Bikini Calls: Girl Power Book, Uh, Rocks

Brand new offering from the writer who previously blew wet kisses in the direction of Sassy magazine actually gets it right.

BY CRYSTAL K. WIEBE

One part memoir, two parts cultural history book, Marisa Meltzer's Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music (published earlier this month by Faber and Faber) traces the prominence of women in popular music from the riot grrrls to the Spice Girls to all-girl rock and roll camps for tweens, ruminating along the way on the effectiveness of the message of female empowerment inherent within (or at least claimed by) each music and cultural phenomenon.

Although admittedly an avid fan of many of the acts she writes about, Meltzer - who previously co-authored the 2007 book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time - manages to contemplate the cultural relevance of all of her subjects with fairness and objectivity. For instance, she considers that the riot grrrl bands that boycotted the media may have been a little too idealistic. While being more open may have risked the media further misconstruing the point of the movement, more press would have at least meant that more girls - especially in the Midwest and other pop culturally dry places in the pre-Internet age - were exposed to the themes of self-empowerment and sisterhood that riot grrrls embraced. For, while the "girl power" promoted by the Spice Girls lacked much substance and emphasized consumerism, at least its ubiquity meant that a message of female pride reached the masses. And Meltzer cites scientific findings indicating that even the Spice Girls' watered down version of girl power had some positive impact on the group's young female fans. Along with the riot grrrls and Spice Girls, Meltzer examines the trends of women's (or womyn's) music festivals in the 1990s, female singer songwriters and the rise of sexy pop tarts like Britney Spears.

The author acknowledges that her portrait of the era is biased toward her own tastes. "This book will have a narrow and highly selective focus by design," she writes in the preface. "It's a discussion and an analysis as viewed through the lens of personal experience." Fortunately, the memories she weaves in - like when she felt she was the only long-haired teenage girl in the crowd of a close-cropped Bikini Kill fans - help the academic analysis from becoming too dry and, more importantly, drive home the message that what women do on the musical stage can have a profound effect on the girls in the mosh pit - even after they go home.