PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Riot grrls with guitars roll into Pittsburgh
by Marie Skoczylas Sunday, Sep. 01, 2002 at 1:33 PM

Marisa Ragonese, Gina Young and Jolie Rickman, who travel the country together as the ARTCAR, pulled into Carnegie Mellon University to spread art and revolution.

ARTCAR rolled onto Carnegie Mellon University’s campus on Saturday, March 16 at the University Center Connan Room. Standing for Action Ready Troubadours Creating Art and Revolution, the event injected Pittsburgh with activism by way of art. It began with a workshop, Feminist Interruptions Into Privilege, and ended with a femme-folk-punk performance that promoted revolutionary ideas, raised awareness of oppression and treated everyone to the talents of two radical women that incite revolution with their guitars.

“We really wanted to create a women’s tour that would encourage women to get on the road and to be political and radical and get their voices heard,” says Jolie Rickman, critically acclaimed musician and cultural activist. “The problem is I haven’t seen enough women doing real ‘out there’ radical work and I think part of that is because it’s easier for men. All the privileges make it easier. If you’re white it makes it easier, if you’re a man it makes it easier, if you’re straight it makes it easier.”

Some know Rickman as the other half of Sing It Down, a collaborative duo that educates and rallies through song to close the School of the Americas – a military institute in Fort Benning, Georgia, that trains Latin American soldiers in torture, blackmail and counterinsurgency techniques - preparing graduates that are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in the world.

“We started Sing It Down, my friend Colleen [Kattau] and I, because we really wanted to work with a movement to respond to its need through music and to do outreach as musicians,” explains Rickman. “So we started working with that movement to close the SOA and developed all these songs and a benefit CD and kept writing songs and going to strategy meetings and really participate and then come out of it with themes that we agreed with and that we wrote about.”

After a brief stint in graduate school where she was “busting out with songs instead of papers”, Rickman focused her attention on combining her work as an artist with the work of social movements. “I think a lot of artists, we’re really critical thinkers…we have individual forms of expression. At the same time, our work shouldn’t be in a bubble,” she says.

A long-time admirer of Pete Seeger and Buffy St. Marie, songstress and activist of the American Indian Movement, Rickman looks to musicians who have worked within feminism and really recognized the dialogue that was going on between the communities and the music. “I really always respected that and wanted that to fill my music,” she says. “It really did naturally because I was an activist and a lot of my songs were coming naturally out of what I was learning…it was what was passionate to me. While I wrote a lot of love songs I also felt this urgency about the need for change. I didn’t intend for it to be that way, its just kind of my whole life, its kind of where I’m at.”

The second performer of the evening, Gina Young, also holds that her music is her voice, documenting the inequalities she sees and experiences on a regular basis. “I don’t set out with an agenda, like ‘I’m going to talk about these issues, and I’m going to write about sexual assault and I’m going to write about homophobia,’ it’s like, those issues are my life. That is my experience and I’m simply reporting what I see and what I feel.”

A self-described “singer/songwriter, actress/activist, daredevil dyke dreamer”, Young is a frequent performer for events that raise awareness of the rights of women and sexual minorities. She’s toured over 20 cities, had a semi-autobiographical music/theater piece produced Off-Off Broadway and has shared the stage with the likes of Bitch and Animal and Alix Olson. Her performances include a Violence Against Women Act rally on the steps of the Supreme Court, feminist conferences in New York and D.C. and a rally and protest against the 2000 Central Park sexual assaults, among others.

“Everything is political,” Young insists. “The question is whether or not you’re upholding the dominant paradigm – whether your music supports capitalism. The question is, is your music upholding the status quo? If music is upholding capitalism and sexism and racism, it’s still political. People try to depoliticize that, act like everything we hear on the radio is just love songs. Yes, but they’re all straight and they’re all directed toward a very certain, particular experience of love and they leave out everything else.”

Workshop facilitator, Marisa Ragonese, agrees explaining that she always surrounds herself with musicians. “Music and the performing arts are such great mediums for activism. I’ve been so inspired by the women I’ve seen utilizing music and pioneering simultaneously new feminist ideologies, new genres of music and new types of local activism that have come out of resisting male dominated music scenes.”

Her workshop added a non-musical but equally political element. Feminist Interruptions Into Privilege defined and deconstructed sexism, heterosexism, white supremacy and progressive backlash, digging into the “isms” and leading the group through an interactive session. Ragonese is a graduate student in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University and has organized conferences, marches, rallies, demonstrations and shows.

“I’ve been doing activist work with Riot Grrrl in New York City for about three year now. Riot Grrrl is basically a young, grassroots, feminist network,” she explains. “It was a movement that started out of the larger punk movement in the early 90s and basically it was girls protesting male dominated, boy supremacist, anti-girl scenes. It was local and it started through networking across the country with two girl bands who were making interventions locally into their own scenes. So they started doing girl zines and encouraging girls to draw stars on their hands if they were feminist and they were punk so that they could find other girls like them.

“They created not just a new feminist ideology, which is amazing, but they created spaces in their local punk scenes and then they created alternative spaces for girls in the punk scene and at the same time they developed a genre of music called Riot Grrrl music.”

Ragonese also exhibits her activism through her daily life. “I like to think that I endanger myself and I take risks and I don’t just do what’s safe all the time, as an activist, as a feminist activist, as a dyke. Just walking down the street a lot of the time for me is dangerous on lots of different levels but I’d like to think I choose that deliberately.”

She places emphasis on the choices that we take as feminist activists and what we do with the skills we have. “It’s hard for me to articulate how fucking scary it is for girls to get up on stage…” Ragonese begins and trails off in a reverent speechlessness before citing punk/feminist/activist Kathleen Hanna as a woman that took risks and gave birth to a movement. “[Hanna] gets up and she has ‘slut’ written on her belly and she’s wearing Speedos and she’s screaming ‘white boy, don’t laugh, don’t cry, just die’ and that is amazing. I feel enough affiliation with that kind of danger. I feel music is a wonderful medium and it’s wonderfully dangerous and I feel drawn to organizing with women who do music.”

Rickman sees an additional possibility for activism and music to work together. “Gina and I today could have been doing outreach for SOA Watch or a number of feminist organizations or a number of anti-corporate globalization organizations but really those organizations don’t fully reach out to musicians and say ‘Hey lets work together’. They employ outreach people for 30-40 thousand dollars a year but we’re saying musicians are natural outreach people – let’s start working together.”

She is currently in the process of starting HEN foundation, hoping it will “develop into an organization that has a couple hundred thousand dollars a year of budget to give out funds and work on projects, compilations, political CDs that will go out to many radio stations, featuring all the artists and the different issues.”

www.indypgh.org

add your comments