I spent the day in a teenage girl paradise and it was incredible
Facing my own mortality via Mia Zapata, Mitzi and All Points East
Hello lovely people!
This week I’m revisiting my own teenage years and helping to make memories for my own teenager. It starts off heavy and ends on a cheerier note. If the email truncates, please view it online!
Mia Zapata – a lost legend
On Saturday Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, would have been 59. I first heard The Gits a few years ago, watching Hype! a documentary about the Seattle grunge scene. I could not believe it when I saw the band on screen. Could not believe it. How did I not know this band? I was gutted for teenage me. I would have been absolutely obsessed with The Gits if only I’d known they existed.
Here’s Zapata rocking it up to “Second Skin”, one of their many excellent punk tunes.
This one is a bit quieter, but also banging.
The Gits were about to be signed to Atlantic, when Mia Zapata was killed1, at the age of 272
This week I watched a documentary about The Gits3 and it was pretty devastating seeing these young people with so much energy and hope, living in a huge house they called the Rathouse (with a cockroach soup-making warlock as their landlord), fall suddenly into despair in the wake of Mia’s murder.
What starts as a musical documentary, with loads of archive footage of Zapata and The Gits, soon becomes like a true crime documentary, with Joan Jett, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Tad and other Seattle bands coming together to perform a benefit concert to raise money for a private investigator.
Anyway, this weekend, I’ll be raising a glass of something to the memory of Mia Zapata, and thinking about all those unwritten songs we never got to hear thanks to a life cut short, wishing I’d heard The Gits much sooner.
All Points East Towards Death
This weekend I got to revisit my disaffected childhood in a different way when we took our teenager (and slightly reluctant 11-year-old) to the Sunday line-up of All Points East in Victoria Park, ending with a glorious performance by the queen of the sad girls, Mitski.
I’ve been to a lot of festivals, but I have never been to one that was populated almost entirely by teen girls. It was pretty lovely. Great atmosphere, spanking clean loos, lots of hand holding and singing, vape clouds hanging low in the sky, and noughties outfits that made me feel ancient. This is how my parents must have felt seeing me dressed in flares. I really regretted my straight leg jeans (I have baggies, why didn’t I wear them?) with my turn ups and no socks (ugh, gen z hate no socks, what was I thinking?) And why didn’t I wear a band t-shirt? I have those don’t I? (Answer: no, my daughter has stolen them all).
Boy do festivals feel corporate when you’ve previously existed on a diet of Glastonbury and Green Man Festival. No food or drink allowed? What a swizz.4 No food and yet they only supplied ONE pudding stand to a field full of teenagers. Whose idea was that? I queued for an hour to spend £25 on 3 crepes.
Another thing that made me feel old was realising I don’t get some of the bands. Beabadoobee has some good tracks, but mostly she makes me think of fake teen bands from noughties high school movies. Any rocking out felt strangely cleansed. Her voice doesn’t do it for me (although She Plays Bass sounds like Madder Rose, which I can get behind). I felt a Gen X eye roll was never far from my face. TV Girl are a total mystery to me. It sounded like a sanitised Happy Mondays set sung by Americans. Ethel Cain was quite gloomy, and given how much I like gloomy bands normally this isn’t a bad thing, but maybe it takes a while to get into her music?? She also had to spend a chunk of her time pointing out people fainting in the crowd and organising water. “It’s become her full time job,” said my youngest. Sir Chloe were easily my favourite – lead singer Dana Foote is cool, snarling about how Michelle is a ‘monster from hell’.
And then there’s Mitski
And I love Mitski – so arty and cool – but I don’t understand what happened to all her muso fans? Where are all the 6Music listeners in band t-shirts nodding along? Do they all stay away because they know all the people who discovered her via TikTok will be there?5 I’ve seen Mitski talk about her total bemusement with TikTok, and I wonder how she feels being the custodian of so many teenage hearts.
And Mitski herself just doesn’t fit the teen idol model. She looked like she had come straight from her pottery class, hair sensibly cropped for minimal effort, the sleeves on her round bottomed shirt rolled up as though she was planning to head to the garden and start putting together a spring bulb lasagne. This is not a criticism. I too love nothing better than leafing through a seed catalogue, but it does make her a slightly surprising hero for teen girls.
Her performance involves an awful lot of hand waving and foot tapping, done so stylistically that many of the teens know the moves by heart, joining along as she sings another mournful track, wafting arms and square dancing, at one point adopting a dead dog position and singing on her back on the floor.
At times she looked like she was leading an over 60s stretch class (In fact she started the show by getting all of us to do some limbering up, everyone duly obliging her with head rolls, sumo squats and hip bends), at others she could have been the star of an interpretive dance troupe. Each mournful arty track was perfect for any given moment in a Twin Peaks episode.
The kids absolutely loved her, spending a chunk of time trying to tell her that the colour of the security staff’s vests was “brat green,”but she couldn’t work out what they were saying because she didn’t have her glasses. The exchange was hilarious but stole a whole track from the set list.
Anyway, she’s funny and arty and I finally remember how some of her fairly meandering songs actually go, but I still don’t understand why the kids love her so and where the rest of her fanbase got to. I also don’t understand why teenagers today (there I said it), don’t seem to want to dance about and get angry. And don’t get me started on them filming themselves singing along to the songs. Sweet lord.
So there you go. That was my week in music. Next time I might cement my aged status by talking about all the gardens I’ve visited this summer.
Bye!
K
PS. The first draft of newsletter went astray. Born of a desire to celebrate a singer I wish more people had heard, it was derailed by the frustration that comes to me any time I hear stories about men attacking women. But after I started down that path, I realised it was kind of depressing to celebrate the life of a brilliant lost talent by talking once again about the tragic way her life ended. If I were Mia Zapata looking down from above, I’d be v. peeved to have my legacy infected by this man’s ugly story.
So, I decided to rewrite the piece, but I put the earlier draft online for anyone who wants to read it. For everyone else, let’s stick to the far more life-affirming subject of teenage girls and their passion for music. Viva Zapata!
No details here, but see the PS for a very alternative first draft of this email that goes into more detail.
What is it with that age?
Early on, a member of the band explains the name of their band comes from Monty Python and says it means, moron, crackpot, freak, dork or nerd. Oops.
Though both Alex and I managed to sneak some snacks in. I never go anywhere without a Graze blueberry flapjack in the side pocket of my bag.
My daughter would like it known that she loved Mitski before she even had TikTok thanks to Adventure Time, which used one of her tracks for Marceline the vampire.
I enjoyed this (and it made me determined to check out the Gits, a band who passed me by), and I am glad you put the first version up too.
Wasn’t a huge fan of the Seattle scene but a few bands like Tad, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees had enough punk rock crossover to edge their way in. Everyone had at least one Gits tape. It was huge news when Mia died. The Evil Stig album released afterwards is well worth a listen.