Let’s forget for a moment that it’s strongly associated with that travesty of a Leo Dicaprio film where a bunch of entitled hippies take ownership over a remote Thai beach, and appreciate it for its musical value. It is genuinely the perfect pop song. I challenge you to put it on at a house party without getting at least five compliments and/or exuberant grunts/shrieks. Soft, relaxed dream-pop is so highly underrated and criminally missing from our current musical era, at least in the popular charts.

That blissfully tranquil guitar riff, the lapping of the rising and falling synths, those wonderfully twangy modulated guitar chords, the bass that seems to reverberate out at you from the deep sea, the way the vocals seamlessly wend their way around each other, the unhurried pace of the song, the giddy swell of the chorus; it all spells a recipe for a song that slouches towards paradise. The choice of William Orbit as producer was bang on. As a musician with deep roots in techno and ambient, he brought the exact right kind of mellow to balance out All Saints’ airbrushed pop. Apparently Madonna was livid Orbit didn’t give the track to her after they worked together on “Ray of Light”, but despite my love of Madonna, I wouldn’t change this song for all the cone bras in the world.

For girl groups, reaching this level of sleek, sophisticated grace is no easy feat, but this song reaches it with such ostensible ease. Even the strange video, with its woozy shots of the band in trench coats on the beach at night, intercut with shots from the Film That Shall Not Be Named, kind of adds this air of mystery and bizarre cool. Sure, the lyrics are completely inane, but they are sufficiently positive to add to the beachy paradise vibe established by the instruments and vocal melodies, and to be honest most people are probably too blissed out by the time the vocals come in to even notice what they’re saying.

This song is a heady concoction of ambient pop that perfectly captures the 2000 zeitgeist; a beautiful meld of ecstasy and naïveté. It’s becoming increasingly important to have these slices of bliss in our current world of bleak-and-getting-bleaker, and this is one of those rare songs that can transport you to a different time, place, and state of mind by caressing your eardrums in just that exact right way. It is a dream-pop orgasm, nourishing music for the soul, and I will always hold it in my heart and in my Top 25 most played tracks on iTunes.

CW: Sexual violence

I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of my youth steeping myself in the music and culture of Riot Grrrl, which represented a vital beacon for me in a world of commercialised boredom. So when the suggestion came to write about it, I of course jumped. I then found myself in this paradoxical situation where I truly wanted to research and accurately document the phenomenon, but it also felt like an invasion into the sacred spaces of feminine youth. If there’s anything a Riot Grrrl knows, it’s that attempting to write in a public forum about experiences and events that you didn’t directly participate in can skew and distort meaning to the point that it becomes alienated and, often, in opposition to its initial intention. Essentially, trying to represent Riot Grrrl was what brought about its death, as a movement which cannot be confined by language and pseudo-reminiscence.

With this in mind, I have tried to come at this article in the most thoughtful and respectful way possible, and only use the words of those who were directly involved. But this will not be a rose-tinted twist of history; I’m still engaged with the issues, such as lack of racial diversity, within the movement and how these helped to hasten its dissolution. Although Riot Grrrl’s original incarnation went down in a blaze of in-fighting, misogyny and ill-fortune, the D.I.Y. and strongly women-centric approach it promoted is very much alive and kicking today. Riot Grrrl is something non-concrete, and its spirit can be felt in so many things subsequent to it that it’s hard to come up with a tight definition, but I’m going to give it a red hot go.

History/Ethos

Riot Grrrl was started in 1991 when a group of girls in Olympia, Washington, inspired by the anti-racist riots in Washington D.C., set up a meeting about sexism in the music industry. They decided to start their own “girl riot” to carve out a space in the D.I.Y. and punk scene that hadn’t previously existed. The use of the word “girl” was intentional, referential to childhood, a time when self-belief is at its highest and inhibitions at their lowest — a state these women aspired to reach in their creative work. It is also a reclamation of a term so often used to belittle.

The context in which Riot Grrrl materialised is integral to understanding the nature of the movement. Sexual abuse and casual misogyny were rampant in the early ’90s, where it was routine to hear stories daily of women like Mia Zapata (the inspiration for 7 Year Bitch’s kickass album Viva Zapata!) being brutally raped and murdered. There were very few women in the music industry and present in local scenes, and those who were had their creative output filtered through a male-centric lens. It was unsafe for women to be in mosh pits at gigs, so they would stand in a ring at a safe distance, holding their boyfriends’ jackets while the men jumped and writhed, carefree. Women felt (and still feel) as if they had to prove themselves — to participate in creative scenes they had to demonstrate superior technical knowledge and skill, simply to prove they were worthy of inhabiting a space that men would walk into without thought. There was simply an expectation that women were incapable.

Riot Grrrl took off most dramatically in Olympia because it was a college town focused around Evergreen University, which didn’t have a grade system and instead encouraged small, self-directed projects. This meant that a very liberal and artistic community was attracted there, the perfect breeding ground for a counter-cultural D.I.Y. movement. The riots in D.C. and the liberal political culture contributed to it kicking off there too. But the fundamental issue in both cities was that women were sidelined in music and art scenes and made to watch from afar, while the men moshed to hardcore, man-centric bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat who could not speak to women’s experiences and perpetuated the exclusion of women from their spaces.

Understandably, there were a number of women highly frustrated by this situation, without an outlet for their anger. Riot Grrrl provided this necessary space. It was a place in which feminism was no longer this abstracted university-level, economic-focused concept that dealt with sexism in the corporate world, the gender pay gap, and maternity leave, but something that spoke directly to young women through a language of anger. This language was communicated through the ear-splitting punk music of Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and countless others, as well as zines that these and other women created to hand out at shows and send cross-country to one another. Zines were crucial to the movement, and they have always been a way of amplifying counter-cultural voices, from science fiction in the ’30s to punk in the ’70s.

Riot Grrrl was begun and initially defined by a few girls: Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, and Alison Wolfe and Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, who collaboratively came up with the phrase “Revolution Girl Style Now!” — standing for active subversion of the stagnant masculine scene by encouraging women to pick up instruments and pens and create their own art that was reflective of their experiences as women.

Kathleen had also done a lot of work with survivors of physical and sexual abuse, and a lot of Riot Grrrl focused around spaces in which girls would meet to discuss their trauma and support one another. This was important, because there were very few forums in which women could comfortably discuss their own sexual abuse, being an issue often shrouded in shame and guilt. Kathleen was a key voice, outspoken about all kinds of trauma that are inflicted upon women. In the Bikini Kill song “Feels Blind” she addresses how society teaches women to hate themselves: “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry / yeah women are well acquainted with thirst / we could eat just about anything / we could even eat your hate up like love.” Mics were often passed around at Bikini Kill shows so that any woman could share her experience of sexual abuse or other kinds of trauma or oppression.

Riot Grrrls were also very vocally inclusive of sex workers, as many of these women worked in the sex industry and understood the pragmatism of this, and the importance of not alienating women sitting at the margins of society who were just as in need of support as any others.

The radical and public banding together of women was crucial in a society that thrives off of women pitting themselves against each other, and where girlhood is generally kept so private — in diaries and bedrooms and silent suffering. The rest of the world dismissed angry, loud, young girls as ridiculous and hysterical, so they had to get validation from one another.

Riot Grrrls wrote constant letters of love and support to one another. Their music and zines unabashedly proclaimed their love for themselves and their friends and their experiences, and through this managed to create a safe space in which to examine the cultural devaluation of women. They had a forum in which they could discuss trauma, critique popular culture, talk about having to give men a basic anatomy lesson every time they had sex with them, discuss being queer and coming out to their families, and start publications and bands and rallies and marches. More than just a musical genre, Riot Grrrl was a radical political, philosophical, and socio-cultural movement.

It was very much about self-creation — Riot Grrrls were brought into existence by nothing but their own willpower and their dissatisfaction with the status quo. A lot of the lyrical material from Riot Grrrl bands deal with the multitude of issues in the patriarchal society that surrounded them. For instance, Bikini Kill’s “White Boy” loudly proclaims: “White boy, don’t laugh, don’t cry, just die! / I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you / Your whole fucking culture alienates me.” The spirit of Riot Grrrl was highly participatory and DIY, completely uncaring about whether something was good or bad, but simply supportive of any woman willing to put themselves out there and create or perform. From its humble beginnings in D.C. and Olympia, as word and zines began to spread, chapters began in multiple different cities across the US, and Riot Grrrl began to take on a multiplicity of different forms as it was adopted by an array of different women. It was quite communist in its aims — seizing the means of production for themselves and giving voice to the traditionally voiceless. Zines were a great way of doing this, to project voices on a wider scale and connect various communities.

For all its merits, Riot Grrrl was certainly not without its issues, chief among them a lack of inclusion of women of colour. It was predominantly a white girl’s thing, and wealthy white girls at that. It can be seen as a fairly basic form of brash feminism that didn’t take the complexity of identity properly into account. Being welcoming and inclusive of people of colour is a typically fraught issue that is still plaguing a lot of movements today; white people are often not good at being overtly welcoming and inclusive without being tokenistic. But Riot Grrrl, although some members were committed to writing about and discussing issues of race, barely made an active effort at all.

Dissolution

In the end, Riot Grrrl fell prey to the age-old story of becoming cool and sought after by the press, who then sanitised or sensationalised their stories and attempted to sell these overblown, but watered down, versions of Riot Grrrl back to the community.  Feminist movements can often tie themselves up in knots trying to answer every possible question, but holding people like Kathleen Hanna up as universal spokespeople for all women involved, as the media did in its coverage of Riot Grrrl, doesn’t allow for the communication of ideological nuance, which is ever-present.

The phenomenon of Riot Grrrl was covered by Spin, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, among others, and the tone of these pieces was generally patronising and ridiculing. They emphasised Riot Grrrl as aggressively anti-men, attempted to make out that the movement and its music was simply objectively “bad”, or trivialised it as a fashion statement. They overtly sexualised the bodies of women such as Kathleen and Tobi by discussing their figures and what they were wearing, rather than the content of their songs, as if they were fundamentally unable to make statements on sexual abuse and misogyny because they were wearing short skirts.

As a result of this, the Grrrls decided on a movement-wide media blackout in 1992 as an attempt to reclaim the disproportionate amount of power the media held over them, and to mitigate the fact that these journalists were making money out of selling the distorted images and stories of Riot Grrls while the girls themselves were barely making rent.

The movement was also divided by differing views on how it should be run, especially with regards to how they related to men and how these relationships should look — some wanted to settle down, and others were highly critical of fitting into the societal mould and making any compromises for men.

As a result of these various conflicts, the media declared the pseudo-death of Riot Grrrl and what was left of the movement dropped back underground. Meanwhile women who expressed a societally acceptable level of anger, such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, took up the “women in rock” mantle.

This commercialised and diluted form of Riot Grrrl culture is seen most potently in groups such as the Spice Girls. Don’t get me wrong, I get down as hard as the next gal when “Wannabe” drops at a party, but their loose and empty concept of “Girl Power!” was simply capitalising on the trend of feminine empowerment without actually adding anything to the movement. Rather than encouraging women to be creative on their own, the Spice Girls and their ilk encouraged their fans to endlessly consume their products in the form of CDs, concert tickets, posters, and figurines.

Lasting Impressions

Despite being fragmented by these many issues, Riot Grrrl created a great precedent for girls across the world to air their frustrations with misogyny through art, writing, and music. Arguably the most important and lasting impact the movement has had is the sense of permission it gives to a new generation of women to be able to pick up a guitar or a pen and create, without care for whether it will be considered objectively good. We have Riot Grrrl to thank for the music of Annie Clark, Frankie Cosmos, Screaming Females, Perfect Pussy, and countless other artists and bands who may not identify themselves as Riot Grrrls, but would nonetheless be unable to unreservedly make the kind of music they currently do without the space carved out by Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and all the other bands and women that made this movement so vital.

The urgency and raw anger of Riot Grrrl is something that still can’t be touched, and is something I don’t think we really get to see at shows today. Because misogyny has since taken a quietly corrosive, more shadow-like form, the anger it instils in women is more of a slow-boiling one that pops out in moments of frustration, but isn’t potent enough to form the foundations of such a vibrant movement. Today’s women-friendly movements are built on quiet thought, care for one another, and the motivation to make spaces able to be enjoyed by all people, but they are responding to similar issues that existed in Riot Grrrl’s time, such as men taking up too much space, physical and sexual violence, and a pitiful amount of women on gig line-ups.

Part of the reason we have to thank for sexism and misogyny largely falling out of style is that Riot Grrrl provided a very cool and exciting antidote to the awful lad culture in existence at the time, and helped feminism become not something just for the academics and the activists, but for the punk girl sitting alone in her bedroom at night wondering when she’d find her place in the world. Riot Grrrl’s magic, and the reason it is so beloved and looked back upon with a nostalgia that doesn’t even belong to those doing the looking, is because it encapsulates that exact kind of rage we feel when we have those quick but monumental realisations of just how fucked up the world is and how much dudes and the dominant culture can suck.

The accessibility of feminism, like-minded people, and the local scene through the internet and social media, though it theoretically makes linking up with one another and creating a movement significantly easier, has dampened the thrill and vitality of the emotion that went into the beginning of Riot Grrrl. It’s almost as if it has become too easy to connect, while the movement was about chance and fortuity and unexpected things coming together, which is hard to fathom in the very calculated age of the internet. Riot Grrrl cannot be resurrected, but the anger and creative fuel it was borne out of has taken a newer, softer form — the torch of which young feminists and musicians continue to carry. As Tobi Vail said, “Riot Grrrl started something. Riot Grrrl started something, but it isn’t finished yet.”

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Your new EP Sugar just dropped and it’s full of stone-cold bangers; I’ve been particularly enjoying bumping along to “Malibu” on the bus and in my car! What kind of approach do you take to creating a new track? Is there a certain element that tends to come first, i.e. a sample or a melodic line?

Often I’ll start humming some sort of melody and record it on my phone. When it comes time to make a track I’ll start with one of those melodies and start playing around with an acapella on top of it, layering it with delays, reverb etc. Sometimes I set out by trying to make a track that captures a certain vibe — with “Malibu” I was trying to make a house track that could fit into one of my DJ sets. 

What kind of musical influences have you experienced throughout your life that you feel really have an imprint on the music you currently make?

Growing up I listened to a lot of ’90s pop and RnB. I remember listening to the local polytech radio station in Nelson and making mix tapes, and ordering in lots of tunes I’d hear on it to my local record store. I definitely think pop sensibilities have made their impact on my tunes — I love sentimental melodies and great vocal hooks. Most of the samples I use are from ’90s RnB tracks — Aaliyah, Ashanti, Brandy, Mariah. Probably gonna get sued one day for sampling so much but every time I try to record my own vocals they sound so terrible in comparison that I just end up going with what sounds best!

What kind of hardware setup do you have when you play live sets?

I don’t play live sets, I do DJ sets. My tracks are generally made over a month or so in front of a laptop and that doesn’t translate super well into a live set. I could split a track into 20 stems and trigger each stem at the appropriate time to attempt to get it sounding like the final MP3, but that doesn’t seem like too much fun to watch or play. I think at some point I’ll try to get something together, potentially singing or playing live keys, but at the moment I’m really loving DJing. I love being able to pick tracks from the last 50 years, from many genres, and mixing them together in ways that can create different feelings on the dance floor. There doesn’t seem to be a huge DJ culture here — and the one that exists is mainly DnB/EDM — but over the last few years I’ve seen the house/techno/boogie DJ scene growing quite a lot and it feels really exciting to be a part of it.

What has your experience been working with Margins, a very grassroots and locally focused label?

I’m friends with the guys who run it, Kelvin and Joe, and when we were on tour last year I told Kelvin that the only way to get me to make music was by giving me a deadline. So he gave me a deadline! And I drew it out by months and months, but it culminated in this release. They’re both lovely guys and I think what they’re trying to do with Margins is vital for NZ electronic music right now, so was stoked to release with them. 

I’ve found that often, as a woman, you’re sort of assumed to be somewhat incompetent by many people (often men) and then met with surprise when you can actually do your job well, although this is definitely improving as more talented women keep emerging. Has this been similar to your experience in quite a masculine industry? Or is gender something you’re not particularly aware of?

I’m definitely aware of it as 90% of the time I’m the only female on a lineup. Promoters are increasingly aware that diversity isn’t just “nice to have”; in 2017, it’s crucial. I think I’ve benefitted from that, show-wise, and I’m definitely going to take advantage of it as long as I can. Visibility is key, and if I’d seen more female DJs and producers growing up I think I would have started making music way earlier. There’s always the occasional shitty experience — being asking if I’m waitressing when I’m literally behind the DJ decks for example — but overall all the guys that I’ve worked with have been really welcoming and haven’t doubted that I know what I’m doing. 

What kind of issues do you think affect the electronic music scene in New Zealand at large at the moment?

As mentioned before, definitely diversity. A huge percentage of the electronic music scene are white guys, and that’s not always a super welcoming environment for people who don’t fit that mould. There’s also a financial barrier to entry — I’ve seen DJs being super elitist towards people using DJ controllers over CDJs when you’re looking at a $500 vs $3000 cost. If the whole scene was a bit more open and inclusive I think it’d benefit hugely, in the way that the indie rock/noise/shoegaze scene has flourished in NZ over the last 20 years.

What kind of non-musical aspects of your life serve as inspiration for you music (e.g. visual art, friends)?

Honestly I think all my inspiration for my music comes from music related things! I’m influenced by my emotions to make certain sounds, and sometimes influenced by people, but mainly it’s hearing friends make amazing tracks and dancing all night to my favourite DJs that inspires me. I’d love to make more nature-influenced ambient songs, and have used samples of NZ birds and oceans in my tracks, but that’s probably the extent of it.

Are there any artists that are particularly exciting to you at the moment?

Yeah definitely, Peggy Gou is an incredible Korean producer and DJ that’s blowing up at the moment and I can’t wait to see what she does next. Same with so many amazing women who are getting a lot of hype — Octo Octa, Powder, Jayda G, all of the Discwomen crew. I think the push for diversity is shining a lot of light on people who might not have been given the same platform, and the music and DJing coming from that is super inspiring and exciting to me.

What is the future looking like for k2k?

Hopefully releasing another EP soon and attempting to put out tracks more regularly. I’m also planning to start a radio show on BFM sometime soon, so that’ll be a good chance to get more radio experience. And it’s not really under my k2k project but I’m starting a record label and party series with a few of my close pals who I ran Inky Waves with. We’re having our launch party on October 6 with Chaos in the CBD and are gonna release our first record in early 2018. 

Born in Mississippi in 1897, there is very little known about her life before she started recording music in New York in 1923 after being scouted from the thriving jazz scene in Birmingham, Alabama. She was deemed too “vaudeville” for her New York label, so she moved to Chicago and signed with Paramount Records, and had a nationwide hit with “Sweet Petunia”, petunia being blues doublespeak for labia. She later moved back to New York and teamed up with pianist Walter Roland, with whom she wrote over 100 songs, and who was known for frequently dancing barefoot in the studio. Unfortunately, Bogan wasn’t hugely popular during her time or immediately afterward, so most of these songs are no longer accessible. She eventually was dropped by her label due to her explicit lyrical material, split from her husband due to infidelity on her part, entered a long-term relationship with a much younger man, and spent much of the rest of her life managing her son’s band, Bogan’s Birmingham Busters. She eventually died of coronary sclerosis in LA in 1948.

Bogan was argued to have had one of the finest voices of all women blues musicians, though she is not as storied as names like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, and this presumably has a lot to do with her controversial lyrical material. The subject matter she drew from included sex work (she discusses the hardships of being a sex worker in “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More”), drinking (Ah, I’m getting sloppy drunk today! from “Whisky Selling Woman” may be the most relatable lyric to come out of the ’30s), and abusive men (she even had a song called “Women Don’t Need Men”).

What Bogan may be most known for, though, are her songs that weren’t afraid to get down, dirty, and highly sexually explicit. Her most well known song “Shave ‘Em Dry” starts with I got nipples on my titties/ Big as the end of my thumb/ I got something between my legs/ That’ll make a dead man come, and only gets even more full-frontal from there. On “Til’ the Cows Come Home”, Bogan sings I got a big fat belly/ I got a big broad ass/ And I could fuck any man/ With real good class, as well as referring to her partner’s junk as a baseball bat and claiming she’ll give him head until he defecates.

The ’20s and ’30s were an era where women were still considered as property in many jurisdictions, marital rape was legal, and women were generally considered submissive creatures that reared children, cooked dinner, took sex submissively and quietly as a pleasure purely for men’s enjoyment, and were supposed to be seen and not heard. Lucille Bogan not only claims her sexuality, she seizes it with gay and mind-bogglingly filthy abandon, wears it shamelessly everywhere she goes, and owns that shit better than anyone I’ve ever known. She’s self-proclaimed as fat and hairy and couldn’t give less of a shit about it, knowing that this has nothing to do with her ability to be sexy. Hot damn, Lucille Bogan had so much right in the ’30s that most of us can’t even bend our minds around over 80 years later. Little is known about the backlash that she received from her lascivious lyrics other than that she was dropped by her label, but this absolutely marvellous lady had enough people who enjoyed her music in the ’20s and ’30s to have a career spanning at least 12 years.

Sex wasn’t the only taboo topic Bogan broached. In “B.D. Woman’s Blues” she discusses lesbianism, “B.D.” standing for bull dyke. LGBT+ rights were in a pretty sorry state during this time and most people believed lesbians didn’t or shouldn’t exist, yet here was Lucille Bogan singing a song about admiring gay women, commiserating with their difficult societal position, and stating that they could do the nasty just as good as a cis man: B.D. women, you sure can’t understand/ They can lay their jive just like a natural man — something that a lot of cis het dudes that I’ve met are still yet to wrap their heads around.

Bogan may be the most lyrically ahead of her time musician that has ever existed, with possibly the most explicit lyrics ever released on a major label (seriously, please go and look up “Shave ‘Em Dry” and sate your curiosity). Tragically, what’s left of her recordings are of very low quality, but they’re certainly enough for the delightfully lewd lyrics to shine through. Her work also echoes throughout the jazz and blues genres through the ’30s and ’40s, with her songs being watered down and reworked by musicians such as B.B. King, Earl Hooker, and Sonny Boy Williamson. In sum, this woman was shimmeringly brilliant and I love her.

The album’s opener, “Diving Woman” is one of my favourite songs of this year; a tantalising mash of Ride-style ’90s shoegaze and early 2000s pop vibes à la Kylie Minogue’s “Breathe” or All Saints’ “Pure Shores”. The album was intended as something of a science fiction musical, and it delivers on this promise on the originally released single, “Machinist”. This track is honestly my musical wet dream. It has sick nasty funk riffs, Kraftwerk-style vocal phrases, strong pop sensibilities, and a ripper sax solo. It is a shining disco anthem written for a cyber lover.

The album’s title track delivers a deliciously reverb-y swirl that almost sounds like a dark, intergalactic version of the country-pop ballads of the ’50s. “Boyish” isn’t afraid to get even a little more country in sound, and delivers the iconic line I can’t get you off my mind/ I can’t get you off in general. “This House” deals with the simple day-to-day reality of living in a flat full of women, sharing trauma as you do the dishes together, the very relatable loss of a relationship, and ruminating on whether it was only a need for companionship and opportune timing that the relationship existed at all. “The Body is a Blade” is a modern shoegaze classic, revamped for today by putting the vocals at the centre of the mix, and provides one of my favourite lyrics of this year, and possibly one of the best pithy summations of mental illness I have ever heard: Your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing.

This album is a heady mix of rock, funk, disco, pop, and shoegaze, and an absolute fucking delight to have in your earholes. Check it out wherever you tend to find your music, stat.

LE1F

Arguably the jewel in the crown of New York City’s well-celebrated queer rap scene (including Mykki Blanco, Zebra Katz, and Cakes da Killa), Le1f’s low drawl and androgynous swagger are unmistakeable. On the track “Wut” from his 2014 EP Hey, the standout lyric — “Ukrainian cutie, he really wanna cuddle / the fever’s in his eyes, he wanna suckle on my muscle” — is accompanied in the video by a muscled, nearly naked white boy sitting on Le1f’s lap in a Pikachu mask. Seeing as the prevailing narrative often involves white men sexualising women, and often women of colour, it is interesting to see this flipped on its head, so that a faceless white man is being sexualised by a black man. Le1f’s music is continually unflinchingly honest about his experience as a gay black man, and this is carried into his 2015 album Riot Boi. You can find him on Soundcloud and Spotify.

PRINCESS NOKIA

Damn, Princess Nokia is cool. The New York-based queer rapper and bruja has Taino and Yoruban ancestry, and frequently uses these languages and makes reference to her heritage in her work. Her recent EP 1992 is an opus of experimental beats and woke discussion. On the track “Tomboy”, she deals with not aligning with contemporary ideas of how a woman should look and act with humour and intellect. She also has her own podcast where she recites poetry and discusses social issues with incredible sageness and wit. You can check out Princess Nokia’s music on YouTube and iTunes.

RANDA

Now to our one homeland hero on this list, Auckland-based rapper Randa. There has been a cloud of hype surrounding him ever since his 2014 banger “Rangers”. Deservedly so, as he is incredibly gifted, puts on a stellar live show, and is an actual angel of a human. He is also openly trans, in a time when it is so crucial for young trans and gender-variant New Zealanders to be able to see people who have gone through similar struggles killin’ it in their lives and work. Randa has recently released two new singles, “Fashion” and “Angel Boy”, and these, among his other music, are located on Bandcamp.

BABE FIELD

Babe Field is part of the rap collective Barf Troop, an array of wonderful women, queer, and nonbinary people of colour from around the US who connected via Tumblr, and all have some form of the word “babe” in their rap moniker, including the sublimely-named Babeo Baggins. Babe Field released one of my absolute favourite hip-hop EPs of all time, 2014’s Half Ripe, which is stuffed with impeccably produced beats and woke dialogue on femininity and black identity. I urge you to drop everything and scramble over to Bandcamp to check it out.

KATE TEMPEST

Tempest is an out gay woman, and a stunningly erudite poet and lyricist who tells unbelievably complex, interwoven tales of life in modern London. She has a cast of characters that she introduced to the world in her 2014 Mercury Prize-winning debut Everybody Down, who represent facets of herself and people she has known, and who are all elaborated on in her novel released last year, The Bricks that Built the Houses. This is a bleak and truthful look at being young and confused and broken in various ways and yet still trying to stay afloat and navigate life with some semblance of dexterity. Like a Zadie Smith novel, with a splash more queerness. She released another hard-hitting album Let Them Eat Chaos last year, peppered with biting social commentary on the many-splendored hypocrisies of our capitalist culture and emotive personal stories. Check her out on Spotify.

MYKKI BLANCO

Also going by the name of Michael Quattlebaum, he created the Mykki persona as a type of performance art, and an ode to drag culture. He will often switch between his own persona and Mykki, highlighting the fluidity of his gender and the multitudes of splendour that can be held within one being unbounded by gender. He is also very outspoken about being an HIV-positive gay man, which is incredibly important to see, given the stigma still attached to this following the AIDS crisis (if you want an example of this, gay men are still unable to give blood in New Zealand). She can morph effortlessly from swaggering, electronic-inspired trap lord to ’90s-inspired feel-good bopper, both showing off her trademark textural growl. Mykki has her roots in the NYC riot-grrrl and queer communities, which means she is unapologetically political and affronting in her art. Though this has led to various beatings, arrests, and gig cancellations throughout her career, she nevertheless channels the anger this creates into his music. You can look up her most recent album Mykki on Spotify.

For those of you who eagerly await Pitchfork’s every social media update with bated breath, you’ll likely be clued in on the current sexual abuse scandal surrounding indie band PWR BTTM. For those who aren’t aware, Ben Hopkins, who alternates between drums, guitar, and vocals for the two-piece, was accused of multiple instances of sexual abuse against one woman in a Jezebel article, and then a raft of further allegations came out on social media from a variety of sources. As a result of this, the band was dropped by their label, their music has been removed from most streaming services, and their upcoming tour for their recently released album Pageant has been cancelled. In other words, PWR BTTM’s musical career is over.

For those, like myself, who have experienced sexual assault firsthand as well as through the accounts of family and friends, and been incredibly frustrated by the way violence is incompetently addressed by relevant authorities and society at large, this is something of a victory. It is heartening to see repercussions being dealt out at this level of severity, as these kind of issues are rarely taken seriously in the public sphere.

The fact that PWR BTTM is made up of two musicians who are openly queer and non-binary (they both use they/them pronouns) cannot be ignored. Queer communities have generally taken a much harder line on sexual assault and consent and it’s also much easier to demolish the careers of those who are already outsiders. With so little LGBT+ representation in the music industry, it is hard to see artists that are unabashedly queer and gender variant, and who do things like request gender neutral bathrooms in the venues they play at, be taken down in the way that they have, while many other straight, cis perpetrators of such abuse and worse still have flourishing careers. The fact that the current president of the United States is a known sexual abuser is a testament to this, and a list of famous perpetrators could fill out all the pages of this magazine, with those like Chris Brown, Woody Allen, and Casey Affleck among them.

However the fact that PWR BTTM are queer, and have actively tried to empathise with victims and to promote the fact that they create “safe” spaces for their fans, makes this all the more of a betrayal. It also exposes the inherent problem in assuming that because a space is queer and trans-friendly, it is automatically a safe space.

Safe spaces are an idealistic concept. It’s clear that no space can ever truly be safe for everyone. That’s not to say that safe spaces aren’t an admirable endeavour, it’s just that, in a lot of music scenes, including Wellington’s, mechanisms to support safe spaces are created and dealt with in a very tokenistic manner. A promoter or collective will state that they don’t tolerate racism or homophobia and that if anyone feels uncomfortable, they should talk to a specific person. They then feel as if they’ve discharged their duty for making that space safe. However, there is very little commitment to actually addressing underlying issues of, for example, the often-internalised misogynistic attitudes that lie at the heart of many parts of the music scene, and are often covered by a veil of faux-activism and wokeness. When assaults occur, repercussions often come far too slowly and without the necessary severity. The inherent problem is when safe spaces are set up by cis, white, heterosexual men, who aren’t really aware of what it truly feels like to be unsafe at a gig — how are they supposed to provide spaces that feel subjectively safe to those who experience unsafety and discomfort regularly at bars and gigs?

Emma Hall-Phillips, a Wellington-based electronic musician who DJs under the moniker Aw B, recently set up a collective called Moments that prioritises women/femmes, LGBT+ people, and people of colour when booking artists, and puts on awesome electronic music nights. At their most recent gig there was a phone number that people could call and people who would really listen if anyone was uncomfortable, and a diverse crowd, which created a really lovely, queer-friendly, and respectful vibe. She creates a safe space by holding the musicians she books accountable for their actions (one of the acts who was billed for the most recent gig was taken off the lineup because multiple people came to Emma with accounts of abusive behavior from him). Emma also identified how spaces can be made unsafe through the attitudes of bar staff at venues. They often won’t take any action against an alleged assault unless there is some kind of concrete proof, which is very difficult to provide in these kinds of situations. A potential remedy for this would be more rigorous training for bar staff in terms of how to adequately respond to these kinds of sensitive issues.

However, HEX, a well-established Wellington rock band made up of women, point out that safe spaces can undermine the fact that abuse isn’t site-specific — it exists wherever people exist. Having safe spaces can be seen, in a way, to legitimise the fact that most of the world is unsafe space, and remove the collective social responsibility to try to create safe spaces wherever we are. HEX believe that the conversation needs to focus on creating safer communities, which is a much harder issue to tackle. This is obviously not to say that safe spaces aren’t important and useful, just that they are often used as an empty piece of terminology. The focus needs to shift to being more transformative of the current, dominant culture. There needs to exist a strong sense of responsibility for the creation and maintenance of safe spaces, and transparency and open lines of communication need to be present when undesirable things happen.

This is one of the great failings of our modern culture: silence. We are so willing to sweep bad stuff under the rug when it happens, as this is easier than dealing with the social censure, discomfort, and embarrassment that can come with actively calling out harmful behavior. However, we need to take responsibility for the shitty things we do and say, the way our own behaviour makes other people uncomfortable, and our complicity in the behaviour of those we choose to surround ourselves with when we let them get away with something like yelling lewd comments at a stranger without reproach. Cis men especially need to be aware of the way in which they take up space and move through it, and how this can be very much exhibitive of their privilege. In this way, often without even being aware of it, they can make others feel uncomfortable or even threatened.

Solo artist and DJ Alexa Casino points out that safety, for her, is being around people she feels comfortable with, and this generally doesn’t happen when you’re surrounded by white guys. “I feel when you bring in performers and artists who are gender minorities/people of colour/queers, you also invite their fan bases, meaning that crowds are more balanced and it isn’t just a sea of fish who all look the same.” We need to acknowledge our own privilege, and as Alexa says, if you don’t understand why someone else feels unsafe, that doesn’t make their feelings invalid; it only affirms that you have the privilege not to share the experience of minority class oppression. She argues that instead of providing simple consequences for behavior that has been normalised by patriarchal structures, we need an overhaul of the current culture of a nihilistic lack of responsibility and hedonism when we go out, so that safe spaces aren’t special, they’re just expected.

PWR BTTM is the first account in modern times of the appropriate response being made to allegations of sexual abuse. Although it’s difficult that this was done to a queer, non-binary band, it at least shows that the music industry is starting to commit to attempting to stamp out sexual abuse and unpack the patriarchal structures that it stems from. The fact that these abuses occurred in purportedly “safe” spaces makes it all the more problematic. It shows that we as a society need to commit to creating a culture of being more socially responsible for our own actions and the actions of those we choose to surround ourselves with, rather than just employing very surface-based mechanisms to attempt to make a space seem safe. As HEX believe, “creating safe space is like vacuuming in a dust storm. It’s not addressing the actual cause of risk, which is, of course, people and our behaviors.”

Salient: I understand you have recently come back from SXSW. How was that experience? Was it daunting coming into it from something of an outsider’s perspective, or did you find it a welcoming environment?

Accorinrin: People in Austin welcomed us so much, and I was so happy that so many people came to our first show! Everyone was friendly, and imitated my dance straight away.

Yoyoyoshie: I felt we were welcomed more than in Japan. It was so fun!

Hiro-chan: I feel people in Austin welcomed us! I was also happy for the audience to talk to us, they were so friendly.

S: What bands have influenced the sound that you try to create?

A: Jun Togawa, Hikasyu, songs of the Showa generation in Japan, and indie music in Kansai.

Y: I feel I have been influenced by Japanese music. I love Yura Yura Teikoku and Oshiripenpenz.

H: There are no bands that have influenced me especially, but I like indie bands in Japan, garage rock, and new wave.

S: If you had to condense it into a couple of sentences, how would you describe the experience of your live show? I’ve heard that it’s incredible!

A: Misplaced violence for you <3

Y: Due to Accorinrin.

H: I think our performance is felt close to us. For example, waves of sounds, hot air of ours.

S: In terms of lyrics, what experiences and ideas do you draw upon? It seems like you use a lot of local Kyoto slang; is that quite close to your own identities?

A: My experience about love affairs and my delusions. Kyoto slang is familiar to me and what I usually use for lyrics. Wording is so interesting.

S: What is it like working as a woman in the Japanese music industry? Do you ever feel patronised? I once had a man that was convinced that because I was a woman, I was fundamentally unable to plug a lead into an amp — have you experienced anything like this?

Y: Nothing else. Now everybody has the opportunity to play active parts, and I don’t think women fear because they are women.

Pop: It is true that there are many men who work in music industries and women have parts of being inferior in power, but I have never felt this especially. I have women friends who work as sound techs. I wonder why they thought you couldn’t plug a lead into an amp.  Everybody can do that.

S: Would you say that your music is part of a rebellion against the roles of womanhood set out in Japanese culture?

Y: We sing songs about men and women in love affairs.

H: Hmm. Not the rebellion but the claims that there are such women like us.

P: Maybe so. I think there is a trend that women must be cute, like idol culture and announcers in Japan. I don’t know what is bad, but we express ourselves freely. Because there are demands of cute men, I think it is okay there are supplies of cool women.

S: What are some of the fun experiences you have had while being a part of this band?

A: The fact that our music is out all over the world.

Y: Having gigs in the US. Reactions from the audience were so interesting.

H: Gigs overseas. And it is always funny watching Yoyoyoshie stage dive into the audience.

S: What are the bands/artists that you’re most excited about at the moment?

A: To tell the truth, I am buried in our own songwriting.

Y: The band named Have a Nice Day! and its fans are interesting and insane. And now I’m interested in British rock bands like Blur. So cute!

H: BLONDnewHALF and NEMU (both are bands in Kansai).

P: JJJ (hip-hop) and Skirt from Japan. Shobaleader One, Clap! Clap!, White Lung, Bonobo, and Slowkiss. Slowkiss became friends with us at SXSW.

S: Does being Japanese create any difficulties for you in terms of making your music and touring? Conversely, what do you think are the great things about making music and living in Japan?

A: I want more holidays, as we all work as full time workers.

Y: I want more holidays. I heard that it is easy to take long holidays in the UK. There are many hot springs in Japan, so we like to go to them when we do Japanese tours.

H: I think it’s interesting and good that Japanese words have many meanings and feelings in same words.

P: I think that Japan is centred around J-pop culture ultimately. We have often said “our music is for overseas.” So our music is enjoyed by outsiders.

You can find Otoboke Beaver’s new EP Love is Short at otobokebeaver.bandcamp.com.

My father continues to punctuate his sentences with “Fred” and “sport” even though I’ve long been over the age of eight. I let him because I’ve always been reluctant to let go of these remnants of childhood (when I realised that my parents stopped making me do a “cheesy grin” and then vigorously brushing my teeth for me every night, I had a mild panic attack).

His room smells like talcum powder and old sweat.

I read The Old Man and the Sea near an old man (my father) and the sea (a swampy inlet). He plays online poker.

We go on a tiki tour. I keep telling him to go up fun looking roads that turn into dead ends.

We are stationary at an intersection between Dead Dog Bay and Rocky Bay.

“Which way should we go?” I can tell my dad is antsy.

“’There are lots of chickens in the sports park,” I respond.

I want to go up Bella Vista Road because I think it means nice views in some European language, but he ignores my wordless request.

I want him to teach me to skim rocks at Rocky Bay but all the rocks are jagged. I notice three large boats sitting next to us on the shore and we have to turn away and leave immediately before a panic attack ensues.

I show him my impressive tyre swinging skills. He smiles absently and lights up a cigarette.

I tell him that I used to think quarries were staircases for giants. He laughs and unnecessarily repeats “quarries.”

I like staring into vineyards because each new row brings a new sliver of the world.

High tide. Overcast. Lots of strangers cycling.

Overly large front lawns fill me with a slow boiling sort of anger.

Someone drew an elephant in the sand. I draw a cat riding on top of it.

I finally remember that I can’t open the door at first because there’s no central locking and feel an inexplicable sense of pride.