I ain't no damsel in distress and I don't need to be rescued.

My shrink asked me the other day if I realize how often say, "I went to an all-girls school." Apparantly I preface many stories with this well-known tidbit of personal information. The thing is, though, I've been out of said all-girls school for 10 years now (which is, it is worth noting, still not as long as I attended that school--that would be 12 years!) and I don't actually think about it all that much anymore. I have vague recollections of the uniforms and the AP classes and my fear of being caught smoking in my uniform and getting suspended (a fate that befell two of my friends). But I don't really think about what it was like to be in a totally boy-free environment 100 percent of the time. However, it has forever colored my thinking. The "all girls school" is like a pair of rose colored glasses through which I see the world. I don't even realize that I'm wearing them, but I see everything the way they taught me to see. I guess that is why I say, "I went to an all girls school" so much.

I bring this up because on Thursday night I went to Sleater-Kinney with Bill. It was an amazing (like pee-your-pants-uncontrollably amazing). Never have they owned their status as a "power trio" more. The new songs rock with honey-dripping, Led Zeppelin heaviness and live they are especially potent. Everyone at Roseland was impressed by how rousing the new songs were, how Carrie's playing managed to be sludgy and sharp, how Corin makes noises that don't sound like "singing" but that are, and how Janet Weiss' drumming, which was always great, is now virtuosic. The screaming crowd kept calling them back for encores and, in their second one they came out and played a kick ass version of "Mother" by Danzig. The night was pretty close to perfect. And then, as we were walking out of the venue, I heard two groups of people (one of which featured women) say a variation of, "They rock pretty hard for girls." That just makes me so mad. If we still think, in 2005, that girls don't rock hard or that all women musicians should be floaty and feminine like Tori Amos or sexy pop tarts like Britney or hairy butch acousitc guitar players like the Indigo Girls, that makes me terribly sad for the new millennium. Women have been rocking hard since the invention of the art form. (Just ask Elvis, who had a big hit with Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog.") And, while there has been an embarassing dearth of woman guitar heroes, there have stars with personalities, appetites, and voices as big as the boys (Janis Joplin, Siouxie Sioux, Exene Cervenka anyone?) and this late in the game we should be used to them. In fact, there should be MORE of them. So it makes me so mad to hear people say "they rock pretty hard for girls," especially since I defy any band made up of dudes to rock as hard and as well and as originally as Sleater-Kinney.

So I'd like to thank my all-girl education for my knee jerk feminist response.

PS: Having said all that (about SK urgent and dense rock), my favorite song on the new album (and perhaps my favorite song live) is their sweet, joyful, mid-tempo tune "Modern Girl." Isn't it the best?