Sleater-Kinney Aren’t Interested In Making Music By Consensus
"We can't do anything but make the music we want to make, do the things we want to do, and hope that people believe in it, or that the songs resonate with them."
“I think everything feels political now,” says Carrie Brownstein. “If you are not taking a stand against something, then you are happily agreeing with the status quo. [And] the status quo is so clearly flawed. The status quo is so clearly keeping people oppressed and subjugated.”
“The reason people want to know [if] something is political, [well] it’s not even that they want to know it’s political. They just want to know that you are awake and alive and you don’t necessarily think that where we’re going is okay… people are craving a voice, a soundtrack.”
Brownstein is chatting about how art is increasingly sold-in as ‘political’. It’s a term she recently rejected for The Centre Won’t Hold, Sleater-Kinney’s just-released ninth album.
“If people thought Sleater-Kinney was gonna put out some loud, anti-Trump record, they would be misguided,” she told The Guardian journalist Laura Snapes. “We’ve been addressing the #MeToo movement and shitty patriarchal systems of injustice and subjugation since 1995!”
But still, there’s a readiness to configure The Centre Won’t Hold as their first ‘post-Trump’ record, one decidedly influenced by our current times. The album’s title doesn’t help; the phrase, a line from Yeats’ 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, appeared in headlines in 2016 more than any other year in history. It captures a mood, and so does the album, which, of course, is political, in the sense that the personal always is.
It thrashes between cold electronic-guitars, aggressive assembly lines and somber, lonely ballads; there is a cohesive centre, but it’s tonal, the reverberations of a 20-year plus hunger.
“This record is both political, and personal — probably more personal than anything in while, song wise,” Brownstein says. “In some ways it’s a rumination of anger, but it explores anger in terms of, ‘How does anger toxify a body?’, ‘How does it get inside you and make you bad and passionate?’ .”
Produced by St. Vincent (Annie Clark), The Centre Won’t Hold is decidedly more jagged than other records. It thrashes between cold electronic-guitars, aggressive assembly lines and somber, lonely ballads; there is a cohesive centre, but it’s tonal, the reverberations of a 20-year plus hunger.
“[‘The Centre Won’t Hold”s title and chorus] was a refrain that we kept thinking about as we recorded the rest of the album,” she says. “In itself, [it’s] the thematic crux of the record. It felt like it could carry the weight of our grief and despair, and it could encompass all of the fractured-ness and tumultuous-ness that we were addressing.”
Of course, the title carries a semi-ironic weight too. Just a month before the album was released, long-time drummer Janet Weiss announced she was leaving the band. After it was announced, conspiracies ran-wild. Fans decided, after studying her facial expressions on TV performances, that Weiss was bored with Sleater-Kinney’s new St. Vincent-tinted sound. While many will analyse the album for clues, the answer is self-evident: people and sounds change, centres shift, but you keep on.
The Future Is Here
Sleater-Kinney began working on The Centre Won’t Hold last January. They planned to work with many producers, but found a groove with St. Vincent, who they’d all known for years (and Brownstein had once dated).
“We felt a kinship with her,” says Brownstein. “We have a mutual admiration for one another. I think she really understands the strength of the band, but is unafraid to take the tools within Sleater-Kinney and reconfigure them, which is something we are always interested in doing with each album…There was a lot of joy in the making the record, and a lot of challenging one another and pushing one another. It felt like a true collaboration.”
The pushing lands The Centre Won’t Hold somewhere between the psycho-sexual pop of Clark’s Masseduction and the band’s own trademark of Tucker and Brownstein’s guitars and distinct, battling vocals. The result is cleaner (poppier, arguably), with more Clark than Weiss coming through, though her drums — the key to so many of the band’s biggest songs — still have their moments. But the album’s biggest shift might be the way it was recorded, Brownstein says.
“Sleater-Kinney is a band that’s used to going into the studio of the process of documentation,” she says. “[Usually], all the songs have been prewritten — the arrangement was pretty close to being done, and we would go in and lay down all the tracks. In this case when songs were done, they were demoed, but Annie wanted to treat each one as its own planet. It was more of a process of discovery, whereas some songs would reveal themselves very similar to the demo.”
Brownstein is aware not all fans will be along for the ride. She doesn’t expect them to be.
“I’m in a band that people feel a sense of ownership over, that they feel a connection with and feel close to, but you can’t make music by consensus.”
“I’m in a band that people feel a sense of ownership over, that they feel a connection with and feel close to, but you can’t make music by consensus,” she says “Each listener brings their own life, history, person, relationship to a song, to an album. If we try to cater to all of that individuality, we would never ever succeed. We can’t do anything but make the music we want to make, do the things we want to do, and hope that people believe in it, or that the songs resonate with them.”
“It really boils down to that. I don’t expect, when I listen to a Nick Cave record, I don’t think or hope he considered all his fans opinions when he made his record. That is not what I want from artists, period. I want them to do something that comes from a place that has heart, and integrity, and meaning to them. I will find my way into it, or I won’t. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like that artist, it just means that maybe this record I don’t connect to as much.”
“When I think about other forms of art, artists get to have mid-periods. You have actors, directors, they have their early period, their mid-period, and their late period. I’m very excited to be in the mid-period of Sleater-Kinney.”
Sleater-Kinney is defying the odds just by having a mid period. There are few ’90s rock bands still going (and those who are, mostly shouldn’t be). There are even fewer female-fronted ones. It’s weary work, but powerful, too, as reflected in Brownstein’s favourite lyric on the album, in the track ‘LOVE’: “There’s nothing more frightening, nothing more obscene than a well worn body demanding to be seen”.
“That song is not just a loose homage to the band itself, but speaks to other forms of collaboration,” she says. “That lyric in particular speaks to the body as a means of resistance. The bodies that are worn down by depression, oppression, trauma, chaos [are still] asking to be seen, making themselves visible.”
Sleater-Kinney’s The Centre Won’t Hold is out now via Milk! Records.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio.