The riot quiets

July 17, 2006 | After 11 years, Sleater-Kinney -- arguably the only band born out of the Pacific Northwest's '90s rock boom that is still extant and relevant -- announced they were going on indefinite hiatus last week. When I heard the news, I felt a burning need to see them one last time, though I was mindful of the fact that one must be circumspect when one is 33 and about to utter the phrase "burning need." Surely, one is being ironic. Surely, one has confused the feeling with heartburn. And yet, that feeling just won't quit.

I've been listening to music and going to shows for more than half a lifetime now, watching indie rock devolve into backward-looking, fashion-damaged pop, while the culture grows ever more unwilling to admit feminism did anything but give women delusion, heartbreak and resentment. In this blue moment for indie rock fans and feminists alike, I need to pay my respects to three women whose noise never sounded like anyone else's and kept getting louder and larger the older they got. I need to see that, like vocalist Corin Tucker, you can be a 30-something mother -- a 30-something woman -- and still jump around onstage and smile and yell and unleash a thunder, that you can also exude joy while being tethered to a partner and a child, because increasingly, women seem to think marriage and parenthood mean you agree to bury yourself alive under a mountain of stuff -- state-of-the-art strollers, art-directed diaper bags, and 12-packs of toilet paper. I need to be reminded that my peers and friends are living correctives to those who believe that it's useless to free yourself from the bonds of biology, history and society, and that you can indeed live a life according to principles that pundits with nannies want to make you believe are quaint unworkable utopian relics of the '60s and '70s. I need to watch three women issue a billowing cloud of noise and in doing so defiantly redefine what it means to be female and an adult.

I have seen Sleater-Kinney four times, most recently in London last September. Seeing them in England made me, as silly as this sounds, proud to be an American girl. It brought to mind the Jamesian narrative -- minus the menacing Europeans and our fatal innocence -- of an American girl being a cultural export that astonishes and trumps anything invented in the dusty old convention-bound continent. The Camden concert hall was filled with hipster guys who had come there for the band's bottom-heavy, wall-shaking sound. This wasn't just pretty good for a bunch of girls; this was probably one of the better rock shows we would ever see. My boyfriend, raised on Van Halen and Black Sabbath, was moved to acknowledge their greatness and power. Even better: the inexplicable number of Bob Hoskins look-alikes in the back drinking Foster's tallboys and nodding along approvingly.

Watching these three women play that night I thought: World, we've given you the blues, jazz, Hollywood and rock, and now we will show you a female band that is no gimmick, but an artistic force to be reckoned with. Currently, yes, we're taking the world down with us, but allow us to say that we have given you Sleater-Kinney. Who are not fodder for the wet dreams of pedophiles, like the Runaways and the Donnas. Who are not, like the Bangles or the Go-Gos, making pretty, flashy guitar pop with retro touches. Or Debbie Harry or Chrissie Hynde out front with a wall of nameless, faceless suits behind them. Here are three individual, indispensable parts: Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker on vocals and guitars with Janet Weiss on drums.

Here, back home, it has been very hard to shake the feeling that all the gains, political and cultural, of the previous decades are being reversed. Sleater-Kinney -- friends and artists whose friendship and art has nothing to do with expensive shoes and self-deprecation -- are quitting when they seem most necessary. Combat boots have long since been exchanged for stilettos. It's still men who write and direct the movies that my demographic flocks to, who write the books that are most read and lauded -- and when women write novels now, there's the ever-present danger that just by virtue of its treating the female, the book will be categorized as chick lit. The New Yorker and the New York Times are giving prime real estate to women -- Caitlin Flanagan and Maureen Dowd -- who refuse to accept or acknowledge the fact that feminism worked and can still work, who ignore the fact that many women in my generation are being loved and married precisely for their intellect and strength and that we live lives as the equal of our husbands and partners -- and in ignoring those facts, in ignoring lives other than their own, they are halting progress. What happens to women, unless you're Terri Schiavo or Britney Spears, seems to be of no concern to the government or the public.

How to account for this backlash? Did it seem like the '60s had won all our wars against discrimination and inequality? Was it the record companies' realization that alternative rock would not make them rich? Can you even believe that Roseanne Barr had a long-running show on network television? And Lilith Fair! Oh, Lord, remember Lilith Fair? Who ever thought that one day there could be nostalgia for Sarah McLachlan and the Massengil-meets-Celestial Seasonings vibe of her tribal gatherings? It may be that third wavers are partly at fault -- that we became so comfortable in the world our mothers had made for us that, during the complacent Clinton years, never dreaming that there would be such a thing as George W. Bush, we decided to play around with theory and vibrators, and became so infatuated with the personal that we forgot that maybe we should spend some time tending to the political. And just when we need to wage war against the right wing, we're also losing a soundtrack to that fight. Which means that the '90s are officially over, and it might be a while before there's another comparable surge of challenging, exhilarating female voices. Exit Sleater-Kinney.

Next page: I still believe in feminism, and I still believe in the saving power of rock