A Broad Underground

Jennifer Precious Finch, former frontwoman of L7, the group that led the charge when riot grrrl rock swelled into the collective consciousness of the ‘90s has returned with The Shocker, a new band with the same old in-your-face attitude. The band is a logical continuation of what L7 started and offers an alternative to the women you see splayed out on the cover of Rolling Stone. This is angry girl music that somehow remains catchy, kind of like the Donnas served with a kick in the face.
The Shocker just finished a stint on the Warped Tour’s West Coast dates and took a few days off before launching their own tour to promote their first record, Up Your Ass Tray. Getting on the road and playing shows for fans who came to see girl bands will most likely be a relief after the testosterone-pumped Warped Tour. Finch hinted that the festival wasn’t their usual scene.
“Some shows you can’t swing a guitar without hitting a girl but at the Warped Tour there is almost nothing but guys,” Finch said. “How much sex can you have with underage boys? It was like ‘where are the women at?’ Sometimes you’d like to have an intelligent conversation, you know.”
The Warped Tour was a great source of exposure for the band, who has been together less than a year, but a club tour will be more what Finch is used to. There will also likely be more L7 fans eager to see what Finch is doing these days. There have been a few displays of L7 love at Shocker club shows but Finch isn’t relying on her status as a former member to bring in large crowds, but some fans are still loyal.
“There hasn’t been that many, but when there are L7 fans in the crowd, you know they’re there,” Finch said. L7 fans were, by most accounts, some of the loudest and rowdiest people at shows during the heyday of the riot grrrl scene and it still isn’t generally a good idea to trifle with the wild girl in an L7 shirt at the punk rock show. Unless a boot to the testicles is your idea of a good time.
That sort of behavior is becoming less necessary these days as women are becoming a more accepted part of music culture. In genres like folk, women like Ani Difranco reign supreme, but in harder rock forms women had to work hard and stick together to fight their way into the club. After the virtually all-male hardcore scene of the ‘80s died down, punk rock became a place where women could express themselves musically again. Metal also started to open its doors to a lesser extent and women jumped at the chance to participate in making music that was exclusively dominated by boys only a few years earlier.
As female bands started up and feminist politics joined in, riot grrrl was born and women carved out their own scene in hard rock, and all you boys best watch out when you jump in a riot grrrl pit. After the riot grrrl scene catapulted women into aggressive music, it is now commonplace to see females participate in scenes that would have been a little too shady 15 years ago.
“It’s more of an open option now and not so weird anymore,” Finch said of women in rock.
There are plenty of examples of women who make music on the radio and MTV but that kind of expression is limited to what the kids at the mall will like and what their parents will buy for them. The real action in the female music scene is below the surface.
“Underground music is broad and you can do lots of things,” Finch said. “With pop you have to narrow it down and focus on one thing that will make you appealing to the mainstream.”
For this reason, it is rare to see female musicians take a political stand in the realm of popular music, whereas riot grrrl was all about politics. Finch said that the times have changed and the powers that be have developed ways to muzzle female political expression after the outburst of the previous decade.
“It takes a crisis to bring that up. Now that kind of thing is kept behind whatever war or terrorist action is going on at the moment,” Finch said, adding that during the riot grrrl explosion of the mid-‘90s, there wasn’t a major war or threat that took people’s attention away from domestic issues once the social smokescreen of the first Gulf War ended. The crisis that inspired many feminist-leaning female bands to take up guitars in the first place was the assault on women’s reproductive freedom and continued backlash against the women’s movement. It pissed enough women off to the point that riot grrrl assumed a prominent place in underground music and culture, also peeking out into mainstream culture the way subcultures like punk rock did in the late ‘70s and grunge did in the early ‘90s.
The Shocker is not an overtly political band, but rather, makes political points sneakily.
“Personally we are all very aware of politics and we all have strong beliefs. We like to take clichés and fuck around with them to make a point,” Finch said. “I like to use clichés as a starting point.”
She pointed to the titles of songs like “Bad Brain, Good Head” where, if one were so inclined to look past the catchy hook that seems to revel in the act of oral sex, they would hear lyrics full of political metaphors.
“It’s fine if no one wants to go there and just rock out to the music, but it’s there if they want to look,” Finch said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, I mean who couldn’t use a little more good head?”
Finch does want to see the world change and sees many ways to do it, not just through music.
“I’ve always said that the best way to change things is through actions,” Finch said. “And I always tell people who want to start a band to change the world that they should go and be the head of a corporation.” She said that the easiest way to change things is to go straight to the source of power and take it over. When the Fortune 500 is ruled by women, the women’s movement will have scored a gigantic victory in the struggle against oppression.

Bookmark: