COVER STORY
over whelmingly white. “Like most creative types, I always
really identified as an outsider, and around 16, I felt ver y disin-
terested in my high school community,” she says. “Expressing
myself through music has entirely to do with how it feels to
make something. It was really important at that age to find
something that gave me a sense of permanence and meaning.”
She found several fellow outsiders while attending Br yn
Mawr, where she studied creative writing and film, and started
Post Post. Around the time of the members’ 2011 graduation,
the band split up and she moved down the road to Philadel-
phia, her father’s hometown. She then launched a new band,
Little Big League, that quickly captured local rock fans and
journalists’ attention.
Fans can find hints of Post Post’s synths and Little Big
League’s fuzz in Japanese Breakfast’s ambient sounds. Her
earlier bands’ records ser ve as documentation of Zauner’s
increasing lyrical master y. The songs on Little Big League’s
2013 debut, These Are Good People, build mounting instru-
mental crescendos under harrowing allusions to violent male
subjugation of women.
“A lot of the record’s informed by a ver y possessive male
figure who was in my life at the time,” Zauner told the Phila-
delphia City Paper in 2013. “On some songs, I even adopt male
voices. A lot of the record’s about power dynamics.”
But she didn’t have these issues with her three white, male
Little Big League bandmates, one of whom (bassist Deven
Craige, who also played with acclaimed Philly rock outfit
Strand of Oaks) still backs her for Japanese Breakfast’s live
shows. Zauner booked her own gigs, coordinated transpor-
tation and managed merch sales, building a managerial and
organizational skill set that she has employed throughout her
career. Only recently has she begun relinquishing these duties
to others.
“From band to band, I just grew a lot and learned a lot over
time; how to record, book shows, run a band, etc.,” she writes
in an email.
In many ways, Zauner’s sound and artistic approach throws
back to a time in music histor y when guitar-slinging rock
stars ruled the air waves and pop culture. Artists as stylis-
tically disparate as Nir vana, Bikini Kill, Radiohead and Liz
Phair all captivated fans the world over while publicly reject-
ing the social and economic forces that profited from their
art. Like those iconic artists, she values independence from
the industr y.
But during the ’90s, rock music primarily whitewashed or
froze out women of color from claiming the rock mantle. The
few that broke through remain overshadowed by the angr y
white men hailed as rock’s saviors. For Laina Dawes, the
author of What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and
Liberation in Heavy Metal, this dynamic plagues even the most
progressive rock subcultures that betray their supposedly
egalitarian values.
“Women of color were expected to sit in the back while
women like those in Bikini Kill got most of the attention,”
she says, as she mused about the riot grrrl movement, a punk
subculture that inf luenced third-wave feminism, with Bikini
Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna as its unofficial figurehead.
“There were a lot of women of color and a lot of queer women
that were completely dismissed over this straight, white, con-