A big part of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is issue #5 of the zine Final Grrrl created by Billie Jacobs. As I’ve written elsewhere, Billie’s voice in the zine is in many ways the farthest from my own, and so it was the one for which I had to do the most research. I want to share with you a little bit about what I found when I set about fleshing out Billie’s background.
Billie’s passion is horror movies. That’s what fills her thoughts most of the time. When her imagination or her creativity is sparked, it’s usually in relation to horror. That desire for thrills and chills is what fuels her reactor’s core. It provides energy, but it doesn’t entirely translate into identity.
As more and more people around her expected her to fit in somewhere, whether or not they had specific ideas about where, Billie resisted most of the conventional cliques. They didn’t want her and she didn’t see herself with them, even though she felt a desire to belong somewhere. She finally found what she was looking for when she came across a copy of someone else’s Riot Grrrl zine at her uncle’s copy shop.
Riot Grrrl is a musical movement rooted in punk aesthetics and driven by feminism. It began in the Pacific Northwest and in Washington, D.C. when young women began forming bands that would allow them to perform and express themselves in ways that they had seen young men doing . Many of them had been going to punk shows for years, but they didn’t feel like they belonged. They often found themselves relegated to the back of the venue. As Riot Grrrl started to build momentum, bands like Bikini Kill would often announce from the stage, “Girls to the front,” emphasizing that their shows were places where women were fully empowered to rock out.
More than a type of music, Riot Grrrl also encompassed a vital streak of political activism that focused on feminism and especially on protecting girls and women from abuse, but it quickly grew to include additional concerns like racism, homophobia, and ableism. Some of this growth was a reflection of the diverse interests of the women who made up the movement, while other aspects of it only grew after some members pointed out the shortcomings of the movement. For example, Riot Grrrl’s message and image were resoundingly straight and white at first, and it took some time for those who were viewed as leaders to recognize how that messaging could exclude some people who wanted to contribute. All of this activism was carried out in the form of loosely organized chapters where members could meet up for mutual support and planning, but more crucially it took place through the mail in the form of zines.
My go-to sources for Riot Grrrl history and aesthetics were two books and a documentary (in addition to a lot of listening to songs by Riot Grrrl bands and reading lyrics).
The Riot Grrrl Collection is a fantastically designed full-color collection of zine material, posters, and other printed ephemera from the movement’s heyday. This book gave me a crystal clear picture of the kinds of things that Billie would have been reading after she sent her $1 off in the mail to get a back issue of Girl Germs or the latest copy of Bikini Kill. It also comes with a fascinating introductory essay by Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre.
To get a better understanding of the bigger picture, I read Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. This book lays out the history, personalities, accomplishments, drama, and eventual decline from the peak of the Riot Grrrl movement in the mid-1990s, around that time that Billie puts together issue #5 of her own zine, Final Grrrl. If you’re interested in more than just the Wikipedia entry on Riot Grrrl, then this is perhaps the best consolidated resource.
But for a more complete sensory immersion in Riot Grrrl, I recommend Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary The Punk Singer. This doc focuses on the story of Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, as the spine of the film, but it also manages to establish a lot of the context for the wider movement. Most important for me, it presents the sights and sounds of Riot Grrrl together, most often through the voices of the women who made it happen. It’s fascinating and compelling, and I highly recommend it as a place to start, if you find yourself wanting to know more about Riot Grrrl.
Of course, there’s a ton more out there. In particular, I recommend looking into the amazing archiving and teaching work being done by people like Dr. Alana Kumbier. Alana and I knew each other in graduate school, and I’m fairly certain her work is where I became aware of Riot Grrrl zine culture in the first place. She has been involved in researching and supporting archives of zines and other ephemera, particularly related to queer communities and producers (like QZAP – The Queer Zine Archive Project), and she has co-taught courses on Riot Grrrl and zines.