Riley Petrocco, Bailee Isackson and Kathleen Dunbar are a part of the KCPR management team and make up the band Diary. This narrative explores their experience as girls in the San Luis Obispo music scene. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Girl Party started from the simple notion that THERE AREN’T ENOUGH GIRLS IN THIS GOD DAMN MUSIC SCENE!
Girl Party began because of the girls we met at club meetings, Front Porch, lying on the lawn and in the crowds at shows. It’s scary to join a club dominated by boys who never considered saving a spot for you.
We make up the band Diary (or Dear Diary? We never really know). We started jamming in Riley’s apartment living room with practice amps and an electric drum kit with the sole intention of bringing female presence back to the San Luis Obispo music scene.
Our freshman year was spent watching bands like earthship, which had female members who absolutely crushed the stage. But as we entered our sophomore year, we saw a severe lack of female representation in the scene. Shows became repetitive, and we found ourselves feeling disinclined to go because every one was the same.
A man in a crowd of men will never consider what is wrong with that picture, but a girl in that crowd or on that stage will always be aware of the discrepancy. We know the lack of inclusion may not be intentional, but the problem lies in the lack of intentionality — in failing to build a space where girls feel like they belong.
Going to shows isn’t that fun when it’s always four identical twenty-something men who never thought to question whether their post-rock, indie-noise, shoegaze emo slowcore was worth your time. Every. Single. Time. Girls are always made to feel like they have to prove they belong in a space, while men just have the inherent belief and feeling that they do.
We started with covers and wrote our first few songs in our shared notes app titled “Dumb” over the summer going into our junior year. It was chord progressions, voice notes, random lyric combinations.
We came into our third year at Cal Poly with the goal of playing a show, maybe not sucking too bad and bringing some fun to the music scene that we so deeply cared about. People seemed excited about us, and the more feedback we got, the more we realized that women wanted a place to be creative, but there was just no support.
Girl Party is the result of a common grievance the three of us shared, one we heard repeated by many around us.
We seldom look up on a stage and see a single girl, let alone one dominating said stage. We were always grateful for the stoics, the girls holding it down, usually on bass or vocals, surrounded by their male bandmates.
At any given show in San Luis Obispo, you can count on one hand the number of girls who’ve played that night.
But in the crowd, between sets and in the parking lot after the show, we talk to girls who play instruments or dream of singing, carrying notebooks full of lyrics. The thing is, they don’t have a support system to push them together or encourage them to get on stage.
The three of us felt like it shouldn’t be a novelty to be a girl band; it should be a requirement of any scene, in any space. They should exist as abundantly as their male counterparts. The stages filled with boys simply were not conducive to that.
Don’t get us wrong, we don’t hate the boys; we’re just disappointed at times. We’re grateful that they saw what we were doing and invited us to share the stage with them, even when we only had four songs. We wish that when they were booking shows, they would consider the importance of variety.
As much as we would like to say we put a lot of hard work into creating Girl Party, it was really quite simple. And we think that is even more of a feat. The community already existed and was ready to gather — all it needed was action.
All it took was an Instagram post with a tagline expressing our frustration: “Sick of all the boy bands?” It took no more than a case of beer, a bag of oranges and a Tupperware of homemade cookies to bring womxn into a shared space.
And with that, Girl Party began!
Calling Girl Party a “womxn mixer” makes it appear more formal than it truly is. All we’ve really done is set a time when the womxn of San Luis Obispo can come together and find a sense of community in a scene where there isn’t necessarily a space saved for them. At the end of the day, all we need is some time to make new friends and play in the park together!
We want everyone to come together and find a musical community that can support them, with the intention of creating more bands in San Luis Obispo that have non-cis men as the focal point, not just female singers, but a diverse ensemble of people and perspectives and a shared love of playing music.
We encouraged people to bring instruments, games and themselves. It was a small but mighty crowd at Cuesta Park the first time we hosted the event. Girls and beyond are welcome. Our only rule is no (cis) boys allowed!
We know Girl Party is not perfect, and we like that we grow with it.
This second Girl Party was exactly what we had dreamed! It felt like our goals were coming to fruition as we listened to the sounds of guitar, clarinet, conversation and laughter mingle in the afternoon sun.
We can only hope that after that afternoon, girls felt compelled to go home and write some music or text their friends to start a band. The ripple effect will land them in front of us on a bill we can finally be proud of.
This article originally appeared in the Analog Edition of The Peak. View the full issue here.
