Cole recorded most of This Fire in a day and a half with Jay Bellerose, the drummer she has played with since she was nineteen years old. The album debuted in October 1996 and her hit “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone” reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100. Cole won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1998, and she is still among only a handful of women whose self-produced albums have been Grammy-nominated.
“Cowboy” satirizes American machismo and conventional domesticity with lyrics like “I will do laundry if you pay all the bills / I will wash the dishes while you go have a beer.” But this was the time of political correctness, and the song’s irony wasn’t initially absorbed. Spin called her the “Nancy Reagan of Lilith Fair.” The New York Times speculated that the lyrics “praise the virtues of docility and domesticity,” and could place her “to the right of Tammy Wynette, creator of the memorable retro anthem, ‘Stand by Your Man,’ as far as sexual enlightenment goes.”
Because Cole sang about anger and emotion, she was frequently subject to the “woman scorned” critique. “In the aftermath of Alanis, the airwaves were crawling with troubled ingénues singing tragic ballads about their haunted eyes,” wrote Rolling Stone.
“Some things come off like, ‘This is my journal, there’s no self-censorship,’” Rich Silverstein, a musical theater director and Cole fan, told me after the Rockport show. This emotionality draws many fans to Cole, but it made her a critical target. Reviewers didn’t seem to know how to discuss a woman artist like Cole without labeling her dramatic, crazy, angry, or all of the above. Her “vocal flutter-kicks and strident self-revelations can be excessive,” wrote Newsweek.
Reviewers described her performances as primal, self-indulgent, and out of control. She was a “twirling banshee . . . roaming the stage wildly” and found “grand drama in private dilemmas.” Like a biblical witch, Cole “unleashed the hellish fury of a woman scorned, bluesily moaned her lust and overindulged in self-administered primal-scream therapy.”
Cole’s cause wasn’t helped by her album’s content, or its cover. This Fire is, at its core, an album of female rebellion and anger. I loved it growing up because it gave me permission to feel rage that I hadn’t known existed in me. It was also sensual and powerful. This was female desire and sexuality expressed and owned by a woman. In the cut “Feelin’ Love,” for example, Cole sings, “You make me feel like the Amazon running / Between my thighs.” The notes she sings sound like orgasm in progress.
The album cover features Cole nude on a swing sailing through blue sky and flames. As a teenager, I was startled to see such a thing. I was used to consuming a steady diet of girls singing about sex in the ways male producers and executives ordained. When Cole did it, it felt different because she was singing for herself and not for men. Shot on a swing set in a Brooklyn backyard, the image on This Fire’s cover is about expression, Cole says now. “I may be nude, but it’s about freedom and sexiness as reclamation. I’m claiming my body for this purpose,” she told me. It’s also a taunt at a music industry that quantifies women musicians’ value based on the extent to which they’re willing to remove their clothes. It mocks the oversexualized album cover, deflating its power. “Here is all of me, my way,” it says.
But not all photo shoots would go this way. “I learned to hate photo shoots,” Cole told me. “I’d be busy on a touring schedule and I’d come to a shoot and they would show me what I was going to wear, and it would be a little pile of gauze strips,” she said. “Entertainment Weekly magazine had a little Girl Scout costume. The photographer had this whole plan. And I went along with it and I deeply regretted it.”
In a joint magazine interview with other Lilith Fair artists in 1998, Cole recalls wearing a “little pile of rags . . . lying on a table filled with cheese and fruit, like ‘You can eat me, too’ . . . If you look in my eyes, you can tell I’m not there. The photographer asked me to expose my breast, so I did, and I now want to kill him . . . If you ever, ever want to say no, say no!”
ANGRY WHITE FEMALE
Cole was an “angry woman rocker,” and this kind of rebellion was precisely what made the Lilith Fair music tour she performed in so detested. It featured an all-woman lineup to protest how few women acts shared concert billings together, and how radio DJs resisted playing women artists back to back. Lilith Fair was one of the most successful traveling music tours in 1997, grossing $16.5 million. Artists donated a portion of proceeds to women’s shelters.
Despite Lilith Fair’s visibility and success, it was derided as emotional and unserious. Detractors called Lilith Fair “breastfest,” “girlapalooza,” and “the mamas and the mamas.” There were plenty of industry folks and concertgoers who expressed excitement about this welcome venue for female artists. But the performance was ultimately immortalized as uncool because it offered “naked good intentions and unbridled sincerity.” It was disparaged as “touchy-feely,” full of “airy-fairy hoo-ha,” and “a slumber party in the woods.”
“Call us insensitive, but when we first heard about Lilith Fair we had one reaction: run,” jabbed Newsweek. “This isn’t entertainment—it’s therapy.” Prescribing therapy for women who expressed emotions was a common gibe hurled by the media.
The “angry woman rocker” label that stuck to Cole, Morissette, and others may have originated with the Riot Grrrl movement. Riot Grrrl began in the early 90s, when women musicians and activists stormed the punk rock stage to espouse feminist values and protest violence against women. Riot Grrrl–affiliated bands—such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy—forcefully reclaimed girlhood and female anger with howling vocals and blatantly political lyrics. The movement was stoked by Bikini Kill front woman Kathleen Hanna’s famous demand “Girls to the front” to protect fangirls at their shows from the moshing bodies of men.
Though music was its loudest megaphone, Riot Grrrl was more of a social movement than a musical one. Activists like Hanna wanted less to join a band than to disseminate a message—that girlhood was under attack, and that it needed to be taken back by girls. Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail put it bluntly: “Not only do we live in a totally fucked-up patriarchal society run by white men who don’t represent our interests at all, but we are in a country where those people don’t care if we live or die. And that’s pretty scary.”
For Rebecca Odes, who studied art at Vassar and played bass in the band Love Child, Riot Grrrl was a more accessible form of dissent than sign-waving at protests. “It was basically making art around our anger. It was challenging in a lot of ways popular music definitely wasn’t. It was protest music,” she told me. The first song she wrote, “Asking for It,” dealt with street harassment.
While Riot Grrrl’s wellspring was the punk scene of the Pacific Northwest, adherents brought the movement’s ideas nearer to the seat of power when they moved to Washington, DC. Riot Grrrls made “fanzines”—handmade publications voicing their ideas that they sold at shows. This was where “The Riot Grrrl Manifesto” was published to outline the movement’s grievances and define its goals.
BECAUSE in every form of media I see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed.
BECAUSE I am tired of these things happening to me; I’m not a fuck toy. I’m not a punching bag. I’m not a joke.
BECAUSE every time we pick up a pen, or an instrument, or get anything done, we are creating the revolution. We ARE the revolution.
Riot Grrrls attempted to celebrate and normalize female anger. They organized consciousness-raising gatherings across the country. They protested in the name of simpatico causes, like storming Capitol Hill to fight abortion restrictions, and speaking against sexual abuse and eating disorders. They wrote “slut,” “rape,” and “whore” on their stomachs at performances and protests, and hoisted signs that read “Keep Your Fist Outta My Cunt” and “We Are Not Things.” They boycotted mainstream recor
d labels and cultural influences, ate vegetarian diets, and avoided alcohol and drugs.
Sara Marcus, who would later write the Riot Grrrl’s history, Girls to the Front, was inspired to join the movement by a report about it in Newsweek. “It felt like finally jumping into a lake that’s exactly the right temperature for your body,” she told me. “You would come into a room and there would be an instant sense of recognition. On a cellular level we were made of the same stuff.”
Since Riot Grrrl was wrapped in the twin discomforts of female anger and sexuality, the movement walked a line between a curiosity and a threat. Thus, the news media didn’t know what to do with it. Its efforts were either misconstrued or outright undermined in press coverage. Its representatives were defused or simply written off. Riot Grrrl was categorized as “feminist fury,” “In-Your-Face-Feminism,” and “mean, mad and defiantly underground.”
A 1993 Seventeen magazine article seemed bent on disabling the movement, accusing it of ugliness, misandry, and having a “militant slant.” This was supposedly proved by its look. Riot Grrrls “don’t shave and deliberately give each other bad haircuts,” the report said. Women who didn’t conform to mainstream beauty standards weren’t real women, as both Paula Cole and Riot Grrrl learned. Unsurprisingly, after the press pigeonholed them as combat-boot-wearing man-haters, angry rape and incest survivors, former sex workers, and caricatures of girlhood, many Riot Grrrls dodged interviews.
The Riot Grrrls’ brash optimism and raw passion were also derided as products of youth and inexperience. The movement itself wasn’t particularly cohesive. Girls formed bands or wheat-pasted zines around cities from Olympia to Chicago of their own volition, not by checking in with some central brain trust. The movement was leaderless by design—which made for plenty of complications and factions.
What Riot Grrrl did do was to confer on female anger a real place in the popular culture, which then commercialized it. After Riot Grrrl’s demise, the very qualities it fostered and the “greater acknowledgement of female anger, messiness, and fierceness” that Marcus says it wrought were celebrated in mainstream female musicians and in consumer culture. “There was no attention to angry women before there was Riot Grrrl,” said Marcus. After Riot Grrrl, “then there was an attention to angry women.”
The movement had effectively fizzled out by 1997, as feminists found new affiliations and causes, and associations with Riot Grrrl became more divisive than cohesive. But the ideology and energy reached into the culture in new and expansive ways. So-called angry women rockers flooded the charts and magazine covers, like Fiona Apple and Meredith Brooks, with her anthem “Bitch.” Alanis Morissette’s Rolling Stone cover in 1995 dubbed her “Angry White Female” ahead of the release of Jagged Little Pill. Female rage was selling music and magazines, and minting stars.
Marcus says she once might have written off these “degraded copies” of Riot Grrrl’s ethos as “bullshit commodified versions,” but now she feels differently. “Some women are never going to go to a Riot Grrrl meeting, or have a zine, but are listening to Bikini Kill. Some women are never going to access Bikini Kill, but they’re aware of Hole. Some women aren’t aware of Hole, but they’re listening to Alanis Morissette. Now we’re at a third-generation degraded copy, and at the same time, there’s an embrace of anger and obscenity that does something for people. Even the Spice Girls are like a fourth-generation degraded copy from Riot Grrrl. So a lot of the effect happened firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand, fourthhand.”
Each generation might be more watered down and commodified, but the idea of Girl Power reached more girls all the same. A large part of the Riot Grrrl movement’s legacy is its disappearance into pop culture. What was underground in the early 90s surfaced above ground several years later. As Bitch Media founder Andi Zeisler puts it, “Alternative culture in the 90s was co-opted and made into pop culture.” Despite the movement’s disintegration and lack of recognition, Riot Grrrl certainly deserves credit for introducing Girl Power into the lexicon.
ANGRY BLACK FEMALE
Unless it could be commoditized, like Alanis Morissette on the cover of Rolling Stone, public brashness and anger was unacceptable for women in the 90s, mostly because it was feared. Black women’s anger was feared even more. When black women expressed their anger in public, they were often subjected to the twin oppressions of racism and sexism. The devaluation of black womanhood that bell hooks writes about in Ain’t I a Woman in the early 80s was still thriving in the 90s in the potency of the Sapphire and welfare-queen tropes. It’s likely why the tough-talking ladies of Living Single who challenged men were eventually silenced. Many black artists and feminists in the 90s were similarly disparaged as angry, domineering, and hypersexual. A prime example is one of the most popular musical acts of the 90s, the R&B trio TLC.
Three black women—Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes—broke out in mainstream 90s music by rebuffing sexual victimhood and owning sexual prowess. Their first album, Ooooooohhh . . . On the TLC Tip, represented “a major breakthrough in the expression of black female sexuality,” wrote critic Nataki Goodall in 1994 in the Journal of Negro History. TLC rejected the “loose, immoral and hypersexual” characterizations often foisted on African American women through the Jezebel and Sapphire tropes while demanding sexual agency. Later, they would dismiss loser dudes unworthy of their beds in “No Scrubs,” an avowed feminist anthem. TLC’s success seemed to prove that black women could both shirk victimhood and own pleasure.
TLC sang about the struggles the black community faced, including gun violence and HIV/AIDS, which were particularly acute in their hometown of Atlanta. They also did for many what school sex education did not—they normalized sex while de-emphasizing its fetishization.
For starters, like some of their female counterparts, they purposely desexualized themselves by wearing baggy hip-hop garb while performing. This choice minimized attention on their sexuality and their looks, and helped them gain legitimacy in the genre. At the same time, their first hit, “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” combined demands for good sex with a rallying cry to use protection. In the video, the group sings, “I like it when you [kiss] / Both sets of lips,” while swaddled in multicolored condoms. Sexual pleasure and safety were linked. “Too many kids think condoms are nasty and vulgar, instead of as something that can save your life,” Lopes told the Washington Post. “Protection is a priority and this demystifies it.” Lopes emphasized the message in her public appearances by strapping a sunshine-yellow condom Captain Hook–style over her right eye. It’s hard to imagine now, when free condoms are available at schools and businesses, but during the 90s such a display was highly subversive.
“We’re consciously working at being role models,” Lopes told the Toronto Star. “There aren’t enough positive ones out there. Not just for young black women, but for all women. Because you guys are still running everything, still making the rules about what a woman can and cannot do and that’s not fair.”
It turned out that their messages about safety and independence were also commercially viable. TLC’s first album went multiplatinum, and by 1992 the band was touring with huge acts like MC Hammer and Boyz II Men. TLC remains by some accounts the bestselling girl group of all time. The only female pop act with higher worldwide sales to date is the Spice Girls.
But increased popularity seemed to muffle TLC’s message. And as their clothes grew more fitted and revealing, reviewers accused the group of sexualizing themselves to sell records. Critics called the condoms a trick to hook listeners. TLC was a ruse—preaching safety to sell sex. After they performed on Arsenio Hall’s show, the group told the Los Angeles Times that other television shows refused to book them unless they “eliminate the condoms and clean up the lyrics.”
The 1999 VH1 Behind the Music documentary reinforced the idea that TLC was too hot. “Their seductive outfits, sultry dance moves, and sensual lyrics launched these beautiful women to the very top of hip-hop
, soul, and pop,” explained the voice-over. On tour, men mocked TLC’s safe sex message while hitting on them. “They’re trying to test us. . . . They think all this TLC stuff is a gimmick,” Thomas said in an interview at the time.
Another common critique was that girlish TLC was too young and daffy to be taken seriously. One report called them the “cartoonish-looking trio.” People magazine described the plots of their songs as girls “standing up to macho men.” Since black women’s authority and sexuality were at once confounding and scary, TLC’s powers needed to be undermined. The group’s longtime manager, Bill Diggins, still calls them “the girls,” even though they are now in their forties.
EVIL EYE
It was when the girls got angry that the spectacle truly began. In June of 1994, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes torched the house where she lived with Atlanta Falcons player Andre Rison after a late-night altercation. Rison told People magazine that he had slapped Lopes “not to hurt her, but to calm her. Didn’t work. We were inside the house now, and I picked her up and slammed her on the bed and sat on her. I still couldn’t control her. So I left.” Lopes’s lawyer later told the magazine, “Lisa is in fear of her life.”
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