Challenging the status quo musically, lyrically, and visually, the pioneering women of punk made sure they were seen and heard. Punk rock didn’t require stellar musicianship or record-company backing; for the powerful women making noise in the genre, it was about overthrowing old tropes of women in music occupying sweet or subservient positions. These pioneers spewed and shared ideas, passion, poetry and individualism.
Late ‘70s New York and London were two of the flashpoints of the nascent punk music scene that welcomed women into the fold. In NYC, Patti Smith was a pioneer who remains quintessential, along with the more New Wave-leaning musicality of Debbie Harry and Blondie. In the U.K., Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, and the Slits made waves on their own terms. Punk's DIY ethos allowed girls and women everywhere to rebel against the macho excesses of ‘70s stadium rock and '80s hair metal.
Since its late-‘70s birth, punk has seen numerous iterations, and as an ethos and genre, it continues to thrive. And women remain an important part of the musical conversation. From the from Riot Grrrl movement kickstarted in the Pacific Northwest in the early ‘90s until the present day, numerous lineups, including Arrow DeWilde of Starcrawler and the Linda Lindas, have taken up the mantle, bringing punk into a new era.
GRAMMY.com highlights some of the pioneering, culture-shifting women who have changed the course of punk and one promising, up-and-coming band at the forefront of the genre’s future.
Listen to GRAMMY.com’s official Women Essential to Punk playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Pandora. Playlist powered by GRAMMY U.
Exene Cervenka
Exene Cervenka performing live in 1983 | Photo: Chris Walter/WireImage
Featuring the shared vocals and lyrics of Chicago-born poet Exene Cervenka and John Doe, X’s 1980 debut LP kicked Los Angeles’ ‘70s soft rock/ hippie era to the curb. Cervenka's enviable thrift-store style, pointed harmonies, bold vocals and personal, clever lyrics made her an unimpeachable icon of the L.A. music scene.
X songs including "Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not," "I Must Not Think Bad Things," "4th of July," plus stellar covers of "Wild Thing" and the Doors’ "Soul Kitchen," and the quartet’s best-known tune, "Los Angeles" are a small part of Cervenka’s prolific output.
In addition to eight X albums, including the most recent, 2020’s Alphabetland, Cervenka was in the country-leaning project The Knitters, while the first of several solo albums solo to date, 1989’s Old Wives,' was pointedly a record "for and about women," she told the Los Angeles Times.
Auntie Christ and the Original Sinners are among the singer/guitarist’s other musical projects, while Cervenka concurrently pursued poetry with collaborators including LA’s "unofficial poet laureate" Wanda Coleman and Lydia Lunch. As a fine artist, the X singer has been part of at least a dozen exhibitions and mounted a one-woman show, "Exene Cervenka: America the beautiful."
Proof of punk’s —and Cervenka’s — endurance and influence? In 2017, the GRAMMY Museum at L.A. Live honored the lineup with an exhibit titled "X: 40 Years of Punk in Los Angeles," which showcased the uncompromising vision that took Cervenka and the band from grimy punk clubs to Dick Clark’s "American Bandstand" and Rolling Stone accolades.
Poly Styrene
Poly Styrene, lead singer of the pioneering punk group X-Ray Spex, in 1977 | Photo: Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
An oral history of Poly Styrene’s life, DayGlo!, published in 2019, includes stories from the X-Ray Spex singer’s many admirers, including the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock, The Slits' Tessa Pollitt and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.
Born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, Poly Styrene was intensely individualistic, leaving home at 15, hitchhiking to music festivals and living in crash bands around her native U.K. In 1976, within a year of making her first demo, Elliott-Said saw the Sex Pistols, anointed herself Poly Styrene and founded X-Ray Spex. She was 19.
The band’s 1978 debut, Germ-Free Adolescents, has horns punctuating the speedy guitars and Poly Styrene’s cocky vocals. Still-memorable songs like "Germfree Adolescence," "Art-i-Ficial," "Identity" and "The Day The World Turned DayGlo" ensure the band’s legacy, which includes influencing bands from Romeo Void to the Waitresses.
Though Styrene died from cancer at the age of 53, daughter Celeste Bell (singer of Celeste Dos Santos and The Tabloid Queens) has helped cement her mother’s place in punk history. The award-winning documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, came out in 2021, and was co-directed by Bell. In the doc, Styrene's personal diaries are narrated by actress Ruth Negga, an artist who shares Poly Styrene’s Irish-African heritage and bold spirit.
Alice Bag
Alice Bag performing at the Mabuhay Gardens in 1978 | Photo: Ruby Ray/Getty Images
The title of Alice Bag's 2011 memoir — Violence Girl, From East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage: A Chicana Punk Story — only hints at the stories the singer/songwriter, musician, author, artist, educator and feminist has lived.
As lead singer and co-founder of the Bags (also featuring bassist Patricia Morrison) the vocalist born Alicia Armendariz found herself at the forefront of the original LA punk scene. The Alice Bag Band was featured in the Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilization before Bag when onto stints in other groundbreaking lineups, including Castration Squad, Cholita and Las Tres.
Bag’s speaking engagements, music, art and writing further the initial inroads made as young punk singer ‘70s and ’80s. Bag’s second book, 2015’s Pipe Bomb for the Soul in 2015 joined her memoir as a staple in gender, musicology and Chicana studies courses across the country.
As a solo artist, Alice Bag’s self-titled 2016 debut album, featuring the sharp single "No Means No" and an updated feminist take on the "girl group" anthem, "He’s So Sorry," was named one of the best albums of 2016 by AllMusic and Pitchfork. Two more solo albums and acclaim followed, including the punky 2020 single "Sister Dynamite," with the trenchant lyrics "she’s so tired of fragile masculinity."
She continues to inspire and influence: In 2018, the City of Los Angeles officially recognized Alice for her "profound influence on music and the punk rock scene in Los Angeles and her activism for the LGBTQ community and speaking out against social injustice."
Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna performing at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival | Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
With more than 24 million Spotify streams, Bikini Kill’s "Rebel Girl" is an enduring anthem for women of all ages and stages. When the tune dropped 1993, Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna was already a voice for third-wave feminism thanks to her collaborations with like-minded young women on ideas, music and zines that launched the Riot Grrrl movement.
That call to action for young women to embrace feminism, especially via the punk rock scene, arose alongside grunge, and still resonates powerfully more than 30 years later. By the time the band broke up in 1996, the frontwomen had a plethora of side projects and guest appearances with top indie musicians among her many accomplishments.
In addition to spawning and empowering many bands, writers and artists, Hanna’s own commitment to art and activism remains strong. In 1991, she performed with Bikini Kill a Pro-Choice Rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.; in 2011 she gave a speech at a Planned Parenthood "Stand Up for Women's Health" Rally.
A documentary about Hanna titled The Punk Singer chronicled her life and work up until its 2013 release. Fronting the groups Le Tigre and the Julie Ruin still with a DIY ethos, Hanna also reformed Bikini Kill for its first show in 20 years in 2019… and had the current wave Riot grrrls, irrepressible L.A. lineup the Linda Lindas, opening. The future’s unwritten, but the end is nowhere near.
The Linda Lindas
The Linda Lindas as guests on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in 2021 | Photo: Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images
By the time the Linda Lindas’ Los Angeles Public Library performance of "Racist Sexist Boy" went viral in May 2021, the three teen (and one pre-) musicians were anointed with the mantle worn by previous all-female punk band groundbreakers including Bikini Kill.
It was late April 2019 when Amy Poehler saw the Linda Lindas open for Bikini Kill and recruited them for her 2020 film Moxie, where they perform Kathleen Hanna and co.’s iconic "Rebel Girl." In 2020, the Linda Lindas wrote a song for the Netflix documentary The Claudia Kishi Club.
"Racist Sexist Boy" tells the true story of an experience Mila, the band's drummer, had when a schoolmate made a racist comment before the COVID-19 pandemic. When the tune became a social media hit, all the right people (Tom Morello, Thurston Moore) took notice, and the band scored a deal with respected punk label Epitaph.
Self-described as "Half Asian / Half Latinx. Sisters, cousins and friends who play music together because it’s fun!" the Linda Lindas "channel the spirit of original punk, power pop, and new wave through today's ears, eyes, and minds." Ranging in age from 11-17, the quartet have already played with punk legends the Dils, the Gears, and Phranc. Their debut LP, the aptly titled Growing Up, came out in 2022, leading to appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, gigs in New York, and a tour with Japanese Breakfast and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
The Linda Linda appear to have a firm hold on their career and position, as a sort of musical cri de Coeur in the lyrics to "Growing Up" makes clear: "We'll talk 'bout problems we share / We'll talk 'bout things that ain't fair / We'll sing 'bout things we don't know / We'll sing to people and show / What it means to be young and growing up."