Rock 'n' roles

BACKSTAGE AT OZZFEST a few weeks ago, a crew worker with a David Lee Roth glint in his eye nudged me and asked how I got my backstage pass. Irritated by his Cro-Mag assumption, I went over in front of the Methods of Mayhem tour bus. Admittedly, this was not the brightest move if I was hoping to avoid a similar encounter, since Tommy "Pam-Just-Left-Me" Lee probably lurked inside, but what I didn't anticipate was walking into a scene straight out of 1985: A group of sweet-faced young girls, cooing like a flock of hormonally wired doves, banged ever so saucily on the bus' windows. The ringleader, complete with flaxen curls and pink satin hot pants, was a dead ringer for Heather Graham's Rollergirl character in Boogie Nights. When men acknowledged the girls with catcalls and whistles, Rollergirl pouted, sucked her pinkie demurely between her sparkly lips, and stuck her satin-swathed ass out at such an extreme angle that I feared several vertebrae would pop from the strain.

While hardly unprecedented (hell, even VH1 has a "Where Are They Now?" for groupies from the '70s), these regressive roles for men and women in rock music are currently enjoying a hearty, head-spinning, and ultimately disturbing comeback. In a New York Times article last summer, esteemed music critic and unapologetic feminist Ann Powers responded to the unsettling reports of rape and vicious, misogynistic behavior that surfaced in the aftermath of that summer's disastrous Woodstock festival. Citing the growing popularity of lyrically aggressive and sonically thick-headed bands such as Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Blink 182, Powers observed a revival of the boys-only club. Not only were these boys back in testosterone-fueled force, she warned, women were welcome to join in the mayhem—as long as they played by certain rules.

"At these shows [Woodstock '99 and the Warped Tour], women screamed their adulation for the very stars hurling invectives at them," Powers wrote. "They climbed the shoulders of their male companions and waved to the throng waiting to grope them. The women seemed to be reviving the role of the old-fashioned rock chick, who gained the right to be sexually expressive by running a gantlet of degradation and scorn. And the men were all too ready to debase them."

Post-Woodstock media coverage glossed over most of the sexual assault reports, and only a few male voices sounded their objections, most notably the Beastie Boys and techno-Cassandra Moby. In an interview published by Addicted to Noise, Moby said, "I think the mistake they made was in hiring misogynist rock bands. If you have all these aggressive bands together, it's a lowest-common-denominator situation. I think 99 percent of the problem was the bands that they chose to perform there. I wasn't familiar with most of them before I got there. I watched ICP [Insane Clown Posse] in open-mouthed horror. This is what Kurt Cobain died for? So these redneck idiots can be rapping about bitches and telling women to take their clothes off?"

By the end of 1999, it was clear that a vicious strain of sexism was once again standard outfitting for mainstream rock's biggest male stars. Virtually every artist Powers mentioned in her article had taken up residency on the Billboard charts as the year came to a close. Strutting and preening like a date rapist on an after-school special, Kid Rock appeared on Saturday Night Live with two buxom blondes. The women gyrated robotically, as if they were in an '80s glam-metal video. To add implied injury to insult, the lead photo in his June 22 Rolling Stone interview depicted Rock wielding a chain saw, preparing to sever a wooden statue of a female figure. Rock's antics, though, were soon overshadowed by the stratospheric rise of what Salon.com has called the "most violent, woman-hating, homophobic rapper ever"—Eminem. Disputing Salon's claim is nearly impossible, regardless of his work's artistic merit; phrases such as "all bitches is ho's, even my stinkin' ass mom" and "hate fags? the answer is 'yes'" aren't exactly open to multiple interpretations.

BOY POWER

Yet young women, in my experience, interpret male rock icons more freely—that is, until this new bad boy showed up. Not so long ago, the glam-rock guitar hero was a more flexible signifier for female fans. He stood for all the other, less famous boys in our day-to-day lives, and that gulf made us question our misplaced deference outside the concert arena. Our rock heroes' amped-up confidence also helped inspire what Seattle musician and author Vanessa Veselka has dubbed the "macha quotient," the degree of feminine self-determination in our developing self-image.