Sleater-Kinney breaks up

"Combat Rock" really was pretty bad.

"Light Rail Coyote" made up for it though.

"Combat Rock" was my #1 for the ILX poll. I regret nothing.

It's like, I get why people dig 'em but Jesus Christ people cool it with the hyperbole

yeah "combat rock" is my favorite song on one beat

some of the lyrics on 'one beat' are so strident and un-subtle that they're weird to hear now. the context matters of course but even at the time i kind of cringed at a lot of 'combat rock.' not that i remotely agree with taylor, who's basically a smarmy centrist clintonoid jerk, salon was full of them in the early '00s.

Combat Rock is so freaking corny.

corin's delivery redeems some of it, but ugh @ this verse especially:

They tell us there are only two sides to be on
If you are on our side you're right, if not you're wrong
But are we innocent, pargons of good?
Is our guilt erased by the pain that we've endured?

One Beat was my favorite album of 2002 and have had no problem revisiting it but I think my ranking it so high has to do with watching them live twice that season and those songs sounded HUGE.

when it came out i only liked "step aside," "oh" and "o2". last i checked i only liked "step aside" and "oh".

always surprised to see the song lengths are consistently under four minutes, though the trick is they used to do so much in three

excitement about that new song died fast, didn't it

might have more going on lyrically that i grasped but musically it felt all too aligned with brownstein saying the white stripes made her believe in rock again

than i grasped

Nope. The new song is still fucking hot.

do you like jack white solo albums

I love the new song, and never liked Jack White/White Stripes.

huh cool

I think further enthusiasm is being held until more material surfaces. Listening again to "Bury Our Friends", and there is so much more going on there than your average White Stripes/Jack joint.

FWIW, the official video for the new song has earned over 344,000 views on Youtube since it was posted a little over three weeks ago. This is a higher view count than the official "Entertain" video has got, and that one's been up since 2006. The clips for "Jumpers" & "Modern Girl" are both in the 500k range after also being up since 2005/6.

i'll admit to some confirmation bias

S/K past the first album or two don't really share that much sonic territory with riot grrl, and saying some of their press was because riot grrl happened is sorta odd to me.... not that there's no truth to it in terms of a literal history of what journalists might have been looking for or narratives they might have (lazily or otherwise) slotted coverage into. But a) who cares, the band rules b) "oh sure but who would pay attention to the ROLLING STONES if the press hadn't hyped everybody on THE BEATLES" c) wouldn't that just be a marker of success (in one narrow area) of riot grrl, that this band reaches a wider audience than it might have otherwise...? i mean not saying that "convert journalists to like girl bands" was a party platform item, but the idea of a whole huge swath of people forming a really dedicated personal relationship with this band that sang about themes not found in other bands seems kinda like...not a problem?

this band that sang about themes not found in other bands

yeah see uh

I mean it's not a problem but that just isn't true

But but but...

I am not overly familiar with their ouevre. I heard their first album when it came out and saw them play live maybe a couple years later where I was accosted by a v drunk punk girl who yelled at me for not dancing (she then dragged another friend of mine into the pit where she subsequently punched somebody and got thrown out). idk I just didn't respond to them.

many xp

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 13, 2014 10:50 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw (I had to check their discography) and yeah I heard everything up through Call the Doctor apparently. Granted I haven't listened since.

but do tell what themes they explored that no other band did, that seems like a p broad claim to make

for real I wouldn't make that claim about *any* band

yeah I heard everything up through Call the Doctor apparently

So all of two albums.

Still no additional west coast dates. :\

gonna say it again, if you want to know what's so great about a band you haven't heard since 1996, read an article by someone you respect written in the nearly 20 years between

maybe even put the album they're talking about on spotify while you do it

spotiwhatnow

I didn't mean to make that as strong a claim as it came out actually. Just noting that a lot of people's relationships with this band did include a "I recognize these people, they're singing about my life and things I've struggled with etc, that I am not hearing in other music." If you want to say that that content is just warmed-over riot grrl, and that all those people, if they had only known Bratmobile, would have dropped Sleater-Kinney like a hot potato, that just seems kind of uncharitable to those listeners as well as to the bands. I also can't tell here if we're talking about the kind of people I knew who loved Sleater-Kinney, or some strawman indie rock fan who adopted S-K but not other members of the scene from which they emerged...

But let's say the themes were 100% exactly the same (I would not agree btw)... the music's still pretty fucking different, which should matter in terms of why listeners might dig a band. The Hot Rock does not sound like a "first-wave riot grrl band" (do these constitute one unitary sound/approach? I wouldn't say so)... certainly not much like S-K's debut even. Even the super hooky direct pop-rock aspects of Dig Me Out (dum dum do do do dum dum de dum yeah!) chart a different map IMO. If the sonic similarities to you are closest to riot grrl, there'd be plenty of ways to back that up given their own roots in that scene (Excuse 17, Heavens to Betsy) but there's enough other shit going on in what they do, that just saying they're the same thing, part two, makes it seem like you don't know the music and are comfortable slotting all 90s female-led bands together in the absence of another narrative.

It also oddly cuts them off from their mid-to-late-90s peer acts even within the riot-grrl map. If the world was really just waiting for this re-do, you'd think Team Dresch and the Butchies would have been as big as Sleater-Kinney. Not dissing either of those acts - there's lots of reasons for that circumstance - but surely one is that all these bands actually made different music.

sorry I meant Dig Me Out ha the one that looked like the Kinks album

xpp

sorry mods please change the 1996 in my post to 1997

(missing comment in my above post - the kind of people I knew who loved Sleater-Kinney were also into a lot of riot grrl bands of whatever "wave," in addition to many other kinds of music also)

If you want to say that that content is just warmed-over riot grrl, and that all those people, if they had only known Bratmobile, would have dropped Sleater-Kinney like a hot potato, that just seems kind of uncharitable to those listeners as well as to the bands. I also can't tell here if we're talking about the kind of people I knew who loved Sleater-Kinney

1) I wouldn't go so far as to call it warmed-over, they were part of that scene, I see them as part of that continuum, I don't think they were a corporate sell-out version of Bratmobile or something BUT 2) maybe we're talking about the kind of people that *I* knew who went apeshit for S-K at the time; many of who, for some reason really did not have any awareness or interest in the earlier scene/bands that spawned them, which I always thought was weird. I had friends who would not have given Bikini Kill or Team Dresch the time of day (too strident, or too poorly recorded, or too obscure idk) but then they found S-K and would do some embarrassing "GIRLS ROCK! I HAD NO IDEA!" schtick and it bugged me.

so says the grumpy old man about kids these days or back then or uh something

now see if you'd just said "man s-k has some overzealous fans, lemme tell you about this time in '97..." nobody woulda blinked

maybe we're talking about the kind of people that *I* knew who went apeshit for S-K at the time; many of who, for some reason really did not have any awareness or interest in the earlier scene/bands that spawned them, which I always thought was weird.

Maybe your friends preferred S-K to the other bands...?

xxxpost Huh, okay, well, I can at least see where you're coming from there. I was in a women's studies crowd and so Le Tigre was actually my gateway drug to almost all this music at the same time.... though I remember having an aha! moment when I realized this was the same Hot Rock that Addicted To Noise had been raving about a couple years before, and my actual first real S-K encounter was a little before I fell in with that crowd, and bought All Hands on the basis of the "Rock n Roll Fun" video. So in that sense maybe I am who you're talking about - college freshman in 2000, Bikini Kill et al totally off my radar, but who's this rockin' band???! I definitely don't remember being stunned that girls rocked, though. The thing is they're a really good band!

like my crew of friends/relatives/acquaintances who were dialed into the Oly scene always seemed a little surprised/befuddled that S-K was the band that really blew up in the wake of riot grrrl, that they were the ones that got indie rock guys all excited. Prior to them riot grrl bands seemed to appeal pretty exclusively to punk girls, the punk LGBT community, and the relatively small number of northwest punk straight dudes who weren't scared off/intimidated by it. But S-K's success erased that boundary, they were the "crossover" act, for lack of a better term.

xp

frankly i wouldn't expect people dialed into the oly scene to understand what kind of band would blow up. their definition of "pop" has proven a bit askew.

like in hype where eddie vedder acts all befuddled that the success of pearl jam led to the success of candlebox rather than the success of the fastbacks

s-k wasn't just in the continuum of riot grrrl, they were a riot grrrl SUPERGROUP featuring members of heavens to betsy and excuse 17. which doesn't change what a crock of shit "strictly for folks who missed the bus" is.

like my crew of friends/relatives/acquaintances who were dialed into the Oly scene always seemed a little surprised/befuddled that S-K was the band that really blew up in the wake of riot grrrl, that they were the ones that got indie rock guys all excited. Prior to them riot grrl bands seemed to appeal pretty exclusively to punk girls, the punk LGBT community, and the relatively small number of northwest punk straight dudes who weren't scared off/intimidated by it. But S-K's success erased that boundary, they were the "crossover" act, for lack of a better term.

xp

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 13, 2014 5:13 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See that's at least a story I can understand - but is being a crossover act the same as being the band "for" people who "missed" the other thing? Presumably you cross over in part because you do something different. I would not dispute, for example, that S-K are sonically less of a punk band and more ready to rock the indie rockers. Carrie Brownstein, I was just shocked to learn from Wikipedia, got her teenage guitar lessons from Jeremy Enigk! So in that case, it's not really surprising that some people would like them and not the "first wave," even when exposed to both. If that's the claim you're making I'll stop beating up on the "for people who missed" story.

full disclosure here, I was in college when this stuff started to burble up, cousin working distro at K, older bro connecting me to 'zine scene and sending me Huggybear tapes etc. But I can count the number of immediate peers (even the women's studies/radical lesbians!) that I knew who were interested on one hand (granted this was Santa Cruz, not really a punk hotbed). 5 years later my roommates are bringing home Dig Me Out like it came out of nowhere and S-K is playing the Fillmore. It was weird.

like in hype where eddie vedder acts all befuddled that the success of pearl jam led to the success of candlebox rather than the success of the fastbacks

ha fair enuf

xxp

Also, do check this thread's early posts, which include plenty of ilxors passionately declaiming why this band struck them as special, describing what they liked about them, etc. There's of course some backlash and hateorade but it's a good capsule... if naturally colored by the circumstances and by hindsight since ILX didn't exist for the first half of Sleater-Kinney's career.

i mean, the shit one could throw at s-k re being a little more mainstream-rock-minded than their peers and immediate elders you could throw at husker du and nirvana - every indie-ish group that got big has a) buckets of nonsensical hype and b) a community they grew out of

"rem, shit man that's strictly for folks who missed out on the dbs...i dunno i didn't hear anything after reckoning. man there was is asshole in college..."

is being a crossover act the same as being the band "for" people who "missed" the other thing?

this is just my crusty aging hipster obsession-with-lineage crankiness but when people who "missed" the other thing claim the crossover act was groundbreaking (for whatever reason) while ignoring those who came before yeah I get annoyed. Like, just be honest and maybe say that you liked that they packaged something you hadn't heard before in a way that slotted into familiar rock conventions (as opposed to being too abrasive or challenging or hard to find or shittily recorded); but let's not pretend they were the first angry women to play guitars and write about lesbian relationships or whatever because they weren't. They might have been the first to do that in a way that incorporated classic rock sonics and traditionalist pop songwriting structures, hell maybe they are just better songwriters than Team Dresch period, but that is a different thing.

xp

the other caveat with rereading this thread, get ready for a long though sometimes entertaining derail concerning whether indie bands are understood canonically as progressing from greatness to decadent irrelevance or the other way around...oof....