Review by New York Times Review
LAST FEBRUARY, Sleater-Kinney took the stage at Terminal 5 in New York City for the first time in nearly 10 years. Carrie Brownstein, stage right as always, was all our rock-star dreams come true, her arms windmilling, her legs high-kicking, brandishing her guitar above her head, her voice a rough demand. It blended with and crashed against the preternatural wail of her bandmate, the guitarist Corin Tucker, backed with the insistent drums of Janet Weiss; three women making a noise we felt all through our bodies. Playing with them again, Brownstein writes in "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," was like being home. That show didn't feel like a reunion, like so many halfhearted affairs when a once-great band reconstitutes as a zombie version of its best self. But it wasn't exactly as if they'd never left, either. Brownstein's new memoir takes its title from a Sleater-Kinney lyric and tells the story of the band, which she begins at its end. In their years together, Sleater-Kinney put out seven records that transcended their origins in the Pacific Northwest's mid-90s riot grrrl scene, transcended punk rock and built on one another until they reached the apocalyptic pitch of "The Woods" (2005), an album that dared the biggest of stadium rock bands to match them. And then they called it quits. Brownstein tells, for the first time, what she did to "destroy Sleater-Kinney." It's improbable but true that Brownstein is better known to some for her role on the sketch show "Portlandia" than as one of the best rock guitarists of her generation or any other, part of what Greil Marcus declared the best rock band in America. Fans of "Portlandia" might recognize the actress they adore in her tales of childhood singalongs, interpretive dances and gender-bending murder-mystery parties, but Brownstein's focus is on how music saved her and remade her, or rather allowed her to remake herself, again and again. Growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, Brownstein constantly searched for connection with the people around her - her distant mother, hospitalized with an eating disorder; friends and friends' parents; even celebrities. She wrote needy letters to soap-opera stars before finding her way to music and realizing - at a George Michael show, of all places - that "I would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines." She describes her experience as a fan, pressing against the rail at punk shows, "risking crushed toes, bruised sides, and the unpredictable undulation of the pit," reaching closer to those she wanted to be. The hunger of the title resonates on page after page - hunger to be known, to be seen, to escape. The book is spare and arching like a stripped-down rock song, but it rarely has the rawness Sleater-Kinney fans might expect. Running throughout is the tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to hide, wanting to reveal and wanting to retreat, wanting to tell but wanting to decide how much. To break through the mythology of Sleater-Kinney but to leave it mostly intact yet truer, closer to reality but still not quite real. Music, Brownstein repeatedly writes, was a way for her to find but also to lose herself. When she met Corin Tucker, then playing in the riot grrrl band Heavens to Betsy, she found the perfect foil for her own tendencies to hold back and then to explode. Of Tucker's sound, she writes: "Any sadness was also defiant; it was not the wail of mourning but of murder. And there was so much I wanted to destroy." Her book is filled with women - the only significant man is her father, the parent who remained in her life (her mother moved away when Brownstein was a teenager) - a choice that feels all the more radical because it is unremarked upon. Brownstein's relationship with Tucker, first as fan, then as romantic interest and finally as musical partner, is central to the book but leaves the reader aching for more detail; at times she seems to be waiting for Tucker's voice to come in, as well as for Weiss's drums to crash. She has left room for them to tell their own stories. The empty spaces in her narrative raise the question yet again of how much of a woman performer we fans get to claim. Women musicians, Brownstein writes, are assumed to be always telling their personal stories. "An audience doesn't want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness." The rock critics obsessively described Sleater-Kinney as "girl band," a label they kicked against repeatedly. Brownstein's fight against being pigeonholed rings on every page: her challenge to the limitations of punk purity and "scenes" and critics' obsession with her femaleness, her anger at being outed not because she was embarrassed but because she didn't want to be defined as one thing or another. By telling her story on her own terms, she is both acquiescing to those questions and continuing to refuse them. After all, she is telling only one part of the tale: how being in a band saved her and then broke her and then, once she'd healed, allowed her to feel herself again. And that story isn't even over. 'I would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines.' SARAH JAFFE, a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, has written about music and culture for Billboard, Dissent and other publications. Her book on social movements will be published next fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Bookended with sea changes in the life of Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein's memoir is as much about the band as it is about herself (minus her Portlandia fame). Her descriptions of her troubled Pacific Northwest childhood set the stage for her arrival on Olympia's lively punk scene. There, amid sweaty clubs and the intellectualism of Evergreen College, she found a rich community and a serious collaborator in Corin Tucker, and Sleater-Kinney was born. Several successful albums later, however, the stresses of touring and Brownstein's health problems took their toll, culminating in an unsettling blowup, a scene she recounts in an apologetic tone. Brownstein flips easily from brainy ruminations on nostalgia, fandom, and record labels to trenchant stories about sexism, music journalism, and how a soy allergy not drugs or alcohol brought her to her knees on tour. Though the scattershot tone makes for a lack of cohesiveness, her vivid Sleater-Kinney stories and descriptions of their albums are downright irresistible. Sleater-Kinney fans went nuts late last year when the trio broke their years-long hiatus, and Brownstein's memoir will give them more to salivate over.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In performing the audio edition of her new memoir, Brownstein, creator and star of TV comedy series Portlandia and a member of the band Sleater-Kinney, maintains an engaging presence with her conversational style. Despite both the emotionally charged nature of Sleater-Kinney's feminist-punk music and the coming-of-age/relationship themes in the story line, Brownstein opts for an understated emotional tone, preferring to leave the screaming on stage. The recording does include clips of original music by Brownstein, in addition to an interview in which she discusses the process of penning her book. One of the most intriguing questions she tackles is the almost total absence of references to Portlandia from her autobiographical narrative. Even listeners not steeped in indie music can at least appreciate the display of artistic devotion. A Riverhead hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Brownstein's memoir of growing up in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, her obsessive love of the indie music scene that developed in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, and the birth and maturity of her band, Sleater-Kinney, will delight fans. Brownstein proves an articulate and thoughtful writer, not flinching from her difficult family life, her immature mistakes as she found her feet in the music world, or her role in Sleater--Kinney's breakup. The author's reading is sincere, clear, and personal whether the subject matter is grim or hilarious. Verdict Recommended for fans of Brownstein's music (Portlandia fans should note that the show is conspicuous in its absence from this book), those who enjoyed Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front, and readers looking for a smart and expressive rock bio. ["A strong, engaging pop culture memoir: personal detail, a little dish, and a well-written look at what made the music, and the culture that spawned it, matter": LJ 10/1/15 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
First-class account of the life and times of an essential riot grrrl and the band she helped create. In this debut memoir, Brownstein, co-founder of the iconic punk band Sleater-Kinney, traces her evolution from the daughter of a secure but secretly unhappy homecloseted gay father, anorexic motherto a gawky teenage rock fan and, ultimately, to becoming an artist in her own right. (She does not delve into her work on Portlandia.) The story of her life is also, inevitably, the story of her own band: meeting (and having a close but tortuous relationship with) co-founder Corin Tucker, the endless process of writing and co-writing songs and guitar leads, firing drummers (they went through three before striking gold with Janet Weiss), and the way life on the road both forges and fractures relationships. For Sleater-Kinney fans, the book is an absolute must, as it not only describes the rise of the band, but also delves into the making of every album. Furthermore, for a band in which song authorship has never been perfectly clear, Brownstein gives some insight as to who wrote what. More than that, the book is deeply personal, an act of self-discovery by a writer both telling her story and coming to understand herself at the same time. "In Sleater-Kinney," she writes, "each song, each album, built an infrastructure, fresh skeletons." The author writes focused and uncluttered prose, choosing the best, most telling details, as she recounts stories that show what it means to perform for the first time and what it means for a woman to be both a fan and a star in a staunchly male-dominated world. Unlike many rock star memoirs, there's no sense that this book is a chore or a marketing effort. It's revealing and riveting. On the page as in her songs, Brownstein finds the right words to give shape to experience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
