Transcript: Culture chat — Sleater-Kinney and where did angry music go?

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat: Sleater-Kinney and where did angry music go?’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show. This week we are talking about the newest album by the rock band Sleater-Kinney. It’s called Little Rope. Sleater-Kinney is an all-women feminist punk band from Olympia, Washington, born out of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90s. They’ve just come out with their 11th album. Now, with two of the founding members, Carrie Brownstein and guitarist Corin Tucker. They’re an iconic band, and today we’re going to talk about their new album and what exactly has happened to angry music like theirs over the past 30 years? To have this conversation, we’ve called the doctor. Joining me from London is the FT’s music critic Arwa Haider. Hi, Arwa. 

Arwa Haider
Hey. How’s it going?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Also in London with our was our magazine editor, his uncut. His whole life is like a picture of a sunny day. It’s Matt Vella. Hi, Matt.

Matt Vella
Hi. It’s great to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s great to have you. So to start off, why don’t we set the scene for listeners who may have never heard of this band? Who are Sleater-Kinney? How would you describe their sound? How would you describe what they represent? Maybe our expert.

Arwa Haider
Oh, I’m not sure I’m an expert, but certainly Sleater-Kinney. Yeah, they started out as a young band, in Washington, in Olympia, Washington, and came out of a scene that was being described as Riot Grrrl at the time. And that’s girl spelt with a triple R, which is a kind of feminist offshoot of punk, which really harnessed, sort of DIY ethos, very polemical, but just also really gutsy and funny and punchy lyrics, raw, stripped back as it wants to be. And by the time the band were well known here in the UK, where I grew up, it was around ‘97. It was their third album, Dig Me Out, and I think I kind of heard about who they were supposed to be before I heard the music. I think people were very impressed that there were these bold, upfront women, and they were my favourite band at the time, but they kind of captured a spirit of energy that definitely resonated with me as a, you know, as someone who came of age in the 90s.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What was that spirit?

Arwa Haider
Just the idea that, you know, you could kind of be what you wanted to be in the world. And I think also for me as a young woman, it was very inspiring. I didn’t feel that, you know, I was at a point in my life where I was really questioning am I doing the right thing. I’m representing the right way. Am I being feminine enough? Am I not feminine enough? And it was very refreshing to be, I guess, confronted with this other possibility.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Matt, what about you?

Matt Vella
Well, I mean, like most things, I stumbled into them because of a girl. I think I followed somebody to a show in college. I had experienced grunge from a distance, but I wasn’t sort of . . . It was at a remove, it was intermediated by MTV. And I just had stumbled into a show, of Sleater-Kinney’s and it was like, OK, I can be part of that, you know? And even though the music isn’t grunge and there’s some distinction, but it was sort of like my kind of entry point into that, that kind of music. There are a lot of loud voices in punk, and there’s a lot of shouting, but Corin Tucker’s voice in particular is so strong and clear and like, it was aggressive, but it got through. And so, you know, I think I left that show like a fan for life. And, I mean, I don’t even remember who I was going there to do, you know, whatever.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The girls fell away and the yeah, the band.

Matt Vella
And all that was left was the music.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I graduated from high school in 2007, so I feel like I was, sorry, I look generation ...

Matt Vella
Oh, not allowed.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . late for Sleater-Kinney in a way. When I was in high school, The Woods came out, that album. And my best friend in high school was very cool. And, she put “Modern Girl” on a mix CD for me, and I listened to it over and over again. OK. I love to talk about this new album, Little Rope. It came out last Friday. We’ve all been listening to it. Here’s a clip from a song that they’re promoting, pretty actively, called “Say It Like You Mean It”.

[‘SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT’, BY SLEATER-KINNEY PLAYING] 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Top line, what did you both think of this album? Matt, what did you think?

Matt Vella
Well, I had this strange kind of experience, because if I’m being honest, as big of a fan as I am, it’s not like their old albums had been in heavy rotation for me lately. So it was definitely a bit of a return. And so at first it felt a bit nostalgic. But then I, you know, I listened to it over and over again and a few tracks really stood out as maybe some of my favourite tracks of theirs, including the one we just heard.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That was one of your favourites?

Matt Vella
Yeah, absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arwa, what about you?

Arwa Haider
Yeah. I mean, similarly, I guess that kind of the nostalgia that I felt was much more about myself than the band. Because actually, I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed just like giving this album time and, like, really relishing, and Matt kind of quite rightly referred to like the strength of Corin Tucker’s vocals, but just there’s such just such a gloriously strong melody there as well.

[‘SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT’, BY SLEATER-KINNEY PLAYING]

I think when you go back to listening to the earlier tracks that they did, they did the earlier albums in their repertoire. They sound a lot more polished now, you know, there’s a much more measured sense, I think, of what they do. There are certainly elements that sound kind of quite 90s in style, but what I really enjoyed was that they sounded like women who have grown into their own skin. And I’m listening to as a woman that’s growing into my own skin. And there’s something very rewarding about that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. They feel older, not in an insulting way, in a sort of a . . . (Laughter) 

Matt Vella
No, but ...

Arwa Haider
That sounds like shade. (laughter)

Matt Vella
But no. But yeah, complete . . . The fact that they don’t feel — apparently, I mean, I’m reading in — but like that need to, it just feels like they’re singing the songs and doing the songs that they want to do for themselves and not fret for any other reason. It’s not like a rehash of old sounds and styles necessarily, it just really feels like it’s intentional, you know? In a way like that would suggest they are grown into themselves or whatever, you know? That song in particular, I mean, as I understand it, right after they started recording, Carrie Brownstein’s parents died in a car accident, and Corin wrote this song to Carrie, you know, “say it like you mean it”, and it’s like, I find this song to be incredibly powerful and it’s nothing on the page. You know, it’s not poetry, but it’s all in the performance. And I just found that this idea that you just need to tell people what you have to tell them while you can — very powerful after this whole period of separation. And it’s very powerful.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I agree, and I went to the album feeling sort of like I was expecting it to be young, energetic, mad Sleater-Kinney to have the same sort of energy.

Matt Vella
. . . fire.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And when I started to listen, I thought, well, this feels a little bit poppier, than I remember them, but poppier didn’t feel like the right word. I felt more accessible.

Arwa Haider
I totally get what you’re saying. I think when I was listening to it, I was thinking that it does sound more polished, but actually from that first track on the album, how like, you know, they can kind of, yeah, raise energy there as well. Yeah. And that cuts through lots of different tracks on the album, which I really enjoyed.

[‘HELL’, BY SLEATER-KINNEY PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to talk a little bit more about how this album fits into their discography. I find it really useful to compare their new work to their old stuff, so I’m going to play a clip of their breakthrough song “Dig Me Out” from 1997, just so listeners can get a sense of their early sound.

[‘DIG ME OUT’, BY SLEATER-KINNEY PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
How do you feel like this album holds up against their sort of catalogue?

Arwa Haider
What makes this album work for me and what’s, you know, what makes them still very captivating at their best as a band is the fact that they’re not striving to be something they’re not. I don’t think, you know, if you’re in your late 40s pushing 50, that you want to pretend you’re 21. Why should you? You know, you’ve done that, and there’s nothing wrong with, you know, really embracing where you are now with all the life experience that you’ve got and, you know, also embracing the turmoil of that age, not just the comfort that your success may have brought you. So yeah, it’s also it’s got me thinking, it’s weird to kind of be saying this in 2024, but we don’t have a culture of like heritage acts that are female. Do we? I mean, you know, rock music has always been, you know, you’ve got quite elderly bands that have been going forever who were male. And we just don’t have that with women. And part of the reason, I guess, is that you’re sort of female artists so I guess we were packaged in a way that may have been construed to have a sell-by date, which is rubbish, obviously, but we’re past it now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I would love to move on to the last section, which is looking at the legacy of Sleater-Kinney against what’s happening in music today. And my main question is just why we don’t have more like it. It feels like we’re all still really angry, but our music is less angry. There is a feminist punk sound coming back, with people like Olivia Rodrigo, and I love her album Guts, but it’s still pop, like she’s still in the machine. It feels like we don’t really have counterculture angry like we used to. But maybe I’m not seeing something obvious. Are you feeling that too? What do you think?

Arwa Haider
I don’t agree with that entirely. But at the same time, I think it’s a really interesting question. Obviously we don’t have the same kind of bands or we don’t have exactly the same movement because movement reacts against what’s around it. And it’s not just that the individuals have changed, it’s that the landscape has changed. You know, the whole music industry is in a state of flux now in the way that it wasn’t in the early 90s when, say, Riot Grrrl was conceived. So in many ways, the kind of modes of expression that a lot of these early 90s bands like Bikini Kill or in the UK, we had Huggy Bear. They raged really hard and they did things their own way, and they didn’t collude with what was actually quite a regressive era in terms of the pop and rock mainstream. So I think artists are, by necessity, much more DIY in their approach because they have to be. If you want to be a mainstream artist, you haven’t got the same props to kind of hold you in place.

Matt Vella
I mean, that thing about context is so interesting because one of the big elements of Riot Grrrl was all these oppositional technologies, like zines, you know, DIY xeroxed magazines were a huge part of that. VHS records, all that stuff enabled them to create a space for their ideas and for people who wanted to talk about the music or be part of the scene. And one of the things that I was thinking about as I was listening to [this album] is that so much of that has changed and gone away. And we’re encouraged to think about the internet as its kind of infinite space, but it feels like that space has also narrowed, as the way that you make money as an artist in the music business has narrowed. I’m curious about when you’re a really big act, how much your management of the fans and the management of the audience and all that stuff, how much that pulls focus from actually making the music. Whether it’s limiting in some way that an artist like Sleater-Kinney wasn’t limited, you know?

Arwa Haider
Yeah, there’s pressure on socials because the connection with fans is so intimate and so instantaneous. There’s just pressure to constantly generate content, and a feeling that things are incredibly hyped but incredibly ephemeral now. But then, in contrast with that, you still have a band that’s on their 11th album. So, I think that is a positive thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So my final question is just what this album makes us want more of? Did it scratch the itch, or did it leave you wanting something from other music that you’re not getting?

Arwa Haider
I guess I approached it with curiosity rather than a really sort of, you know, loaded expectation and nostalgia as well. But it definitely left me wanting more of something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is just embracing the rage and beauty and grief and energy of, you know, being in mid-life, I guess. I want to hear that and see that as much as possible. And it was, I think, pretty exhilarating to hear that come across in a way that felt fully formed, but also quite unbridled in some ways.

Matt Vella
But how would you answer that question?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I guess I liked being able to go back to, like, the sort of like first years of a band from 30 years ago, and then here where they’ve settled in now, I was listening to a couple of interviews with them, and they sounded pretty content. You know, they were talking about their creative process. They sounded like they said exactly what they meant to say. And I kind of wanted more of that. Like all of the music that’s being fed to me in my algorithm from high school and college on Spotify. I just wanted . . . I wanted sort of the new version of those bands, too.

Matt Vella
Yeah. I mean, I agree with both of you. I would say, like, what was so great about this is it wasn’t a nostalgia trip. It was just true without like, feeling like performative of the truth or this is my, you know, like it wasn’t like, oh, I’m now I am delivering my truth to you, you know, just like, this is what it is, which is great and authentic and too rare I think.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Arwan and Matt, this was so interesting. Thank you both so much. We will be back in just a minute with More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[‘THE RETREAT’ TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to More or Less, the part of the show where each of us talks about one thing that we want more of or less of culturally. OK. Arwa, what’s yours?

Arwa Haider
I’d like a return to more daytime raves, I think ...

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, cool.

Arwa Haider
More daytime parties, matinee raves. I went out to something that’s already very established success. The DJ and writer Annie Mac, she runs a party called Before Midnight, which is what it sounds like. It kind of starts in the evening and wraps up before midnight. Which sounds like it’s music for old people, and there’s some element of that. But it got me thinking about around the turn of the century when, you know, you could go out on a Sunday. And I did go out on a Sunday often, and you could sort of start, you know, early in the morning. I remember I used to go to a party called Sunnyside Up, which literally started at 6am, and then you could go over to Lazy Dog, which was run by Ben Watt from Everything But the Girl in the afternoon. And then you could wrap things up with some Sunday Best, which went on till about midnight. And I just think having space to dance around the clock is always a really good thing, whatever age you are. So I’d like more of that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I love that. I want more of that too.

Matt Vella
That’s great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Matt, what about you?

Matt Vella
Well, mine’s a lot less high-minded and joyful, but, in the Weekend Magazine this week, Tim Harford, our economics columnist, has written a cover story about deep fakes and AI and what sort of happens in a world of prevalent disinformation. And you know, one of the theories is that the more bad fakes we see sort of like fake literate we all become. And, you know, like the Pope and the Prada puffer, which wasn’t real. So I kind of want to see some more bad fakes. Yeah. You know, knock on wood, as I’m saying that, I’m thinking, oh, God, I’m going to relive hate this. But for now, that’s my answer. What about you?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mine is inspired by Arwa. I want more going to small venues to see music. At least for myself this year. And fewer big arenas. I went to a show at this jazz club in New York, the Blue Note, which is this kind of old-school institution. To see this jazz singer, Samara Joy, who will be on the show in the coming month or so.

Arwa Haider
Oh, she’s great. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
She’s incredible. And, man, live jazz. Like, what a delight. I’m sorry to tell you all we already know, but being in a really small room, like with a live band and a really big voice, was really awesome. I had a really great time.

Arwa Haider
I can imagine that sounds great. And, I mean, the thing is, it’s like, you know, that idea of epiphany and revelation that, you know, it might be like, “Oh, we know that already”, but you don’t, because that’s what makes music and arts and culture so phenomenal, because it will always hit you at any point of life as being this incredible revelation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally. Yeah. Arwa and Matt, this was really thought provoking and really wonderful. Thank you both for being on the show.

Arwa Haider
Thank you so much.

Matt Vella
Thanks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have relevant links and discounts for a subscription to the Financial Times. Great discounts. We also have ways to stay in touch with me and with the show, whether that’s by email, on X or on Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Monday.