Guest post written by The Lightning Bottles author Marissa Stapley
Marissa Stapley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick Lucky, which has been optioned for television, as well as international bestsellers The Last Resort, Things to Do When It’s Raining, and Mating for Life. Her journalism has appeared in newspapers and magazines across North America. She lives in Toronto with her family. Visit her at MarissaStapley.com or follow her on Instagram @MarissaStapley.
Her latest novel, The Lightning Bottles, is on sale now, which is a spellbinding story of rock ‘n’ roll and star-crossed love—about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre’s journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier.
The world of ‘90s grunge and alternative music was not as white male-dominated as its folklore would have us believe. Yes, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots were great bands. But female musicians and female-fronted bands were breaking new ground and, in many cases, paving the way for their male counterparts—all while having to work twice as hard in an industry that still seems to fail at acknowledging everyone’s contributions equally.
“One of the biggest challenges that women musicians in [the] ’90s faced was the idea that they were a part of a trend, not actual cultural contributors,” says Andrea Warner, music journalist and author of We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music. “There was always a sense of being othered. Magazines never ran ‘Men in Rock’ issues, but of course, the ‘Women in Rock’ issues had to be separate. If you’re always being positioned as being outside a movement, and just showing up is a special highlight, then even if people are trying to celebrate you, it’s still feeding into a larger narrative that this is not a space you naturally belong in, not a space you helped create—which is obviously a complete lie.”
So, who are the women who helped found and foster the grunge and alternative music movements that defined the ‘90s? Read on to find out who the artists you should be learning more about are — and then, go add them to your grunge and alternative playlists.
Tina Marie Bell
While Neil Young is known as the “godfather of grunge,” almost no mention is ever made of a Black woman named Tina Marie Bell, who fronted the Seattle-based band Bam Bam and, even though she got no credit for this when she was alive, is widely considered one of the founders of grunge. In fact, future tragic grunge god Kurt Cobain once served as a roadie for Bam Bam, and was a self-professed huge fan. And, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron was an original member of Bam Bam.
Further proof that Bell was leading the way? Bell’s band Bam Bam independently recorded and released their EP Villains (Also Wear White) at the same recording studio where Nirvana would later record their first two demo albums, Bleach and Incesticide. Bell’s smoky voice and arresting stage presence, combined with a talented trio of musicians backing her up, should have meant Bam Bam would have a guaranteed spot in the grunge canon. Instead, the tragedy of Bell’s life may be the saddest story to come out of a scene that had more than its fair share of distressing endings: after years of popularity in the Seattle scene but on-stage racial attacks on Bell in other locations, Bell first tried to make it in Europe, then left the band and eventually quit music entirely. Plagued for years by alcohol and depression, she died alone in a Las Vegas apartment at age 55. What’s worse, all of her writings and artifacts – song lyrics, poems, Bam Bam memorabilia – were disposed of before her family could get there. The grunge movement’s true “godmother” was effectively pushed to the sidelines forever.
Courtney Love
Courtney Love’s life and legacy are stained by tragedy, addiction and some problematic actions she still needs to address. But it’s a viable argument that if she were a man she would already have a redemption arc that would have seen her career celebrated and memorialized in the same manner her male counterparts’ work always has been. “[Love] subverts the notion of what a female musician should be, how she should look, and how she should act,” writes music journalist and author Lisa Whittington-Hill in her essay collection Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women. “While male artists are repeatedly celebrated for their ambition, antics, and their addictions, Love is constantly judged for them.”
In the 90s, Love was accused of everything from using her husband, Kurt Cobain, for fame, to hiring a hitman to kill him. The truth? When she met her angsty rocker husband, her band Hole’s debut album, Pretty on the Inside, was outselling Nirvana’s Bleach. The contract for Hole’s second album, Live Through This, was a seven-figure deal that saw Hole out-earning Nirvana in royalties. What seems obvious to this day is the love Cobain’s widow still has for him – yet the conspiracy theories about her being responsible for Cobain’s tragic death by suicide in 1994 persist. “Love, like all women, was supposed to save her partner from death and addiction,” writes Whittington-Hill in Girls, Interrupted. “Fans of Cobain projected all their anger and resentment over the loss of the Nirvana front man onto Love and soon she was blamed for not only his addiction but also his death.”
Love should also be applauded for attempting to warn people about Harvey Weinstein. In a 2005 red carpet clip – twelve years before Weinstein was outed as a serial predator – Love was asked what advice she had for young women in Hollywood. Love hesitated a beat, then looked into the camera and said, “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at the Four Seasons, don’t go.” According to Love, the damage to her career was swift and breathtaking, with a vindictive Weinstein blocking her from roles and overseeing boycotts that meant she never acted again.
Sinead O’Connor
By 1991, Sinead O’Connor was one of the most famous women in music, known for her unforgettable voice, shaved head, and songs that ran the gamut from heartbreaking to with righteously rageful. She received eight Grammy Award nominations, including a win for Best Alternative Album with her iconic masterpiece I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. But when O’Connor ripped up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live as a statement against child abuse – both abuse within the church and the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her mother – she quickly became infamous.
Shortly after the Saturday Night Live incident, O’Connor was booed by a crowd at Madison Square Garden while she performed at a Bob Dylan tribute. In the face of a shouting mob, O’Connor ripped out her earpieces and launched into a haunting acapella version of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ – the same song she had performed on Saturday Night Live. The lyrics of ‘War’ are a near-exact repetition of a 1963 UN speech by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, calling for peace in a broken world.
This was the last time she would ever perform in North America.
Subjected to threats and verbal abuse on national television and constant scrutiny and harassment in the public eye, O’Connor retreated back to Ireland, penning an open letter in a newspaper when she got there begging the public for mercy. “The price you pay for being a successful musician is your life, and the more successful you are, the more of a price you pay,” O’Connor said in a media interview. “That makes you invisible. People project onto you, and they see something that isn’t really you.”
By the end of the ‘90s, O’Connor was considered a cautionary tale. It was only when she gathered the courage to tell her story through her memoir, Rememberings, in 2021, and by participating in the documentary Nothing Compares, that the public realized what she had suffered—and what they had lost by allowing her to be cast aside so easily. But it was too late. After years of struggling with her mental health, and following the loss of one of her children to suicide, O’Connor, a chronic smoker, died in London at age 56 from complications due to asthma and lung disease. No matter how her life ended, her legacy should be firmly centered on her talent, tenacity, bravery, integrity—and how much she risked to share her art with the world.
PJ Harvey
PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey is a singer-songwriter who has passionately, purposefully and creatively reinvented herself with every album released. Among the many awards and accolades Harvey has received are both the 2001 and 2011 Mercury Prize (making her the only artist ever to have been awarded this twice), eight Grammy nominations and three albums on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Alongside her own impressive music catalogue, Harvey has inspired some well-known tunes, too: in the 90s, she was romantically linked to musician Nick Cave. After their breakup, Cave said the unforgettable songstress inspired his album The Boatman’s Call, with ‘Into My Arms’, ‘ West Country Girl’ and ‘Black Hair’ all written about her.
Through the years, Harvey has also been the subject of strange theories prompted by her lyrics, with some fans becoming convinced – because of the content of her hit song Down By The Water – that she once gave birth to a child, then drowned her. “There used to be a few people who actually believed that,” Harvey said in a 2008 UK interview. “It’s surprising, sometimes even scary. It makes me wonder …There aren’t many artists whose lyrics are taken that literally.”
Although her continuing musical legacy speaks for itself, like many female artists, Harvey’s physical appearance has often become more of a news story than her work. Most notably, the fact that she chose to leave her underarms unshaven drew massive media and public attention. She’s also been called – in her own words “some kind of axe-wielding, man-eating Vampira” — when all she really wants is to be known for her music and her art.
Melissa Auf der Maur
A Canadian musician who was most memorably the bassist for Courtney Love’s band Hole – but who has also played with The Smashing Pumpkins and Rufus Wainright, among others – Auf der Maur once got so fed up that the big anniversaries and milestones of the ’90s music scene were often being celebrated without mentioning female artists at all that she railed against this an open letter to the music magazine Kerrang! At its core, her letter was a plea not to allow Cobain to overshadow Love’s musical legacy any longer.
“Rock music [is] an almost entirely male-dominated world that I, too, had been in love and infatuated with since the discovery of my mother’s record collection,” wrote Auf der Mar in the letter. “The album art, the songs and the stories—it was clear from a young age, that it was a man’s world of magic and musical power. Most women were only defined as the ‘girlfriends, mistresses, muses’ and sometimes their personal photographers. But almost never the front-person.”
“It was something that a dear old friend of Courtney’s, Joe Mama Nitzberg, said backstage that has always stuck with me,” she continued in the letter. “It was something along the lines of, ‘Those guys go out there dressed in the leather and makeup, hiding behind machines and strobe lights, threatening to commune with the devil, while Courtney steps onstage in nothing but in a ripped lace slip, smudged red lipstick, three awkward, shy band members, no stage show, just raw guitars and drums, able to stand up to the devil himself with the power and rage like none of came close to.’ The audience was intimidated; the boys in the band were intimidated. The world was intimidated. No-one held a flame to [her] level of engagement, confrontation and power.”
Auf der Maur is a tremendously talented musician too, who can hold her own against some of the most admired bass players in the world – but she’s also a fierce advocate for equality in the music industry, and this deserves to be applauded.
Kim Deal
A petition should be started to get mythic bassist Kim Deal into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, where she belongs. Her singular bass lines and cool girl harmonies were an institution in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s alternative music world, but almost as captivating was her no-BS brand of feminism. While in the Pixies — a punk/surf rock/indie band with a cult-like following — a friend told Deal that by taking her husband’s name (Deal was married at the time to an Air Force contractor named John Murphy) she’d be more respected. Deal thought this was ridiculous. To highlight this, she ironically adopted the stage name Mrs. John Murphy.
When Pixies lead singer/songwriter Black Francis became creatively stifling and controlling, she called his bluff and left to start her own side project with her twin sister, Kelly —but the Breeders became so much more than a side project. Instead, they were a hugely influential alternative band whose debut album, Pod, was often touted by Kurt Cobain as a major inspiration for Nirvana’s Nevermind. Their next album, Last Splash, contained the hits ‘Cannonball’ and ‘Divine Hammer’ and outsold every Pixies album combined.
