Shouting Out Loud
Lives of The Raincoats
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- 2,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A must-read about these punk trailblazers' KATHLEEN HANNA
Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians.
Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats tells their astonishing story in three extraordinary lives. In The Raincoats' first life, they recorded three full-length albums now regarded as classics and were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. Nearly a decade later in 1992, the band's second life took off when Kurt Cobain's love of the band catalysed their renaissance.
In 2001, The Raincoats emerged from their five-year hiatus into their third and ongoing iteration marked by performances in art museums such as New York's MoMA, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery. The Raincoats have and continue to be a singular phenomenon and influence for so many.
Featuring exclusive interviews and never-before-seen images from The Raincoats' archive, Shouting Out Loud is the ultimate, authorised biography of this pioneering group of women - and the must-have account of a legendary band that holds a vital place in twentieth and twenty-first century sonic history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this admiring account, music journalist Golden (I Thought I Heard You Speak) frames overlooked British post-punk group the Raincoats as a galvanizing force in alternative music. Founders Ana da Silva and Gina Birch met at Hornsley School of Art in London in 1977 as the city entered a period of creative ferment. Empowered by such all-female groups as the Slits, they formed a band that harnessed punk's "tremendous energy" for an uncommercial and sometimes unorthodox sound. The group started out in London squats before accruing a modest but devoted following. Later, they even spurred Bikini Kill to reunite to play at a Raincoats show in 2017—Kathleen Hanna remembers thinking, "We'd do ANYTHING for The Raincoats! Even get back together after twenty years!" The author highlights the band's squatter-art-student origins, their influence on Nirvana and other groups, and the challenges of negotiating sexism as an all-female band, with members debating whether their lyrics had to be overtly political to convey a feminist message and whether the term feminist itself was pigeonholing. Such discussions are effectively contextualized against the broader cultural shifts of the period, though Golden's attempts to bring to life the band members themselves often feel belabored ("The fact that Ana and Vicky didn't always see eye to eye... reveals their humanity; they'd had different experiences, and while they saw the world in similar ways, they also saw it differently"). It's an ardent if imperfect ode to post-punk trailblazers.
