After I dislocated my elbow in January, when I read the message from my doctor’s office that said the MRI showed a torn ligament, a torn tendon, and a fracture, my first reaction was a giant mental “ugh,” except with more swear words. My second reaction was to put on the song “Dig Me Out” by Sleater-Kinney, the volume turned up loud. Dig Me Out was the first Sleater-Kinney album I heard (I was in high school when it came out), and that title track is apparently still my first choice for a song to hear when I’m upset, when I want to get lost in something loud. Carrie Brownstein writes about that song in Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, how her guitar riff starts off “fast and careening, a skid into a crash,”; how her bandmate Corin Tucker’s vocals are “desperate and angry,” how the melody is “on the brink of oblivion, frenzied yet resolute” (124). Brownstein also writes about her own musical experiences as a fan, about “why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now” (3). I don’t know: some albums I listened to in high school haven’t aged particularly well, and I think there’s more than nostalgia in some of the ones that still sound great, though yes, there’s nostalgia and familiarity too, in the way it feels to hear a song you first heard and loved decades ago. All of which is to say, I really like Sleater-Kinney, and have been meaning to read this book since it came out in 2015, and I’m not sure what took me so long.
There are lots of fun things about this book, which is mostly but not entirely chronological, and largely but not entirely focused on Brownstein’s time with Sleater-Kinney between 1994 and 2006. After an opening section about Brownstein’s youth, where we learn about the challenges of her early family life, her love of performing, and how she started being in bands, we get chapters about each Sleater-Kinney album through The Woods, with bits about writing the songs, making the albums, and touring. I sometimes wanted the structure to be a bit tighter—there’s a chapter about having opening bands/being an opening band that was interesting but didn’t feel like it was integral to the narrative flow—but the overall reading experience was satisfying to me. I liked reading about how Brownstein approaches/feels about music, like when she writes this: “so much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it” (51). I liked reading about how Brownstein listened to Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy, how she met Corin Tucker by introducing herself after a Heavens to Betsy show; I liked reading about the music scenes in Seattle and Olympia and Portland. I liked reading about the challenges and rewards of making music, of touring and recording. And I liked reading about specific albums, thinking about specific songs. I also appreciated Brownstein’s self-aware and sometimes lyrical writing style, like in this passage, where she’s talking about home/family:
I realized that after wanting to celebrate Christmas for so long, it wasn’t about having a tree, it was about having a box in the basement or attic or garage, something that we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us and this is where we were last year, and this is where we’ll stay, and this is where we’ll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it’s blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can’t name because it’s so new. (46)
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