Carrie Brownstein is well known for the caricatures she paints — of her contemporaries and of herself.
Her IFC note Portlandia,created with Fred Armisen, premiered its eighth and final season on January 18. The note has grown to be loved by many for its incisive (clear and sharp in analysis or expression) humor and intelligent silliness about the idiosyncracies of the urban left (and resented by some real-life Portlandians for the same reason). Brownstein is currently adapting her 2015 memoir, and starvation Makes Me a Modern Girl,for a Hulu pilot that promises to portray her life and ascent coming of age in the Pacific Northwest, finding a community in the riot grrrl movement and breaking out nationally with her band Sleater-Kinney — with a similar sincerity.
On this episode of It's Been a Minute, and Brownstein reflects on the arc of Portlandia,the relevance of riot grrrl to contemporary conversations about feminism and managing the anxiety that comes with performance.
Interview HighlightsOn Portlandia's critique of "aspirational liberalism"Our note has always been an exploration of well-intentioned people who can often fade about things in a misguided way. The note is kind of culminating at a time when there is a bit of a whiplash after the election of Trump: "Oh, perhaps we were so privileged and had such a sense of progress being inevitable that we overlooked certain things." I think the note in some ways has always kind of tried to obtain at that question of, and what are we overlooking? [And because it] started with this thesis of "The dream is alive" — which was such a,perhaps, fraudulent idealism, and fraudulent sense of utopia — the dream kind of crumbling is not the worst way for us to occupy the final chapter of the note.
On comedy as a performance of privilegeFred is half Venezuelan and a quarter Korean. I am queer; I've been out since my early 20s. So when we're exploring categories of status quo,we're coming at it as people who sort of "pass" in certain situations. Our version of heteronormativity on the note ... is always kind of exploring these categories that we assume are finite and fixed and default. It seems really odd to make default this thing that is so inherently flawed and odd and so easily torn apart. So I think sometimes when people are trying to figure out why the note gets at things in a certain way, people can forget that Fred and I reach from places that are not just, or like,the most "normal people." We're kind of exploring it from the margins a microscopic bit, and exploring the ways that we embody privilege, or that we pass,or that we are able to, you know, or perform whiteness,perform heteronormativity. And we kind of force all of our characters to perform these things ad nauseam until you see the absurdity in these categories.
On riot grrrl's contemporary relevanceIt was a movement that really aimed to middle women's experiences in a very unapologetic way and to bring up the subject of discrimination and exploitation where women had often been the object, particularly in the context of rock music. This sort of put women as the unabashed narrator, or the unabashed protagonist of their own yarn,and actually had a very outsized influence considering how peripheral it was in terms of mainstream music. And there were riot grrrl meetings, women-only meetings people talking about experiences of sexism, or sexual harassment,a lot of analogies to what is going on nowadays. Of course, riot grrrl was a successor of earlier modes of organizing, and definitely instilled in me a boldness that I think I has served me well in my life.
On the return of Sleater-Kinney and dealing with anxietyIt was a band where everyone was trying to play a lead — two vocalists each telling their version of a yarn. Then you had a very powerful drummer trying to make sense of it all. It's making it sound a lot more avant-garde than it was,because in some ways I think that we actually occupy some pretty catchy songs.
A couple of years ago, Sleater-Kinney put out our first record in almost a decade, and No Cities to Love. I had taken the time to reassess and to examine the things that really caused the anxiety. A lot of it was just the fragmentary nature of touring for me. ... Even though onstage I was doing the exact thing I needed to do,which was sort of reaching out to other people and feeling them return that energy and turn that warmth, I also was not at home — my sense of what home was started to really dissipate. And so this lack of stability that caused me a lot of anxiety, and I just kind of worked on that.
Web intern Stefanie Fernández contributed to this yarn. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org