Courtney Michelle Love is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, and actress. A figure in the alternative and grunge scenes of the 1990s, her career has spanned four decades. She rose to prominence as the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989. Love has drawn public attention for her uninhibited live performances and confrontational lyrics, as well as her highly publicized personal life following her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. In 2020, NME named her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture of the last 30 years.
Hole was an American alternative rock band formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1989. It was founded by singer and guitarist Courtney Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson. It had several different bassists and drummers, the most prolific being drummer Patty Schemel, and bassists Kristen Pfaff and Melissa Auf der Maur. Hole released a total of four studio albums between two incarnations spanning the 1990s and early-2010s and became one of the most commercially successful rock bands in history fronted by a woman.
Huggy Bear were an English riot grrrl band, formed in 1991 and based in Brighton.
K Records is an independent record label in Olympia, Washington founded in 1982. Artists on the label included early releases by Beck, Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. The record label has been called "key to the development of independent music" since the 1980s.
Kathleen Hanna is an American singer, musician and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, and punk zine writer. In the early-to-mid-1990s, she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, and then fronted Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2010, she formed The Julie Ruin.
Tobi Celeste Vail is an American independent musician, music critic and feminist activist from Olympia, Washington. She was a central figure in the riot grrl scene—she coined the spelling of "grrl"—and she started the zine Jigsaw. A drummer, guitarist and singer, she was a founding member of the band Bikini Kill. Vail has collaborated in several other bands figuring in the Olympia music scene. Vail writes for eMusic.
An all-female band is a musical group in popular music that is exclusively composed of female musicians. This is distinct from a girl group, in which the female members are solely vocalists, though this terminology is not universally followed. While all-male bands are common in many rock and pop scenes, all-female bands are less common.
Kinderwhore is a fashion style most notably worn by some female grunge and alternative rock musicians in the US during the early to mid-1990s. The style is characterized through the combination of cute, feminine fashion items like babydoll and Peter Pan collared dresses, with more adult aspects like smudged red lipstick and dark eye makeup. It has its origins in the mid-1980s band Pagan Babies, which featured future Babes in Toyland vocalist/guitarist Kat Bjelland and future Hole vocalist/guitarist Courtney Love, who lived together and shared clothes. Following the band's disbandment, the two's subsequent bands achieved significant mainstream success and led to the fashion being popularised amongst the general public and being referenced by high fashion designers including Marc Jacobs.
Teen pop is a subgenre of pop music that is created, marketed and oriented towards preteens and teenagers. Often, the artists themselves are teenagers during their breakout. While it can involve influences from a wide array of musical genres, it remains a subset of commercial pop, focusing on catchy melodies and marketability. Teen pop’s lyrics emphasize themes that teenagers can relate to, such as love, growing up, or partying. The image of the artist as an aspirational or desirable teenage figure is a crucial element of the genre, highlighting their visual appeal.
Cock rock is a description of rock music that emphasizes an aggressive form of male sexuality. The style developed in the later 1960s, came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, and continues into the present day.
The port city of Olympia, Washington, has been a center of post-hardcore, anti-folk, and other youth-oriented musical genres since the late 1970s. Before this period, Olympia's The Fleetwoods had several Billboard chart successes between 1959 and 1963. Olympia saw a rise in feminism in the music industry, where artists commonly addressed rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, racism, patriarchy, classism, anarchism, and female empowerment in their songs. It was a center for the riot grrrl movement of the early 1990s, which featured Bikini Kill and Bratmobile.
Pretty on the Inside is the debut studio album by American alternative rock band Hole, released on September 17, 1991, in the United States on Caroline Records. Produced by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and Gumball frontman Don Fleming, the album was Hole's first major label release after the band's formation in 1989 by vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist Courtney Love and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson.
Sharon Ann Cheslow is an American musician, composer, artist, writer, photographer, educator, and archivist. In 1981, she formed Chalk Circle, Washington, D.C.'s first all-female punk band. She has since become an accomplished artist who works between different mediums, mostly sound-based.
Not Bad for a Girl is a documentary on women musicians of the 1990s from the indie rock music genre grunge and riot grrrl and celebrates madness, creativity, and gender play. It was written, directed, produced and shot by rock phenomenologist feminist Lisa Rose Apramian, edited, shot and co-produced by drummer Kyle C. Kyle and co-produced by Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. A DVD, with a booklet, was available for purchase at the official website and a release date for the sequel book is still in the works as of 2019.
The Beautiful Monsters Tour was a North American concert tour co-headlined by American rock bands Hole and Marilyn Manson. Launched in support of each band's respective third full-length studio LPs, 1998's Celebrity Skin and Mechanical Animals, the tour was planned to run from February 28, 1999, until April 27, with 37 shows confirmed. However, due to a highly publicized altercation between the bands' respective lead vocalists, the tour only visited arenas until March 14, for a total of 9 shows before Hole withdrew from the bill. The tour garnered a large amount of media attention and was billed by MTV as a "potentially volatile mix" due to the public feud between each band's outspoken vocalist.
Skinned Teen was a riot grrrl band from London, England, active in the early 1990s. They have been cited as an inspiration by Beth Ditto, Kathleen Hanna, Gina Birch and Josephine Olausson of Love Is All.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington, and the greater Pacific Northwest, and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. A subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music, and politics, it is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express anger, rage, and frustration, emotions considered socially acceptable for male songwriters but less commonly for women.
Candice Pedersen co-owned the Olympia, Washington-based independent record label K Records from 1986 to 1999, along with Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening. In 1999, she sold her half of the label to Johnson.
Women have made significant contributions to punk rock music and its subculture since its inception in the 1970s. In contrast to the rock music and heavy metal scenes of the 1970s, which were dominated by men, the anarchic, counter-cultural mindset of the punk scene in mid-and-late 1970s encouraged women to participate. This participation played a role in the historical development of punk music, especially in the US and UK at that time, and continues to influence and enable future generations. Women have participated in the punk scene as lead singers, instrumentalists, as all-female bands, zine contributors and fashion designers.
