Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl QUOTES

1 " Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”) "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

2 " I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

3 " That’s why all of those records from high school sound so good. It’s. It that the songs were better- it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something- survived it, experienced it- is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living though something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in- temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

4 " Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something - survived it, experienced it - is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

5 " I felt that first awareness that there’s a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you’ve never heard—the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

6 " It's important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn't come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

7 " I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

8 " I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt business like or even transactional...I hadn't been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn't feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother's departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

9 " If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

10 " My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

11 " Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

12 " That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

13 " We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

14 " To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

15 " There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

16 " I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

17 " It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

18 " Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

19 " We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

20 " Entitlement is a precarious place from which to create or perform—it projects the idea that you have nothing to prove, nothing to claim, nothing to show but self-satisfaction, a smug boredom. It breeds ambivalence. It’s as if instead of having to prove they are something, these musicians prove they aren’t anything. It’s an inverted dynamic, one that sets performers up to fail, but also gives them a false sense of having already arrived. I don’t understand how someone would not push, challenge, or at least be present, how anyone could get onstage and not give everything. "

― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl