That's Not My Name: At Pitchfork, WCP contributor Lindsay Zoladz offers an excellent essay about the pervasiveness of the "riot grrrl" label in contemporary discussions about women musicians. Titus Andronicus' Amy Klein articulates the annoyance felt by female musicians who are spoken about in limited, sex-coded terms: "We have fewer cultural references when it comes to women in the arts... But female bands feel frustrated when they're automatically compared to other female bands."

Shut Up Already: Former WCP Sexist columnist—and current Good editor— Amanda Hess wants the journos behind that obnoxious We Are Journalists Tumblr to get over themselves. Says Hess: "This is the major distortion of We Are Journalists: The idea that we are somehow voiceless. How could we possibly be more heard?"

Fresh Blood: Molotov Theatre Group has a (kinda) new artistic director. In a press release, the Grand Guignol company announced that former associate artistic director Kevin Finkelstein is taking over for Lucas Maloney, who is moving to New York, but will "remain with the company in an Emeritus capacity." Molotov will take off this fall and winter, but be back to freak you out next year.

Hit the North: Our Baltimore bureau sends word that Animal Collective's Brian Weitz has been spotted scuba-diving at the National Aquarium.

Today on Arts Desk: The arty side of Occupy D.C.; the crazy shit bands will do for you if you pledge money to their Kickstarter campaigns.

Author Sara Marcus

Almost 20 years after it began, it seems like short-lived '90s phenomenon riot grrrl is making a comeback. Girls swap zines and feminist ideology via Etsy and Tumblr; fashion prodigy Tavi Gevinson recently launched the teenage-girl-geared website Rookie, where she posts themed mixes and drops tips on how to get over girl hate; hundreds of people participated in SlutWalks in cities nationwide.

Sara Marcus' 2010 book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution helped revive riot grrrl. Tonight at 7 p.m., Marcus talks about the book at the University of Maryland's Taliaferro Hall. I spoke to her about female musicians today, my future band name, and how college-aged girls (and boys) can be part of the reblossoming riot grrrl scene.

Why did you decide to write about riot grrrl, and what did you find that was most shocking or compelling to you?

I felt that the story wasn’t being told properly and it was going down in history in a way a different than people experienced. It was important to talk to everyone before too much time went by and people forgot. Because riot grrrl had the media blackout and didn’t talk to the media, people were trying to tell the story with no facts and emphasizing what they wanted to. It felt important to do that because it’s a symptom of how not seriously young people can be taken. For example, Occupy Wall Street—a lot of people are saying that it's not real politics because it's just young people, but I don't see anything that was started by grown-ups taking off like this. It seems ridiculous for people to call attention to young people for having all this political passion and I thought that was happening with riot grrrl. The thing that was the most shocking and compelling was that when I was doing the research how much sense it made that we were all that mad then. With more research into the political context of that time, like the study that came out when I was 15 about rape that should that way more girls were being sexually assaulted than people realized. I must have read that and gotten really mad, it was really a hot-button moment for women's issues and young people's issues that just completely made sense. We were all fed up and had to band together and take action. In hindsight, our political responses were a lot more justified. Shocking might be too strong of a word but it was a nice thing to see.

It seems like there’s a resurgence in riot grrrl lately. Why do you think this happened?

When I was writing the proposal for my book and I was trying to make the case that there would be a big audience, it would’ve been cool to bring up Etsy and feminist Tumblrs, but that wasn’t happening in the beginning of the book. It’s really wonderful that it’s coming out now, because I didn’t know if women in their teens and 20s were interested in it now. I think a lot of it is that those two books [Marcus’ book and Marisa Meltzer’s book Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music], the Le Tigre documentary, the documentary about Kathleen Hanna that was recently funded, and Tavi’s blog and Rookie—I just think that they all build off all each other. The two books came out at the same time and if someone sees the word riot grrrl in the media three times in the space of the year, you’re probably going to go research it. Marisa and I are basically the same age and we grew up enough that we can do something crazy and write a book. I think each of us could’ve written the book 10 years ago, but we wrote it better now. Although, I do wish more girls started bands. You can listen to Bikini Kill but you’re never going to have that experience of seeing them live. I want all of you to start bands and you can be the bands people go see!

My roommate and I are trying to start our own band, but we can’t play any instruments. Were you ever in a band?

You should! Make a pact with yourself that you’ll write five songs before you criticize anything. Make sure to create now, and judge later. The mentality of girls from the '90s  hasn’t changed—we have to do everything perfectly, have to be perfect overachievers. But you should be playing play punk rock; it’s better to be messy and play a song that sucks and be like “Whatever!” You don’t have to care what people think. The first band I joined in Maryland was during the winter break of my freshman year of college. I played bass in our band even though I never held a bass before, but they said, “That’s no problem, here’s a bass." From that first band, I learned how to play drums and bass, and I was a drummer for bands and I even toured after college. But if I had felt that the first band was perfect, I never would have gotten started. I actually have a band name for you: “Arrabiata,” which means spicy or angry in Italian. I can’t believe no one’s named their band that before.

Do you see a difference in the perception of female musicians now than in the early '90s? What music are you listening to now?

I think it’s easier now to be a female musician because it’s a lot more normalized, it’s not like, “Whoa, you’re a girl playing music.” It’s weirder to see a show where everyone in every band playing is a guy. There are certainly more people playing music, but it's more important that people don't think it's strange. That really changed in the past 10 years and I think the effect of riot grrls' “let's talk about this” mentality had a lot to do with it. Right now, I'm really into tUnE-yArDs and Mountain Man. I'm also into Talk Normal, my friends' band Christy and Emily, and Household. Those are the really good main ones right now.

What can girls in college do that are interested in riot grrrl?

I really can’t emphasize enough, because it’s great to be inspired in the past but the point is do things now. You have to let the history that you research propel you forward to the public square. You should write songs, start a band, make art and display it, start a zine or blog, apply to the student paper for a weekly column, and try and start a community. Say to a girl you know, “Hey I know you want to be a writer but what have you written? I want to make sure you keep moving forward and you know that I support you and I want to feel like you'll read and listen to my stuff." It's really important to start a community, not only girls support your male friends too! It can be hard sometimes to form supportive bonds with other girls but when you manage to do it its incredibly rewarding. That’s the message that I want to give everyone.

Riot grrrl's in the middle of a cultural victory lap. In the past year alone, the early-'90s punk feminist movement has seen some noteworthy milestones: Sara Marcus published Girls to the Front, a terrific and meticulously documented history of the movement; NYU's Fales library opened the first comprehensive archive of riot grrrl zines; and Kathleen Hanna was honored with a star-studded (Tavi Gevinson! Kim Gordon! Kim Gordon's kid!) Knitting Factory tribute show filmed for an upcoming documentary on her career. Even before it was announced last week that her one-time solo project Julie Ruin is heading back into the studio, Hanna's name seemed to be hovering in the air. Even The New York Times could not resist waxing nostalgic.

Into this fortuitous moment comes the DVD release of Who Took the Bomp?—Kerthy Fix's documentary chronicling Hanna's feminist electro-punk band's final tour in 2004. The recently launched D.C. queer web zine Where the Girls Go screened the film on Saturday night to a sold-out crowd crammed into the imaginatively decorated (life-size, zine-style cut-outs of the band greeted attendees in the doorway), and woefully un-air-conditioned Gold Leaf Studios. The event brought together fans young and old, united by a passion for feminist punk, radical politics, and also that really gross and universally leveling feeling of sweat pooling in the small of your back.

Coupling sequin-laden performance montages with fly-on-the-wall tour footage and interviews with band members, Who Took the Bomp? explores the personal politics that animated Le Tigre over its eight-year run. Worn out from riot-grrrl infighting and the media's misrepresentation of the movement, Hanna—along with beatmaker Johanna Fateman and future queer heartthrob JD Samson—started the band in 1998 as a way to infuse messages of feminist empowerment into the traditionally dudely world of electro music.

Like any good rock doc, Who Took the Bomp? indulges in requisite moments of backstage goofiness. And if this is Le Tigre’s Don’t Look Back, the role of Donovan is played dutifully here by Slipknot, with whom the ladies shared the bill at New Zealand’s Big Day Out Festival and plot, with sarcastic glee, a backstage meeting. (Fateman pretends to have a younger brother who’s a fan, and poses for a picture with one band member whose look can only be described as Hellraiser chic. “Timmy will be so excited!” Hanna squeals.)

But the film's at its best when it digs a little deeper, interrogating the difficulties of bringing queer positivity to a wide audience (the band decides to pull an ad from Jane magazine when the publication shrinks from using the word lesbian) and Hanna’s notoriously prickly relationship with mainstream media. Hanna was always uncomfortable when the media portrayed her as the figurehead of riot grrrl, and here she voices her frustration at journalists who continue to define her legacy through the famous men she’s often associated with. Riffing on another trusty rock doc trope (foreign journalists say the darnedest things!), Fix focuses on an encounter between Hanna and a radio host in New Zealand who won’t stop asking her questions about one of these men in particular. “I understand you once wrote some graffiti on Kurt Cobain’s wall,” he says. “I wrote, ‘Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” Hanna answers, in the polite but wearied tone of somebody who’s had to answer that question incessantly over the past 20 years.

Hanna’s not the only focal point, though. Fix’s film provides well-rounded portraits of the other band members, including Samson, the proudly mustachioed lesbian who’s gone onto become the frontwoman of the band MEN and music’s most visible poster girl for female masculinity. Being a queer icon, the film shows, can be trying. While in New Zealand, she goes on what she thinks to be a date with a woman, but when the woman goes on a homophobic rant about how “nasty” lesbians are, Samson realizes there’s been a misunderstanding: This woman thinks Samson is a gay man. She leaves without correcting her and relays the incident to her bandmates with humor, but it’s maybe the most poignant moment in the film.

Fix, who co-directed last year’s Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, doesn’t quite plumb the depths of how provocative a moment this was in Le Tigre’s history (er, herstory?): Having just released its unexpectedly glossy major-label debut This Island, the band was courting a new audience and risking alienating fans who’d originally identified with its DIY ethos. But even if this dynamic is only implicit in the film, it still adds up to an engaging portrait of a band navigating the conflicts of making music with a message.

"I always fear erasure," Hanna says toward the end of the film, expressing requisite worries about her band’s legacy. But Who Took the Bomp? should serve as a lasting document of Le Tigre’s message—and the packed house sweating it out on Saturday night proof that there’s are still plenty of people still willing to listen.

One of the original '70s punk outfits, The Slits toured with The Clash and pushed out female-friendly art rock for years. Sadly, founder Ari Up passed away just last month, but her fearless spirit lives on in her curious and adventurous music.

Five badass Brits formed their "boy/girl revolution" in early '90s London, and the short-lived Huggy Bear put out a few awesome tunes before the members parted ways. The feedback-laden fury of "Her Jazz" pulls no punches, and here's a riotous live performance of the track.

Katy Otto has long fought for female justice, be it through social work, the positive messages of her myriad bands, or simply her role in running an awesome independent label. Her band Trophy Wife keeps it simple: two rad women kicking ass on their respective instruments. Come watch them do just that AND learn about the history of Riot Grrrl for free at St. Stephen's on Friday.

Partyline (2005-present): Fascination with the riot grrrl movement burned brightly and briefly, but the members of Bratmobile—which formed in 1991—kept making music, on and off, until 2002. Sort-of based in D.C., Partyline isn't the first other project for singer Allison Wolfe, but it's had the most staying power. The band's name sort of reminds me of that chirpy Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie where they share a phone line, but Partyline's music—snotty, high-adrenaline, feminist—quickly corrects that association. The trio plays at the Velvet Lounge tomorrow night at 9 p.m. with Edie Sedgwick and Noisy Pig. Tickets are $8.

More riot grrrl second acts after the jump: flowcharts, riots in MTV studios, and Christina Aguilera!

Julie Ruin (1998): When Bikini Kill split up in 1998, singer Kathleen Hanna recorded a one-off album under the sobriquet Julie Ruin. Sonically, it's a bridge between Bikini Kill and Hanna's later electroclash outfit Le Tigre. The lyrics, too, are of the same smart, anarcho-feminist mold, but they also irreverently take measure of riot grrrl itself. Take "Aerobicide," whose spoofy video plays with the cop-show aesthetic of Beastie Boys's "Sabotage" promo, and contains mustachioed suits strategizing how to sell riot grrrl. Best shot? A flowchart in which all arrows point to "dance party."

Sleater-Kinney (1994-2006): This jagged Olympia, Wash.-based band emerged from Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, and took the riot grrrl ethos to its largest audience yet. The best testament to the trio's success? None of the Sleater-Kinney fans I know have the same favorite album. Also, member Carrie Brownstein's Moniter Mix blog is one of the Web's best blends of hard thinking and excellent taste.

Comet Gain (1993-present): The members of the U.K. band Huggy Bear all joined other groups, none better than Comet Gain. This jangly outfit featuring bassist Jon Slade—one of the few males to play in a riot grrrl band—formed around the time Huggy Bear started a minor riot in an MTV studio, thus earning canonization by British rockists. Production assistants have rested easy since: Comet Gain's vibe is decidedly calmer.

Le Tigre: (1998-present): Kathleen Hanna's second second act. Originally conceived as the back-up band for Julie Ruin, Le Tigre pumped out three loud, rude, and synthy releases beginning in 1999, and is still making music in 2009—with Christina Aguilera. Don't get snooty: A decade after the fact, Le Tigre's "Deceptacon" remains the best part of any dance party where people have the chutzpah to play it.