Crate Digging with STL Riot Grrrl Revival Quartet The Pink Tax
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All photos by Chance Russell
On a day that I foolishly hoped would be the end of the Midwestern summer’s final heatwave, I found myself driving nearly the full length of Gravois Ave in St. Louis, Missouri. This stretch of road has increasingly become a connective artery between the bars, parks, art galleries, indie theaters, and house venues that comprise the city’s alternative music and art scenes on the south side.
What stands out on this drive is the way it quietly narrates a textured history of St. Louis, with hard shifts between buildings that are occupied and ones that are vacant, between neighborhoods where schools are back in session and ones where former school buildings have been adapted for other purposes, between buildings built of red clay bricks that earned the city its nickname and those where the same materials illustrate the planned institutional abandonment and post-industrial downturn you find throughout the Midwest. In other words, it makes sense why the punks gather in pockets around here. The class politics that catalyzed the subculture are visible in the landscape.
Were we not living in such an unwaveringly car-pilled place, I wonder if it all would have come together differently: not an array of scattered intersections and three-block stretches separated by short drives but, instead, as something more interwoven. But also maybe there is joy in the process of discovery, the way that the hidden parts of the city become known parts of the city as the years of shows, openings, screenings, and general nightlife goings-on show you somewhere new.
My destination on this day lay just past the city line: a punk shop known simply as The Record Space, which sells all forms of physical media and serves as home base for the also matter-of-factly named The Record Label. Since making his Discogs hustle a proper brick-and-mortar storefront in late 2018, owner Don Bastard (who also fronts STL’s Bastard Squad) has continued to scale up the collection he started in his teens.
He also opens the store’s backlot for local shows. An early post-COVID-era bill brought me out originally, but that lineup I’ve unfortunately memoryholed. What I recall of The Record Space as a venue is that it offers a classic pan-Midwestern DIY music experience: chance an illegal parking spot in the adjacent Domino’s back lot, stand for a few hours on hot concrete with only a PBR to cool you down (or Stag, if you’re local), and maybe mosh a bit if you’re young or brave enough to risk it.
As a record store, I remember feeling like I had only cracked its surface in brief changeovers between sets. Amidst the racks of VHS tapes and poster-lined walls, The Record Space seemed to offer both a walk through canonical hardcore eras past and a window into the current musical subculture one must drive by in order to get to it. And sure, I suppose it can be a nostalgia trip in the way that all in-person places you buy things are now: intoxicatingly romanticized, commodity fetishistic, and all that, but there’s something unique about a space managed by someone who’s stayed with St. Louis punk continuously since 1992. Someone’s first Misfits record might be one bin over from a local 7-inch split that the clerk brought in from her own collection.
With these possibilities in mind, I reached out to STL’s The Pink Tax to join me here for a crate-digging session, anticipating the release of their debut EP BIG MOUTH. The all-femme four piece – composed of vocalist Trin, guitarist Jo, bassist Nina, and drummer Bowie – is on the other side of their twenties from me. They caught my eye this February with a cover of Mannequin Pussy’s “I Got Heaven,” which they documented on TikTok against the familiar backdrop of a St. Louis house show basement. Since then, the band has made rounds through the south side scene and recently kicked an incredible set for the twentieth anniversary of All Punks Meet Under The Arch. Less an attempt to demonstrate their punk ball knowledge, our dig documented their shared love for the music, film, and TV that brought them together.
In a section marked ALT & NEW WAVE, the members of The Pink Tax comb through a series of names and titles they respect, but hold at a distance. They shout out Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish as they thumb over it, then nod to a few softer acts like Simple Minds and Mac Demarco. Despite the shifting names we give to this sound in each historical moment, they tell me that what they make stands apart from it. To call The Pink Tax ‘indie’ is a non-engagement with their music, as well as the riot grrrl tradition to which both are indebted.
TRIN: A lot of people try to compare us to indie because they don’t wanna call us punk. They don’t consider riot grrrl to be punk enough.
JO: Because it’s not heavily masculine – and they automatically associate punk with being masculine – they try to group us somewhere else, instead of just being like, “oh, they’re a punk band.”
BOWIE: These are good artists; it’s just not us. It’s almost a backhanded thing. Like, “you’re not good enough to be what I think of as punk, so I’m just gonna bring you down to the umbrella of indie.”
The band’s riot grrrl classicism is apparent in their love for canonical acts like Bratmobile, Mommy Long Legs, and Bikini Kill, as well as contemporary ones like Destroy Boys and Dazey and the Scouts. If the distorted power chords, screamed vocals, and propulsive drum grooves of punk still serve as a soundtrack to a countercultural white masculinity, then to harness the same sounds while being anyone but a white man also still remains a useful tactic for women to affirm a politics that prioritizes their needs.
TRIN: People don’t think “punk” and “unapologetically feminine” in the same sentence. I personally am a pretty feminine person. I know it pisses some people off or makes some people uncomfortable because they’re used to very masculine performers in punk, so I like to amplify that part of myself when I perform. I think we all do that, to be honest.
At the same time, being riot grrrls in this moment of revival also necessitates a broader understanding of gendered performance scripts. Blending the ‘feminized’ tropes of earlier indie waves with riot grrrl energy and aggression opens up a uniquely queer space to center the feminine excess of big feelings, however those might emerge. Thus, by taking songwriting cues from heavy-but-still-hybrid acts like Die Spitz and Mannequin Pussy, The Pink Tax explores new avenues within the riot-grrrl sound, offering political valences that build on the movement's history.
JO: All we do is think, eat, sleep, and fuckin’ breathe Mannequin Pussy.
BOWIE: Maybe also, like, Die Spitz? Because they just look so cutesy when they perform but also so intense.
NINA: They’re so heavy; their music is so heavy.
TRIN: Bands that have that juxtaposition. That’s what I’d say we’re similar to.
NINA: I feel like that influence comes through most in songwriting because our verses and choruses are very different. A lot of our verses are yelling, then a lot of our choruses are very melodic, or the opposite. Or, like, instrumentally, too: we have a song called “PMS” where the verse is really chuggy and so is the melody, kinda, then the chorus switches up.
While Dazey and the Scouts’ Maggot was the formative listening experience that brought the band together, each member’s path to riot grrrl revival also reflects political and musical maturation as women in the scene.
BOWIE: I think I found riot grrrl when I was in my second or third emo phase. When I did School of Rock, I was in a riot grrrl band, and at first I thought, “this is stupid; it’s just sound!” And then I learned one Sonic Youth song, and this is what I live and breathe now.
Coming of age while My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! at the Disco were synonymous with “alternative” – at least as imagined in the mainstream – allowed for diffuse explorations of masculinity, especially when those masculinities failed to meet a hegemonic middle-class ideal. But to be socialized as a woman in the same era remained comparatively narrow and contextualized with the often understated misogyny of emo masculinity.
BOWIE: Your eyes really open, especially the more music you listen to, you begin to realize what they’re talking about. Men hate me, and they want me dead, and life sucks because the world is built to tear us down. You’re angry, and you find another set of music that speaks to that more directly.
But the nature of fandom is contradictory. The band seems to have a take-the-good, leave-the-bad attitude when it comes to this. For instance, Nina cites her love for brutal tech death as the basis for her chops as a composer and multi-instrumentalist, but shrugs a stereotypical metal highmindedness when it comes to how that collides with the others’ tastes. Likewise, Jo, Trin, and Bowie reject emo’s misogyny, but nevertheless still find things to celebrate in records like A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.
TRIN: We’re really theatrical. Even at our shows, we like costume themes. We always do concepts, and I know that I write mostly through that.
BOWIE: I don’t think we sound like Panic!, especially on that album, but we’re definitely theatrical in that way. We don’t make circus music, but if you thought of a local band that could be called “circus freaks” in that way, that’s us.
TRIN: [Laughing] Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d describe us.
BOWIE: They have a creep aspect to them. I don’t know how else to say it, but they’re two percent off putting, and we’re like ten percent.
En route to the FILM & TV section, we pass by soundtrack vinyl, and Trin picks up a Record Store Day release compiling music from Jem and the Holograms, a three-season Toei Animation cartoon about a girl leading a double life while fronting a holographically generated glam rock band. It’s easy to see how the show planted seeds for Trin’s self-proclaimed theatricality, but it also speaks to a penchant the band shares more generally. As visual performers, they wear their taste in television – especially late nineties and early aughts Cartoon Network series – on their sleeves.
TRIN: We’re big on DIY. Things like our merch, our outfits—
BOWIE: Yeah, I make all of our shirts!
JO: If you see us with something on, eight times out of ten, we’ve sewn it.
TRIN: Or thrifted it!
JO: Or did something new to it. Before shows, Trin and I are like, [mimics running back over every outfit through a sewing machine] all the time.
This affinity for the homemade and cobbled-together speaks to another tenet of the band’s shared sensibility: a love for DIY filmmaking, especially horror. The extent to which the visual informs their taste becomes clear as we move to The Record Space’s backroom shrine to horror memorabilia, VHS tapes, and DVDs, all while chatting about our moviegoing experiences at the summer’s blockbusters, micro-budget horror projects, and indie auteur cinema.
TRIN: We’re all big movie fans, but I think we all like horror the most.
BOWIE: I’m generally a big film nerd; I was supposed to major in it, and I wanted to write for sitcoms. But yeah, horror especially.
JO: And I think everybody has their own special subgenre of horror they like. I’m a zombie girlie. [To Trin] I feel like you kinda touch on the slasher a lot.
TRIN: Yeah, slashers, but also supernatural horror. A gothic supernatural is more my vibe. [Laughing] I’m specific. Frankenstein is my number one favorite – the book especially – but I also love del Toro’s adaptation from last year, and he makes some of my favorite movies generally. The Shape of Water is my favorite movie ever; it’s the most romantic movie to me.
These tastes translate to The Pink Tax’s sound as something beyond pastiche. Though none of us had seen Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at the time, it’s hard not to retroactively read the film’s ideas about the queerly subversive gender potential of the slasher into the band’s horror-inspired songwriting. There is a deep-seated power (and maybe also a pleasure) in the interplay between being the killer and being the killed, between being simultaneously the object of deep desire and deep hatred, and especially between retaining and relinquishing control of that narrative.
TRIN: I would say our song “Pillow Fight” shows how into horror we are. That was heavily inspired by the Psycho soundtrack—sixties horror and suspense type sounds.
JO: Before we started writing the song, we were having conversations about trying to capture the feeling of the slasher: that type of storytelling, killing someone, but kinda campy with it.
One quintessentially punk trait the bandmates share is a disregard for what others deem high- or low-brow. The Pink Tax Criterion Collection collates the lauded (David Lynch’s Eraserhead) with the derided (Marc Forster’s World War Z), the original (John Waters’ Hairspray) with the remake (Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows). Pop culture can eat itself both self-consciously, like the Scream franchise, and self-indulgently, like Stranger Things; what matters most to the band is these viewing experiences bring them together as musicians.
BOWIE: I feel like that’s what we bond over. We may not always watch movies and TV shows together, but we do always end up in the basement talking “movie, movie, movie,” or “TV show, TV show, TV show.” [Sing-songy, to herself] Ooh, Beetlejuice!
Back in the PUNK & HARDCORE section, the conversation turns to an important question: what will the Big Mouth cover look like? While the stills from the cover shoot have already been banked, the matter of presentation remains an open question. The band digs for a few points of inspiration, and eventually Bowie pulls Amyl and the Sniffers’ 2019 self-titled record.
BOWIE: You know what, this is my inspo, I think.
JO: Yes! Wow, that’s really good. I just wanna be Amy. [singing] “Stuck on you! Just like a chewing gum”—
TRIN: That’s my fave. I love “Guided By Angels”—
JO: [singing] “Guided!”
ALL [together]: “by angels!”
JO: [singing] “But they’re not heavenly!”
TRIN: “Hertz,” “Freaks to the Front,” we were at a concert; we were up front!
JO: That lowkey actually changed my entire life, seeing her live.
TRIN: I crowdsurfed, it was great!
JO: She did! And then you came right back. I didn’t expect to see you again after that.
TRIN: During the first two songs, my feet were off the ground – I got completely lost from her. She was on the other side of the room from me. Crazy.
Other picks for cover art inspiration start to establish a pattern. Along with a number of punk-inspired collage covers, the band points out a few more reference points: notably, The Cramps’ film photography and poster-like edits and the pop art-y cover for AFI’s Dork 7-inch. Cover shopping crystalizes a difficult task: how do you capture ephemeral things like musical influence and style strictly in the domain of the visual?
TRIN: We like a kind of sixties vibe, but also the collage aesthetic – so I think we’re aiming for a marriage of the two.
NINA: Collage feels very OG riot grrrl to me.
BOWIE: Yeah, there’s something about it that just works. You know someone made it. And it always looks cool.
TRIN: [with a copy of the AFI record] The cover on this one is pretty cool. It’s got a comic book, or graphic art thing about it, something in that territory.
Ultimately, the matter of cover art remains unsettled and recursively leads back to the conversation of influence. Maybe a result of talking about album covers, Trin recalls X-Ray Spex, whose first single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” features a closely framed headshot of their Black femme lead, Poly Styrene, encircled by flashy text designs. (This recollection sparks another rendition of the song, again led by Jo.)
TRIN: It’s still hard to find people of color in the scene—
JO: Especially performing in the scene.
TRIN: Let alone, girls performing in the scene who are people of color. And also very… extra? Like us. Not even just in the scene though: you don’t see us often. I mean, we got into this by going to shows, yes, but it was kind of hard.
JO: Feeling welcomed in the scene is definitely an issue, especially when it is still so white male dominated. And so when we go to shows, it’s like, “Oh, shit, I don’t even know if I wanna mosh; it’s super big dudes in there; I don’t really see many girls in there.”
TRIN: Even though they’re punk people, and they’re alternative, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t racist or that they understand a version of punk, or riot grrrl, that had anything to do with us. Personally, I didn’t really think we were “in the scene” when we were just going to shows.
JO: Yeah, not really until we started playing them. It kinda brought out all the people who are like us, which made me feel more comfortable.
TRIN: Not to give us too much credit, but our shows definitely definitely breed space for people of color, more queer people, more people who feel like they can mosh, like actually.
Trin and Jo’s experiences show the nuances between feeling like you belong to a subculture rather than simply taking up space in it, in a way that the particular intersection of being Black, femme, and alternative uniquely brings to the fore. While the problems that come with being rendered both hypervisible and invisible are unique to each generation, I have also started to observe a cyclicality to these issues. At the same time that some generations of Black and femme alternative music fans are reflecting on how we litigate representation on national festival stages, others are eking out space for themselves at the all-ages DIY venue for the first time. To focus solely on the matter of representation risks tokenizing The Pink Tax, I think, but my hope is that – like their sound and style overall – on this front they represent something both new and familiar. Certainly, that’s how I meet them on the other side of the record bin.
J. P. Cupps is a St. Louis based music theorist and PhD candidate studying race, regionalism, and recording process in musical subcultures across the US, spanning interregional hip-hop, punk, and electronic music scenes. Alongside STL’s 18andcounting and Superman Damn Fool, they also help organize Modular Mobb, a local meetup for hardware synth producers that streams every last Wednesday of the month on YouTube.
