- Photo: Brigitte Sire
FOR NEARLY A DECADE of my life—from 1997 to 2006—I saw Sleater-Kinney at least twice a year. At La Luna, at the Glass Factory, at Meow Meow, at B Complex, at other venues whose names I can’t remember because they no longer exist. I don’t remember too much about the shows themselves, either—it’s all a blur of sweaty rooms, girls with cat-eye glasses, cool lesbians traveling in packs. The same faces jostled in the crowd at every show—my ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend was always at the front of the stage. Bands like the Need opened, and Gossip, and the Butchies and Bangs and the Haggard. Sometimes Sleater-Kinney would swap out different names in the lyrics to “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”: “I wanna be your Mary Timony.” Corin Tucker’s voice was as undeniable as the weather, and shows became queer and feminist spaces, the likes of which I don’t think exist nearly as often in Portland anymore. (Or maybe they do, and I’ve just gotten so lazy that I’d rather stay home watching Scandal than go find them.)
So it’s really easy to write nostalgically about how great Portland’s music scene was in the ’90s. And it’s really easy to write nostalgically about the reunion of the band whose pictures I taped up in my locker in high school. I could probably get out at least 600 words on mixtapes alone.
There’s a problem, though, which fundamentally undermines that whole approach: Sleater-Kinney has no room for my nostalgia. Sleater-Kinney fucking shreds my nostalgia. Their 2015 album No Cities to Love is as urgent and forward-looking as anything the band’s ever released. You can’t be nostalgic about something that’s still as relevant as Sleater-Kinney is.