Over the past decade, I’ve read many of the supposedly seminal works on the origins and first several years of punk rock. Please Kill Me chronicles the oral history of the leading (mostly male) lights in New York CIty, the United Kingdom, and Los Angeles. Gimme Something Better discusses the rise of punk through the lens of the California Bay Area with only a bit of attention paid to Southern California. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire places New York City as the epicenter of all the big upheavals occurring in rockist music in the late 70’s.
There are more! Rip It Up and Start Again looks specifically at post-punk, wherein the anger driving Year Zero punk had burned away, leaving people to create “art” from whatever was left. White Riot addresses race in punk like few books have then or since. Our Band Could Be Your Life lets the leading indie rock acts of the ‘80s tell their stories without the self-serving mythology of the books in the first paragraph. And with Girls to the Front, Sara Marcus tells the story of ‘90s Riot Grrrls with deft, unvarnished, and often heartbreaking honesty.
That doesn’t even include all of the amazing memoirs I’ve read about the people mentioned in those books. Yet, when it comes to learning about the many women who’ve been creating punk and punk-related music in the past 40 years, Revenge of the She-Punks by Vivien Goldman trumps them all.
Subtitled “A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot,” this 200-page tome (released on University of Texas Press) discusses the art, talents, and driving ambitions of woman punk rockers with a passion and fervor I found inspiring – and a bit shaming.
As in, it shouldn’t have taken until 2019 for some of these women to receive their due. Even worse, if their stories were already out there, that meant I’d either ignored them or simply decided they weren’t for me. Recognizing this filled me with a deep sense of self-loathing as a self-described feminist and ally, until I realized I was just making the situation about me. It’s only when I started listening to and engaging with these amazing women and their stories on their terms did the book truly come alive.
A veteran music journalist who spent many of her earliest years as the only woman writing for UK music publications like Sounds and New Musical Express, Goldman has been at the forefront of punk rock since the very beginning. This made her an ideal scribe in that she was present for the events and enough time had passed for her to resist waxing nostalgic or hagiographic. Even better, she resisted telling a purely chronological tale by arranging the book into four distinct themes:
- Girly Identity
- Money
- Love / Unlove
- Protest
This presentation provided narrative freedom in that it gave her the space to visit and revisit key figures in punk rock history. With this setup, she used them as the lens through which both unheralded, older acts and newer, upstart outfits could be discussed organically.
In short, Goldman delivered meta-level analysis of the concepts often discussed in woman-first punk rock while also giving them the attention they’d long been denied.
“Girly Identity” kicks off the book with a trenchant critique on how society in general and the mainstream music industry specifically. Collectively, those forces have long sought to impose certain guidelines and parameters for how woman musicians should present themselves. Cutesy girly-girls who can be manipulated, controlled, and shaped to fit the predominant male gaze of an era were preferred. If you didn’t fit that mold, you didn’t fit, and you wouldn’t be able to make music.
Using exemplars as diverse as Poly Styrene, Blondie, Kathleen Hanna, and Alice Bag, Goldman showed readers that remaking, accepting, and entrenching your identity against prevailing modern ideals and pop culture will always be punk. Whether it’s your clothes, fashion choices, race, class, or gender presentation, identity is what you choose to make it. The history of women in punk teachers that you do not have to subscribe to the looks, body types, body image ideals perpetuated by the mainstream.
The true punk spirit encourages people to be their true selves – whomever and however that might be.
My second-favorite chapter, “Money” places at its core the mirror image of Patti Smith and Madonna, the original outsider woman punk of the ‘70s against the Material Girl of the ‘80s. One began her career sharing squats with her equally impoverished artists in a burnt-out New York City, while the other exemplified the consumeristic nature of Reagan’s ‘80s. Goldman uses this dichotomy as a launching pad for sharing the stories of she-punks who have lived out the communal, resource-sharing nature of the earliest punk rockers.
Examples from the ‘70s and ‘80s abound: ESG in New York City, Malaria! in Germany, The Slits in the United Kingdom. All of them showcase how punk can be defined as marginalized classes making the most of their limited resources to create art. The absence has been a motivation – not a hindrance – for punks to get shit done. And it’s this lack of money that has mobilized the political activities of 21st century bands like Pussy Riot and Maids of Arc – woman-centric acts who speak directly to the ways contemporary economics adversely harms normal people in everyday life.
While a cursory hypothesis of “Love/Unlove” might be “Punk rock doesn’t have love songs,” a truer premise might be “Punk rock lets people express and experience love in ways that bash societal norms.” Goldman weaves a phenomenal, far-reaching thesis that discusses love, sex, bodies, identity, marriage, gender roles, and gender fluidity with pronounced compassion. Acts as far reaching as Crass, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Alice Bag, Grace Jones, and Nenah Cherry tell their stories about coming to grips with how their definition of love and how they live it out.
Just as the clothes you wear don’t matter, punk has often been a haven for people who don’t necessarily “fit” the rules of gender identity and expression created by mainstream culture.
The spirit of punk rock lets you be who you are and how you want to be that person, especially if you’re questioning and pushing back against the gatekeepers.
But punk rock hasn’t necessarily been a panacea, which Goldman sadly admits. By trying to create a world where women have agency and people can love who they want to love, she-punks have experienced more than their fair share of rape and violence, including the murder of Mia Zapata in the ‘90s.
In the concluding (and my favorite) chapter, “Protest” gets to the heart of why society at large demonizes punk, and how punk has continually pushed back. With a truly world-spanning effort, Goldman makes the pronounced case that punk is truly the most global of all protest mediums. From kids living in squats and sharing their meager resources with each other to actively rebelling against oppressive state regimes who created the economic conditions that caused those squats, punk serves as a common, unifying language.
Punk has called out what’s wrong about contemporary society since its Year Zero origins in 1977. Protest remain the bedrock impulse of the genre, and it’s especially fertile soil for women who create punk. This instinct has taken hold of Poison Girls and Skinny Girl Diet in the United Kingdom, Zuby Nehty in the Czech Republic, Las Vulpas in the Basque region of Spain, Sandra Izsadore in Nigeria, and Fertil Mizeria in Columbia – just to name a few.
Punk was, is, and will always be personally and perpetually political.
By its nature, the punk spirit should serve as a primary artistic medium for resisting oppression, whether political, social, sexual, economic, or otherwise. It doesn’t need buzzsaw guitars, ramshackle drums, and a snotty vocal delivery. It simply needs people who can and will stand up to the powers that be so that the voices of the marginalized and dispossessed are heard.
That is what Vivien Goldman means when she titles her book Revenge of the She-Punks. As she tells Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders on page 7,
“We’re not talking about that mean-spirited sort of gotcha! revenge. In the case of punky females, revenge means getting the same access as your male peers, to make your own music, look and sound how you want, and be able to draw enough people to ensure the continuation of the process. Sounds simple enough, talent permitting, but as this book shows, it’s different for girls. … Our path is beset with particular pitfalls, which makes our glories all the sweeter.”
The genius of this book lies in how Goldman never lets any one band, artist, or sub-genre of punk take the lead. In fact, her overriding argument just might be that, even while the definition of punk as a genre seems to change every few years, its power lies its status as an ethos, aesthetic, and general set of operating principles. Punk rock is power for many people around the globe who live outside the normal confines of power. Hence, this book serves as a stellar showcase for the strong, yet hidden and often forgotten, collection of women artists and innovators coursing through the history of Punk Rock.