Scream Club
By: Liz Ohanesian
“The Story is that we’re two queer chicks in love who make pop music and want to spread the message of fun, love and togetherness.”
For Scream Club, two beat-happy, rhyme-slinging girls from Olympia, Washington, fun, love and togetherness is the perfect reaction to the not-so-secret prejudices of mainstream media.
“Most everything people are fed is negative, heterosexist bullshit. The radio is terrible. Most everything you ever hear or read would lead you to believe women are inferior, stupid and put on the earth to be slaves and that they deserve to be cheated on and told what to do and that it’s okay to be dishonest because women are uncapable [sic] of understanding a man’s need to screw everything he sees.”
Scream Club on bell hooks
Cindy Wonderful, Sarah Adorable and The People’s Dance Party all agree—bell hooks is a role model. With that in mind, we at The PDP thought it best to ask Cindy and Sarah to talk about how hooks has influenced them and then play a little association game, using only words that are prevalent throughout hooks’ work. Cindy Wonderful: bell hooks has made me recognize racist thinking that I didn’t know existed. I never liked reading theory before, it put me to sleep, most of it is too academic and not at all personal, but bell hooks relates it to her own experiences. It’s easy to see where she is coming from. Plus, she has answers. Her books don’t just tell you things are messed up, she lets people know there is a solution. Her books made me more aware of racism and sexism. She made me realize how detrimental the patriarchy is on so many different levels I hadn’t thought about. She just opened my mind. She’s smart, articulate and inspiring. A real role model.
Sarah Adorable: bell hooks has been an influence for me because she is a feminist theorist who writes in very accessible terms, she keeps her writing personal, which in turn makes reading her a personal experience for me. She is able to highlight prominent racisms and sexisms, while still keeping a very positive attitude. She’s a person that really lives her life without compromising her integrity. Killing Rage and All About Love are my favorites. I’m learning to live with a love ethic.
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Scream Club counteracts with Don’t Bite Your Sister, the debut album off of Tiny Sensational, where peace-loving, day-glo rhythms a la De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising intermingle with sharp stabs of guitar easily reminiscent of Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear. For the album, duo Cindy Wonderful (ex-Rainbow Sugar) and Sarah Adorable (co-director of the short film Malaqueerche: Queer Punk Rock Show) put together a list of collaborators that reads like a who’s who of underground rock and hip hop, including The Gossip’s Beth Ditto, who sounds like a smoky jazz sample on “And You Belong,” and members of The Shape Shifters, who provide a hip hop interlude on the decidedly more rock-leaning number “What You Gonna Do?” But underground guest stars have nothing on Cindy and Sarah’s husky, passionate delivery, which flits between song and rap. Throughout the course of the album, they deal with empowerment (“What You Gonna Do?”), love (“And You Belong,” “I’ll Show You How”) and the art of zit-popping (“Acnecore”) with great skill, sometimes, to paraphrase the track “Sunset to Sunrise,” even making Peaches “sound like a schoolgirl.”
“We are trying to make music we relate to as feminists and as queers.”
It is no wonder then that Scream Club cites cultural theorist bell hooks’ as an influence. As a nineteen-year-old student at Stanford University, hooks began work on her first book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism as a response to dominant feminist theory, which she saw as excluding women of color and women of the working class. In the decades that followed, hooks has helped reshape radical feminist ideology to reflect the needs of all women and has dissected popular culture to illustrate how issues of race, gender and class still adversely affect society. While Scream Club is still a young band, after all Don’t Bite Your Sister is the debut, it is obvious that Cindy and Sarah have the power to alter the oftentimes anti-feminist and heterosexist perceptions of both punk rock and hip-hop.
“We are just trying to do what feels good and hopefully give some people new things to think about. Ideally, we would like to make songs so catchy, like all the radio jams we despise, so some bigot in Texas can hear it and get into it, and then maybe he can be surprised to find out, wow, these are two queer punk rock chicks. He would have a new insight, you know. It’s like sugar coating the medicine.”
