Babes In Toyland - The Cavewomen's Club

It all began with Frightwig (San Francisco, 1982-1986), the first fox-core band in history: their role was to ferry the female hard rock of The Runaways and Joan Jett (Los Angeles, 1975-1979: in England there were Girlschool) from the Seventies into the Eighties, and through them into the Nineties, where it morphed into the "riot grrrl" movement. Naturally, Frightwig updated the stale old hard rock vocabulary for the age of indie and hardcore. Wendy Williams' Plasmatics (New York, 1979-1983) and L7 (Los Angeles, 1985) were respectively the most direct predecessors and successors of Frightwig. In this story, it fell to Babes In Toyland (Minneapolis, 1987-1997) to gather up this long-standing legacy and push it to its most extreme and fully realized forms. Babes In Toyland alone were then relatively able to shift the center of gravity of the genre in general, and of fox-core in particular, from the West Coast (California) to the provinces - however well-stocked with ferment Minneapolis was and still is. The genre's homeland, the West Coast, between Seattle and Los Angeles, would then fully reclaim it with the various riot grrrl bands of the early Nineties (Hole, 7 Year Bitch, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Sleater-Kinney).

Babes In Toyland are incomprehensible without Frightwig. Like them, their sound bears no comparison, even remotely, to the speed and power of male hardcore or metal (not least because of a deliberately handicapped drum style). Like them, they are open to new wave influences (Siouxsie And The Banshees) and to the influences that new wave itself absorbed (tribalism, boogie, funk, gospel). Just as Frightwig relied on the voice of Cecilia Lynch, Babes In Toyland lean on the voice of Kat Bjelland: voices so fast and powerful that they outdo their male counterparts. Kat Bjelland, however, is even more extreme than Cecilia Lynch. Only the great Wendy Williams can really be considered her equivalent.

Compared to Frightwig, Babes In Toyland are on one hand capable of writing splendid songs (indeed, in this respect, they are arguably the greatest all-female band of all time), and on the other they absorbed heavy metal more in the guise of L7 than of the Plasmatics, originally pairing it with the noise of Sonic Youth.

All these elements, summed up in the name Babes In Toyland, would become the characteristic expressive form of the music of the feminist riot grrrl movement, born in 1991 in Seattle, made up of women in their twenties and driven by an agenda full of contradictions (against feminists, pro-abortion, pro-marriage and monogamy, pro-lesbianism) - understandable, though, coming from those who have been victims of rape, drugs, and punk living, and who now want nothing more to do with sex or alcohol: it has also been called "rape culture" (in the US alone, 2,000 women are raped every day; more than half of them minors).

Riot grrrl were on one hand punk (since their struggle was eminently social) - in this sense the only true representatives of American punk, since hardcore was never a social struggle - and on the other hand they were nonetheless children of the hardcore generation (their social struggle was driven by a whole set of deeply intimate, subjective motives and goals).

All the themes of riot grrrl matched those of Babes In Toyland perfectly, themes that had already appeared, albeit in a more masculine form, in Wendy Williams, and, albeit more playfully, in Joan Jett. The music of riot grrrl - the means of exorcising violence actually suffered through a different, now self-inflicted violence, cathartic and ritualistic - was the grunge of the same era. Musically speaking, riot grrrl meant grunge in female form. And one could say that Babes In Toyland were playing an elaborate, early form of grunge avant la lettre. After all, the boys of grunge too are, more or less metaphorically, abuse victims seeking, through music, confession and comfort.

As happens with true artists, the message of Babes In Toyland cannot, however, be reduced to the riot grrrl movement alone, but takes on a universal, existential meaning.

Kat Bjelland was born in Oregon. After an adolescence of trauma, loneliness and poverty, in the mid-Eighties, in San Francisco (where Frightwig were active), barely into her twenties, she formed Sugar Baby Doll. The experience lasted only a few months and obviously left no recordings behind, but that name would represent the common denominator of the main riot grrrl bands: Bjelland was in fact joined by Courtney Love (later of Hole) and Jennifer Finch (later of L7). In Italian Whorenuns, one of the various bands from Bjelland's San Francisco apprenticeship, we find Janis Tanaka (future member of Stone Fox).

Having left San Francisco for the less consumerist Minneapolis, Bjelland met Lori Barbero, a waitress coming off an adolescence of excess (drugs, sex, alcohol). It was 1987, and Babes In Toyland were born.

Babes In Toyland's label was, naturally, Twin/Tone, a beacon since way back in 1977 for independent and hard rock bands from Minneapolis and beyond (Suicide Commandos, Suburbs, Replacements, Magnolias, Soul Asylum, Agitpop, Halo Of Flies, Skunk)

Spanking Machine (1990) LP, 11 tracks, 35 minutes.

Kat Bjelland: Guitar, Vocals

Lori Barbero: Drums, Vocals

Michelle Leon: Bass

Jack Endino: Producer, Engineer, Mixing (ex Skin Yard – Seattle's proto-grunge band -, the quintessential grunge producer, having worked with Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Tad)

The masterpieces are: “Dust Cake Boy” [- 3:31], an unsurpassable gem of outrage in both form and content: fast, powerful, screamed to the point of incredulity, yet still able to nail a tear-jerking chorus; “Fork Down Throat” [- 3:54], no less extreme, built on the opposition between music in steady crescendo and a voice, truly phenomenal, capable of carrying everything on its own and dictating the whole track: here Bjelland reaches levels of power and shrillness never matched again, not only by her but by any other female voice – or male, for that matter – in living memory: it's a holocaust in the stone age.

The other tracks are: “Swamp Pussy” [- 2:24], a manual of the Babes In Toyland sound: epileptic guitar work, tribal drumming, slow and mighty bass, monstrous vocals; “He’s My Thing” [- 2:56], which speeds up and radicalizes the nerve-wracking formula a great deal, making it fierce, compelling, heavy; “Vomit Heart” [- 2:49], a slow track amid overflowing noise, dark riffs, a funereal rhythm section, and a vocal more tragic and mournful than ever; “Never” [- 3:16], the dutiful – and thoroughly successful – tribute paid to Sonic Youth, even pushed further into fatalistic nihilism; “Boto (W) Rap” [- 2:31], whose articulation – and rhythms – could make Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction envious; “Dogg” [- 3:53], sung by Barbero, is heavily influenced by Siouxsie And The Banshees, but boasts one of the most dejected and mournful riffs in history and is a slow, inexorable, distorted requiem from the other world; “Pain In My Heart” [- 3:59], which could drink Hole and any other would-be riot grrrl under the table, and already contains within it all the subsequent tribal-core of Fontanelle; “Lashes” [- 3:46], which moves from the epic to a bitter mockery ranging from fierce deflagration to fragile crystal; “You’re Right” [- 3:07], which once again tests the peculiarities of a tribal ensemble in rhythm, acid and noisy in the guitar, ogre-like in the vocal.

Fontanelle (1992) LP, 15 tracks, 37 minutes.

Kat Bjelland: Guitar, Vocals, Producer

Lori Barbero: Drums, Vocals

Maureen Herman: Bass

Lee Ranaldo: Producer (Sonic Youth's main guitarist, born in 1956 in New York: this is one of his rare production credits).

The album's absolute masterpiece, as well as that of Babes In Toyland, and one of the greatest rock anthems ever, is “Handsome and Gretel” [- 1:50], the ultimate example of the contrast between quiet and loud, opened by a couple of memorable guitar riffs and culminating in the uncontainable “motherfuckers” of the chorus – its cross to bear, however, being a set of drums (perhaps also due to the recording) that sound handicapped.

Inevitably a notch below this peak of immediacy, a whole series of other masterpieces follows: “Bruise Violet” [- 2:52], the most metal – a genre whose prevalence on this album it openly denounces – and feminine track at once; “Real Eyes” [- 2:51], an unflinching flagellation that stages a primal, dark rite of immolation, never denying itself fleeting melodies; “Mother” [- 3:13], finally all-out rushing, leaping from one heaviness to the next right up to the scansion of the central verse.

The other tracks are: “Right Now” [- 2:19], which eats Rage Against The Machine alive – on their own turf; “Bluebell” [- 2:22], the most neurasthenic descent into despair, sublimated in a siren-like vocal, immediately contradicted by exasperated snarls; “Blood” [- 2:44], martial and industrial without losing any of its drive or emotion, always dizzying; “Magick Flute” [- 3:02] – written and sung by Barbero – a sinister voodobilly for the post-industrial age; “Won’t Tell” [- 2:27], the most catastrophic inferno, sweeping away Hole and anyone else who tries to imitate it; “Quiet Room” [- 2:59], a slow instrumental for solo guitar that dampens and dilutes the overall tone – it remains, nonetheless, squarely within the American tradition, like the intros or semi-acoustic ballads of Metallica; “Spun” [- 3:03], yet another variation, still firmly within a tightly cohesive territory, in the great sonic encyclopedia of Babes In Toyland, which after a long prelude hits with devastating, sharply punctuated drum and guitar blasts; “Jungle Train” [- 2:15], which reaches cacophony in a saga of sabbatic screams and instrumental lashings straight out of surrealist avant-garde; “Pearl” [- 1:56], which banishes all verbosity in favor of ever-phenomenal inventions – in this case a frantically sobbing guitar; Gone [- 2:28] closes the album somewhere between Pere Ubu – and all those in rock who have used broken bottles to keep time: Siouxsie And The Banshees included – and Hole, who are no credible champions of screams this visceral (screams, and their delivery, that would be dutifully copied on “Live Through This”).

By early '93 the band had already broken up. They would reunite that same year to record the oddity that is Painkillers (5 studio tracks – Fontanelle outtakes – plus all of Fontanelle in a memorable live performance). 1995 brought the third and final LP, Nemesisters, caught between metal and major-label pressures (Warner, replacing Reprise, the label founded in 1960 by Frank Sinatra, with whom they had been signed since the days of Fontanelle: Reprise, however, belongs to Warner).

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