Tagged: girlschool
No, I never “grew out of it”….
Dozed off on the train on my way home, and when I woke up, just a few minutes before my station, the girl next to me smiled and said:
– I remember you from junior high!
I looked at her and I could have sworn I’d never seen her before. But I generally suck at remembering faces, which gets me in trouble as people probably think I’m a stuck up bitch for not remembering them…
She turned to my colleague, pointed at me and said:
– She was the only girl in the entire school, who was into heavy metal.
Well, okay then. Apparently she DID know me. :D
– So… I guess you’ve grown out of it now, huh…? she said and smiled.
Grew out of it? Of what? Being a metalhead? Are you kidding?
Hell, NO.
– No way, I’m still a rock chick, always were, always will be. Well it was nice to see you! I said, still not knowing who she was.
She said she used to be in a grade above us. Okay, that makes it even better. Back in those days you definitely didn’t socialize with anyone YOUNGER, that was very uncool. So, I must have left quite an impression if even one of the “older chicks” noticed and remembers me – from 1983!
My mind just wandered off to those days, when I started my walk home. 1983. Junior high.
I don’t remember much from that time really, other than being intensely crazy about heavy metal.
I was still a kid, trying to find my identity – which was especially hard being the only girl in school who was into metal. I had no one to share that with and I didn’t really belong anywhere.
I used to hang with the guys, which of course the other teenage girls in my class didn’t do, unless they wanted a boyfriend. So, I guess I was just…different. :)
There were very few female role-models for me. I remember getting into Rock Goddess but they were pretty much like guys… Same thing with Girlschool, guys with tits.
Then Lita Ford came along and that changed my whole world. She became my “guiding light” through the jungle of metal where girls simply didn’t belong back in those days. She was a tough woman, but still a woman. Not a dude-chick.
I was so in love with the whole heavy metal scene that I couldn’t focus on ANYTHING else. It was ALL about hard rock/heavy metal.
I would go and buy those cheap LP’s with cut-outs from Spain, cause I couldn’t afford anything else. I remember buying Scorpions “Blackout” and it had all the titles translated! Hang on, I’ve still got all that shit here…. Yeah, this is what it looked like:
I would sit and carve the names and logos of the bands I liked, on my school desk with a sharp pencil – leaving permanent traces of where I’d been. I guess you could call it an obsession, cause it really was.
My backpack was decorated with the same thing – the Judas Priest logo and a bunch of Van Halen and Def Leppard-buttons and patches.
I read everything I could get my hands on, any metal magazine – which of course would be from the UK or the US cause we didn’t have anything like that in Sweden. Until the music mag OKEJ came along.
I used to hang outside the newsstand every Wednesday morning when a new issue of OKEJ would come out, right before going to woodwork class. Then of course, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else all day, I would read that freaking thing, cover to cover, not missing a WORD! :)
And it had all these cool posters too. This was my first Judas Priest-poster, that was from OKEJ. ME – I looked dorky as hell, but the whole world of rock’n’roll was all still new to me. Before I “converted” to metal, I had been a BEATLES-fan…! Quite a transition to say the least.
My parents worried. This was not supposed to happen, they wanted big things for me, I was supposed to go to university and make something of myself. Not listen to that….noise.
Dad used to say that music wouldn’t “put food on the table” and I needed to focus on the IMPORTANT things in life. Well… When I got my first job writing about metal 5 years later, he couldn’t really use that as a motivational speech anymore. ;)
Eventually my parents accepted that this was my call in life. I loved the music, it was very important to me and I incorporated it into my life with a passion.
[14 years old, just started decorating my walls with ugly longhaired men dressed in black leather!]
And no – I never “grew out of it”!
I told the girl on the train, that there is nothing to “grow out” of – because metal is the ULTIMATE music in my book. There is no higher level.
Many are always going to think that classical music is fancier but when it comes to complexity, you will find a lot of those influences in metal as well, only modernized and better suited for electric guitars and amps.
She looked surprised but I walked away with a sense of pride. Yeah, I have to say that I actually felt proud to be remembered by someone, 31 years later, for being the only female rocker in junior high – and STILL BE that girl! :)
I don’t know what my life would have looked like if I hadn’t fallen in love with metal, but I’m so glad that I never had to find out, because I’ve really lived a life I could never have dreamed of when I was a kid- and I owe it all to rock’n’roll.
It’s the love of my life and will be in my heart & soul till the day I die. :)
What triggers sexism in some rockers?
So Lita Ford is about to release a new album soon, and it was, as usual, on Blabbermouth yesterday.
Another thing that’s “as usual” are all those strange individuals on Blabbermouth who are filling the newspages with the weirdest comments…
The article was 100% about Lita’s music, yet the very first comment on there was: “Gonna do some MILF porn Lita?”
Another brainiac continued with another ever so intelligent comment that included, among other things “she s***ed Chris Holmes nasty alcoholic c**k for a few years in the 80’s“
It’s an interesting phenomenon, because I’m pretty sure that the pimplefaced teenage boys (I hope to god that these stupidass comments were NOT written by any ADULT….) got a heartattack just SEEING a picture of a WOMAN on their macho metal pages. All those sexually frustrated, morons turned into Beavis & Butthead in about two seconds by the mere sight of a woman among their male heroes.
Oh horror – I mean, really?! How DARE she exist in their little narrow macho-metal world?! Only LEMMY is allowed to rule that world of theirs, definitely no chick. They forget that this particular chick has even recorded a song she wrote with said legend….
[Lemmy and Lita = Can’t Catch Me]
But it’s always, always the same shit when a woman enters the world of metal. It’s all that sexist bullshit she has to listen to from a bunch of insecure dweebs who are convinced that they are exerting an imaginary power by acting as if sexuality is something that they are entitled to by nature, whereas women should be grateful if they “GET” some. You know, kind of what they were thinking back in the 50’s.
Especially in this case, when we’re talking about Lita Ford – THAT kind of behavior becomes nothing but BRAINDEAD and embarrassing. Why? Because she is not the kind of chick who gets offended by rough talk. First of all, she’s more vulgar than most of those little teenage nerds. If you think that the usual sexist talk is intimitading to someone like her – think again.
Back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, she was interviewed by RIP or Metal Edge, I forget which one it was – and stated that if she hadn’t made it as a musician, she would have pursued a “career” as a callgirl. Because she liked the idea of unbridled, unconditional sex.
That was a pretty “shocking” statement back in those days. She was very “SO FUCKIN’ WHAT??”
Her songs have always been about sex in all forms, I guess her last one, Wicked Wonderland, was no exception. And her stories and pics from her and her ex-husband Jim’s “sex-room” and their endorsement of a site that sells sex-toys and what have you….
The whole thing with the nervous teenage boy who’s trying to be cool in the safety and security of his anonymity, just becomes even more stupid. He chose the wrong chick to try his amateur, clumsy version of classic master suppression techniques on.
That crap is just such old news, and I don’t know how it still manages to survive among some retarded groups out there, in 2012.
It’s always the same. I saw some pretty nasty shit being said about Elize Ryd of Amaranthe for instance.
What is a guy thinking when he writes a comment to a music video, saying “She can sit on my face!”? And then there will be OTHER Beavis and Buttheads out there cheering it along.
I heard all that stuff back when I was singing in a band too. I’m not easily offended either. I mean, I joined my first band when I was a teenager, and trust me – I heard more intimate stories than I bargained for. The guys forgot I was a chick when they acted like boys do – so, yeah, every exaggerated sexual conquest was reviewed in the rehearsal studio.
After a lifetime of that, you get jaded, to a degree. But sometimes, in some situations, I still can’t help thinking “when is this shit gonna be OLD NEWS, it’s just getting so… old“.Every time I got up on stage, there was some dude, whose pals he was trying to impress, that yelled: “Show your tits!!”
In the end, I got so sick of hearing it, that I decided to address it with a sense of humor instead of bitching about it.
So, one evening I put on a whole bunch of t-shirts, tried my best to make it look like it was only one, and then did a bit of a “striptease” – taking off one t-shirt after the other, layer after layer.
I thought they would get the irony of it, but when I got to the last top, there was still some idiot who yelled, with a beer in his hand, “show your tits!”. I gave up. Some just don’t have a sense of humor or the IQ to understand irony and when they are being mocked.
I just hoped and wished that things would be different in 2012. I’ve been a rocker since I was 13 years old. When I started, there were very few female role models, and Lita was my first real source of inspiration – just because she did things her own way.
“Better sexy than ugly” is what she used to say with a laugh. She made being feminine something cool, something fun – not something political or aggressive. It was just the way she was. I admired her for it.
And after all the work she’s done her whole life, there are still caveman-people out there making the same stupid remarks now that they did back in 1983.
It’s not all just negative, that’s not where I’m going with this. Things HAVE changed a lot. We see more and more women at festivals – both in the crowd and on stage.
Last year, at Sweden Rock Festival, people worshipped Joan Jett and they got up early, dispite their hangovers, to see Lee Aaron.
Doro has always had extremely loyal fans who absolutely adore her and Girlschool have most certainly earned their legend-status just as much as their male colleagues.
It’s definitely better than it was in 1983, but I just wish that some of these “developmentally disabled”, to put it nicely, would become a thing of the past, altogether.
Maybe another…20 years from now…? Who knows.
IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR 