Carrie Brownstein is sort of a lightning rod — she attracts not so much attention, as just plain craziness. A momentary stage sufferer of both hives and shingles, and the daughter of an anorexic, the precocious if somewhat quantitatively undocumented Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist is also prone to Tourette’s-like outbursts and emotional tantrums. All of this snowballs into the sort of sentiment that the crowd at MCA tomorrow is sure to get their money’s worth. The public has acted accordingly, the event having sold out.
There seems to be a feminist tinge placed on the proceedings, with Jessica Hopper’s attendance, but Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, in accordance with how S/K always stood on the shoulders of other Riot Grrrl bands, branches out with blooms of discourse refreshingly devoid of pro-girl bent. “I didn’t want to be a girl with a guitar,” articulates the singer at one point. “‘Girl’ felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitar was a tourist, an interloper. I wanted the guitar to be an appendage–an extension even–of a body that was made more powerful by my yielding of it” (101). Hopper has been known to go on pouty feminist rants, even declaring something like, boys could never write songs good enough for girls, so it’ll be interesting to see whether Brownstein actually gets to see a discussion of her influences flourish, which ranged in addition to Bikini Kill from Ratt to Pearl Jam, or if the event will dissipate into platitudinous cultural yammering.
Anyway, here are two questions I would pose, were I able to go to the event, neither of which has anything to do with sex, one way or the other:
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What’s the explanation for Sleater-Kinney having neither a b-sides collection nor a live album, and what is your overall opinion on these enterprises?
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You guys switched to producer Dave Fridmann for the recording of The Woods. Is there any correlation between this and the inclusion of a laughter sound byte at the end of “Roller Coaster”?