--or another example has to do with jokes; things that start out as a joke become a total end part of everyday life - like how making fun of the way someone talks can totally become a real way to talk or even to communicate something entirely separate from its origin--or the thing of in-jokes where it goes on and on and on and nobody remembers where it came from or why but they keep referring to it and it ends up being some kind of weird ritualistic assertion of a group identity that has very little to do with the actual situation from which it stemmed...well anyways, I think that this sort of phenomenon could happen in our fanzines too, self-referencing to the point of absurdity which may or may not be significant--personally it is my total entertainment scene which I think is entirely valid, politically even--but also, a more serious concern is perhaps at stake here and that is that in this environment it is too easy for our doctrines to turn into dogma and RGSN recitations rather than meaningful interactions is what maybe becomes the political terrain: new standards arise when our whole thing was to shatter the old and replace them with action..again with reference to something our good friend the shmada said to me one day, we must not let the precedents we set ourselves distract us from the very things that drove us to set those precedents in the first place and it is with this in mind that I encourage girls everywhere to set forth their own revolutionary agendas from their own place in the world, in relation to their own scenes or whatever, rather than to simply think about ours.

This is about making new meanings of what it is to be cool that make real sense to you to do with who you are and what you want in revolution...embrace subjectivity as the only reality there is...context is everything...an idea of aesthetics as subjective truth, more on this next time...action.

Paula Pierce, lead singer and guitar player of the all-girl L.A. based band the Pandoras died of a heart attack last month. She was so cool. I used to listen to the Pandoras in 9th grade. She changed my life and Billy was in love with her. R.I.P.
--Tobi