With a new month, we have a new volume of Tunegrape. That makes today’s issue Volume 2, Issue 1. In other words Issue #2.1.
Last month much of the focus was on how we connect to music and how music connects. In other words, relationships to songs and to people based on those songs.
This month is all about the environment music creates and the ways in which music can affect our environment. We’re in for a 4,000-word doozy today, so let’s get into it.
Tunegrape Issue #2.1 Playlist
Spotify embed isn’t working so here’s the playlist and you can also click below to access it on YouTube:
‘Queen of Hearts’ by Flailing Idiot and ‘Wake Up Gene’ by Hijas de la Muerte
Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.
There are few things in this existence I love more than a great punk song. The genre is as near to my heart as food is to my cat’s heart. And trust me, Miso cares about nothing more than eating.
So when someone on Reddit recommended “Queen of Hearts” by Flailing Idiot and “Wake Up Gene” by Hijas de la Muerte, both bands I had never heard before, their suggestions were granted VIP access to the editorial calendar.
I’ve been fascinated by the philosophy and politics of punk since my days going to punk shows on Long Island in the early aughts. I even bought a book on punk philosophy. Punk songs and culture helped shape my views on politics and authority as much as anything.
A defining moment in understanding punk came at the end of “SLC Punk.” After two hours of watching two guys get on their soapboxes and argue about what punk is, occasionally interrupted by the wise owner of a local head shop named Trish, the main character meets his future wife. And she tells him something I’ll never forget.
That’s not rebellion, that’s fashion.
But when is rebellion punk and when is it something else? When online conservatives say it’s punk to take a contrarian stand against progressive norms, are they right?
Looking back, while the guys of “SLC Punk” seem generally good, blue-haired Steve-O did display some toxic relationship dynamics. And there’s no doubt in their world, those characters would have come across some truly shitty dudes. After all, there have been a lot of toxic guys throughout the history of punk music. But where there are toxic men, there are women who fight. And punk has had a lot of fighters. Believe me. There are few things scarier than the tiny woman in the mosh pit, set on proving she’s bigger than her body.
Women in punk, a history
In the early 1970s, Patti Smith was the pioneer who bridged the gap between avant-garde, Beat poetry-tinged New York rock of a previous time and the punk era to come while playing at legendary punk venues like CBGB in New York City. Her poetic punk music shattered conventions as her songwriting alternated between lengthy spoken-word sequences and crunchy guitar riffs.
It was seeing Patti Smith in concert that inspired The Slits to make music and, in the process, challenge the conventions of a genre still taking shape. This 1979 song, in particular, is dear to this blog.
The Slits did more than give us a great Marvin Gaye cover. They also challenged the conventions around what women in music were supposed to look like. Whether they were smearing mud over their bodies, wearing men’s clothing, or walking onto stage with greasy, unkempt mullets, they were innovative in finding ways to challenge the male gaze. And while wearing punky clothes isn’t necessarily punk, they showed us that there are ways in which appearance can be punk.
By the time Kathleen Hanna formed Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington, in 1990, punk had emerged as a force soon to be thrust into the mainstream by Nirvana. But rather than confront the police, the government, corporate structures, or capitalism, Hanna confronted the men who would attend Bikini Kill shows just to shower abuse on the band.
Their 1993 album “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” opened with “White Boy,” a forceful statement against oppressive men in the scene.
Bikini Kill was uncompromising in their approach to rebellion. In “White Boy,” Hanna sings “I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you, your fuckin’ culture alienates me.”
While some men were punching neo-Nazis with one hand and women with the other, Bikini Kill was exposing their patriarchal tendencies with raw and violent music.
The first time I heard Brody Dalle’s voice
The first time I heard Brody Dalle’s voice was on the Distillers’ track “Beat Your Heart Out” while playing “Tony Hawk’s Underground.” And I didn’t realize she was a woman. With so many of them of the era singing in a higher register, I assumed she was one of them. Then I saw the music video for “The Young Crazed Peeling” by The Distillers, and I fell in love.
Punk isn’t clothes. But the clothes or fashion choices can help. A certain top or hairstyle can communicate alienation from a societal norm. And liberty spikes are one damn communicative choice. I loved it. And more than that, I loved the music.
The Distillers are one of, if not the, most underappreciated bands of the early and mid-aughts relative to the quality of their music. And the band largely revolved around Brody Dalle. In my mind, her band deserves at least as much attention as the bands of the two famous men she married.
Dalle met Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong during a music festival in her native Australia in 1995, when she was 16 years old and he was 30. She moved back to Los Angeles with him, and by 1997 they were married, and the following year she formed The Distillers. Their 1999 debut album includes “Oh Serena,” about a girl whose reputation is unfairly disparaged by gossip. It also includes several songs attacking women who thought Dalle was stealing their men.
The band released two more albums between their debut and 2003, a stretch that also comprised the entirety of her and Armstrong’s relationship, one in which she described feeling controlled by him. The second, “Sing Sing Death House,” brought the band some degree of fame. The album brought stronger hooks and better riffs packed with tighter, more mature writing by Dalle.
For example, it included a more overtly political entry: “Seneca Falls,” a song about the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first formal women’s rights convention in the U.S. and a launching point for the country’s women’s suffrage movement.
It also featured a song that seems like a more direct sequel to “Oh Serena” called “Young Girls,” about a childhood friend who was abused by her father. The combination of this song and “Seneca Falls” illustrates a young woman growing more concerned with patriarchal dynamics both at the systemic and family levels.
The following year, Dalle divorced Tim Armstrong, and her band released what was probably their biggest album, as well as the record with my favorite Distillers song: “The Hunger.”
While “Sing Sing Death House” brought tighter writing, “Coral Fang” brought experimentation. Her success and the band’s sound had previously been attributed by some to Tim Armstrong. “The Hunger” demonstrated a much more unique artistic voice. About the struggle of moving on from her relationship with Armstrong, the song shows Dalle vacillating between coming back to him and moving on as the song vacillates between solemn verses and gritty screams and moans over churning guitars.
The “Coral Fang” album cover seems apt because her divorce from Armstrong led to Dalle’s crucifixion in the punk scene (in the album cover, I can’t help but see a Girardian turn of events, but we’ll get to that later). “Drain the Blood,” off the same album, much of which rehashes the relationship, is a much angrier and more definitive song about moving on, with one particularly accusatory line in the chorus: “All these fiends want teenage meat.”
The divorce, spurred by a photo of Dalle kissing Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme during her and Armstrong’s separation, played out in public as well as behind the scenes. Armstrong and friends blamed Dalle for the divorce while they privately made efforts to blacklist her and her bandmates from the music industry. They crucified her to protect Armstrong from excavations of his own role in the relationship, especially its predatory beginnings.
She was later married to Josh Homme, whom she met at Lollapalooza when she was 17 and he was 23. They married in 2005 and remained married for 14 years, having three kids together. It was shortly after their marriage that she formed a new band, Spinnerette.
The band took a turn toward a more garage-rock sound and its debut album received decent-to-great reviews, depending on the publication. It received 3.5/5 stars from AllMusic and 9/10 from Alternative Press. Only Pitchfork was truly down on the record, with a 2.7/10. But the single, “Ghetto Love,” never went anywhere, and Dalle’s music never had the same mainstream reach as it did during her run with The Distillers.
Her 2014 follow-up under her own name, “Diploid Love,” also received decent reviews, like a 4/5-star write-up from The Guardian and another 4/5 rating from DIY Magazine alongside the subtitle “part-time rock star, full-time awesome.” It also continued her musical adventurism outside the borders of punk music.
Songs like “Carry On,” with its electro-punk sound, not only show Dalle’s continued artistic growth, but they also show her learning with lyrics about pushing through difficult times and overcoming them. But again, the album received little attention.
In 2019, Dalle filed for divorce from Homme, citing his alcoholism and drug abuse. This seems to have come after some rocky years for the Queens of the Stone Age singer. In 2017, he was captured on video kicking the camera of Shutterstock photographer Chelsea Lauren into her face. While he initially denied doing so on purpose, he eventually admitted he had kicked her on purpose and apologized.
After the divorce, Homme entered rehab, and then they began hurling accusations of domestic abuse at each other. Dalle eventually won custody of her children, but the victory was brief. In 2023, Homme was granted sole custody of the children and granted a restraining order against Dalle after it was determined that her boyfriend had forged her signature on several legal documents.
Dalle never got a fair chance after entering the industry under the auspices of a predator who eventually cut off her access to resources and then suffering the abuses of a man who has shown a pattern of horrific behavior. Just when she got a chance to taste victory, it was snatched from her on a technicality. After Homme released a statement celebrating, Dalle released her own. She wrote, among other things, the following:
”My story is not unique and it is not rare, it is happening to protective mothers (and some protective fathers) everywhere. If you have never been accused of the quack debunked, looney and extremely dangerous claim of parental alienation and with zero evidence because there was none…..please, hold your tongue, you have no idea.”
The Distillers attempted a reunion and played a few shows around the time of Dalle’s divorce from Homme. But the reunion never took off. And it’s difficult to find much recent news on her. Dalle was alienated from her music, her friends, and her children by a series of patriarchal systems that used her, paraded her body in the press, took her family from her, and left her behind.
“I’m fucking broken,” she wrote in her 2023 statement. “This has shattered me into a thousand pieces. For a long time, I couldn’t get out of bed. I contemplated what the point of going on was. I’ve been filled with so much pain and fear for so long.
“No one can sustain that state. No one should ever. I let it go. I released it. I found the ladder of light. Get the fuck up and fight for your life. For them. Always.”
The battle of this decade’s two best bands
There’s something about Dalle’s story, and the “Coral Fang” cover in particular, that brings to mind the work of René Girard. I’m no expert, and only know his work through discussions of it had by people much smarter than me. He argued that human desire is mimetic. Over time, rivals competing over shared objects of desire begin to mime each other’s behaviors. Communities resolve the tensions that emerge from this mimicry by blaming a scapegoat. A Catholic, he argued that Jesus, hung on the cross, was sacrificed to show us the innocence of the scapegoat. To illustrate that our mimetic cycles of violence inevitably target innocents.
Dalle is whisked away from home as a teenager by a man who begins to resemble the forces of authority he opposes by controlling every aspect of her life. The consequence of this tension is Dalle choosing to leave, and for that she is scapegoated.
But like Dalle, there are plenty of women in punk today who aren’t content to quietly hang from their crosses, dying for the sins of shitty men. One of those women is Missy Dabice of Mannequin Pussy.
Anyone of the mind that conservatism is the new punk will be disabused of the notion by the night’s end if they wander into a Mannequin Pussy show. This is a band that, like Bikini Kill, would rather alienate the right people than allow those people to scapegoat them.
Just like the night I saw them open for another band at Terminal 5, in their NPR Tiny Desk performance, Missy makes an urgent plea to her audience. One that would drive revulsion among reactionary forces. But one that’s punk in its intent.
I discovered Mannequin Pussy shortly after “Romantic” was released in 2016. But it was their next album, released in 2019, that led me to conclude that they’re the best punk band of their generation. Maybe even the best band period, for my money. I remember waiting to transfer to the Muni at the Montgomery BART Station in San Francisco, listening to this album day after day while standing on the platform. I was amazed by the range of sounds explored, strength and emotion inherent in the message, and force with which the band’s collective fist swung upward.
Mannequin Pussy is an excellent example of the fact that the Trump-era punk scene has been dominated by female-fronted or nonbinary-led bands. And it’s not just the bands playing Tiny Desk. Songs like “Punch a Nazi” by The Muslims meet the moment as well.
The band Mannequin Pussy opened for that night at Terminal 5 is the other one that I’d say might be able to lay claim to the title “Best Punk Band of Their Generation.” Amy Taylor and her band emerged from Australia with boundless energy and a message that grows more political with each album release.
Although I haven’t seen Taylor mention Dalle’s name, they’re often compared as two women fronting punk bands that emerged from Australia’s underground scene.
One of the most effective songs in the band’s growing oeuvre of political polemics is “Knifey.” It describes an all-too-common fear among women—the fear of walking alone at night. Taylor sings, “Out comes the night, out comes my knifey.”
Taylor, of course, voices a real fear: men making something as simple as walking at night dangerous. But what about when the state itself is the danger? Even then, we have examples of women rushing into the breach, risking their safety for the benefit of an entire oppressed society.
Punk’s power is bigger than the Anglosphere
In 2012, the world heard the name Pussy Riot. A group of women dressed in colorful dresses, tights, and ski masks entered a Russian Orthodox Church and filmed a performance in protest of the church’s alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime. That night, the performance was posted as a music video for the song “Punk Prayer.”
Within a couple of weeks, two of the band members were arrested and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. A third was arrested not long after. While none of the women are still in prison, several are in exile—one, facing house arrest, escaped Russia in 2022 disguised as a food delivery driver.
They knew what they were risking when they entered the church, when they sang lyrics like “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin,” and “Don’t upset his saintship, ladies, stick to making love and babies.”
These women knew that punk is more than noise. It’s protest with the power to foster fear in the patriarchal system.
Few performances I’ve seen embody the physical expressions of punk and protest more than Otoboke Beaver. Diving into the crowd to crowd-surf while banging your hand away at your guitar, freeing it to screech whatever distorted notes your pick happens to find? Punk. Fucking. Rock.
It’s not just punk because it looks cool, though. It’s punk because with every performance, Otoboke Beaver is raising its collective middle finger to traditional Japanese gender roles.
But the first time I saw Otoboke Beaver, I took away more from the concert than unceasing admiration for its performance—I also discovered accordion punk.
The next decade of punk music
A band of Spanish-speaking immigrants based in Queens, Ratas en Zelos is fighting the patriarchal white powers that be with the pounding wheeze of an accordion. After seeing them open for Otoboke Beaver, I knew right away I needed to see them again. Luckily, they scheduled another show in New York City with Otoboke Beaver shortly after.
Their female-forward, immigrant-centered punk rock is timely and unique. Plus, who can resist their rat-ear headbands?
I’ve seen Amyl and the Sniffers twice. My long history of discovering bands while seeing them open for other bands is well established across this and other entries. And another is Upchuck, one of the openers for Amyl and the Sniffers when they played Brooklyn Steel in 2022. At the time, they were touring for their album “Sense Yourself.”
The album cover itself is an exercise in the appearance, the projection, of punk. KT Thompson’s bald head and face covered in smeared blood as she faces upward, singing into a microphone, hand clasped around its grill.
The bouncy “Facecard” illustrates Upchuck’s seamless blend of fun grooves and aggressive confrontations with authority. The lyrics are a rejection of objectification and exploitation based on looks and identity.
For Upchuck, political confrontation has always been part of the package. Being a woman is inherently political. Being a Black woman fronting a punk band even more so. And “Forgotten Token” from their latest album, “I’m Nice Now,” speaks to the way society devalues and tosses aside Black lives. KT Thompson sings, “I just feel ’cuz I’m Black it gets stacked in a lost closet forgotten token.”
You can see it in the way women like Sonya Massey have been murdered by police. Black women scapegoated and sacrificed to resolve tensions between the white desire for control and the white desire for freedom. Or the white desire for freedom and the white desire for violence.
But the next ten years might belong to a band that right now goes harder than any other I can think of: Die Spitz.
With guitar riffs that borrow from thrash and hardcore, sometimes churning beneath simmering solos and other times below assertive shouts, Die Spitz brings muscle to every punch.
The music, of course, is more important than the clothing. But these women’s outfits communicate something. Their looks don’t shout punk, but that’s exactly why their looks communicate something. They wear makeup, flowery dresses, and embroidered cowboy boots as they swing their guitars, curse at shitty men, and flail their bodies around the performance space like ragdolls. They know what punk is, and they can look as feminine as they want as they fight the power. Maybe a leaping scissor kick while punching power chords and wearing a sundress communicates something in the same way liberty spikes do.
But you don’t come by rebellion through your clothing purchases. It manifests in your mind. Your style is just a potential means to project it. And who you give your money to when developing that style matters. Buying punky clothes from Amazon or complaining about trans people or women who work serves the same thing: the billionaire class. Divide and conquer consumer. And being a billionaire isn’t punk. After all, your mind can’t produce rebellion if you’ve trained it to avoid introspection.
The reactionary who thinks they’ve guided the billionaire’s hand toward someone else’s throat is distracted by women just living their lives as the billionaire grips the reactionary’s throat instead.
It’s billionaires who defund affordable women’s healthcare, it’s billionaires selling glasses that secretly record women, it’s billionaires creating addictive algorithms that affect teen girls’ mental health, and it’s billionaires who perpetrated the Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking ring.
But it’s also the cool 30-year-old in a famous band who brought a 16-year-old girl 8,000 miles from her home to marry her. It’s that nice-seeming guy who pushed drinks onto you until you relented, brought you back to his apartment down the block, and used you for sex.
From billionaires on down to the guy at the bar, these forces seek control. And control, more often than not, is a downward punch. And when desire for control creates tensions, women are often made the scapegoats.
Men, desiring control but divided along political, class, or religious lines, resolve those tensions and unify around the subjugation of women.
There are plenty of guys who will dress up in costumes and perform as punks while abusing women (see Rolling Stone magazine's “The Punk Rock Predator”). But recently, and as always, it’s the women in the scene who embody punk the most. They refuse to accept being victimized by male violence, to be controlled or scapegoated. And you know by the direction of their fists.
When you consider who to rebel against, you have options: You can punch down, you can complain, you can change your mind and do nothing, or you can punch up.
Only one of these options is punk. And I know some ladies with strong uppercuts.
Which female fronted bands do you see punching up? Let us know below!
See you next week with another human-suggested song.