(This article was originally commissioned for the Janaury 2003 issue of Harp Magazine. Unfortunately, it was cut to make way for a Joe Strummer tribute. It was picked up by Amplifier Magazine in February, and you can view the PDF version of that here. Below, you can read the unedited piece as it would have appeared in Harp, with pictures taken from the Kill Rock Stars website.....)

Sleater-Kinney Article for Harp

It is tempting to try to draw a corollary between the absence of Sleater-Kinney and the sliding of the country into war and chaos. Since the band went on a voluntary hiatus two years ago, the presidential electoral crisis took place, the terrorist attacks occurred, the government clamped down on civil liberties--and for a long time, the best the music industry could muster was the chest-thumping, empty-headed, patriotic jingoism of Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood. What happened to intelligent discourse in rock music? Where had the protest song of the past gone? In short, where was Sleater-Kinney when we needed them?

Almost as if by design, of course, Sleater-Kinney re-emerged in the nick of time last Fall from their hiatus, jumping back onto the stage and into the public forum, asking the questions that needed to be asked, and making some of the most passionate modern rock at the same time. Sleater-Kinney, a Portland, Orgeon-based band, has carried on in the proud tradition of bands like the Clash, mixing politics, social conscience, and hip shaking swagger in an unbeatable combination of scorching guitar riffs, dynamic rhythms, and intelligent lyrics. Releasing their material through indie label Kill Rock Stars since the mid-nineties, Sleater-Kinney has built up quite a loyal following, has been heaped with critical (if not commercial) acclaim, and has even been called the Greatest Rock Band in the World by influential music critic Greil Marcus. The trio, comprised of guitarists/singers Carrie Brownstein, 28, and Corin Tucker, 29, and drummer/singer Janet Weiss, 37, released its sixth album, “One Beat” in early September, and then went head-first back into heavy touring across the U.S. It seems that Sleater-Kinney has come back just when the music world needs a shot in the arm.

“Last summer, Carrie and Corin started playing together while I was on tour with Quasi,” explains Janet Weiss, speaking on the phone from Portland during a week of promotional interviews. “When I got back in late October, we started practicing, writing some more. We wrote several of the songs sort of after that period, between December and February, and then recorded in March.” Weiss explains that the band took some personal time off after completing tours for their “All Hands On the Bad One” CD in mid-2000. Each member pursued various activities during the time off. Brownstein attended some college classes and acted in an independent film called “Group.” Weiss toured with her side project, Quasi, and Tucker had a child. However, there was never a question of not getting back together. When the girls initially started regrouping in the latter half of last summer, the songs began to materialize.

“There’s not really an exact science to it,” says Weiss, explaining their writing process. “What usually happens is, Carrie and Corin will just kinda get together and work on ideas for songs and parts for songs, and then we’ll get together and play, and kind of weed through the different things that we’ve got. I’ll kind of help out and arrange things or structure things or add breaks or...it’s pretty collaborative.”
Weiss says that Tucker and Brownstein usually work “...pretty exclusively on the lyrics. I think the music comes first, and then after we have the music, they work on ideas and lyrics, and I think one person will take the reigns and steer it in one direction, and the other person will accommodate their writing to that. But some of the writing of the lyrics happens in the studio, as well.”

Every Sleater-Kinney record manages to touch upon the issues of the day. On “All Hands...” songs like “#1 Must Have” focus on the degrading treatment of women in the media, while other songs have addressed the rape of girls at rock concerts and issues that the band members have witnessed in everyday life. On “One Beat,” it was inevitable that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington would be discussed.
“Yeah, I think it would’ve been really difficult to just sort of ignore what happened, and the time that we were primarily working on the record was September through January, so...What had happened last fall was very prominently in everyone’s minds and thoughts, so I think that Carrie and Corin always write about what's happening in their lives,” says Weiss. Two tracks in particular directly address the attacks. One of those, “Far Away,” features militaristic guitar and drum sounds, Tucker’s trademark shrieking, and an ominous vibe throughout. Featuring the opening lines: “7:30 am nurse the baby on the couch/Then the phone rings/Turn on the T.V./Watch the world explode in flames,” the song addresses the attacks in honest, direct lyrics that articulate the confusion, fear, and sorrow of that day. Weiss says, “I think, as far as ‘Far Away’ goes, I heard Corin say that she really wanted to write a song about September 11 from the perspective of a housewife, which is what she was doing at the time with her baby. She thought that was something that wasn’t going to get said very often.”

The other song, “Combat Rock,” addresses the mood of the country in the months following the attacks, during a time when Attorney General Ashcroft set a witch-hunt tone, restricted civil liberties, and made statements which suggested that to question the government during this time of war would be unpatriotic. The song drips with vitriol, featuring biting lines like “Let's break out our old machines now/It sure is good to see them run again/Oh gentlemen start your engines/And we know where we get the oil from” and “We'll come out with our fists raised/The good old boys are back on top again/And if we let them lead us blindly/The past becomes the future once again.” Weiss explains, “I think, there’s many points in history--pretty much ALL points in American history--where you could write a song like that. It’s just, things were getting so unbearable, and the government was getting so much publicity that the sort of evil nature of government was getting crammed down our throats [laughs].”

Weiss states that the nature of the band, operating on the fringes of the mainstream, is one of the reasons why Sleater-Kinney is free to write such material. “We don’t consider ourselves as part of the mainstream. It gets a little bit irritating when ‘the savior of rock and roll’ has to be a guy singing about nothing, basically,” she says. “That that is looked up to as the ideal can be sort of frustrating. I just try to look elsewhere, you know. There’s bands like Fugazi and X, bands who’ve been writing political music for years and years, and will probably never make it into the mainstream like Eminem [laughs], but I’m not sure the mainstream is really ready right now for anything except sort of blind patriotism.”

Being one of the few bands to tackle such tough topics on their records has earned Sleater-Kinney comparisons to the Clash, which could be a weighty mantel to carry. Weiss, however, says that what the critics say is always put into perspective, and is never carried into the recording studio. “Do people compare us to the Clash? They are one of my all-time favorite bands, so I would never complain about that,” she says, laughing. “We try not to look outside of ourselves for any sort of validation, or, on the same note, it doesn’t really affect us much what people write or what people say. That’s in a perfect world [laugh]. Of course it does affect us, but we really work to try to kind of rise above the chatter. Because, it can be kind of damaging in a way, to read things that explain to you who you are.”

Weiss is also quick to point out that there is far more to Sleater-Kinney than just the serious, political material, saying that their repertoire features plenty of songs that are just good, thrashing rock songs. Referring to their last album, she says that “We were basically just enjoying playing together so much...[and] we needed a few songs that weren’t so heavy, like ‘You’re No Rock’n’Roll Fun’ and ‘Ballad of a Ladyman,’ you know. Although there are a lot of things on ‘All Hands On the Bad One’ that are political in a lot of ways, like ‘Was It A Lie,’ or ‘#1 Must Have,’ which was one of my favorite Corin songs...But even on this record, there’s ‘Oh,’ and ‘Step Aside,’ and ‘Prisstina,’ you know, there are some songs that aren’t political and aren’t really heavy. And we’re sort of always interested in a little ass shaking [laughs]. It’s true! We really are!”

“One Beat” also features some new sounds in the Sleater-Kinney arsenal, such as horns on “Step Aside,” a rollicking, Motown-meets-Punk rocker, and organs on “Prisstina” and “Oh.” The drummer says that the band had a little time to live with the songs before they went into the studio, and were all willing to experiment a little bit.

“[On ‘Step Aside’] we were just thinking horns, and you know, you kind of envision a song. We had demoed the songs, which is something we have never done, we just recorded them in my basement. It gave us time to listen to them in a raw form and kind of envision the things that we wanted to add. And horns just seemed like they would work well on that one.” On “Prisstina,” Stephen Trask, the composer for “Hedwig & the Angry Inch” plays organ and adds the first male background vocal on a Sleater-Kinney disc. Weiss says that “We had met him a couple of times, and he asked us to be involved in a project recently, and we were gonna be in the studio. Because he had asked us sort of recently, he was in our minds, so...[producer] John Goodmanson brought up the idea of maybe extending a couple of the songs to people, to just sort of add things and see if we liked it. It’s something we’ve never done before. And so we thought of him. Especially with that song, in particular, that song seemed to lend itself to some sort of campy, decadent feel.”
One thing that the band members were wary of during the recording of “One Beat” was retreading old ground. In terms of not repeating themselves, Weiss said that “It’s difficult. It’s really difficult. Obviously, we speak this certain language between the instruments, primarily two guitars and drums...[and] that limits us in certain ways. But we try not to rehash the same ideas over and over. It’s really challenging. This record was laborious to write. We didn’t just put down the first thing that we thought of and go with that. We really poured over the songs and tried to make them as rich as possible. And as solid as possible, as far as like their structure. We wanted them to be a really solid group of songs.”

With the American leg of the tour behind them, and dates in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan coming up, Weiss says that getting back on the road has been “really good, really fun.” After each show, the band has been going out into the crowds, working the merchandise tables, and mingling with their fans, which Weiss says is “something I’ve been doing since I’ve been playing rock shows. I like getting to talk to the kids.” This tour has also seen the band hiring a sound monitor engineer for the first time, which “for a band can determine if it’s a good show and a bad show,“ and which has saved Corin and Carrie from losing their voices. Weiss says the band is looking forward to the next leg of the tour, and they are also looking toward early next year, when they will make another swing through the States. Despite the excitement over playing the new songs, Weiss says that the band will continue to compose new material over the next few months, explaining that “We’re not the kind of band that can go on tour for two years playing the same songs. We’d kill each other [laughs].”

-Neal Alpert