Scabs grow thicker by the years

The Real Janelle and its titular song originated as the spontaneous response to Weasel’s reductive and sexist caricature of ‘Janelle.’ After hearing his song, Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe recalls saying, “‘We can write a better song.’ It became a fake war against those guys. I think I just wrote it right then and there in the van.”

In Bratmobile’s version, “The Real Janelle” – which Weasel refuted with the pettiest of clap-backs, “The Last Janelle” – Wolfe sings the opening lines, “She’s so swell / Oh Janelle! / Bennie Weasel, go to hell.” “I’ll stand by it,” she says today. Bratmobile reclaimed Janelle, who came to represent women in punk, as well as a nod to their real friend Janelle Blarg. In fact, on the cover of the album and reissue is Janelle Blarg herself, zine artist and former Bratmobile roadie, posing cool as a cucumber with a lollipop in her mouth in front of a punk house in San Diego.

As one of the leading bands of the Riot Grrrl movement, Bratmobile defended real people as much as the more symbolic ‘women’ against patriarchy out of necessity. A few months after they recorded The Real Janelle, the band left for England to tour with Huggy Bear – the Riot Grrrls across the pond – and to record the Peel Sessions. Weeks before they left, a man raped and murdered Mia Zapata of The Gits in Seattle. Her death devastated the Pacific Northwest music scene, sending reverberations throughout the genre for years to come. Joan Jett created a band called Evil Stig, which is ‘Gits Live’ spelt backwards. The hardcore band 7 Year Bitch titled their second album ¡Viva Zapata!. Even though the band wrote the lyrics earlier, that context affected the Peel Session recordings: “It’s a reminder of violence against women and how it affects all of us,” Wolfe tells me. “That was something that was on our minds.”

Music has the power to influence its listeners because they learn the words before they learn what the words mean. We can’t help but identify with a singer, the residue of their message left in our minds. Bratmobile’s signature take on punk rock-surf rock buoyantly uplifts their feminist message while tossing abusive men to the floor. Even the name Bratmobile reclaims a totem powerhouse of boyhood – Batman and his Batmobile – for girls.

In the song “Brat Girl” the band attacked the Spur Posse, a gang of boys in the Los Angeles area who sexually assaulted girls for points, by throwing their sexism back in their faces: “I’m gonna throw this knife through your chest / We’re gonna kill those Spur Posse Boys / It’s the surest way to your heart little boy.” And speared abusive patriarchal fathers in “And I Live In A Town Where The Boys Amputate Their Hearts” (titled “Make Me Miss America” in the Peel Sessions) – “Rub her face in glass, Dad / Don’t care, don’t care / Try to kick some ass, Dad / Don’t care, don’t care.”

Wolfe’s playfully melodic voice metabolizes the harm of domestic violence so the rest of us could listen and feel relief. 30 years later, that relief resounds all the same.

In commemoration of their legacy, the band are re-releasing their 1994 album The Real Janelle on vinyl via Kill Rock Stars this month, along with the Peel Sessions. The Real Janelle represented a sonic shift for the band. Pottymouth, Bratmobile’s first album, offers a fuzzy relic of their early music rejecting the scuzzy men of punk. As the more refined sequel, The Real Janelle forecasted their endurance as a band 30 years later. After The Real Janelle, Bratmobile released several more albums: Ladies, Women, and Girls in 2000 and Girls Get Busy in 2002. But nothing reverberated as widely as those first two albums.

The violence in Bratmobile’s lyrics creates a natural connection with the pioneering horror punk band The Misfits, and the reissue features Bratmobile’s cover of that band’s song “Where Eagles Dare”, featuring vocals from Kill Rock Stars co-founder Slim Moon. He performs the gregarious male part alongside Allison Wolfe’s more reticent delivery. There were good reasons for her reticence. Let’s not forget this was 1993, folks. That means no googling the lyrics. No streaming. The only way to know the words was if someone had a mixtape with the song on it – leaving room for words lost in translation – or a record with a lyric sheet. The result? “Half the lyrics, I kind of made up,” Wolfe says of the song. When they perform it live, Wolfe kindly prints out a lyric sheet because she likes to have someone sing it with her, but it must be Bratmobile’s version. At Mosswood Meltdown this year, Trent Ruane of The Mummies joined her on stage. See if you can hear the difference.

The lyrical alterations on the reissue don’t stop there. On the Peel Sessions, on vinyl for the first time via this reissue, Allison Wolfe couldn’t swear. Crap! I mean, this was the BBC for fuck’s sake! (‘Bitch,’ of course, is always allowed.) The most obvious omission occurs in “No Other Way”, though I encourage you to search for the others. Bratmobile, or as drummer Molly Neuman called the band jokingly, Blurmobile, performs a brief cover of britpop band Blur’s song “No Other Way” as a segue to “No You Don’t”. In the middle of “Panik”, Wolfe breaks into an improvisational ditty of the “Hey Mickey!” chorus. Such spontaneity exists only in recorded live performances. Also on the Peel Sessions, the songs “Bitch Theme” and “Panik”, squeezed in the middle of Pottymouth, are offered high quality remakes. “You’re such a bitch” from the former rings out louder, and the queer panic in “Panik” becomes a visceral fantasy.

In the intervening years between when The Real Janelle came out in 1994 and now, Bratmobile’s lyrics have remained upsettingly relevant. In fact, women in America have fewer rights than they did 30 years ago since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The only thing that hasn’t aged as well is the soft dig at Courtney Love, Hole’s lead singer, in “Make Me Miss America” (“Courtney kissed me / I won’t tell”) – plus, I guess, the technologically outdated reference to having your number scrawled on the wall.

To talk about Bratmobile now is to swoon amidst a global legacy. Of course Bratmobile has contributed to the canon of Riot Grrrl and feminist punk, but it’s the effect they had on individuals that underscores their impact. In the middle of a belated obsession with Riot Grrrl, I attended my first ever concert by myself. It was a Bleached show at the Lodgeroom in Los Angeles. Allison Wolfe was the MC, it was her birthday, and The Linda Lindas (before they were The Linda Lindas) whistled along to Bleached’s song “Hard To Kill”.

Wolfe remembers that night: “That was such a joyous show,” she says, but for a very different reason. “I remember [Bleached] got this awesome vegan cake. If you sell out The Lodgeroom you get a vegan cake… Because it was my birthday, Bleached almost let me go home with it.” Critics, music nerds, zinesters, academics, and feminist writers have all touched on the impact and meaning of Bratmobile and Riot Grrrl – mostly flattering and inspirational, yet often rightly critical of its lack of intersectionality – but it’s the people behind the movements that made it what it was. Their creativity, lyrics, and zines have inspired people all over the world. They built on the genre of feminist punk rock, started in earnest by bands like Frightwig, The Brat, and The Raincoats. After that Bleached show at The Lodgeroom, I began driving two hours from my dorm room in East LA nearly every weekend to see shows in the city. Allison Wolfe – her voice in Bratmobile and continued presence in the music scene – made music real to me, something I could touch and feel.

Wolfe has her own origin story of the night music became something she could do: “There were a lot of shows that were pivotal for me, but one I really remember was in high school. There was this band and everyone was like, ‘You should go to this show.’ The band was called Skid Row. They were from Aberdeen, it was their first time playing in Olympia, and it was my first night to stay out on a school night. I went and there weren’t that many people there… And it was Nirvana. Nirvana was called Skid Row for at least a couple years before they changed their name.”

But Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and her music venue/art space Reko Muse in Olympia gets the credit for inspiring Wolfe to start a band: “I remember seeing her band, which was called Viva Knieval. I don’t remember if it was band practice or if they were playing a show, but she was just screaming and yelling. It was intense. That same summer I saw Calamity Jane, an all-girl band who formed at Evergreen State College. They were more like garage rock – snarly – and I loved them. Those two shows, summer of ‘89 in Olympia at Reko Muse, made me kind of start thinking, ‘Oh, girls doing this, okay.’” Wolfe and Bratmobile picked up where those bands left off. The Linda Lindas, Big Joanie, PISS, and an abundance of other bands create the new voices of punk rock feminism, all inspired to do as Bratmobile did for the next generation but with their own unique interpretations.

Fans of Riot Grrrl worship Bratmobile, but the band has never gotten the recognition they deserve. Numerous man-bands from the same era return to the stages of huge festivals. They rake in the cash for standing there and playing the hits. Hello! Allison Wolfe does cartwheels on stage and would like to stop having to prove herself.

“I think that in our culture women get put out to pasture at a pretty early age,” Wolfe tells me. “Once you hit your forties, you’re done. None of us feel done.” Until Bratmobile’s lyrics become truly outdated, they will keep having to prove their mettle – a journey towards which they will continue as long as they have to. “Scabs grow thicker by the years / I don’t care,” Wolfe projected in “I Live In A Town Where The Boys Amputate Their Hearts”. Forevermore, Bratmobile’s legacy and the enduring voice of Riot Grrrl is impossible to kill. This vinyl reissue of The Real Janelle makes that message tangible.