Photo: Press
Carrie Brownstein is trying to remember one of her favourite quotes. It’s by American short story writer George Saunders, and it’s to do with contradictions. After a couple of stuttering false starts, she triumphantly pulls it from her brain: “Put contradictory ideas in the same cage,” she says, “and let them vibrate.” Later, a quick Google search tells me she was paraphrasing somewhat - but it’s a sentiment that returns repeatedly throughout our conversation. Because Carrie Brownstein is a mass of contradictions.
Case in point: last night, after speaking confidently and eloquently in front of a rapt crowd of at least a hundred fans at Rough Trade East – she was there to promote her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl - she went out for dinner with a few people she hadn’t met before. Suddenly, her confidence abandoned her: “I was really nervous speaking in the group.”
On-stage with Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein emits an intoxicating, kinetic energy – all sharp, twitching body movements and angular guitar playing. When the band performed at London’s Roundhouse as part of their reunion tour earlier in the year, she would occasionally collapse, dramatically, to the floor and begin majestically writhing.
Today though, speaking to me on the phone from her Covent Garden hotel room, she is softly, carefully spoken - her every utterance thought through with painstaking care. “I think with new endeavours I can still be shy,” she muses. “I remember the first night [of the book tour] in Brooklyn, Questlove from The Roots was my interviewer, and I got on stage and didn't feel nervous at all, and I talked, and then he asked me to read… and all of a sudden my voice was shaky.”
There’s a section in the book where Brownstein recalls her time at Evergreen State College, and how her classes there were plagued by a seemingly insurmountable shyness. “I knew what I wanted to say,” she writes of her attempts to speak in lessons, “but didn’t know how to interject or insert myself in a conversation.” By the time she managed to work up the nerve, her voice would be so physically affected that she sounded “on the verge of crying.”
“I don't think it’s an odd or new phenomenon,” she says when I tell her how much I related to the passage. “I'm much more awkward in social settings than I am on stage. I think there's something about being at university and being in a classroom that is very analogous to a small dinner party - and that's when I'm more nervous.” She pauses. “But I can easily jump on stage and perform in front of anyone at this point.”
Negotiating a lifelong balance between shy and confident is not the only aspect of Brownstein that’s embedded in contradictions – but to be contradictory, she explains, can only be a good thing. Because to be contradictory is to reject a binary-obsessed sense of personhood. When a fan on Tumblr asked how she had come to identify as bisexual, she told them she preferred the term “queer”, because “it rejects a sense of the binary, and questions universality and objectivity.”
“I feel like personhood is always in flux,” she elaborates now, “and to acknowledge that is to embrace something like queerness. Life and feelings feel transient, feel fluid and contradictory. I think queerness allows for a whole plethora of selves to coexist - artistically, physically, metaphysically, ontologically…” I silently add ‘ontologically’ to the ever-increasing list of words to Google after we’ve hung up. “And it can incorporate non-binary ideas about sexuality and gender. I really like that.”
Was queerness always a term with which she identified, then, or did she try out and discard several other labels before landing on it? “I suppose it was a journey to come to that as an identifier, but at the same time it's probably always best suited who I am. But I think all of it is a process that each of us should be allowed to engage in without other people weighing in.”
It’s a point she reiterates to the fan on Tumblr too – that they, despite how she or anyone else chooses to identify, should define themselves in the way that best suits them. It’s an important thing, I suggest, that people be given the space to understand themselves. “I think so too. I really understand wanting to feel claimed by a term, and I know that if someone else is using a certain term, that you then feel a kinship with them, but I think there are actually deeper things to bring people together than language. It's an unsteady surface upon which to put a lot of value.”
Watch Sleater-Kinney perform 'Modern Girl' at Pitchfork Festival below
It’s a somewhat surprising sentiment from someone who’s just released an entire memoir. The book, after all, is many thousands of words of ‘unsteady surface’ – tackling some of the most difficult parts of her life with both beautiful poignancy and, occasionally, a pragmatic detachment (yet another Brownstein contradiction). But still, she insists, language is not something to be relied upon. “If anything changes, it's language that changes as much as we do,” she explains, “So trying to hold onto that as a means of linking yourself to someone else is - not dangerous, but I think it's flimsy.”
Is this something she’s experienced herself? Passionate fans taking inspiration and encouragement from her – using her identifiers as a way of linking themselves to her? She thinks for a moment. “I feel like what I can contribute most honestly,” she unfurls, carefully, “is the work itself, and I think people know that I can't just deny my own participation or proximity to that work, but that that is what I'd rather be judged on than my own private self. I prefer to have some guardedness and distance, because I don't think that's necessary for appreciating or understanding what I put out in the world.
“I don't feel like I owe anything to anyone in that way. I just try to be compassionate and grateful and generous. But I don't know, I guess I don't... I try not to hold myself - or other people - to a standard. I'd rather judge their output in the world.”
I’m reminded of an interview Rihanna gave recently, in which she refused to be labelled as a role model. “I really loved that actually!” I can guess why - because people in the public eye, particularly women, are expected to – “be likeable! It's so mundane. There's something so mundane about that expectation. There's something so domestic about it, it's very care-taking. It's still putting the woman in a care-taking role, and to have to simultaneously be larger than life and very down to earth. I just think that's an unfair expectation for anyone, and I like that rejection of likeability.
“Because what we're defining likeable as is very, like I said, mundane. These ordinary, kind of pedestrian traits, it's not about... You can still be compassionate and be unlikeable, these things can co-exist! You can still be generous and be unlikeable!"
Suddenly, we've returned to Brownstein's favourite subject. "I think art has always been contradictory," she concludes, "so I don't understand why we disallow people to be.”
