The frontwoman and guitarist for Los Angeles-based indie band It’s Butter, Britta Raci is often the only woman on the lineups that her band plays. “After we played, [other musicians] would come up and be like ‘Wow, you’re actually really good,’ which I know is a backhanded compliment, but I feel like I did earn their respect,” Raci said.
Growing up, Raci’s parents made sure she tried lots of hobbies—from sports to karate to music. She was eight years old when her parents gave her a guitar. The first song she learned was “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day, and soon after she wrote her very first song called “Still Here” about the passing of her pet hamster. Raci decided to stick to guitar after receiving a lot of encouragement from her family—especially from her dad.
Raci grew up listening to bands that her father introduced to her—from 90s alternative rock like No Doubt, Alanis Morrissette and Blink-182 to classics like The Beatles. Her first experience playing live was through her church where her mom was the leader of the youth group and led a Sunday performance group for kids. She was a part of this group until high school when she joined a band with some of her musician friends from her youth group.
Raci recalls the first time she discovered gender norms in music—when she joined middle school band. She wanted to play saxophone. “All the other girls were playing the flute,” Raci said. She chose to play alto saxophone.
After high school, Raci attended Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, Calif. where she earned a degree in music. After her first semester, Raci went to a party where she was surrounded by musicians with tattoos—and she wanted one herself. Raci made an appointment with one guy at the party who was a tattoo artist. Later that week he inked a Telecaster guitar on her left arm.
“Even though it’s not the prettiest looking tattoo and it’s older, it’s always going to be on my arm because I’m always going to play music,” Raci said. However, she often gets comments from customers at the marijuana dispensary where she now works. “Customers every day at my work will say ‘Aw, that’s cute, you like music so much you got a guitar tattoo?’ and I’m like, ‘No I play guitar! I’m in a band!’”
Whether it’s being mistaken for a fangirl instead of a serious musician or being condescended by other musicians, Raci’s experience illustrates the challenges women face in an industry with a long history of sexism and misogyny. Many local femme artists can tell similar stories of feeling overlooked and disregarded by their male peers in the independent music scene. These attitudes have even led to more severe forms of sexual abuse and assault and has recently hit close to home for the Southern California scene.
The Downfall of Burger Records
The downfall of Southern California’s Burger Records was not a surprise to those familiar with the label and the local scene. Rumors had been percolating for years around artists affiliated with the label. Burger Records had released music for hundreds of underground artists since its founding almost 15 years ago, in addition to hosting a variety of shows and festivals and maintaining a storefront in Fullerton, Calif.
Evelyn McDonnell, a music journalist, professor and writer who has dedicated her career to highlighting the role of women in modern music history, agreed that she was not surprised when the Burger Records sexual abuse allegations surfaced. “[The allegations are] indicative of things that people knew were happening—that women in the scene knew were happening—that we took them for granted and accepted them and didn’t even really feel like it was worth changing,” McDonnell said.
Dozens of bands affiliated with Burger Records were hit with sexual abuse allegations—situations that survivors claimed were a result of Burger’s leniency with their artists. “They were hiding in plain sight,” McDonnell said. “They weren’t pretending that there wasn’t something deeply problematic about their attitude towards women.”
Burger Records had always perpetuated the ideals of “sex, drugs and rock and roll,” which allegedly had led to grown men taking advantage of young, underage music fans. Burger Records band The Growlers hosted their annual festival Beach Goth featuring other bands and artists from the label—flyers for this festival often featured artwork of topless women in skull makeup that became synonymous with the band.
In June 2020, a former fan of the band accused Sean Redman of L.A.-based band The Buttertones of sexual assault. A month later, Clem Creevy, the frontwoman of Burger band Cherry Glazerr, wrote on social media that Redman began a sexual relationship with Creevy when she was only 14.
Many other women involved with Burger Records and the Southern California indie scene began to come forward including Lydia Night of the Regrettes—who accused SWMRS drummer Joey Armstrong of forcing her into a relationship when she was only 16—and Arrow de Wilde of Starcrawler who accused The Growlers of sexually degrading her on tour by forcing her to receive a lapdance from a male stripper. In an interview with Variety, de Wilde explained that it felt wrong to not speak up—”I felt like a lot of people believed that they had changed and were different now. That’s why I wanted to come out and say, ‘No, this sh-t happened this year.’”
Burger Records ceased its operations on July 22 after its founders continued to deny that they were aware of this behavior and proposed to restructure the label instead. While the fall of Burger Records seemed like a great first step toward creating a safer and more inclusive music scene, there is still much do be done to eliminate the misogyny that women involved music continue to face.
“The problem is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” McDonnell explains. “There’s not that many women in positions of power in the scene. We’re marginalized, and so we’re afraid to speak up or to point out that we’re not one of the boys.” She compares it to ‘passing,’ as women are trying their best to fit into the male-dominated power structures without much of a sisterhood or support system to give them the comfort to speak up. Until all women can feel safe enough to share their experiences, the cycle of abuse will continue to manifest in the music community.
“So, who are you sleeping with?”
Allyssa Cornier organizes tours and local music shows under her promoter name Cosmic Bloom Booking. She also takes portraits and live music photographs for artists.
In summer of 2019, Cornier was on tour with Los Angeles band The Haunts. She had booked the West Coast tour herself and decided to join the band on the road as its tour manager and photographer. At a stop in San Francisco, a friend of the lead singer decided to come to the show and hang out with the band afterwards at a bar near the venue.
After being introduced to Cornier, the friend turned to her as they were crossing the street and asked, “So, who are you sleeping with?” Cornier was absolutely shocked. “I thought, ‘How dare you? I actually booked this tour and I’m their photographer,’” Cornier recalls.
Although she says her experience in the local music scene has been mostly positive, Cornier says that she is not taken as seriously as a professional because of her gender, even though she takes her work very seriously. “I don’t know why women are seen as less, but I feel like we are doing a lot behind the scenes and we are often pushed aside because ‘We don’t know what we’re doing’ or whatever,” Cornier said. “Women need to be recognized as something much more than just trying to sleep with a band member.”
Although there have been instances of oppression and abuse perpetrated in the Southern California music scene, Cornier is optimistic for the future as the new generation of music fans are more socially aware and accepting of different gender identities. “We want everybody to be safe and have fun and not hurt anybody. I think that the people in our music scene are like that and we’re on the right track,” Cornier said. “It’s the power of the people. If the people band together and say that is not allowed, then they’re done for.”
Social media has played a powerful role in this reckoning with many local bands at all phases of their career being “cancelled” after a survivor publicly shares their story on their social media platforms. These stories are shared throughout the music community online and have the potential to bring consequences to those band members that are being accused. “Even just the act of exposure is producing change and you clearly saw that with Burger Records—it just completely went away,” McDonnell said.
The Music Industry’s #MeToo Movement
The music industry’s #MeToo moment has been years in the making. The reckoning started with artists at the top of the industry—like R. Kelly and Ryan Adams—but is now trickling down to less prominent bands and musicians. The Southern California independent label Burger Records folded after the onslaught of sexual harassment and abuse allegations against its artists and founders that surfaced over the summer of 2020. It is clear that the ‘code of silence’ in the music industry is breaking down and female survivors are ready to tell their stories.
“There was not a receptive audience. There was not a receptive power structure for this kind of complainant exposure until very recently,” McDonnell said.
The theme of “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” has played a prominent role in how the music industry has operated since the beginnings of modern music. According to an article by Catherine Strong and Emma Rush at RMIT University in Australia, “Music spaces are marked as masculine and dominated by male homosocial networks, and women intruding on these spaces are often reduced to sexualized bodies through assumptions that they must be girlfriends or groupies.” Misogynistic attitudes towards women have been projected throughout the creative communities since the beginning of the commercialized music industry.
This is one of the reasons McDonnell believes that it has taken so long for abuse to come to light. “There is this way in which music is about sex and somehow it’s okay to be hypersexualized because that’s part of what pop music is about,” McDonnell said. However, some men in the music industry have taken advantage of this narrative to oppress and abuse women.
Although these assumptions about women have dominated the music industry for decades, McDonnell says there are strides being made to counter these attitudes. “It’s that arc of history bending toward progress,” she says. “We may flatten out or not bend as much but I think we’ve made a pretty strong movement toward realizing that sexual misconduct, sexual assault and sexual exclusion are wrong and unacceptable and need to be exposed.”
“My opinions didn’t matter.”
Michaela Rabina, currently working on her music project Siam Jem, has been involved in the Southern California music community for years, playing in different bands throughout high school and into her early 20s. Like many women in the industry, she has grown cynical after experiencing abuse as a result of being involved in the local music scene.
“In 2019, I got roofied at one of our shows and that was super scary,” Rabina recalled. “Someone told me that some dude was trying to get me to leave with him, a total stranger, while I was completely blacked out.” Her band cancelled their shows for the following 4 months as she was nervous to perform again. “I was okay, but I definitely felt the after effects for a while. I would have one sip of beer and get so sick, it was weird,” Rabina said.
Rabina was the only girl in her very first band from high school. She acted as the manager and booked all of their shows in addition to being the band’s singer. People involved in the scene overlooked her—if they needed to talk to the band they would go to the male band members even though Rabina was in charge. “It slowly started becoming very obvious that people’s first intention was to go to the males in the band and I did feel overlooked because I did a lot of work,” Rabina said.
Her male bandmates didn’t try to support her—instead they took advantage of her. She recalls being picked on and bullied by her bandmates. “At the time I didn’t realize why but now that it has been a couple years, I’ve realized it’s because I was an easy target because I was a girl,” Rabina said. “My opinions didn’t matter.”
Although it seems as though being a woman involved in the local music scene is synonymous with abuse and oppression, more women are becoming involved in all areas of the music scene. “We have to support women artists and women managers. We have to support them so that there’s more of them,” McDonnell says.
Many of the existing power structures have lost their influence after facing economic hardship amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in addition to women and other marginalized groups confronting these structures about their lack of diversity and inherent sexism that plagues these systems.
“This is a time of rebirth and change,” McDonnell says. “It’s horrible what we’ve gone through but if we don’t make a better world now with this opportunity, when are we?”