In the mid-1990s, Seattle was the center of the music world. And at the center of one of its biggest bands — alongside Nirvana and Pearl Jam — was Carrie Brownstein, a founding member of the all-female rock trio Sleater-Kinney. Instantly successful, "Esquire" crowned them the best band, ever. In her new memoir, "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," Brownstein charts the band’s incredible rise and fall.
Kurt Andersen: In the book you talk about the tour supporting "The Woods" being really tough. Do you have a single most vivid memory from that time?
Carrie Brownstein: My body had been rejecting “tour” for years. Tour is a very fragmentary existence, it's peripatetic, it is destabilizing, and so my body had kind of been screaming out for years, “Please stop, please slow down.” And in some ways I felt like I was touring emergency rooms. I've seen a hospital in so many cities. It kind of all came to a head in Belgium in 2006. I describe in the book a very self-annihilating moment that unfortunately happened in front of my band mates.
Talk about how the song "Jumpers,” from "The Woods," came to be.
There was a brief period of time when I was living in the Bay Area. I felt very displaced down there. There was such a disparity between these bright, beautiful, cloudless days and this encroaching depression. So I was living in this beautiful place and feeling very lost. I was reading an article in "The New Yorker" by Tad Friend called “Jumpers.” It was about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was actually about the survivors, a very small percentage of people that have survived the attempted suicide off that bridge. What I wanted to write about was this combination of something that signifies architectural prowess and structure and solidity and progress. That it could both be that and a place of despair. And that, when people cannot find meaning in their life, their last hope is that they'll find it in their death. That to me is very sad and I related to it a lot then.
And ten years later, do you relate to it in a different way?
Sleater-Kinney went on hiatus for about 10 years. When we came back together to start writing "No Cities to Love," we started out playing some of our old songs just to reconnect. And I remember we practiced "Jumpers" — collectively it's one of our favorite songs — and I realized I was singing it about living this time, which is a big change. So yeah, I think of it differently now.
Let's talk about "Portlandia." You clearly have a fondness for these subcultures that you're satirizing. Is the self-regard and jargon that we hear in the show endemic to humans in any little world?
If we are hyper-concerned about organic versus local or how our coffee's made, these kinds of worries are just a privilege. Sometimes I think that narcissism of small things can start to be corrosive. And with "Portlandia," we're not sitting outside of it looking in. We're very much engaged in it. We're trying to be part of an ongoing conversation that's already happening. These highly curated selves that we're projecting, these highly curated neighborhoods that are just reflections of our highly curated selves, is this actually making us better people? That's essentially what "Portlandia" is about.
Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Carrie Brownstein
Music Playlist
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Entertain
Artist: Sleater-KinneyAlbum: The WoodsLabel: Sub Pop Records -
Jumpers
Artist: Sleater-KinneyAlbum: The WoodsLabel: Sub Pop Records -
Sapokanikan
Artist: Joanna NewsomAlbum: DiversLabel: Drag City