Shouting Out Loud

These days the Raincoats are most often remembered because of
who remembered them: Kurt Cobain recalled in his Incestide liner
notes that the British post-punk girl band’s 1979 debut album was a
life-saving device, a reprieve from his depression and boredom. The
plaintive mash note from punk’s living Jesus revivified the Raincoats’
legacy at a time when we needed it, amid the grunge boom of 1992.
Underground, there was riot girl salvation and Fugazi, sure, but up-top
cool was Pearl Jam (not yet sanctified, or anything more than macho qua
rebellious) and the best-selling album of the year was pre-crack
Whitney’s last stand, her soundtrack to The Bodyguard.

In 1994, when DGC Records and Rough Trade reissued the trio of
records that constituted the Raincoats’ discography, the band needed
someone to co-sign their ultra-cool. (We can forgive the too-typical
fact that rock star-boy approval was necessary to accept the genius
girls’ work.) Cobain was the acceptable boy bridge to girl culture; he
helped pop the escape hatch to a world where Candlebox didn’t matter,
his endorsement a kind of atonement for the crush of grunge that
Nirvana’s success accidentally helped seed. Then, 15 years after the
inaugural fact, we needed the Raincoats to stave off the boredom and
depression. There was still no other band quite like them.

This week Kill Rock Stars reissues the band’s self-titled debut
album, on vinyl, and the timing couldn’t be better. We are mired in an
epic wave of aesthetics first, and the post-ironic era hath wrought an
inscrutable wave of bands utterly resistant to meaning (swastikas as
album “decorations”/neon hippie bullshit, etc.)—but The
Raincoats serves up a perfect reminder that discernable earnesty
doesn’t automatically signify emo, and having meaning doesn’t mean the
work isn’t open to dynamic interpretation. People keep tending to the
Raincoats, reminding us of their importance—with good reason.
They were special, yet absolute everygirls, making music that was and
is personal, expressive, artful, and full—FULL!—of joy.

Cobain’s notes imagined the band perhaps making him a cup of tea,
which would be very polite and grandmotherly—though maybe the
offer of a spot of tea is what all people expect of British women.
Maybe it’s because on the track “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Ana da
Silva sings about cups of tea marking time, right after she shouts in
this derailing, winding, defiant yelp, “No one teaches you how to
live!” She sounds like she figured it out anyhow. She sounds like the
kind of girl no one teaches anything.

Listening to the self-titled debut, it’s easy to see why they were
imagined polite, kind, and even doting; rising up from the gnashing pit
of punk’s nihilism, The Raincoats has more PMA than H.R./Bad
Brains ever did. They are sunny without being pop, and while they were
as rudimentarily skilled as their string-bashing punk peers, there was
a sense of cohesion, another vision of the world. They were out-punking
punk, defying its leather/spitting/anarchy trope with art-school
playfulness, with a sunny pink drawing of a children’s choir right on
the cover. They liberated the ultimate girl instrument—the
violin—from its chamber/school orchestra realm. It’s a memory of
girl-life, lived.

Yet, for all of this, The Raincoats is often referred to as a
harsh, clanging album. The party line usually frames their genius as
accidental, as brilliant amateurs—girls in the wilderness of
their own stuttering hands. The implication being they couldn’t have
been serious or intentional, sounding as excited and rough and kooky as
they did. Punk was full of amateurs—as was post-punk (which was
more their scene; they had a violin)—but girls were always the
exception. As brilliant amateurs, they fared a bit better than their
compatriots the Slits, who mostly just got compared to animals.

The album is not “harsh” or “shrill” (that one comes up whenever an
“angry” woman is making art). It’s filled with space and grace. “I am
the music inside” they sing on “No Side to Fall In.” They knew what
they were doing, they were absolutely following their own cues. They
sha-la-la’d about their minds and thinking (“The Void”)—they made
a record about being real girls knee deep in life. We don’t get a love
song until deep into side two with “You’re a Million,” and it’s vague
at that, a “lover” here, an “I’m yours” pledge, and that’s about
it.

The Raincoats understood the meaning of covering the Kinks’ “Lola”
and keeping in all the “she” references. Just the year before, the
Pretenders made their debut with a totally straight (in every way) take
on another Kinks song, “Stop Your Sobbing.” The Raincoats’ version of
“Lola” was less about the Kinks or homage, and more about exploding all
that rock ‘n’ roll boy seriousness.

The particular amateurish, special quality of The Raincoats was willful and girly in that it flaunted its gentleness, its
otherness, and its disregard for virtuosity and rock toughness as their
sole path. In early-’80s BBC concert footage “Only Loved at Night”
(YouTube it), da Silva sings about the sad dating life of a girl with
bad skin, how the world judges and values women. The song does not
rock, it trembles, as da Silva clunks two woodblocks together, pursing
them like she’s fighting percussive rhythm, resisting the linear path
and letting the song disintegrate. Like most of their material, the
bass carries the melody and there is a singsong to their delivery,
something chirping or skronking in lieu of a solo—none of it
obscuring the importance of the words, of what they have to say.

The Raincoats are the sound of learning and having fun and making it
up as you go along; may they be revived, rediscovered, and reissued
infinitely.