Carrie Brownstein
Carrie Brownstein
Carrie Rachel Brownsteinis an American musician, writer, actress, and comedian. She first came to prominence as a member of the band Excuse 17 before forming the punk-indie trio Sleater-Kinney. During a long hiatus from Sleater-Kinney, she formed the group Wild Flag. During this period, Brownstein wrote and appeared in a series of comedy sketches with Fred Armisen which were then developed into Emmy and Peabody Award-winning satirical comedy TV series Portlandia. Sleater-Kinney has since reunited and Brownstein is touring with...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth27 September 1974
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
The idea of self-effacement, the idea that you feel so powerless that the only tiny morsel of power you have is over your own ability to deny yourself food - that to me is a very profound and sad methodology and indicator of how powerless a lot of people feel in this world. That they will turn that onto themselves until they are physically smaller. I think it's affected my worldview a lot - just being sensitive and empathetic towards the ways people want to be small. I don't wish smallness for anyone.
It's very common to think that we're always evolving, that we've changed so much from our younger selves, that within decades we've transformed into these different people. We like to think that. I feel in some ways that I am still so much my younger self. There are ways that I'm different: I feel like I'm wiser and kinder. But I think a lot of the impulses are still the same. I learned that.
From a self-conscious standpoint, it's hard to see myself on a screen in a way that isn't just me playing music or doing something silly.
I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.
There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.
I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.
As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.
I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.
I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.
What I value most in new music is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.
To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.
"We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music.
No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.
You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity.