|An interview with Whore Paint’s Reba Mitchell, Hilary Jones and Meredith Stern|

How did the three of you meet?

Reba: Well we met while working here at AS220. Meredith was booking and I was a Vista. I thought she was very cool and we got to work together a lot which was great. And one day before Christmas she mentioned to me that she and Hilary were going to play some music together, and I said, “That’s the sickest dream team I’ve heard of in my life.” And then Meredith was like, “You can play music with us too if you like”. So I went away for Christmas, and they had a band practice, and then the next week I came back and we had a band practice together. And it was the best band practice that has ever existed in the history of humankind.

Hilary, what did you do at AS220?

Hilary: Oh, this was a zillion years ago. I worked for three months at the café, before the restaurant existed. We’ve all been playing music in bands that have played AS220 for years and years so I knew Meredith through bands I had played in.

Meredith: We were communicating when I was booking the performance space because Hilary was in a band that played AS220.

H: Yeah I was in Sweet Thieves, and then I was in Arcing. And I was also doing some booking at some point for B sharp. So we were in communication about that.

R: But we’ve been a band since the last days of 2009, or the first days of 2010.

M: Our first song was written in 2009.

How do you write songs? The melodies, the lyrics?

H: It’s pretty collaborative. We end up jamming stuff out. We just play together and actually do a lot of recording of our practices too. So we’ll try and record stuff, go back to it afterwards, then pick out parts that we liked and then try to put them together. That’s the main way we write songs. We jam pretty organically and then arrange it all together.

How would you guys describe yourselves? What draws you to this genre, and how would you define it?

R: I know we have some strong…yet ambiguous thoughts about it. There’s a couple of different ways I think our band identifies. One prong of that is aesthetically,we all have strong musical influences that are coming from no wave stuff, and also wherever riffs come from. It’s pretty shreddy at times. And then there’s this other, fairly ideological prong of feminist hardcore. Both of those things are things we would describe ourselves as pretty explicitly and things we would have named. I think all of us would have named those things as influences even before we were a band. But they also came about very naturally and sort of by accident. Which I think is part of why this band works really well together. It’s just sort of where we’re all instinctively coming from. But we have this new joke that we’re in a “gender genre” because we get described that way a lot, as do a lot of lady bands. “Female-fronted rock bands”.

What do you mean by “gender genre”?

H: This thing happens when you get booked on two different types of shows. There’s a type of show where it makes a lot of sense aesthetically: You’re playing a show with other bands that sound a lot like you or make sense in some way.  And then there’s another thing that happens sometimes, especially if you’re going on tour, or if someone’s doing a women-in-rock kind of thing. It’s when someone is like “Oh, there’s women in the band. That means they’re all the same, or they sound the same.” And so you get booked on these shows with women on them, which are usually awesome, but often very aesthetically different. So it might not make sense as a show in any other way than the fact that there just happen to be women in the bands.

R: It’s different with LadyFest. With the LadyFest, the point is that there’s an ideological unifier. That’s why people are there. That’s why people have bought in, why bands have invested, because they explicitly want to support feminism specifically.

M: LadyFest encourages women in creative endeavors, whether it’s through zines or through music.

R: Creating a space in which that is normal, is perhaps a bigger part of it.

H: Talking more openly about gender in general, and redefining gender. And so I think the LadyFest and Clit Fest are different in that they are specifically for that purpose. They really are about that ideological piece, as opposed to just, “Oh, there’s a bunch of women together who may not have any ideological similarities at all, and have no musical similarity. But, people perceive them to be the same because there are women in them, hence “gender genre.”

Is that frustrating?

All: Yes.

M: Because you’d never see that happen with male bands. “Oh, there’s a man in the band!”

R: “Oh, there’s a male-fronted show.” Yeah.

M: And I think this is something that happens to anybody who isn’t a straight white male.

R: I feel like I’ve started seeing it happen with Latino bands. Like, “They have a couple of Spanish lyrics, they must be political!” Which is frustrating.

H: They just throw ’em all together.

So how does your ideology blend into the content of what you sing about and your aesthetic?

R: One hundred percent. Our band writes music super collaboratively, but I would not say we write lyrics terribly collaboratively. But content-wise and theme-wise in our lyrics, a lot of lyrics do come from conversations we’ve had, things that are on all of our minds, that usually surround the things that we’ve been talking about together. Lyrics will come from when we’re explicitly having a conversation about some topic in contemporary feminism. That’s usually not sitting around having a theoretical conversation, but it’s usually like we all get to band practice and we’re all real pissed about something. Like, “Can you believe that thing that happened in the news? Can you believe that fucking dick in the street that was just barking at me while I was riding my bike?” So I think it’s true that I can’t think of any lyrics from our band that couldn’t be considered explicitly feminist. And I think that that’s what I’m inclined to write about naturally.

It’s nice that this band fits in well with our ideology because I know that when I write those things, there’s not going to be some kind of discordance with other people in the band. Our lyrics are pretty much all clearly about being a woman. When I had written those lyrics—which are pretty much the only lyrics I know how to write—in bands that were just with men, it was a little weird. And I know that there has been pushback to be more neutral, to speak to everyone. Which I think is clear to probably all of us that speaking to “everyone” means speaking to men. Which is not something I’m particularly interested in doing. It’s perceived as normative, sweeping.

H: Objective?

R: Yeah. It’s perceived as a “regular” audience, but as women, we know that the general audience doesn’t actually speak to women. So to write as just a regular person when you’re a woman is kind of exceptional. It’s nice to not have to make a really concerted effort to alter the things I know how to write about, the things that are on my mind. I mean, everybody in the band definitely reads the lyrics before we put out the records. We’re pretty much all on the same page about them. Only once or twice was I a little worried and I said, “Guys. I wrote this lyric. Is it going to be weird and misrepresentative of all of us if I sing these lyrics?” So we talked about it.

So Reba, you’re the main lyricist. I have two questions that come out of what you just said. Do you guys play for a specific audience? And how would you define that audience?

R: I think that can also be described in terms of our two prongs. With regard to audience, there are two kinds of shows we’re attracted to playing. One is a show that we’re really aesthetically aligned with. And then there are shows we’re really ideologically aligned with. It’s awesome when those two things overlap, which happens a lot—I think we’re lucky. We have the experience—and it’s kind of self-selecting, it happens when we book our own tour—that we’ll play with bands that we identify with musically. And they also really kind of get what we’re doing. And it doesn’t feel tokenized. There are other shows we end up playing, such as a show we played at Wesleyan recently, which was the best day of our lives.

We’re allowing for a different model for what music looks like. For what aggression looks like. What being a woman looks like.

The Wesleyan show that you played was booked in response to the lack of women on their Spring Fling lineup, right? What was playing for that audience like?

R: Yes! Aesthetically it was a really magical show. But in that situation we were also playing for a lot of young women and young queer people who were really psyched to see a show where they were reflected. And it is nice to have that element when we play. And it’s not just for women. We’re playing for people who are interested in music and the kind of music that we play. It’s also really nice to be able to know that just while we’re doing it as individuals, we’re also allowing for a different model for what music looks like. For what aggression looks like. What being a woman looks like. And that’s valuable for other women to see, in particular really young women. But it’s nice for women to see, for men to see, for all of us to be on the same page and for all of us to just be people playing music and to have those conversations that are not just about ideology and not about feminism. It changes the landscape of what music, aggression, competency is.

H: It’s cool too—and I think this happens predominantly when you play smaller towns—that we’ll get girls who come up to us, specifically and be like, “We just never, ever, have women come through playing. Ever.” To have them come up to you and really say thank you for coming to their town. Because it’s just not everywhere. We’re lucky in the sense that we have more women playing music here than in other places. In bigger cities, there are more people, so you get that. But in smaller towns especially it’s hard for people.

What is it like being a part of the Providence music scene?

R: I think that Providence is an exceptional place. It wasn’t always this way. It was not this way even ten years ago. But now there is such a visible, coherent, cohesive, real powerhouse contingent of women making art and music who are respected as peers with men. It has changed a lot in the past thirteen years that I have been here. It’s a really, really different landscape. I have been to a few other places where I have sensed that. Baltimore being one, Vancouver being one. But even in a lot of big cities I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that way in L.A., for example. I don’t particularly feel that way in New York. I don’t see that seamlessness between really artistic, really freaky men and women as collaborators. The seamlessness is the really magical thing in those places.

H: I think it’s also hard to be seamless in places like L.A. or New York, because they’re just so big.

R: Well, that’s fair.

How long have each of you been in Providence?

H: I’ve been here since 2002. I’m from Fargo, North Dakota.

M: I’ve been here since 2004. I’m from what used to be a rural area one hour northeast of Philadelphia.

And more importantly, what made you stay here?

R: I would have probably answered that question differently every two years that I’ve been here. For a long time I would have said it was an accident. But I do feel more and more like the reason I stay is part of what I was just talking about, in terms of women being able to work artistically in this town with real force. I forget that that’s not the case in other places because it feels normal here. When I go other places, it’s just so disgusting and heartbreaking to not feel that way, which makes me appreciate Providence a lot more. I’m from Tulsa, originally.

How has Providence and the arts community evolved in your eyes?

M: Providence has a lot of women-generated projects. There’s The Dirt Palace, and I booked AS220, which Maralie is now booking—so there’s been women booking the space for five or six years. Reba books at Machines with Magnets, which is a recording studio and venue space, and Hilary is the executive director of Girls Rock! RI. And there are tons of things that I’m not even mentioning. There’s women in music education, venue-generating, sound engineering. There are a lot of aspects of the music industry that are positions traditionally held by men, but are actually run by women in this town, which is remarkable. So that’s something that intrigues me. And I feel like that has shifted, subtly and effectively, what the culture and tone of the music scene is.

Even when I came here in 2004 it was like Riot grrrl never existed, and every band that was playing was comprised of straight white dudes. Not that there’s anything wrong with straight white guys playing music, but when at every single show they were the only people being represented, I just felt very much not at home. Especially because I had just moved from New Orleans where the music scene was really different culturally. So even in the last eight years, there’s been a pretty significant shift. Being in Providence is really interesting for me because all the spaces have shifted.

How have your past music projects led you to Whore Paint? Reba, you touched on being in bands with all men, and how you didn’t feel quite like your songs fit that. So what about you, Hilary and Meredith, what other ventures have you been involved in?

M: We’ve been involved in playing music for probably half of our lives. Minimum. So we all have a long history of playing music. I’ve personally been in several bands, and only one of them where I was the only woman in the band. One of my friends was interviewing women in bands at one point, and she asked a similar question of “How does playing with women differ from playing with bands where you’re the only woman?” At the time I was playing with just dudes, and I was in a different zone. I couldn’t remember how awesome it was to play music with women. Because there is a tangible difference. It’s also the personality of any band that you’re in, regardless of gender. But a band can be totally magic regardless of the gender or identities. For me our gender is less important than that we are ideologically aligned. Though we have certain show experiences that come from being a woman in this culture.

H: The lens through which we’re analyzing the experience.

M: I’ve definitely been in bands with women who have not had the same interests or analysis that we have. I’ve also played with feminist men, so there’s been a really awesome alignment there, even though we didn’t have the exact same experiences. I’ve often felt supported by my band mates who were men.

H: I’ve been playing in bands since I was sixteen. I didn’t even notice this initially when it was happening: My primary instrument was the guitar, and I picked up the bass later. But the bands that I’ve been in where I was the only woman are the bands where I played bass. And I almost didn’t realize that I was doing the thing where I was “the girl in the band who plays the bass”, that I was falling into that very traditional model. Granted, I loved the bands that I was in, I love the bass. There’s nothing wrong with the bass. But it’s interesting that I found myself falling into that same situation where the girl has to play the bass because the boys are ‘better’ at guitar. But I definitely would play the bass again in a heartbeat, I play it all the time. It’s just interesting for me to look at myself musically, and how that’s worked out.

How do you confront the assumptions people make about you?

R: It’s uncomfortable when a thing that you’re doing because you love it falls in with a role to which the narrative is already decided. I have had that with singing to a really extreme degree. When we’re doing anything in a band setting, or even if we’re not together and it comes up in conversation that I’m in a band, people will say to me – are the singer? And the answer is, “Fuck you.” But the answer is also yes.

But what they’re asking is not what I’m giving. When someone says, “Are you the singer in a band?” what they’re asking is, “Do you not play an instrument? Do you provide some kind of really typical visual focal point for a larger musical experience? Do you not lift things? Do you like attention? Because you need validation in some way, because you obviously have nothing on going on in your life?” The answer to those questions is no. And I think that for me, and for all of us, one of the really magical things about being a band that’s all women, is that it takes those questions off the table a little bit. It’s different to be collaborating with people who are really your peers, than standing in front of a group of men, singing songs at people.

H: It’s interesting, because people will ask me that all the time. Like “Oh, you’re in a band? You must be the singer.” Every time. Every time. And so it’s interesting to have that difference in experience.

M: And Reba’s classically trained. And also does lift heavy things, all the time. I have a similar response from people after we play a show. I often have men come up to me and make the comment, “Oh, you actually hit the drums.” And I say to myself, “Is that supposed to be a compliment? Because you’re basically saying, ‘I don’t think girls can play drums. But you actually hit them. Nice job.’” It’s so invalidating.

R: Oftentimes we have a great response. It’s a bummer that we have to feel like we have to prove ourselves in some way, but sometimes people come up to us and are so validating. It is complicated. I feel in some ways like I can skirt expectations because our music is pretty aggressive. But even that can be interpreted in ways that are pretty patronizing. It can be interpreted as strictly sexual—which is just gross idiocy.

It also complicates my personal artistic trajectory, because I also make music in other projects that is really understated, that people describe to me as really feminine but unapologetically so. But I don’t know if I would feel at liberty for making such quiet, understated, beautiful music, if I didn’t also make really aggressive music. Because I don’t know if I would be able to go into shows with people I don’t know and have people be more along the lines of  “That is beautiful. That is just lovely,” because it would be accompanied by something that is pretty patronizing, which is a bummer.

How do you respond to misinterpretation of your music?

H: The sexualized aspect of all of this is the hardest part to manage. With our band name in particular…We had a horrible time coming up with a band name. We tried to come up with a band name for three months. And then one day we just locked ourselves up in my house for eight hours straight to come up with a name. We had a page of maybe 100 band names, and we just couldn’t find one that seemed to fit. We ended up going with this one. We were like “Oh yeah, Whore Paint! Like makeup.” And it is “edgy”. But apparently people don’t think that’s a word that means makeup, and they end up thinking you’re being offensive for no reason.

 M: Or think that it’s okay to call us whores. On a couple of occasions people will yell at us “Hey whores!” and think it’s funny. Or that because the word is part of our band name that’s what we’re ‘asking for’. So I feel like the sexualized part of it is the hardest part in that way. We’re always up against that.

How do you deal with people sexualizing you in that way?

M: Sometimes we just don’t want to deal with it. We just want to go home and not give any power to this situation. And then other times we’ll confront it head on.

H: It’s kind of the same thing as if you get yelled at or harassed on the street. Every incident is a little different, depending on your mood, the specific scenario: you choose whether you’re going to say something to this person or keep walking and just ignore it. Whatever works best in that situation.

R: We did finally make an FAQ on our website. Not that every person saying weird things to us has read our FAQ, but just to clarify what we’re doing as a band and to clarify that we’re not just throwing controversial, offensive remarks into the world just for attention. We are explicitly not shying away from the fact that we are an all-woman band, not shying away from the fact that we’re all explicitly feminist, not shying away from the fact that our band is going to be interpreted in a particular way because we’re women. We’d rather confront it head on than try to skirt the issue. We don’t downplay it. I kind of feel like if you’re a woman playing music, people are going to call you a whore either way. It might not be so overt. It might not be the soundman yelling, “Hey whores!” at us—which is a real thing that happened—but it’s something.

There’s a degree to which naming something first takes it off the table a little bit.

There’s a degree to which naming something first takes it off the table a little bit. We’ve had to deal with that dynamic in real different ways. As Hilary and Meredith just said, it’s moment-to-moment and depends on whether it happens to us all at once or separately. I feel like some of the ways that we deal with it are life skills that all women learn. Because there’s this idea that you just have to roll with the conversation, even if it’s deeply uncomfortable. And I think it’s valuable to be able to know how to stop and say to someone’s face. “What are you talking about. You sound like an idiot,” before it gets super weird. And I don’t want to be a person who’s so aggressive and confrontational all the time, but there’s a way to be a perfectly kind, nice, and reasonable person who also is comfortable with cutting things off before they get deeply offensive and manipulative.

H: And it feels like there are some men who really like women in bands to a degree that it seems like…

Kind of like a fetishization?

H: Yes, thank you. So you don’t know where they’re going with it. So with certain scenarios, certain men who continue to act in a particular way that is creepy at shows. And it is a challenge.

M: If someone’s fetishizing you and degrading you to your face—and then you actually let them know that’s what they’re doing to you, you become a “bitch”. It’s as if the default is that we must be doing this for the benefit of men, but we let them know that that’s not what we’re doing. It’s a bummer when you’re playing a show and you feel like people are finally getting it, and you’re communicating and there’s this beautiful sense of community that’s happening—and then at the very end, the one guy who has been fetishizing you all night lets it be known. And it kind of can ruin an otherwise positive experience. If you stand up for yourself, then all of a sudden, “those ladies are dicks.”

H: And I’m sure most female musicians have experienced this.

M: I mean my ideal dream is that in those scenarios, there are other rad dudes around to witness it and they can be allies to point out what’s happening. The sad reality is that the small percentage of dudes doing that will rather listen to other guys than to you. There’s a need for male allies.

H: Not that we need to swoop in and save us, but to show to other men what is normal and acceptable.

M: Because it shouldn’t be up to all women to teach all men. People need to do their own work. Otherwise it’s very draining.

In that vein, you mentioned earlier that sometimes you are self-selecting in the shows and the audiences you play for. Do you ever intentionally do the opposite and play at a venue where you know you won’t necessarily get the best reception but you feel like you have to spread the message?

M: Yeah. Maybe some of the campus ones…not the Wesleyan one.

H: Yeah, sometimes we’ll play a show that feels weird or different to us. And we know going in that it’s probably going to be weird. But we feel like that’s fun to have that weird new experience and to play in front of new different people who aren’t used to seeing that. So yes.

So how does Foo Fest fall in that spectrum?

M: We’ve all played Foo Fest in other bands we were in.

H: We’ve all collectively, in different bands, probably played at AS220 at least one hundred times. Maybe not, but it seems that way. As a band we have it as kind of a home base.

R: And I feel personally that, as a band, there is something tremendously cool and validating about playing Foo Fest. It’s an awesome compliment to be invited to play, because it is a big deal, and it is a celebration of what is really going on in Providence artistically and musically. And it is always a really cool combination of established people and heavy hitters, but also newer/more varied in that community, perhaps lesser-known but aesthetically really interesting stuff. And AS220 is such a home base for us, the way it probably is for most Providence bands. But for Foo Fest, you are playing for a much wider audience. And there is not a guarantee that it is just your underground, aesthetically and ideologically identified group. It’s families and college students; it’s much broader. It’s a street fest. So it’s both of those things at once- very comfortable and very different. I am confident that it will be great, but it will have that element of risk, of having an audience that hasn’t already bought into what we’re doing. But I also feel confident that AS220 will have our back.

You recently released a seven-inch entitled “Menarchy“. Do you have a full-length album coming out soon?

R: Yes! Awesome you should ask: it came in yesterday! It’s coming out on Load Records, which is, for us, the ultimate Providence dream. Just aesthetically, it is the most perfect thing that could happen. I feel like Load has such an incredible history of such a well-honed, weird, particular, impressive aesthetic that it’s so sick to be on that label. And in the same style we’ve been talking about it’s awesome that Load invited us to do a record with them. We’re doing our explicitly feminist thing, which is also not something that Load has shied away from in talking to us and promoting us about our music, but it’s also very much not the entire point: We’re on that label because we’re aligned with it musically. So I think that speaks to the magic of Providence that I referenced earlier: to be a woman and not have it be the focal point of what you’re doing.

M: That seven-inch was on Anchor Brain. Within the independent music realm it’s less common for bands to sign up with one record for the rest of their lives than it is to do it project by project, to figure out what makes the most sense at any moment.

Does Load Records have a history of working with other female-fronted bands?

M: They did have the Scissor Girls in the 90’s. That was a band that really inspired me musically. They were one of the first Load Record bands that I became aware of, so for me there is a kind of beautiful circle there.

R: But that is one of so many bands that Load has worked with. It’s the only one I know of that has any ties in particular to feminism. Oh, and Coughs, that’s right! That band was sick. Also, real freaky musically. They were from Chicago. That band was incredible.

M: And definitely for myself–musically, aesthetically, culturally–Load Records is exactly where I would want to be positioned. It’s the history and the musical cohesiveness that Reba was talking about. There’s a certain legitimacy in terms of noise rock that Load is the pinnacle of in my opinion. It’s first and foremost our dream come true, in being positioned musically where we want to be.

R: Load is an analogy for what I’d want the world to be. It’s so free and so freaky. And I don’t have any sense that Load is explicitly or purposefully activist with regard to its identity. It’s just a weird musical utopia where that stuff isn’t a hindrance in our regular lives. Load is not like “We’re dedicated to promoting women in music! Let’s talk about diversity! Let’s talk about social justice!” There’s none of that. It’s just regular life. You can just be a fucked up noise band. The end. If you’re a particular caliber, a particular aesthetic, that’s the label for you. It doesn’t have to be about that, and therefore you can be about that. You don’t have to push your identity down deep while you’re making the music you want to make. It’s been really awesome getting to work with them.

M: It’s vaguely utopian in a way. I want to have the music speak for itself, to be the first place where people are engaging with what we’re doing. And so finding a label where it’s about the music where identity politics aren’t at the forefront is awesome.