Today’s the fifth week in our on-going coverage of the 2010 Vans Warped Tour that kicked off on June 25th in Carson, California and runs all the way through to the middle of August – hitting 43 cities in a total of 51 days.
Each week, on top of posting numerous interviews from the first two days of the tour, we’ve looked at the different elements of the tour and today’s topic is the ever growing number of female musicians and performers on the Vans Warped Tour. We talked to the singers themselves to see exactly why they think it is that more and more girls are forming punk bands and bring their band on the road.
I’d also like to thank the talented Cary Liao from SonicShooter.com for snapping the live pictures for this feature.
The Female Punk Band – No Longer An Oddity
By Bobby Gorman
Sadly, punk rock and alternative music has always been a very male dominated industry. While yes, it’s true that if you look back through the annals of punk rock history there have been quite a few female fronted bands that have left a never ending legacy in the music world. I’m talking about bands like Blondie, X, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Hole, The Runaways, Bikini Kill and so on; but to paraphrase what Al Fair wrote in the booklet of Nakatomi Plaza’s swan song album Ghosts, “if you can name all the female fronted punk bands, then there aren’t enough female fronted punk bands.”
We live in an era where girls in the music industry are expected to look, dress and act a certain way in order to succeed – and when they do, they’ll be deemed a “bad role model.” Take Taylor Momsem, the seventeen year old Gossip Girl actress that’s fronting The Pretty Reckless all summer on The Warped Tour. Her highly-sexualized outfits and stripper shoes have been reported about after every show on the tour; and the fact that she lit up a cigarette during the first day of the tour had anti-smoking initiatives calling foul. “People tend to have preconceived notions about her,” said Mark Damon, bassist for The Pretty Reckless, “about what they think the music’s going to be like, what the band will be like and as soon as we get on stage and play – as soon as they hear the music – nine times out of ten they go ‘wow, that’s not what I was expecting. This is really good.’ So I think we just need to let the music speak for itself.”
She’s a modern day Cherie Curie; the mainstream wasn’t ready for Curie in the seventies and they aren’t ready for Momsem now.
But what happened between The Pretty Reckless and Bikini Kill? There’s almost a two decade gap in there and it’s harder to name female fronted bands that made a lasting impact in-between the two. Yes, there’s a few that jump up. No Doubt, Dance Hall Crashers, Tsunami Bomb, Paramore and even Evanescence could be dropped into the historical timeline of the past few decades; but it was really a period of a different type of music. “There was like a ten year era of the producer,” recalled Juliet Simms of Automatic Loveletter. “The producer making the *Nysnc, Britney Spears, Christina Aguliera, who are talented, but it’s now the era of the artist again.”
The era of the artist, that’s a good way to put it. More and more women are starting to jump into the spotlight again; and as Simms said, it’s about time. “I think that musical evolution is coming around again where women are having something to say and are the leaders of a band and I think that it’s about fucking time that we have another Alanis Morissette or Jewel or whatever.”
Sadly, before a lot of women come out and say what they have to say – they need to be shown that it’s attainable. That being a woman on tour and making music is viable and no longer such an oddity. The Warped Tour is proof of that as there are more female acts on it than any in recent memory. Hey Monday, We Are The In Crowd, Poema, The Summer Set, Gardening Not Architecture, are on the whole tour while other acts like Big D & The Kids Table or The Mighty Regis are playing an odd show here and there and it’s definitely seen as appositive aspect. “I think it’s really cool,” said Alexia Rodriguez of Eyes Set To Kill, “because there’s a lot of girls that go to Warped tour so I think it’s cool for them to see someone like them to be up on stage.”
More and more girls are seeing that it’s possible to do it and in the same way that Bad Religion started playing punk because they realized they could just as easily slap three chords together as the others, all these girls are starting bands because they see they can do it just as well.
“Of course you have Hayley [Williams of Paramore]. She was like the only one around at the time and like damn, she’s killing it” explained Sierra Kusterbeck of VersaEmerge. “We can do that too. I mean, that’s how I felt and that’s why when I got in and it started happening, all these girls are like ‘we’re going to go for it too.’ Even locally, I see so many bands with chick singers now because it’s more accepting.”
“Washboard” Breezy Peyton of Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, the only washboard player you’ll see on this year’s Warped Tour, echoed that thought “it’s more acceptable to be a girl in punk rock. I think for a long time, it was seen as too masculine to a woman and it was kind of foul. I think now people are more accepting to it and just think that you’re a bad ass if you’re into it.”
So all you girls out there go and watch your favourite bands playing at this year’s Warped Tour and see that it is possible. Go home and start writing music, start your own bands and say what you have to say. Do what you want to do and do it well; because when it truly comes down to it, bands won’t always be separated by male or female vocalists. “They’re either good or they’re bad,” says Peyton, “it doesn’t matter what’s in their pants.”
