- Riverhead Books
Tonight at the Newmark Theatre, Carrie Brownstein discusses her new memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, with Tig Notaro.
“Entitlement is a precarious place from which to create or perform—it projects the idea that you have nothing to prove, nothing to claim, nothing to show but self-satisfaction, a smug boredom,” writes Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein in her new memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. “It breeds ambivalence.”
She’s describing a kind of male-dominated “slacker rock,” the opposite of Sleater-Kinney’s spare, explosive music, and Brownstein’s own all-in performance style. That distinction isn’t trivial: Sleater-Kinney were often asked to define themselves in relation to what they were not—men, mainstream, a band with a bass player. But if entitlement breeds ambivalence, Brownstein’s memoir suggests that a lack of it could foster a kind of power; Sleater-Kinney didn’t have the luxury of smug boredom, so they became one of the greatest rock bands ever, full stop.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is a compressed, forthright portrait of a compressed, forthright band, and a document of the pre-tech boom Pacific Northwest of the ’90s, which Brownstein portrays as it really was: part swampy frontier land, part well-tended secret, while the music of its damp cities “embodied the emotional equivalent of getting washed up on a beach somewhere.” Here’s what she told me about unimaginative rock journalism, how far we haven’t come, and the allure of business casual.
MERCURY: Today I don’t know that Seattle and Portland are the same sort of places for young artists without a lot of money or resources. Are there new places where you’re starting to see upstart creative communities?
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: Well, I definitely think that second cities are having a resurgence, places like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee. There are reasons that young people, creative people, people with less upward mobility move to cities where they can afford to live and have a quality of life that allows them to be creative and afford to do that without working 60 or 80 hours a week.