Of course, some people weren’t even afforded this type-casting as a victim-to stand as one was to be implicitly believed, and that privilege usually required being white. Whether it was true empathy or an eye for tragedy that led the media to over-extend the victim narrative, the framing was a sign of the times these days, artists who share their stories of abuse are more likely to be thought of as brave survivors. Going through magazine and newspaper interviews with Amos from 1991 to 1993, it’s striking how an overwhelming number of them mention her sexual assault within the headline or first couple of paragraphs-as if the worst day of her life is her defining moment. Where rage defined the punk end of the ’90s sexual-assault songs canon, Amos and subsequent mid-’90s artists like Fiona Apple, whose rape at 12 became part of her early narrative, had a victim narrative foisted on them by the press. Riot grrrls ended up being pigeonholed by the mainstream press as “combat-boot-wearing man-haters, angry rape and incest survivors, former sex workers, and caricatures of girlhood,” as one recent remembrance put it. I often thought of this song-with its blood-curdling screams as Kathleen Hanna starts to sing John and Yoko’s “Give Peace a Chance”-during the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testimonies in 2018 they each capture such deep, perpetual cosmic unfairness, you have to laugh or scream or both. On Bikini Kill’s 1991 demo, Revolution Girl Style Now, amid disturbing confessions of abuse at the hands of a father figure, is a seething song called “ Liar” that condemns men who rape and then paint women as the uncredible ones. Working in the late-’70s feminist punk tradition of the Raincoats and Kleenex, bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy critiqued the white male capitalist patriarchy, demanded sexual autonomy, and railed against the normalization of sexual violence against women (or what we now call rape culture). The early-to-mid ’90s also saw the spread of riot grrrl from a small rock scene in Olympia, Washington, to a global movement. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.