by Ann Powers
Most male rap stars didn’t participate in AIDS activism or even awareness-raising. But they did lose one of their own when Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, a founding member of Dr. Dre’s group N.W.A, succumbed to the disease not long after being diagnosed in 1995. “I’ve learned in the last week that this thing is real, and it doesn’t discriminate,” Eazy-E wrote in a letter to fans while on his deathbed. By then AIDS had become the leading cause of death for young African American men and the second for young black women. This rise was inextricably linked to the subject of many of Wright’s drug-dealer glamorizing lyrics: crack.
A concentrated, highly addictive form of cocaine, crack had overtaken many inner-city neighborhoods. As it devastated more and more lives, laws like Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 reinforced a “war on drugs” that put users in jail instead of offering them help. This tightened the noose of criminalization around the neck of anyone caught even experimenting with drugs. It established a vicious cycle that, as Nelson George writes, was the true source of the hard-heartedness reflected in what had come to be called gangsta rap: “There is an elemental nihilism in the most controversial crack-era hip hop that wasn’t concocted by the rappers but reflects the mentality and fears of young Americans of every color and class living an exhausting, edgy existence, in and out of big cities.”53
With the genre’s biggest male stars both embodying the gangsta role and struggling with the emotional (and real-life) constrictions it created, it was left to women rappers to employ the music as a tool to educate listeners about the blights overtaking their communities, including AIDS. Few in number compared to their male counterparts, women rappers often found themselves playing the role of conscience in a milieu that didn’t have room for much open, mature talk about eroticism. The New York trio of rappers Salt-N-Pepa and DJ Spinderella enjoyed a breakthrough with 1991’s “Let’s Talk About Sex,” a playful invective against both conservative censorship and men’s hesitancy to be clear with their partners about their expectations. The trio rerecorded the song as “Let’s Talk About AIDS,” releasing an all-star video that included a few pop-friendly male rappers alongside other minor celebrities like MTV VJ Dave Kendall. In 1992, the R&B group TLC attracted national attention with its slinky sound, distinguished by the crafty rapping of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Lopes adorned her costumes with condoms; the gimmick also served as a public service announcement. “We wanted something eye-catching, so when kids see the condoms, they ask why do we wear condoms and talk about condoms? That brings up the issue of safe sex,” she explained.54
Those “sex packets,” as the Bay Area group Digital Underground wryly called them, were affixed to Lopes’s colorful, baggy jackets and pants when TLC entered the pop scene. But by the mid-1990s, women in hip-hop were working a different look and style: the “hard-edged black girl MC glam” of rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, associates of male rap stars like Biggie Smalls and Sean “Puffy” Combs. These women shot out rhymes recalling the dirty verses of 1920s blues queens. As Imani Perry has explained, they looked feminine, but “occupied male spaces linguistically,” matching their male counterparts in bluntness and mercenary attitude. Articulating desire for sex itself as well as the material goods sex often earns women in a patriarchal society, hard female rappers engaged in the time-honored tradition of battle rhyming—only now it was the battle of the sexes, not a strictly masculine game, that preoccupied and titillated audiences. The male-female relationship in rap continued to be played out within the resurgent narrative of the pimp and his whore. Eithne Quinn has argued that this story partly made a comeback in the 1990s because women were making economic gains, securing more power in the American system than black men, ever more criminalized, could muster. “The pimp was about registering as well as repudiating the power of women,” she writes.55
Hip-hop in the late 1990s was not merely about hard men and the women who fulfilled their fantasies (and occasionally stood up to them). A strong alternative scene focused on groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul represented more bohemian styles and self-consciously progressive values. In this world, women like Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill of the Fugees, and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira of Digable Planets did sometimes speak women’s truths. Hill in particular made a powerful statement with her 1998 solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, eloquently considering the responsibilities of young motherhood in the poignant “To Zion” and cautioning her female fans against predatory boys in the girl-group throwback “That Thing.” Hip-hop would continue to blossom in countless ways, providing a foundation for an increasingly diverse array of artists, including, in the 2000s, major women pop stars like Beyoncé and Rihanna.
Yet gangsta rap, with its nihilistic overtones and strangely puritan streak, held a strong grip on the mainstream imagination, crossing over to a large white audience whose motivations for embracing its stereotypes were highly questionable. Its influence reached a nadir in 1999, via a rock-rap fusion that became hugely popular, pioneered by bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn, who blended hard rock’s most depressive elements with gangsta rap’s misogyny. That year, at a festival in upstate New York meant to carry on the countercultural spirit of Woodstock, four women were raped, one near the stage as Limp Bizkit performed. “This was an orgy of lewdness tinged with hate,” one reporter wrote.56
DOWN IN IT
When Kim Gordon wrote “Kool Thing” for LL Cool J, she included a question for him: “Are you going to liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” In the song’s verses, she made fun of herself, playing the clueless fangirl as Chuck D of Public Enemy, fully in on the joke, leered, “Oh, yeahhhh,” in the background. That was in 1990, long before rap-rock’s cretinous pretenders in backward baseball caps made their own horrible joke of the genre. Hip-hop would recover. Mainstream rock had a harder time; its cultural impact has continued to diminish. But indie rock would be redeemed in the 1990s by a counter-reformation led by furious young women, the spiritual younger sisters of Gordon, who said “I don’t think so” to the scene’s sexism and then kept talking until it changed.
As rap responded to tough realities, indie rockers sought some solace by looking to the past. By the mid-1990s a highly diverse form rooted more in the economic practices of running a label, publishing low-cost fanzines, and touring at a club level than in any one sound or even attitude, indie rock had always welcomed some heavy metal parking-lot long-hairs into its mix. The Replacements, one of the 1980s bands that developed the scene in ways that diverged from hardcore punk, regularly covered songs by metal progenitors Black Sabbath and KISS. Starting around 1989 more players and fans began to show allegiance to those roots. Rockers grew their hair long and stretched out their guitar explorations, replacing the short sharp shock of punk with heavy riffs and even, sometimes, guitar solos—once the ultimate symbol of arena-sized overindulgence. Seattle became the emblematic town generating this heavier sound. It was an industrial city then, known for shipping and airplane building, with a working-class soul that suited this expressively earthy, self-consciously unpretentious trend. “Grunge,” as the Pacific Northwest sound came to be called by the media, held on to punk’s suspiciousness of the mainstream even as its stars crafted arena-worthy anthems. It was hard rock in a thrift-store plaid shirt instead of Spandex.
Grunge sounded like a giant male moan; the critics Simon Reynolds and Joy Press called it “castration blues, the flailing sound of failed masculinity.”57 Its creators styled themselves as sensual refuseniks. As one star of the indie rock scene adjacent to grunge, Sean Nelson of the band Harvey Danger, described it, “The idea, I thought, was not to deny your sexual urges—that would be folly—but to keep them to yourself, to mute them, to deplore the fact that any expression of them was bound to be either vulgar or predictable or, worst of all, male.”58 Even the name “grunge” was a self-deprecating term that Mark Arm, the singer from Mudhoney, devised as a joke against alpha-male ambition: “Pure noise! Pure grunge! Pure shit!�
� he wrote in a letter about his own band to the Seattle zine Desperate Times in 1981, a decade before it became common parlance.59
Viewed by many as the last commercial gasp of mainstream rock, grunge’s legacy is tinged with sorrow, both because its most beloved figure, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, committed suicide in 1994, and due to the heroin habits of many other key players, several of whom died of overdoses. Yet grunge was also openly progressive, and it was the first mainstream American rock milieu to embrace feminist politics, with Seattle band Pearl Jam regularly playing benefits for pro-choice and anti-rape organizations and Cobain famously writing in the liner notes to Nirvana’s 1992 compilation album Incesticide, “If you’re a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, we don’t want you to buy our records.”
Cobain’s politics were locally rooted. Before forming Nirvana in 1987, he briefly lived in the college town of Olympia, Washington, where he became close to Tobi Vail, a young feminist whose own band, Bikini Kill, would become the central voice of a new take on women’s liberation known as riot grrrl. A major factor in the generational shift within feminism starting to become known as the Third Wave, riot grrrl was a movement as noisy and confrontational as hardcore punk, but with sexism—and specifically, the sexism young women experienced within the indie rock scene—as its main target. The very young women who invented riot grrrl wanted to raise up what they saw as the ghost of feminism, drained dry by academic entrapment in women’s studies programs or diluted to death by neoliberal corporate culture’s surface gestures toward diversity, and make it scream as it had in the streets in the 1970s. The scream blended rage with pleasure. Declaring “this society isn’t my society cuz this society hates women and I don’t,” the photocopied manifesto Bikini Kill distributed at shows read, “The revolution is about going to the playground with your best girlfriends. You are hanging upside down on the bars and all the blood is rushing to your head. It’s a euphoric feeling. The boys can see our underwear and we don’t really care.”60
The young punks whose lives were changed by riot grrrl formed consciousness-raising groups; they published zines like Vail’s Jigsaw, to share stories of rape and resistance; they formed bands with furious, funny names like Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and the Frumpies. Their numbers grew. The new guard of Third Wave feminism found leaders in writers like Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and Rebecca Walker and rekindled grassroots activism by learning self-defense skills and protecting abortion clinics from pro-life picketers. Riot grrrl turned its reformist energies on rock itself. Watching Bikini Kill’s charismatic vocalist and songwriter Kathleen Hanna snarl “Here are my ruby red lips, better to suck you dry” at the band’s very first show, Seattle journalist Emily White comprehended riot grrrl’s strategy, which was to shove the energy of rock and roll misogyny back in the music’s face. “Such acts probably confuse and terrify the teenage boys in the audience who’ve been waiting for this moment, but they make more and more sense to a generation of young women who are coming to understand that contradiction might be the most powerful feminist tool yet, creating a kind of paralysis, or night blindness, in the man/boy imagination,” she wrote.61
Feminist rock in the 1990s extended far beyond the borders of riot grrrl. All-female bands began to proliferate: L7 in Los Angeles, Babes in Toyland in Minneapolis, 7 Year Bitch in Seattle. Solo performers like Liz Phair, whose 1993 album Exile in Guyville wryly identified male micro-aggressions in explicit songs like “Fuck and Run,” and PJ Harvey, who flipped the switch on rock clichés with declarations like “you leave me dry,” went where countercultural heroines like Janis Joplin hadn’t dared. In “Me and a Gun,” the singer-songwriter Tori Amos recounted her own rape with utter clarity; she would go on to help establish RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which continues to provide services to victims across America. Out lesbian duo the Indigo Girls and solo balladeer Melissa Etheridge forged a link between the folksy sounds of 1970s women’s music and contemporary rock. Focusing on music industry inequities, the singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan founded the female-dominated Lilith Fair Tour in 1997, which, over three summers, included performers from across genres and generations. Lilith Fair drew so many women that it became 1997’s highest-grossing package tour, grossing $16.5 million for thirty-eight shows. Its popularity even raised Reagan-era televangelists from their slumber—an editor at the newspaper run by the Reverend Jerry Falwell declared it demonic because the name invoked the biblical Adam’s apocryphal first wife. Other men, less scripturally motivated, simply dismissed it as “Lesbopalooza” and “Breast-fest.”62
The shots fired toward Lilith Fair remind us that while feminist rock did signal a new consciousness about gender entering the rock mainstream, plenty of backlash greeted its rise and threatened its stability. The phenomenon produced polarizing figures, none more controversial than Courtney Love, leader of the band Hole. Love was not a movement type. She despised the activists of riot grrrl, ending Hole’s second album Live Through This with a tirade against what she viewed as their lockstep conformity: “We look the same, we talk the same, we even fuck the same.” As Kurt Cobain’s wife, then widow, and one of grunge’s most charismatic performers, Love occupied a privileged position within the scene. Yet she was also highly stigmatized. Accusations that she had victimized Cobain, using him for fame, dogged her, reaching a fever pitch after his death, for which some rumor-mongers went so far as to blame her. Love’s aggressive personality and blatant ambition to become a pop star only fed her image as a dangerous succubus, a particularly unattractive role in a punk-based scene that valued independence above all.
Yet Cobain and Love, who had one child, Frances Bean, in 1993, did form a significant artistic partnership in the brief years when both Nirvana and Hole thrived. Their music speaks powerfully in tandem with the physical and psychic struggles of being in bodies oppressed by impossible standards of masculine strength or feminine beauty, and of trying to connect with another body across the minefield of gendered limitations and stereotypes. The fury and darkness in Nirvana’s songs, especially those Cobain wrote after uniting with Love, emanate from a man who feels trapped inside his body, because of its weaknesses (Cobain had multiple afflictions, including addiction to opiates, chronic stomach pain, and likely bipolar disorder), but also because others expect him to fulfill the masculine ideals of virility and physical strength. Love’s songs are equally visceral, spilling the milk of her new-mother’s breasts and smearing walls with obscenities written in the lipstick of a beauty queen. Had Cobain lived, perhaps the pair would have eventually reached for more coherence in their music and silenced their naysayers. As it was, the music they made while together is a powerful document of the confusion of a moment that, for many, felt both open-ended and oppressive.
“Grunge is the one good thing that AIDS gave us,” the comedian Hal Sparks joked in a radio interview in 2010. “Nothing explains the biggest left turn in the history of music, but AIDS . . . You tell a generation of thirteen-year-olds that sex equals death, you’re gonna have them going—A DENIAL!” Sparks screamed the notorious concluding words of Nirvana’s most significant hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” as evidence of the music’s fatalism. Though crude, his humor hit a nerve. The music’s incessant focus on sexual politics and on the pain, even horror, that could come of erotic desire did often dwell in a place that, for popular music, was uniquely uneasy. “I was up above it . . . now I’m down in it!” wailed Trent Reznor of the industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails in 1989. In 1994, he’d make the dreck specific in what would become his signature song, “Closer.” Over a thorny bed of dissonant electronics, Reznor moaned: “I broke apart my insides . . . I want to fuck you like an animal . . . My whole existence is flawed. You get me closer to God.” Sex still might sanctify individuals, in the view of the grunge generation, but not before it devastated them.63
As the AIDS pandemic entered a different phase, with new prescription drug cocktails finally promising to make the syndrome chronic instead of f
atal for those lucky enough to afford them, the reformist and sometimes nihilistic spirit of the previous decade seemed to devolve into a mood of aggression devoid of pleasure, much less love. The twentieth century was ending in a dark place for popular music. A new generation would need to emerge to turn the tide. And it did, in an emerging environment called cyberspace.
8
HUNGRY CYBORGS
BRITNEY, BEYONCÉ, AND THE VIRTUAL FRONTIER
CYBERSPACE, 1999–2016
As the new millennium began, Americans found ways to reinvent themselves as erotic beings. The fear of AIDS was manageable for many once life-sustaining drugs became available, though the epidemic continued to worsen worldwide. By 2000, American attitudes about physicality itself were shifting as people spent more and more time within the virtual realm made possible by a new phenomenon called the World Wide Web. This electronically enabled computer screen world, where people could interact with both stars and each other across time and space instead of just passively consuming, was a prime environment for imaginative play—a place where regular folk could reimagine themselves as airbrushed superpeople, and where cyborgs, those enhanced creatures of science fiction, were real. And inhabiting it increasingly felt real. Physical reality, inversely, seemed more and more like that screen world—a place where impossible goals could be realized. Women’s bodies acted as maps for these new explorations. But men were not exempt. Viagra, the anti-impotence drug, became the fastest-selling drug in history upon FDA approval in 1998, extending male potency past the age when most accepted it would become a fond memory. High school jocks might be hiding a stash of their own supplements, participating in the “creatine craze” after the well-built baseball player Mark McGwire confessed to taking such performance-enhancing drugs in 1998.