Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
A Memoir
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one of the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance. With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. They would be cited as "America's best rock band" by legendary music critic Greil Marcus for their defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations, and redefined notions of gender in rock.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era's flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later.
With deft, lucid prose Brownstein proves herself as formidable on the page as on the stage. Accessibly raw, honest and heartfelt, this book captures the experience of being a young woman, a born performer and an outsider, and ultimately finding one's true calling through hard work, courage and the intoxicating power of rock and roll.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This strikingly expressive memoir from Brownstein, a writer, actress, and guitarist who created the critically acclaimed television show Portlandia, gambols over the sometimes steep hills of the quest for self-definition. Brownstein attended her first rock concert in fifth grade; she went to see Madonna, and was enough of fan to even try dressing like the star. Her mother nixed her outfit, but Madonna's show was still a "moment I'll never forget," she writes, "a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness." Struggling though a chaotic family life, she finds herself through music, eventually co-founding the group Sleater-Kinney with her friend and then-lover, Corin Tucker. In the beginning, music mimics the turbulence in her life, as the band searches for ways to practice, write songs, cohere as a group, get along with one another, and establish themselves in the Seattle music scene as well as outside the US. As their reputation builds and they take their place at the forefront of the Riot Grrrls movement, Brownstein writes, "the unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth... found a home in music." Brownstein is unafraid to reveal her emotional vulnerability, making this one of the smartest and most articulate music memoirs in recent years.