The year 1992 will always stand out in my mind as the “Year of the Woman.” At the time, I was a reporter at Newsweek based in Washington, D.C., covering the presidential election, and politics was my world. It was the election that followed the cataclysmic Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, in which Hill, facing a panel of all white, all male members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was humiliated and dismissed as she told the story of her former boss’s sexual harassment. We all know what happened next. Thomas was approved for the Supreme Court, and women voters rose up in outrage over the spectacle of the gender imbalance in the Senate and elected a slew of new women representatives to Congress. The national consciousness raised that year made way for what is now considered third-wave feminism.
But what I was completely oblivious to from my perch inside the Beltway was the cultural reverberations of that signature year. Not only were rebellious women storming the Capitol and demanding the passage of legislation like the Violence Against Women Act, they were also dominating stages in clubs, taking over the airwaves on independent radio stations, and signing up with record labels. Washington State, represented by “Mom in tennis shoes” Senator Patty Murray, also happened to be home to a new underground feminist punk rock–grunge movement called “riot grrrl.” If 1992 was the political Year of the Woman, 1993 to 1995 were the Years of the Woman in the alternative-rock music scene, when, as the historian Tanya Pearson writes, “a tsunami of rock women released albums on major labels, to critical acclaim.”
In her captivating oral history of this feminist rock phenomenon, Pretend We’re Dead, Pearson resurrects the decade when audacious, angry, outrageous rockers like Courtney Love, Donita Sparks, Shirley Manson, Liz Phair, Nina and Kim Gordon, and others dominated the music scene. It was a glorious heyday for feminist musicians, a time when they were embraced by the mainstream music-industrial complex. But this embrace came to an end after the Twin Towers came crashing down on September 11, 2001, when American culture abruptly reverted to a conservative patriarchal war mode that ignited an anti-feminist backlash. As the war on terrorism consumed the country in the 2000s, tolerance for norm-smashing, guitar-bashing, women rockers evaporated almost overnight.
Pearson lived through this decade as a teenage die-hard fan, but when she set about writing a research project in 2014 about women rock bands in the 1990s at Smith College, she discovered that there was very little archival record from which to draw. Thankfully, she had the foresight to start the Women of Rock Oral History Project at Smith, in which, over a decade, she and others have captured interviews with 40 of these iconic artists, whose musical contributions will no longer be lost to history. The fruit of Pearson’s labor, Pretend We’re Dead, harnesses the vivid voices of women on stages and in recording studios to tell the story of this important decade in American cultural history. It is also a nostalgic reminder of a simpler time, before TikTok and Spotify, when music was recorded on vinyl by multiple independent labels, and small college radio stations were king (and queen) makers.
In September 1991, grunge music captured the mainstream with the release of Nirvana’s hit single “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Pearson heralds Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain (who died in 1994), as a feminist whose “moral fortitude brought out the best in everyone, but it certainly brought out the best in men.” Women musicians benefited from Cobain’s leadership, and grunge music itself was strongly antisexist, antiracist, and anti-misogynist. Pearson was in high school in 1991, and observed that Cobain’s ethos influenced his fans. “Even the douchebag boys in my school became more feminist. Their musical tastes expanded, they thought women were cool, and they disavowed misogyny.”
As Nirvana conquered the charts, Cobain’s soon-to-be-wife Courtney Love’s band Hole also gained traction. Cobain and Love’s youth, beauty, and fuck-you attitude made them the glamorous “it” couple—the John and Yoko, or Beyoncé and Jay-Z—of the early ’90s. Love was all headache to Cobain’s heartthrob. “She didn’t attempt to pacify the general public or patriarchal notions of feminine propriety,” writes Pearson. “She twisted gender norms, punched people, aggressively pursued fame (and men), thrust her leg on a monitor, and screamed. Love upturned the agreed-upon notion of how popular female icons should behave.”
Courtney Love’s unleashed id and her brazen aggression stood in stark contrast to traditionally feminine rock stars like Stevie Nicks, Cher, or Olivia Newton-John. And Love was far from alone. Take, for example, Donita Sparks, the lead guitarist and vocalist for L7. “We dressed very grungy, our hair was matted, dirty, dreaded, and clumped, and our clothes were torn,” says Sparks about her band. “None of us knew how to sew, and we would duct-tape our pants closed … I’m the one who threw the tampon, our audiences were literally riots—stage-diving mayhem.” Spin magazine featured the band on its July 1993 cover with the title “The Magnificent 7,” describing them as “four of the funniest, meanest, strongest, coolest, most pissed-off women I know.”
The media struggled with categorizing this genre of bands, because each one was so different. “L7 played metal riffs and were dirty, androgynous, and absurd,” writes Pearson. “Shirley Manson was direct, outspoken, and led Garbage, an all-male backing band that infused rock, pop, and industrial elements; Liz Phair was a hyperfeminine, overtly sexual singer-songwriter and sang about blow jobs and fucking and running.”
When the Madison, Wisconsin–based band Garbage toured in the early ’90s, and their songs started to get picked up by radio stations, things progressed quickly. As lead singer Shirley Manson describes it,
It was like wildfire. It just ignited. And then before we knew it … record labels were falling over themselves to come and sign us … The thing that I don’t think people quite understand about that trajectory for us was, that whole period in the ’90s was the first time alternative music (i.e., anyone who was nonconformist) suddenly became the popular kid. Suddenly, we were overtaking everything. If you weren’t alternative, you weren’t getting played on MTV, you weren’t getting played on the radio, you weren’t getting on the front covers of music magazines. So it was a surprise for everyone.
Bands like Veruca Salt, Hole, the Breeders, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Jack Off Jill, L7, Luscious Jackson, and Garbage dominated magazine covers, music videos, concert halls, and the airwaves by the mid- to late 1990s.
This was the first time since the 1960s hippie counterculture—when women musicians like Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Joan Baez reigned—that “nonconformist, antiestablishment women got a mainstream platform,” Pearson explains. And like their ’60s predecessors, who devoted their lyrics and performance to social justice issues like protesting the Vietnam War, the female grunge bands also took public political stands. When arsonists began terrorizing abortion clinics and David Gunn became the first obstetrician to be killed for terminating a pregnancy, L7 started a series of high-profile Rock for Choice benefit concerts, which took place from 1991 to 2001. Other bands took a stand against rape and domestic violence. The Seattle band 7 Year Bitch “were masterful social commentators fusing blunt punk and metal riffs. The band released their first full-length album, Sick ’Em, in 1992, featuring the classic ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape,’ ” Pearson writes.
The beginning of the end started when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the broadcast industry and allowed large corporations to gobble up small radio stations. For example, in 1995, Clear Channel owned 39 radio stations, and five years later the radio behemoth had acquired 1,100 stations. Unsurprisingly, corporate conglomeration proved to be the death knell of musical diversity. College radio stations, Pearson explains, which used to be the best vehicle for promoting underground bands, were all but eliminated because of consolidation. Then the internet, in its nascent stages in the mid-’90s, would eventually finish off what the corporate radio conglomerates started.
As radio stations consolidated, so did record companies. Small independent labels became scarce by the turn of the century. “Capitol Records had gone through personnel change, and the people who had championed us throughout the years left or were fired,” recalls Kate Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson. “They were left with us and didn’t quite know how to market us … All the radio stations were like, ‘Well, we’re already playing Garbage, so we can’t play Luscious Jackson.’ It was that kind of thing. ‘We already have our lady group.’ ”
Pearson and the women she interviewed also point to the disastrous Woodstock ’99 three-day concert, held on the 30th anniversary of the original music festival, as a bellwether that signaled the backlash against feminist alt-rock. The festival, which only featured three women-fronted bands—one per day—turned violent. “The legacy of the festival remains one of disaster, corporate greed, middle-class white misogyny, sexual assault, bonfires, looting, rioting, and rivers of human excrement,” writes Pearson. The small radio stations that played women alternative rock in the mid-’90s “all went away pretty quickly by the time that fucking Woodstock ’99 thing happened,” Schellenbach says. After Sheryl Crow played at the festival, she reported back, “This was horrible. Women were literally getting groped and fucked in the mud pits. It was just awful.” Schellenbach says, “We all had a sense that ‘this is not good.’”
Then came 9/11, and the music scene went the way of the nation, which returned to the perceived safety of patriarchal patriotism. Susan Faludi, in her second book about an anti-feminist backlash, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, carefully documents how the war on terror contributed to the end of third-wave feminism. “In the aftermath of September 11, you didn’t have to be a feminist to feel the purge,” Faludi writes. “Soon after the World Trade Center vaporized into two biblical plumes of smoke, another vanishing act occurred on television sets and newspaper pages across the country. Women began disappearing.”
Pearson fills in what Faludi left out of her book by showing how the music industry followed the same post-9/11 playbook as the rest of the culture. “After September 11, they stopped playing nonconformist women on the radio,” says Shirley Manson of Garbage. “I mean, that’s just a blanket rule of thumb.” Garbage, which sold 4 million copies of their first record in 1995 and their second in 1998, planned to release their third album, Beautiful Garbage, on the ill-fated day of September 13, 2001. Needless to say, the album was a commercial flop. “The conservative political climate that arose after 9/11 killed us as a pop band for sure,” Manson says.
Soon enough, most of the other alt-rock feminist bands met the same fate as Garbage. “Boy bands, female pop stars, nu metal figureheads like Slipknot, Korn, and Staind, and some members of the old guard—namely Aerosmith and U2—graced the covers of Rolling Stone through the early 2000s, but nonconformist women disappeared,” writes Pearson. “It was like the feminist, alternative rock wave never happened.” Thanks to Pearson’s essential book, their glory days will no longer be forgotten. But this book does raise the question: Who will the cultural victims of the new Trump era be?
