Girls Rock!

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted March 20, 2008.

I was very chaostic sometimes.

-- Amelia

"That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood / She's got the hottest trike in town." Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" serves as an apt clarion-call of an introduction to Girls Rock!. A snapshot of one installment of Portland's annual Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls (ages 8-18), the film makes a case that unfortunately still needs making, that girls can sweat, shout, and rock as hard as any boy. It makes this case emphatically and mostly joyfully, walking a line between celebration and instruction, addressing viewers who know too much and not nearly enough. The girls themselves make compelling self-assessments, understanding well the worlds in which they live. Even if they don't see themselves as queens of their neighborhoods quite yet, they're already imagining what it's like to have that trike.

The models are out there, both positive and less positive. Sitting on her pink-spread bed, eight-year-old Amelia, aspiring guitar player, makes clear what she isn't: "I'm not somebody like Hillary Duff" she says, "who just wants to be famous." Just what she's looking for is less definite, though she's got a collection of songs she's written about her dog Pipi. Carrie Brownstein, camp counselor and Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist, says the camp offers what she calls "that sense of empower," as a transitive verb waiting to be completed with subjects and objects. "Having a microphone for the first time, having volume," Brownstein says, "You can't underestimate how it feels to hear your voice echo through a room." Founded by Misty McElroy in 2000 and now affiliated with branches across the country, the camp grants girls the chance to hear themselves and also to feel heard.

The film, directed by Arne Johnson and Shane King, expands that chance, addressing a presumably broader audience, to advocate for more "empowerment." Girls Rock! affects a kind of DIY look and appeal, its collagey intertitles offering up stats that are at once predictable and outrageous (in music videos, "women are five times more likely to appear in revealing clothing," and "Four out of five girls in 8th-11th grade have been sexually harassed by a schoolmate"). For its brief historical background, Girls Rock! begins with the birth of Rock Camp, on the heels of great, good, rousing artists like Kathleen Hannah and PJ Harvey. Cutouts of Kim Gordon and Kim Deal tilt and pose, until they're replaced by the "diabolical threat" that made its appearance at the end of the '90s, namely, as indicated by more cutouts, Britney Spears, cotton candy, and lapdogs. It's a cute, if reductive, means to tell this story, leaving out details of DIY's collision with commercial markets and solicitors, as well as problems even movement boys had with girls, despite and because of stars like the Breeders or L7.

This version of the story, however, sets up a recognizable target, namely, an odious model for girls' behavior and expectations. As one girl puts it, "It's just really stressful because I'm only 14, I don't need people telling me how I need to be." Et voila, at rock camp, she's encouraged (as opposed to "told") to be another way, her own way. Camp teacher Shemo observes, "It's so weird how boys are not trained to apologize for the amount of space they're taking up intellectually, emotionally, physically. And the girls are like, 'I'm really sorry, I don't know if I'm sorry, but I think I'm sorry.'"

See more stories tagged with: gender, feminism, girls rock!

Cynthia Fuchs is Popmatters' film and TV editor.

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