As someone whose music taste usually tends toward rock and alternative, I was excited when I learned that we would be having guest speaker Rich Stremme speaking to us about his formative experiences with the nascent punk rock scene. Something I have always admired about the punk scene was how grassroots it was, which Rich discussed in length. I found it so fascinating that he created a zine basically by himself when he was as young as 13, and that he managed to carve a place for himself within the scene at such a young age. It takes an incredible amount of dedication to start from nothing and work your way into the scene, which is what Rich managed to do. I also really enjoyed how he discussed the sort of multidisciplinary aspect of punk rock in regards to his work with graffiti artist Revs. You wouldn’t have been able to promote your music without some kind of graphic accompaniment, which for Rich came in the form of Revs’ work. I think this also sort of ties into the idea of zines, as one would have to make them visually appealing to gain a following. Something else I found curious was his response to my asking him his thoughts on the riot grrrl movement and his experience with women in punk. I was surprised to learn that his experience with women in punk was that they were mostly photographers, which I hadn’t known beforehand. I did know, however, that women were excluded from the predominantly male scene, so at least within that they were able to carve out a niche for themselves. On riot grrrl, however, Rich said that he felt it to be exclusionary of men. He told a story of somebody at a Bikini Kill concert harassing other crowd members, after which he was asked to leave by the band; he ended up killing his girlfriend that night, apparently. He said that he would have welcomed the man in the concert so that he wouldn’t take the frustration of being rejected out on innocent people. Honestly, I would never have thought of riot grrrl in that way. The way I see it, riot grrrl was an avenue for women who were excluded themselves from the punk movement and, felt alienated by the sheer testosterone of it all. Thus, they branched out into their own offshoot of punk and wrote and sang about their specific frustrations. I will say that I found it interesting to hear such a radically different viewpoint from my own, and I can definitely see where Rich was coming from in that regard.

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