Photos by Jason Rodgers

 

At eighteen, I cared about power and speed. My favorite bands were The Refused, Dillinger 4, Operation Ivy, and Black Flag. I wanted my music to hit me hard like a shiny hammer to the brain, over and over and over and over, until everything dull and boring and demanding and responsible was shattered into simple bits of idealist platitudes. Details and normal people were boring. Destructive, aggressive, maniacal joy, visible to me in Henry Rollins’ tattooed, gym-built forearms, kept me feeling fresh in the poisonous landscapes of a happily mediocre America.

But I could only read so much Nietzsche and do so many push-ups before I started feeling like a jerk. Truth be told, punk rock is often a nihilistic ritual demonstrating the depths of male social baggage. Examine the list of the most successful third wave pop punk rock bands: Bad Religion, Face to Face, Pennywise, NOFX, The Offspring, Rancid, Guttermouth, No Use for a Name, The Vandals, AFI, Green Day, Blink 182…and there are hundreds more formed in their mold. But all dudes. These bands might have groupies. But very, very rarely does a woman fill a creative role.

And the arms race got boring. How much faster could the music get? How much harder could it sound? How much anti-political diatribe could uninformed adolescence truly summon? How much surf skate idiot self-actualization rhetoric could I pass off for life philosophy? I began to feel that the ideas in popular punk music were mainstream and had no power, and that the music itself had become mannered and self-indulgent. I wanted a new form of that energy I had felt when I first started listening to punk rock—that feeling of urgency and radicalism.

But there was also an obvious lack that quickly became physically evident in the makeup of the audience—there were no girls. And the guy-girl interactions that did exist were so limited that, ironically, the music became a reflection of the conservative patriarchy I so fervently felt was the invisible enemy. Where was my future, if all the bands were telling me everything sucked but also assured that the status quo was just going to stay the same? I got bored of getting in fights, and I was bored of being bored. Social radicalism has no efficacy without actual practice, and lacking love, everyone gets angry and sad.

In 2000, right before the winter break during my first year at the University of Texas, a friend of mine invited me out to a free show a hundred yards away from the dorm. I didn’t particularly want to go—I had no idea who was playing—but there was also no reason to turn down a free outdoor show so close to home. It took five minutes for me to walk over to the outdoor patio of the Texas Union, and I had no expectations of what I was about to see there. But when I strolled up, I noticed that all of the cool kids I had seen in classes—the ones with something intelligently alternative happening—were lined up in the back. I started to pay attention.

The first band was already playing. Two women with mullets, if I remember correctly, playing a sort of sweeter-than-Janis version of Southern classic rock. They sounded Bruce Springsteened familiar, and they were good. They joked about how everyone in their seventh grade class was sent home the day the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane went down. The music was accomplished, and they rocked. But I can’t remember their name due to the blunt force of the next act.

Le Tigre post-show memories are dear and forthcoming. But very quickly, I will pretend like it is possible to categorize artists in two ways: artists that open doors (for others to walk through), and artists that close them. Artists that open doors effectively shine a light and make visible to others viable tools and strategies that were previously off limits. Artists that close doors create superlative art in which virtuosity replaces innovation, reducing contemporaries to competitors.

Brian Eno once speculated that although almost no one bought Velvet Underground records, everyone that did made their own music shortly thereafter. However, this effect is timely—doors don’t stay open for long. Culture creates itself anew from the genetic strands of that which came before, and the most useful forms are the ones that place their power in the hands of the future.

Le Tigre kicked my doors wide open.

To be honest, it hurt. My eardrums. The music was RAW. The sound quality was uncomfortable. The songs were loose and loud and distorted and piercing. Three women driving a song along that sounded harder and more aggressive than the dandified punk man-boy bands I was already feeling sick of; the music was instantly more urgent and engaging. Something was already massively different. A slide show played behind them—huge graphic representations of pop art feminist agitprop. The show was much closer to a theatrical performance than a mere rehearsal of songs. I heard someone say the lead singer was Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill. “Oh, Bikini Kill, yeah, they’re cool.” I had no idea who that was.

Hanna was screeching out the lyrics almost like she was trying to make everyone leave. The bassist provided the propulsive power to a sound that kept threatening to turn into dance music, but stayed aloof and angry. But there was also music coming from somewhere that wasn’t being played—was this pre-recorded? Where was half the music coming from? Was I cool with pre-recorded blasphemy? Or was that a keyboard? A sampler? This was all very new to me, and I was starting to get an amazing feeling that anything was possible.

Suddenly the meaning of punk was slipping away from me, as the rug of obnoxious musical virtuosity was yanked out from under all the contemporary punk I was listening to. Something much more important was going on here. Le Tigre was simple, but utterly catchy and precious, even in such raw form. The lyrics referenced art world figures unfamiliar to me and turns of catch phrases started to mean something, as the wild synth beats changed timbre radically and often.

This was punk rock. I was as excited as I ever had been about music. So many new tools were being placed in front of me in a completely new form of expression that made perfect sense. I immediately wanted to start a band. I wanted to make a slide show. I wanted to dance, and I wanted to scream, and I wanted to get crazy. I felt like things were changing.

One thing that did not come across at this show was how irresistibly danceable Le Tigre was on record. After I hit up Sound Exchange for the Feminist Sweepstakes LP and listened to it about a thousand times, I realized that every time I put on “Deceptacon,” everyone within reach of the beat lost their minds. And after DJing a few parties, I found that I got instant cred from a certain subset of kids once I played Le Tigre.

I could play any of the songs off that album and instantly the vibe was a little fresher, a little rawer, and most importantly, people would dance. Girls and boys would dance, and not like it was MTV Spring Break, but like they each wanted to be Michael Jackson. But these weren’t pithy love songs about being tough—this dance was one of political liberation and radical creativity.

It took a while for my musical and cultural intelligence to catch up with Le Tigre, but the seed had been planted. Looking back, I’m glad that at first I had no idea what I was witnessing. My ignorance placed the actual differences manifested in the Le Tigre performance in higher contrast with what I was used to. I had no rhetoric to deal with what I had just seen. But there was no exclusionary elitism.

The show was free, outdoors, and open to the public. Le Tigre was a political demonstration, and even as they became extremely popular, the form of the music itself explicitly presented no barriers to prevent my participation. I liked that. And there were cool girls at the show that were smarter than me. I liked that too.

One of the true joys of listening to live music is the chance to discover something. And upon that moment, when I noticed I was really into my Le Tigre experience, I felt like I was crashing into an iceberg of culture that previously I could not see. But once glimpsed, everything changed. Sexual politics felt accessible, real, and urgently important. I was already way behind the curve. By the time Le Tigre broke things open for me, I had already missed the most contentious and politically charged years of the “riot grrrl” scene.

I was too busy listening to Nirvana (though to be fair, lead singer Kurt Cobain once said “The future of rock belongs to the women.”), but then again, I was also just nine years old in 1991. I had to pay my dues and spend the time it took to discover and understand the work of those artists and writers whose ideas laid the foundation for the power of Le Tigre, like Helene Cixous, Lynda Benglis, and Carolee Schneemann. I had to start paying attention and see as much art as I could. I had to graduate and play in bands and make my own art, and I had to move to New York and begin to participate.

Now I can listen to Le Tigre and I get it. I understand why there might be no conclusive judgment on Cassavetes. I’ve met some of the artists mentioned in the songs. And I understand the genius in combining ultra-attractive catchy dance music with an aggressive political agenda. The music is so fun and fast that conservative minds don’t have the time or presence of mind to realize their fears are being broken down in front of them and replaced with a cultural program of real creative freedom. Something strange and new is in the making when the Boston Red Sox radio show samples “Deceptacon.”

The music of Le Tigre broke me of a need for cold ideology and made me aware of the power of community. Communities change and fade and mutate and provide the basis for individuals to explore and experiment. And the artistic community that provided the power of Le Tigre is still in the process of taking over and changing the world.

Le Tigre is on hiatus, but the members of the band are still making radical culture happen. I recently stumbled across one of the newest incarnations of the Le Tigre spirit in the form of the Seagull, a Greenwich Village community landmark that Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre and riot boy Shaun Cottle have reinvigorated. The Seagull, a salon for men and women that originally opened following the gay liberation of the Stonewall Riots, is now once again the freshest place to get a haircut. I recently had the opportunity to talk to Johanna about the Seagull, politics, and that free show in Texas back in 2000.

Mike: I saw Le Tigre play a free show at the University of Texas in 2000, and that experience had an enormous impact on me. The show felt like a radical political demonstration, and came at a crucial political moment in Texas and the US. Did Le Tigre play lots of free shows like that on college campuses?

Johanna: We always played at least one or two colleges on every tour, at least in the early years. It's always great when the student activities board (or whatever) has money to bring a band to campus and doesn't have to charge for tickets because then everyone comes . . . even people who don't know who you are. So the shows are really unpredictable, and in the best-case scenario, there is a wild party dynamic where the fans infect the newcomers with their enthusiasm. As a performer, there's nothing like the feeling of winning people over who didn't expect to be interested in your show.

Mike: Did you ever encounter resistance to the activism of the show? And more specifically, how were the radical political messages of Le Tigre received? Were audiences receptive? Did the reactions change geographically as the band toured? And how would you compare that to the response you received in New York?

Johanna: Our audiences were almost always supportive—beyond supportive, like ecstatically WITH us—in terms of our "political message." In some ways the enthusiasm was greater, or less inhibited, in the red states and more conservative areas because it was such a release and rare event for the feminists, queers, radicals, and otherwise freaky kids to feel like they were being spoken to and included. I shouldn't say kids actually because we always had a lot of older people at our shows, as well. People who disagreed with our politics or despised women or whatever didn't really come to our shows. New York was always good to us too. Sure, we got heckled sometimes but I can only think of a few minor incidents offhand, mostly involving fall-down drunk loser dudes.

Mike: That sort of support, and even having the chance to wild out at a Le Tigre show, wasn't possible fifty years ago…or was it? The Seagull sounds like it has a really interesting place within the history of queer culture in New York. Can you give me the scoop on the story of the salon?

Johanna: I don't really know what opportunities there were to dance in feminist/queer spaces fifty years ago. Probably not many, and not at rock clubs or at college campuses…

Seagull, the hair salon in the West Village that I own with Shaun Cottle, began as a unisex barbershop in 1971. The idea of a barbershop for both women and men was new (women welcome in a traditionally male space!). And the West Village in the ’70s was THE post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay liberation neighborhood. Seagull has been passed down to several different owners. Shaun and I took over in 2006 and it is now full-service hair salon, not a barbershop.

Mike: If there is one quintessential thing you would like people to take away from their experience at Seagull, what is it?

Johanna: I find it very grounding and inspiring to own and work at a business that employs creative people and draws such a diverse and interesting clientele; Seagull is a salon for queer performance artists and hedge fund managers alike. It's the intersection of many worlds. Historically, the social space of the beauty parlor has been the site of consciousness-raising and political organizing, as well as chance meetings, gossip, and grooming, and I hope that Seagull carries on that tradition. And of course I want people to leave with the best hair of their lives!