Raw (girl) power
Today: Mark Yarm, author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge and contributor to Long Lead's Depth Perception.
Issue No. 550
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Punks
Mark Yarm
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Punks
by Mark Yarm
In the late 1980s, Theo Kogan, Gina Volpe, and Sydney “Squid” Silver—a group of friends from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, aka “the Fame school”—connected with fellow scenester Sindi Benezra to form the punk rock band Lunachicks. It wasn’t long before the irrepressible teenage girl gang was discovered by Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and signed to the indie label Blast First.
The pioneering band, known for its grunge-drag stage garb, gynecological humor, and in-your-face feminism, would go on to release five studio albums, beginning with 1990’s Babysitters on Acid. They toured the world with everyone from the Ramones to the Offspring to the Go-Go’s, and played the Warped Tour in 1999, the rare female band on a traditionally dude-heavy bill. The group, which had several lineup changes over the years, went on hiatus in 2001, reuniting a couple of times before going dormant again in 2004.
“I feel like we were sort of the redheaded stepchild, or the bridesmaid, of that time,” says Lunachicks singer Kogan today. “We never really got our due. And maybe it’s because people weren’t ready, and we were too wild and crazy and weird and funny.”
More recently, though, the band has been getting its flowers. In 2021, the same year the Lunachicks published a memoir—Fallopian Rhapsody: The Story of the Lunachicks, co-written with music journalist Jeanne Fury—the group played its first shows in 17 years. Last week, for Record Store Day, the Lunachicks released We Can Be Worster, its first-ever best-of compilation. And now, the band is the subject of a documentary, Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, directed by Ilya Chaiken. The movie comes out tomorrow in select theaters and via video on demand.
“I’m fucking thrilled,” says Kogan, now an accomplished makeup artist. “To know that this is an important story—and Ilya felt it was an important story to tell—is very affirming.”
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