Book of the week – Hunger Makes me a modern girl

Hunger makes me a modern girl
A memoir
Carrie brownstein
Riverhead books

Carrie Brownstein is not your typical rock band member. At first glance There was no broken home, little introvertnes. Maybe the opposite. This was a happy kid looking for recognition amongst her peers.

As a girl Carrie the 80s meant George Michael, Madonna and Duran Duran. Letters were written to bands, actors. People whose pictures were in glossy magazines.

But then the surface begins to scrape. Dad finds another man after mam left her food on the table more often than her mouth before moving out. The carefree shine of early adolescence became the hard reality of a tough teenage life. This teenager discovered music and record shops and started to play. Music was an act of defiance as much as an act of celebration and bikini kill were defiantly leading the way. They were leading a charge of bands like heavens to Betsy, autoclave and slant 6. 7 year bitch were rocking away and Carrie was in awe of it all.

Carrie moves from Seattle to Olympia under a pretend guise of college when it was record labels and bands that were providing here education. Here classes could have been Kill Rock Stars and K Records as she started playing in her own band, Excuse 17 and moved on to Sleafer Kinney.

What’s great about this book is that it’s a fan of music who came to play in a band. There was no trajectory set out just a love for creativity. The story of how it all came about is a tale of love, openness and respect for all. It’s dialogue is perfect. Carrie is speaking to you the reader, telling the story of the time in a flow that resonates. Of course being a book about a band in the diy punk scene that was about to sell a lot of records they story dabbles in record labels, larger distribution against loss of autonomy. The words stripped bare about punk are stark. The respect for punk and diy is completely there but did the all inclusive punk scene turn into an exclusive club for those who can afford it? I guess that’s another book in itself!

niallhope