The Comedy of Errors: Bikini Kill - Suck My Left One (13 June 1992)

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I look back on my teenage years with affection, regret, annoyance, humour and embarrassment - just like you’re ideally supposed to.  Some of the embarrassment centres around times when I was desperately looking for guidance on things that mattered to me and realising that the guidance I was reading was written for people older and less naive than me.  Most of all, I hate to retrospectively remember how much things mattered to me when I was a teenager and feeling a sense of isolation and confusion towards these things that didn’t really matter.
In 1993, I was almost touchingly desperate to expand my horizons when it came to pop music.  I’d fallen in love with 1960s music over the previous two years and over the course of the first half of ‘93 I’d listened attentively to the charts and found them....lacking.  I wanted to feel culturally engaged with the times I lived in and one way in which I wanted to do that was to immerse myself in the popular music of the age.  I had just turned 17 and I was impatient to hear music that defined my age.  I should have waited given that the window in which music defines your youth is that one between 16 and 25 years old.  But I couldn’t get behind and celebrate the likes of 2 Unlimited, Shaggy or Ace of Base, so I found myself, circa May 1993 reading an issue of Melody Maker for guidance on groups and releases that I wasn’t aware of because I wasn’t listening to night-time Radio 1.
You may laugh, but it was terrifying and baffling to me.  An onslaught of names, long hair, swearing and blurry gig photos.  Some bands were rhapsodised over, others were dismissed out of hand in viciously curt terms.  I had no frame of reference and while I was gratified to see that the few bands I knew and liked that inherited this inky, alternative world (Saint Etienne, Therapy? and would you believe it, World Party) were generally regarded as a good thing, I was floundering in the face of the likes of Porno for Pyros and as for this thing called Riot grrrl that was popping up in connection to several female-fronted bands in the issue, all I could tell, without hearing any of the music was that it had nothing but contempt for weaklings like me.  I sloped away uniformed, uninspired and depressed for reasons that seem horrendously facile to me now, but which genuinely mattered to me then.  I felt like an outsider in my own time looking for something trivial but essential, which is what pop music basically is after all.  It wouldn’t be until a year later that I would find the scene I was looking for in Britpop and then older, wiser and a little more sure of how I fitted into the times I lived in, I opened doors to bands and music which had terrified me when reading about it on the page a year earlier.

It’s often said that written horror fiction is scarier than visual horror movies because the imagination
runs more wildly without visual or aural stimulus.  This was definitely the case for me when I read
that Melody Maker issue in 1993.  Porno for Pyros turned up on Later....with Jools Holland in the summer of 1993 and were beguilingly strange, but not in the least bit scary.  I find myself wincing with embarrassment at my callow behaviour though when considering that if I had been listening to John Peel on 13/6/92, then Riot grrrl would have held no fears for me at all upon hearing the music connected with it.  At the time it was either seen as grunge music for female-led bands or a politically charged feminist musical movement.  Fun, frolics and love didn’t appear to be on the agenda for most Riot grrrl bands.  Indeed, John Peel was moved to comment, “Uncompromising would appear to sum
up Bikini Kill” after playing Suck My Left One on this evening’s show.  This may very well be the first Riot grrrl scene track that I’ve heard him play and if I had heard it on that June night, 28 years ago, I may very well have nailed my colours to the Riot grrrl mast even while being aware of how ridiculous I would have looked.
Sonically, there was nothing new in Riot grrrl or in what what Bikini Kill were doing.  Peel may very well have played similarly cut music on Radio 1 out of US girl groups in the late 1970s.  But what Bikini Kill did, they did very well and the subject content cuts very close to the bone, closer even than their influences may have been permitted to get away with 15 years earlier..  The theme of the song is a classic power-struggle with an authority figure in the home, in this case, daughter/father battles.  However, the track contains disturbing overtones, in the second verse that the relationship between Daddy and his daughters is an incestuous one, and it’s not altogether clear in the final verse whether the mother of the house is complicit in what’s going on or not.  Certainly the monotone repetition of the word “fine” in response to the apparent threat of “Wait until your father gets home” suggests that the subject of the song has been here many times before.  Furthermore the barked response of the title line suggests a determination to take control of this horrific situation and not be merely a passive submissive to the abuse.  Singer, Kathleen Hanna may have drawn on her own difficult relationship with her father and experiences working at a domestic violence shelter.  Her extraordinary vocal performance sees her swing between sounding like an off key pre-possession Regan MacNeil through most of the song only to give it her best Pazuzu on the chorus lines.

“We wanted women to say, ‘That sounds like a real woman’s voice.’  It’s not covered in reverb, I don’t sound like some far away thing.  I sound like a real woman who is pissed off one second, and then maybe a little girly the next. Those two things can be right next to one another.  That’s one thing I learned; you have to keep the pimples in.” Kathleen Hanna in a 2012 interview with AV Club

Peel played Suck My Left One from a four track EP featuring 3 other bands called There’s a Dyke in the Pit released by Outpunk Records.  It was the opening track and is by far the best thing on it.  The video above features the complete EP.  The other tracks are Manipulate by Tribe 8, Soiled Princess by. Lucy Stoners, which is very good and Dead Men Don’t Rape by 7 Year Bitch.

Video courtesy of Ivy Ros.



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