"suicide girls" + "options"

FROM June 21, 2004

Excerpt from a letter I received for "Crashing the hardcore sausage party," an interview with Martyr AD bassist Sheer Tara I did for AP magazine, about being one of the only hi-profile women in a heavily male-dominated genre (metal/hardcore):

"Your interview with bassist Tara Anderson (in issue #192) was excellent, and way too true. AP has to run more articles on women in alternative music. Let's just face it: misogyny runs wild in alternative music, albeit unintentionally. Not to say that guy fronted bands are bad, its just that they outnumber anything female many times over. Hardcore and punk: the new breed of the men's club."

What Melissa Auf Der Maur said when I interviewed her:

"We were invited to play a show in a radio station, and in this radio station they were proud to tell me that they had never played a female artist, ever, since they had changed over to a hard rock format. And it was kind of by principle, you know: 'We don’t play female artists, BUT, your song rocks so hard that we did.' And I was wondering if they realized how absurd that is. But at the same time, there’s a joy in that, I’m excited to be penetrating the airwaves of a male-dominated voice. It’s one of the reasons it makes me excited to do this.

I talked to some women after the show and they were saying, literally, 'We didn’t even know there was anything other than Britney Spears.'"