Girls To The Front: The True Story Of The Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
Similar to another reviewer, I felt disappointed in this book as though it had revealed too much about the riot grrlmovement, and I didn't like what was behind the curtain. Really I think the whole book just proves that sometimes movements are better when viewed through romantising nostalgia, and sometimes movements were never anything but that. This may be the case with the riot grrl "movement". It seemed like everyone in the book thought that it was going on elsewhere, and were trying to get to its true home or base. At least from the depiction in the book, riot grrl was never truly happening anywhere except in a lot of teenage girls' hopes. I could write a book called "How Bikini Kill Saved My Life," but it wouldn't be very original. Marcus has done much better, writing about the women you want to be your best friends as if they really are. I was born about 20 years too late for riot grrrl -- although I like to think that the way I shaved my Barbies' heads as a kid was my contribution to the movement -- and yet these bands and those zines were formative for me, too. Look, I know a lot of people don't get the music. My ex-husband, for example, asked me to please stop playing my "vagina music" in the house because it made him want to "choke on a tampon." But the first time I heard "Rebel Girl," everything kind of clicked for me, like a whole list of new options opened up. Those first jarring chords relax the tension out of my shoulders and all I hear is "It's okay not to be perfect, not to be gorgeous, to have messy hair, to feel angry, to be real and raw and scared and courageous all at the same time." Marcus' book describes how the Riot Grrrl bands -- Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Huggy Bear, to name a few -- created this space of acceptance for women in the 90s. And it's not just 300 pages of fangirling (because that's why my book would be, if I wrote it); Hanna and Vail and Neuman and Wolffe are real and relatable in these pages, not untouchable heroines nor shrieking man-haters. And, I mean, that's really the whole point, isn't it? Five fucking stars.
What do You think about Girls To The Front: The True Story Of The Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010)?
Great book. I actually learned a lot about what really happened inside the riot Grrrl movement.
—Natikan
A fantastic read for anyone interested in modern feminist movements.
—shiloh03wallace93
