In the alley outside The Smell, an all-ages punk venue in Los Angeles, I chat with Katy Goodman, the bassist in the indie-rock band Vivian Girls. She had cut her finger earlier that day while making stencils for the “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirts they’re selling inside, and she’s worried that it’ll affect her bass playing. The band is headlining tonight’s benefit show for Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist performance-art group whose members were recently sentenced to two years in a penal colony for “hooliganism” after reading a “punk prayer” inside a Russian Orthodox church.
I ask Goodman what made her want to perform. “Here in America, we can sing about anything we want,” she says. “And because of, like, riot grrrl and stuff, it’s not even weird that Vivian Girls is a band. Girls can get together and sing about anything, whether it’s political or about flowers or something. Being in prison is not something we ever consider when it comes to our music.”
Despite the chasm between freedom of expression in the United States and Putin’s Russia, it’s been impossible to resist connecting Pussy Riot with riot grrrl, the punk-rock, radical-feminist movement of the early nineteen-nineties. “In terms of feminist musical acts, activism, and community building we do give credit to the Riot Grrrl movement,” one of the members told Vice in February. Though we should be careful not to overstate the parallels. As Marisa Meltzer, the author of “Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music,” told me, “No one was threatening to imprison Bratmobile for singing about school or boys or feminism. Obviously the stakes for Pussy Riot being much higher is what’s made the story so irresistible.”
U.S. artists have taken up Pussy Riot’s cause, from big names like Bjork and Madonna to indie acts like the bands playing at The Smell in late August and at dozens of other benefits that have been organized around the country over the past few weeks. Proceeds from this night’s show will go to the Pussy Riot Defense Fund, a group working on the artists’ behalf.
One of the opening bands finishes its set inside, and kids push through the metal doors and out into the alley. I meet two fifteen-year-olds, Lucia and Clara. Lucia’s cheeks are flushed and a garland of plastic flowers is woven through her blond hair. She wears a tan-collared Boy Scouts of America shirt with “Boy” Sharpied out and rewritten, “Grrrrl,” a short polka-dot skirt, and oxblood Doc Martens. She is the idealized nineties, the good nineties, the aspirational nineties, as filtered through thousands of Tumblr posts and Rookie-magazine essays and fashion editorials.
A specific set of conditions set the stage for riot grrrl, says Sara Marcus, author of “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.” With the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, “sexual harassment becomes a major conversation point. There’s also a huge study on rape that comes out in 1991 that quantifies how many young women in their teens are being sexually assaulted.” Abortion access for teen-agers was one of the most contentious issues in the 1992 election. “If you’re a teen-age girl and feeling the cognitive dissonance that you’re empowered but your body is up for play politically, then you start looking around,” Marcus says. “And there’s no shortage of things to feel mad about.”
Lucia and her friend Clara, who has long, straight dark hair and is wearing red lipstick and a sixties shift dress with a gold floral pattern on it, come to The Smell a lot. The Grrrrl Scouts of America isn’t just a fashion statement, it’s sort of a group they belong to, along with some other kids they know from around L.A. Two girls Lucia knows started the group after they learned about riot grrrl and were sad that there was no modern-day analogue. The group has been invigorated by attacks on women’s rights in the United States, and by Pussy Riot. “This has kind of sparked the feminist movement in the U.S.,” Lucia says. “It’s like there’s free speech, and then there’s also reproductive rights—I just feel like it’s all connected in a way.” She tells me her boyfriend just updated his Facebook status with a rant about women’s rights. “He’s totally a feminist,” she says, “but now he’s talking about it online.”
Similar to Lucia and Clara, Pussy Riot is of the Internet. Most of the protests are physical demonstrations, and the musical component is added later, like a soundtrack, before videos of the events are uploaded to YouTube. Most recently, they created a clip for the MTV Video Music Awards, in which they thank the famous musicians who have expressed solidarity and urge everyone to keep fighting. Goodman tells me this is one of the things she admires most about Pussy Riot. “It’s cool that they have this very specific, unique way of throwing these protests, which are half in real life but half on the Internet. They understand the power of the Internet, and the fact that things can go viral, and the impact that that can make,” she says. “I like the way that they married the two: an in-person protest with an online side. Half and half.”
Alejandra Lopez, a twenty-one-year-old with bleached-blond hair and a faded floral dress, is taking her fourteen-year-old sister, Valeria, to her first concert. They haven’t heard of any of the bands on the fliers—they’re here because they’ve been following the Pussy Riot saga on Tumblr. “We’re from Mexico, so we’ve kind of been through the same thing,” Alejandra says. “We got someone elected and no one cares about him. For me, it’s all connected. Money and power are what get you to be elected President. In that way, it’s always connected.”
Inside, I watch four guys in candy-colored dresses and balaclavas pogo around the stage, snapping their heads back and forth, pounding their instruments at a frenetic pace. They look like human-size Pez dispensers. Kids are moshing up front. The place is thick with sweat. The bodies hum up and down, not quite in time to the music. Sweat tickles my lower back. Through the pogoing crowd, I watch Lucia climb up on the stage—even backlit, I can tell it’s her by the plastic floral wreath—and dive into the sea of hands.
Marcus says that, politics aside, she sees echoes of riot grrrl in the way Pussy Riot “carry themselves physically in the videos. The way their bodies occupy space. They’re kicking, they’re punching, they’re always standing on something tall and being really monumental. There’s this way that toughness gets projected through their body language even without being able to see their faces. That’s really through the feeling of seeing a punk band of girls on the stage.”
Photograph, of Katy Goodman of Vivian Girls, by Roger Kisby/Getty Images.
