Lunachicks
Pretty Ugly

I wasn't even 13 years old when friends of mine, superior at their 16 years, made me mixed tapes to instruct me on the cornerstones of punk. Christmas '00, side A, the last song is Lunachicks - Yeah, which is the opening track of the album "Pretty Ugly".

It would be appropriate to first mention the cover, an emaciated Barbie head, an element always present in the bedrooms of riot grrrls. We're well into the '90s, but this album is pure foxcore. Well-played, well-rhythmed stuff, whose lyrics can be playful (as in "Mr. Lady": "When I was a little boy, Malibu Barbie was my favorite toy"). Almost always.

What's behind the Lunachicks (and more generally behind all foxcore bands, even the current ones)? Why that kitsch look made of tattoos, heavy makeup, clothes bordering on the absurd? You find the answer in track #7 "What's Left", which halfway through the album completely overwhelms the listener. "What's Left" is different, slower, sadder. It features the figure of a grandmother who takes care of everyone, emblematic of a woman, endowed with such superhuman strength that she makes her man feel weak, yet still forced to live within phallocentric schemes; it's a song that marks a peculiar point of continuity between Luce Irigaray's radical feminism and the riot grrrls movement.

Make no mistake, this doesn't represent a hypothetical turning point of the album, it's more of a unicum, the most secret soul that gives the omnipresent irony of the other songs a dignity: the awareness of a condition in which one is forced as a woman. An awareness that turns into rage, and consequently into rebellion as a way out. And the exodus for Theo, Gina, "Squid", Sindi, and Chip was the Lunachicks, with the image they projected as a group and their sunny sound that seems to want to comfort and give courage to any girl who wants to listen.