Girl Talk

The riot grrrl movement remains an overlooked part of modern music's framework, often painted on the coattails of its boys-club counterpart, grunge. Girls get their due in Sara Marcus's new book, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, where, from the early to mid-'90s, the deliberate passion and fury of key figures like Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna fostered and united creative female communities on opposite ends of the U.S. (Olympia, WA and Washington, DC). Definitive and authoritative, yet as personal as the nuanced culture itself, Marcus romanticizes the highs and is heartbroken by the fractured lows, giving due and fitting voice to a scene equally as charged.