Aged 18 and living in the suburbs of Seattle, Carrie Brownstein answers an ad in a local music paper: “Girl guitarist wanted, no wanky solos”. It turns out to have been posted by the Washington riot grrrl band 7 Year Bitch. To her shock, she gets an audition, so she puts on her dad’s suit jacket, a white T-shirt and a green baseball cap turned backwards, and sits on the sofa feeling like “a puffy cloud on a couch surrounded by women who were clearly thunder and lightning”. When she doesn’t get the job, she writes them a letter, pouring out all the psychological hurts that feed into her desperate need to be in a band – her mother’s anorexia, the stifling silence of her family home.
When she sees them around town in the months afterwards, 7 Year Bitch look at her with pity and distrust. “There is a gulf of misunderstanding between musicians and their fans,” she writes, “and so much desperation that the musician can’t possibly assuage, rectify or heal.”
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