This post was mostly inspired by the complaint of my fellow BadRep member Sarah J that, when the subject of Elastica comes up, the band are frequently dismissed outright as flagrant copyists led by Britpop’s version of Lady Macbeth. In fairness, I spent most of the 90s thinking the same thing. God, I used to hate Elastica. Wilfully amateur slack-jawed rip-off merchants whose over-privileged frontwoman seemed to exist only as a drawly amalgam of her indie boyfriends (hair by Brett, boots by Damon), whose competency in snagging the catchiest bits of post-punk couldn’t disguise how irritatingly thick and bland they were in all other respects. Right? Right. Now that I’m no longer a chippy thirteen-year-old convinced that people with trust-funds can’t make good music, I’ve been reassessing Elastica.

Elastica are a band it’s probably easier to appreciate in retrospect and in isolation from their era, especially if you weren’t actually around for it. They weren’t a great fit with Britpop, their music drawing more on the punk revivalism of New Wave of New Wave, one of several burgeoning movements which Britpop left steamrollered in its wake. This 70s-rooted recycling was also ahead of its time, being more of a piece with the early-2000s bands also inspired by post-punk: like Karen O, or Jack White, Justine Frischmann now just looks like a cool-as-fuck frontperson. I mean, she was posh, of course. If she called her dad, not only could he stop it all but in 1989 he could also buy her a Kensington townhouse. Not that she ever tried to hide this, or to claim any kind of gritty authenticity. (Given that the British music press, and music in general, was and remains riddled with posh girls and boys, I do wonder how much of the media focus on this aspect was some kind of overdefensive deflection on their part, back in the insulting and appropriative days of poor-is-cool.)

Elastica’s potted biography reads like a Britpop potboiler – or, in accounts like John Harris’, an ‘indie soap opera’. Frischmann founded Suede with her fellow UCL student Brett Anderson in 1989, hawking the embryonic group around Camden as their de facto manager before leaving both Suede and Anderson for her iconic power-coupling with chancer extraordinaire, Blur’s Damon Albarn. In 1992 she formed her own group with former Suede drummer Justin Welch, adding enigmatic Brightonian bassist Annie Holland (who ended up with her own theme song) and south Welsh urchin Donna Matthews as Frischmann’s musical foil on guitar. In 1993 they released Stutter, a crushingly cool eyeroll of a single that, having something to do with male sexual dysfunction and something to do with female sexual frustration, was one of the most playfully frank songs I’d heard since Orgasm Addict. The next year, as Britpop was decisively yanked into the mainstream, Frischmann’s relationship with Blur’s lead singer gained her lasting notoriety in the music press and beyond as a kind of Britpop Dr Girlfriend.

I’ll come to the fuss made over Justine’s sex life later. The other Thing That Everyone Knows About Elastica is that they stole all their best riffs. Well, yes, Elastica settled out of court with both Wire (Line Up, a song I’m still happy to hate, rips off the chorus of Wire’s I Am the Fly; the synth in Connection rips off the guitar in Three Girl Rhumba) and the Stranglers (Waking Up rips off No More Heroes pretty much wholesale) – but let’s think about this. Britpop itself was incredibly derivative, backwards-looking, insular and self-referential, as were its exponents. The entire exercise was a cultural and aesthetic rip-off of the late 1960s, and more particularly of the Beatles-Kinks-Jam tradition of white-boy guitar rock. Musical, lyrical and sartorial rip-offs (or ‘tributes’, or ‘homages’, or ‘cheeky nods to’) abounded, as indeed they do in any period and genre. In music as in any art form, it’s what one does with it that counts. I still rate Cigarettes and Alcohol, for instance, despite its massive musical debt to T-Rex’s Get It On, and despite Oasis’ massive debt in general to, oh, let’s start with the Beatles, Status Quo, Slade and the Glitter Band.

If it were simply a case of, to misquote an unknown wit, ‘Your album is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’, that would be one thing. But there is a reason why 1995’s Elastica became the fastest-selling debut in UK history at the time. Even in the throes of my irritation with Frischmann herself, I found the music slickly derivative, sure, but also annoyingly listenable. The songs on the debut – which it took me about three years to grudgingly buy and listen to in full – are sharp, snarky and unadorned gems strung together by that snide, campy Sprechgesang that was probably Justine’s best musical asset. The songs range from little flash-bangs of sex-positive brilliance (Stutter, All-Nighter, Blue, Vaseline), to vaguely sinister languor (S.O.F.T, 2:1, Waking Up), to the archly anthemic (Car Song, Line Up, Connection). The album’s stripped-down, angular art-punk, its odd, listless mix of sleaze and melancholy, and the band’s Last Gang In Town fronting in photographs and on record sleeves, anticipated the revival (or the ripping-off, perhaps?) of such stylings almost a decade later by the Strokes/Libertines axis of hipster. And when thinking back to the bands who came to be regarded as luminaries towards the tail-end of Britpop – The Bluetones, Shed 7, Northern Uproar, and no doubt I’ve repressed many more – you can only wish they’d ripped off something half as interesting themselves.

At a point in the 90s where the dominant female aesthetic revolved around ladette football shirts or twee tea-dresses, Elastica adopted an atypical New Wave uniform: black leather, drainpipe jeans, hair boyishly cropped or bobbed. For Frischmann at least, her androgynous aesthetic was a deliberate choice linked to self-consciousness, a protective effacing or subsuming of femininity which will make sense to anyone who’s tried to negotiate the disputed territory of being socially independent while aware of one’s relative vulnerability. In an interview with Simon Reynolds in 1995, Justine referred to her choice of look as ‘Nineties urban camouflage’, and, interestingly, associated the process of growing up with learning to step away from a conventionally feminine presentation rather than accepting it:

[JF]…When you’re in your twenties you feel more confident about what you are, you don’t feel like you necessarily have to dress up for boys. When I was a teenager I had really long hair and felt like I had to wear make-up. But now I feel a lot more comfortable with short hair. It’s something I discovered with leaving home and going to college. In a way, it’s Nineties urban camoflage. It came about when I was coming back from college really late, getting on the last tube. If you’re wearing long hair and make-up, you’re gonna feel a lot more vulnerable than if you’ve got short hair and big boots…

[SR] So there’s a sense that you sartorially avoid the things that signify vulnerability or ‘availability’?

[JF] It’s just expecting to be treated as one of the lads. You don’t want to deliberately remove yourself from being able to be a good bloke.

– Source.

NB I like Reynolds’ idea, in this interview, of women artists in the 90s ‘taking on played-out male traditions, tweaking and reinventing them’, but I’m not altogether sure how helpful it is to dub it ‘stylistic transvestism’ as he does, rather than simply problematising ‘feminine’ identity itself. (He’s on steadier ground when he mentions Buzzcocks, who Elastica remind me of especially in songs like Stutter and All-Nighter, with Justine’s nonchalantly transgressive blurring of gender norms suggesting a southern female mirror-image of Pete Shelley, but maybe that’s just me.)

On ‘stylistic transvestism’, she seemed similarly doubtful:

[SR] Drag kings rule: Polly Jean Harvey with her hoary blues-man posturings; Courtney Love as Henry Rollins if he’d only remove his ‘Iron Man’ emotional armature and let his ‘feminine side’ splurge’n’splatter; Liz Phair and her feminised/feminist take on the geeky garage punk of Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. And there’s Justine Frischmann, who’s somehow miraculously found imaginative space for herself in the Stranglers’ gruff, fake-prole belligerence and ‘who wants the world?’ cynicism. That said, Justine’s pretty phazed when I ask if she ever feels like she’s in drag onstage.

[JF] Well, I sometimes feel like Meatloaf, when I’ve got hair all over my face and I’m really sweaty. Which is a bit depressing. But no, I don’t ever feel like a woman in drag, to be honest.

[SR] So there’s no sense in which you play-act a tough-guy?

[JF] I think lots of women do that these days. And there’s always been girly girls and non-girly girls. There’s girls who have really high voices and like wearing dresses, and others who don’t. I don’t think I’m exceptional, it’s just that most of my mates haven’t been very girly. There’s lots of young women in London who look and dress like I do.

– Source.

Even when I was forcing myself to dislike her on grounds of class chippiness, one of the things I couldn’t help liking about Justine was the casual confidence, the superiority even, in so much of her lyrics and delivery, and their emphasis on female sexual agency. All-Nighter is, like Stutter, a self-assured and playful song about sexual frustration, and there’s an archly objective approach to sex in Car Song and Vaseline and many more. There’s ‘just’ sex in these songs – little sentiment and less romance – but equally there’s little angst, no judgement and no self-reproach. Never Here is a heartfelt, simple and incisive anatomy of a defunct relationship, just as well-crafted and moving as, say, Blur’s Tender, but terse and economic where the latter is overblown. Frischmann’s protagonists are thinly drawn but invariably assertive and self-possessed, frustrated or impatient with their hapless, thoughtless or less self-assured partners, sure of what they want and feeling no guilt about taking it. They never make a point of being Bad Girls, they just happen to be girls.

Like her fellow Stranglers aficionado Gaye Advert twenty years previously, Frischmann’s drop-dead charisma got in the way of her stated intention to be ‘one of the lads’. Her sexually confident persona and Elastica’s pleasure-centred, borderline-selfish lyrics, despite their matter-of-fact delivery, tended to be treated as ‘naughtily’ deviant departures from feminine convention rather than just another way in which women might happen to view themselves and their sex lives. That the music press and wider media insistently framed Justine in relation to the men she chose to sleep with was part of a wider sexualisation where, in the post-Britpop 90s, female sexual agency had increasingly to be presented within a Lad frame of reference. I remember, specifically, there being a weird concentration by the music press on whether she would or wouldn’t pose for Playboy. It’s tempting to conclude that Frischmann’s ostensibly aloof and independent approach, her chilled assertiveness, her androgyny, and perhaps her background, attracted a reductive emphasis on her sexuality and sex life as a way of rendering her comprehensible, less of a threat and more of a ‘regular’ girl.

Women weren’t absent from 90s indie, but as I’ve written elsewhere, there is a sense in which they were squeezed to the margins by the elevation of ‘lad bands’, the testosterone-heavy dominance (with some honourable and dishonourable exceptions) of the music press and mens’ magazines, and the focus on male key players and kingmakers, from Anderson, Albarn and the Gallaghers to Alan McGee. The received wisdom of Britpop as a male concern and male preserve obscures how highly-rated Elastica were at the time – notably, they came closer than either Oasis or Blur to cracking the lucrative US market – and it also overlooks the contribution made by Frischmann to Britpop’s originating impulse. Love or hate it, Frischmann’s influence on and creative partnerships with (or, if we’re going with the Lady Macbeth angle, her bewitching and manipulation of) Britpop’s main men was instrumental to the movement but goes more or less unsung. Instead she now gets frequently relegated to a minor player, an accessory or at best a ‘muse’ to the more famous and credible men in her life, and her band are remembered as, in Sarah J’s words, a ‘Blurgirlfriend novelty act’. Her break-up with Albarn in 1997 was partly the result of a reluctance to accept what she perceived as the restrictions of domesticity and motherhood:

“Damon was saying to me, ‘You’ve given me a run for my money, you’ve proved that you’re just as good as I am, you’ve had a hit in America – now settle down and let’s have kids.’ He wanted me to stop being in a group, stop touring and have children. I wasn’t very happy, and he kept saying, ‘The reason you’re unhappy is because you really want children but you don’t know it.’ It did throw me: I thought about it quite seriously.” – Source.

After 1996 Elastica were gradually subsumed by smack, angst and inter-band acrimony, with an endless parade of members leaving, being replaced and returning. Their second album, 2000’s The Menace, was more firmly anchored in post-punk experimentalism, but lacklustre, anticlimactic and accordingly less than commercial – although I had by this point got over myself enough to admit that I liked it, an epiphany which I’m sure was a source of extraordinary comfort for the band, who announced their amicable break-up the following year. Since then, Frischmann has been a bit of a Renaissance woman: collaborating with M.I.A. on songs including 2003’s Galang; moving to Colorado to study visual arts and psychology; dipping into abstract painting; and, as shown here, fronting a BBC series on modern architecture.

Justine Frischmann’s rise against a Britpop backdrop, and her subsequent infamy or dismissal, raises several issues relevant to feminism: the denial or marginalizing of women’s contributions to artistic and creative moments; the relegation of women to the accessory of whichever man they happen to have slept with; the idea that women in bands are automatically amateur or derivative, or just not as good at being amateur and derivative as the boys are. However short-lived Elastica’s fame and drawn-out their dissipated demise, their career remains more edifying than watching the Oasis juggernaut run slowly and embarrassingly out of steam, or indeed whatever Alex James is currently up to.

They decline to reveal the smallest details, aiming to maintain total secrecy. They will say only that most of the band members met at the small protests held by Russia’s once-feeble opposition, from monthly illegal demonstrations calling for the right to assembly to banned gay pride marches. Their average age is 25. They are hardcore feminists. Most studied the humanities in university. They won’t detail their day jobs.
– Guardian, 2nd February 2012

Pussy Riot, like the Sex Pistols, have a name designed to make headlines, and a bit more political substance to back up the sensationalism. Formed in Moscow last September, this offshoot of Russia’s complex and fractured political scene has come to prominence in the UK media in the context of protests against political corruption which have been gaining in volume and intensity after parliamentary elections last December. In mid-January, one of the collective’s impromptu guerrilla gigs, taking place on Red Square opposite the Kremlin, ended with its members detained by police.

Laura Barton in the Guardian, picking up on the band’s citing of Bikini Kill as an inspiration, offers a slightly short-sighted view of 90s Riot Grrrl as an antecedent for the expression of ‘an alternative female voice’. While the group clearly do reference Riot Grrrl’s ‘tone of wild irreverence’, it also makes sense to consider Pussy Riot in the context of the former Soviet Union’s long and fascinating history of political protest coalescing around avant garde art and music, especially punk. Adam Curtis’ recent blog is an interesting attempt to make sense of this sort of determinedly oppositional culture which has been notable by its relative absence from the UK’s current wave of socio-political protest. Similarly, the clash of sartorial signifiers which Pussy Riot provide by combining miniskirts and stockings with ski-masks and balaclavas could be a legacy of Riot Grrl too, but as a practical measure it has as much in common with other Anonymous-style contemporary protest movements, not to mention the general history of masking and disguise in protest.

Russia does have a long tradition of women in protest, notably the 1917 revolution in which women played a prominent part, encouraged by the intersection of socialism with many of the goals of women’s liberation. Pussy Riot cite this ‘deep tradition… of gender and revolution – we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.’ They add that ‘the revolution should be done by women… For now, they don’t beat or jail us as much’. This assertion ties in with historical debates on the ability of women to take part in protest or civil disobedience with a greater degree of impunity than men – an ideal which isn’t always borne out by the treatment of female protesters.

Contemporary Russian politics – like any – are not a straightforward matter, and the extent of Pussy Riot’s relevance and representativeness remains to be seen. But in a context where growing and disparate opposition groups are encountering heavy and often violent repression across the world, the ways in which women participate in protest, and the styles of self-expression they employ, are always worth noting.

Hi, I’m Jo. I’ve been calling myself a feminist for as long as I can remember. And I listen to black metal. As in, while I appreciate other forms of music, the overwhelming majority of my time, attention and love is lavished on black metal. I can’t help it – I just love black metal, and the filthier it is, the better.

Black metal is purposefully alienating. Its logos are unreadable; its practitioners often wear corpse paint; its lyrics revel in references to hatred, violence, nihilism, death, Satan. The music itself is typified by screeched vocals, blastbeats, fuzzy guitars; songs stop suddenly.

The genre is also overwhelmingly white and male. Of the 46 black metal bands on my iPod, only one of the bands has a female member (LSK, bassist/backing vocalist for Secrets of the Moon from Germany), and as far as I know, none of the members of any of the bands identify as a race other than white.

As I said up top, I’ve identified with feminist ideas from an early age. Unequal representation of women in places like government, the boards of businesses, the upper echelons of journalism and the law and churches and so on make me angry and upset. So how can I justify investing so much in a type of music produced, in the main, by men? A type of music which is often linked to vile white nationalist ideologies, such that NSBM is a thriving sub-genre?

Er. It’s tricky.

Black Metal and Me

I operate from a position of relative privilege, being white, cis, currently able-bodied, in a relationship with a white cis man, UK-born, and so on. My various forms of privilege allow me to ignore some of the more problematic areas of black metal, and have surely insulated me from encountering prejudice at black metal gigs. For the record – as a cis woman attending many dozens of metal gigs in London, I have very rarely encountered sexist treatment from fellow gig-goers. From anecdotal experience, black metal bands also attract more women to their live performances than, say, death metal bands. Which is not to say that black metal audiences are gender-balanced, because they’re really, really not, but they’re relatively better than those observed at concerts of bands from other metal subgenres.

I sometimes wish I did like more ‘acceptably feminist’ types of music – or, at the very least, types of music where women performers aren’t a vanishingly small minority. The problem is, if it ain’t black metal, I’m (probably) not interested. The intensity of black metal gives me an emotional ‘hit’ I don’t get from many other types of music (live classical music can produce the same effect – but not as reliably as black metal, whether live or recorded). I fully acknowledge that black metal isn’t for everyone, and I fully understand why most people do not enjoy it; I don’t want to come across as ‘judging’ people for musical taste, which, OK, I did when I was 13, but that was a long time ago.

Which leads on to another of the problems with black metal, from a feminist/progressive point of view. It is, as I said above, unapologetically impenetrable to outsiders; more than that, the scene contains a strong current of elitism.

Kvlter Than Thou

One of the stereotypes of black metal fans is of the elitist “kvlter than thou” forum-poster who spends obscene amounts on deleted demos by long-defunct bands, limited to three tape copies. No, three reel-to-reel recordings, two of which were burned as part of an occult ceremony by the band before they went and attempted to torch a church. Black metal enthusiasts often proclaim themselves proud Nietzscheans, which, in their (often rather simplistic) worldview, boils down to I proclaim myself to be better than everyone else. As a feminist, I have a problem with any philosophy which deems some to be superior to others. Black metal is imbued with it. The elitist fans take their cues from the bands themselves, from Varg Vikernes onwards. Black metal is fiercely individualistic; feminism is rooted in solidarity with others, a concept that is incompatible with the proclamations of the most influential black metal bands.

Incidentally, the concept of “black metal as expression of individualism” has led some in the scene, notably He Who Crushes Teeth of the band Bone Awl, to describe NSBM as oxymoronic (warning: long article – ctrl+f “nsbm” for the relevant section); black metal based on a philosophy which is inherently ‘optimistic’ is paradoxical, he says, and Nazism counts as ‘optimistic’ because it aspires to be all about building a ‘better’ future – ‘better’ if you deny the humanity of groups you don’t like, of course. Black metal should be nihilistic, in his view, and nihilism as a philosophy is as antithetical to Nazism as it is to socialism. But I digress.

As part of my sometimes uneasy ongoing attempts to reconcile my feminist/lefty political beliefs with my love of black metal, I do not listen to any bands which are classified as NSBM on Metal Archives. It’s nothing more than a gesture, really, but it’s an important one to me. I’m cutting myself off from many bands whose music I am sure I would love; but I just can’t bring myself to give them any playlist space. For many metalheads, my shunning of black metal is treated as illogical (I’ll listen to songs about the destruction of all life or the murder of Christians but I won’t listen to songs glorifying the ‘Aryan’ race) and ‘wimpish’. I think, for, me, the difference is that persecution of Christians is not something that happens in the West, despite what the Daily Hate-Mail would have you think, whereas we still live with the repercussions of what happened when a lot of Europeans got rather too worked up about racial ‘purity’. And a song attacking Christianity written by people from Europe or the US is a very different proposition to the same group of people attacking Muslims, who are an often-vilified minority in Europe. (Bands from Islamic countries attacking the theocracies under which they live, such as Janaza – that’s very different, and something I can get behind, mostly.)

Theatricality and corpse paint

Another reason I feel able mostly to disregard the lyrical content of non-NSBM bands is the theatricality of black metal. There is a definite tension at the heart of how many black metal bands present themselves. The spikes, the shining black leather, the corpse paint, the OTT references to Satan – they can’t be serious, can they? Well, the best reply to this I can formulate is yes… and no. It’s pretty impossible to parody black metal bands, because however hard you try to come up with something ridiculous, an actual band somewhere will have beaten you to it. (Watain store their stage outfits with dead animals so that they pick up “the stench of death”, FFS.) Fans – the non-über-kvlt ones, anyway – tend to treat bands with a mixture of affectionate humour and deadly seriousness. We go and watch monochromatically-painted and -clothed bands who follow the style rule that there is not a single type of apparel that can’t be improved by the addition of spikes, lots of spikes, singing songs about being the devil’s executioners or whatever; it’s all a bit silly. Yet at the same time, it’s taken quite seriously. Singers exhort audiences to hail Satan. And they/we do. Not because we’re all practising Satanists – most metal fans I’ve met tend to be of the cheerful atheist variety – but because it’s part of the act.

Black metal’s theatricality can be seen on one hand as being about escapism. Of course I don’t believe in demons, I’m far from being a nihilist, and I can’t even watch horror films because the sight of blood makes me feel all wibbly, but I’ll happily listen to bands singing about all these things because, on one level, it’s so outrageous, I can’t possibly be expected to take it seriously. Yet I do, truly, deeply love the music, and spend large amounts of energy seeking out new bands, going to gigs, talking about metal to friends with similar tastes, and generally being a huge fan. So I take it seriously – and not seriously. This allows me to worry less about the violence inherent in the genre’s lyrics and its underlying philosophy; it’s all part of a big joke, and everything is on a continuum of unseriousness, so I can ignore the less-than-savoury aspects of black metal fairly easily. (Again, I am sure that my relative privilege plays a large part in this luxury to ignore what I don’t like about the genre.) And hey, that church-burning and murder unpleasantness was years and years ago – we’re past all that, aren’t we? Unlike the stark black and white of corpse paint, I’m in something of a grey area; I can blur boundaries enough to quieten my social justice instincts. Is this an ethical position to hold? I’m not really sure.

“Not for girls”

The overall metal scene is seen by outsiders as bloke-dominated; there’s a lot of truth in that, but I am constantly annoyed by mainstream publications’ disappearing of women in metal, be they performers or fans. Just because we’re a minority doesn’t mean you can ignore us, dear music journalists taking sideswipes at “that boy from school who had a bumfluff moustache, constant body odour and an unwashed Megadeth T-shirt that he always wore on non-uniform days”. And please, as the mighty Grim Kim says, don’t dismiss us by trying to fob us off with “girlfriend metal”.

Having said that, though, I have a horrible snobbish tendency when it comes to outward signifiers of musical taste – which, in the metal scene, means t-shirts and patches. Moreover, it’s a pretty gendered snobbishness, which makes me feel even guiltier. Whenever I see a woman wearing a Nightwish t-shirt, I feel absurdly, un-feminist-ly disappointed; we female fans of metal are already characterised as liking ‘girly shit’ like Nightwish (symphonic, melodic, female-fronted, no Cookie Monster vocals), so why, I find myself thinking, do you have to go reinforcing stereotypes? This is a really bad habit of mine and one I am trying to break. It spills over into my own wardrobe choices: I’ll borrow my boyfriend’s Absu t-shirt to wear to a metal gathering, but not his Sólstafir one, despite the fact that I love the band – because Sólstafir is on our playlist of “stuff that’s safe to play for non-metalheads”, whereas Absu certainly is not. I don’t want to be thought of as one of “those” female fans of metal, you know, the ones who like metal with actual clean vocals and stuff. Ugh. As a relatively unstereotypical fan of black metal, it’s all too easy to think of myself as a special snowflake as a consequence – a tendency I have to be on my guard against.

If I were in a relationship with black metal, our Facebook status would definitely be ‘it’s complicated’. With depressing frequency, something happens to make me roll my eyes in feminist outrage (the “girly” t-shirt for the band Shining [Swe] which says “I have a boyfriend at home but I think of Niklas Kvarforth when he fucks me”, a blog post like this…), but I don’t want to give up on the scene. In fact, the recent internet flap over Sady Doyle’s article on Game of Thrones (spoiler alert!) reminded me why I want to stick with black metal. I’m a huge fan of GoT, and yet I agree with most of Sady’s points about its problematic nature. As with GoT, I don’t deny that there are many problematic aspects within the black metal scene. But I am and will remain a fan nonetheless, because a) if I leave, I’m not working within the scene to make a difference, and b) I love it and am not prepared to give it up.

*

• Jo lives in London, and goes to far too many metal gigs. She got into metal at a relatively late age, thanks to last.fm. She’s toying with the idea of writing the dissertation for her MA on black metal, if the university will let her. Say hi to her on Twitter, or at the Underworld next time Taake comes to London (19th October, as it happens).