Generational Relay: A Full Circle Just Press Record Lesson

It started with a Bratmobile tape in the '90s. And, being an impressionable teenager, complete with awkward tendencies and a burgeoning taste in music, it didn’t hurt that it came from a cool, slightly older girl. If there were mysteries I someday hoped to solve, this was my entire life up to that point in a nutshell.

Arguably that’s the day I learned what a riot grrrl was, via said messenger, who explained to me it was the identity she and her (also very cool) friends most identified with, and that if I ever wanted to be cool, I had better get on board with these riot grrrl bands, like, pronto.

The tape’s been lost to time (and shoeboxes), but I think one side had Pottymouth on it and the other had assorted Bikini Kill songs. I’ve thought about both that hallway experience and that tape a lot over the years. Mostly because it’s so weird how you learn and get exposed to things growing up, but also because life is funny in the most beeyooteeful ways.

With the funny ways life has turned out 30ish years in, when I had the chance to introduce Allison Wolfe (of Bratmobile) to Brianna Collins (of Tigers Jaw) on Just Press Record, I started thinking about the tape again, but I couldn’t imagine how my story would fit into the broader context. That is, of course, until they started talking to each other.

There’s an age gap between Allison and Bri, where I’m somewhere in the middle, and I started to see a relay system I didn’t fully understand as being there before. It helped me understand my own loop of leaving the area where my wife and I grew up, and then, only a few years back, deciding to return. Their ideas put a whole host of ideas and experiences into a context I needed a Personal Archive entry to reflect on.

Both Allison and Brianna describe a variation on the same leave home + go explore + return with context pattern. Especially in the aspect of going out to understand possibility, separate from your understanding of possibility in the place you started out. The whole return, especially when it’s not out of abject failure or pure nostalgia, but out of some gained clarity, it really strikes deep on so many levels.

Allison told the story from later in life too, when she moved to New York, then left for LA, and how it felt building adulthood across multiple cities. Opportunities and adult details had new influences. You can kind of leave and return from new homes too, and some of it is on the road with your band, while other parts are in locations (like her getting a teaching gig at UCLA).

Bri’s experience rhymed in a unique way. She left for college, found space to establish herself as an adult, but then made the choice to return home, sort of, about 40 minutes from her exact home, and based it largely off of that area being the place where her people were. The community that helped raise her got a new member to help raise others in it.

And I don’t say this to heroes journey or romanticize it in any way - what works is that it was so strategic for both of them, even if it’s more strategic in hindsight than it was in real time.

You won’t feel the weight of a creative ecosystem until you've seen how it operates from the inside AND the outside. Life requires perspective shifts, and distance is key lens to help us figure out if we want to choose to stay, rather than just defaulting to it.

I joked in my Grow Your Network post about Bri, that she’s got a little George Bailey It’s a Wonderful Life complex brewing, in how she is just appreciating the influence you have even when you don’t know you’re having any influence. She talked about a friend’s kid who loved her band, and now has grown up to start his own band, that she’s gone to see live.

She wasn’t taking credit for it, but she was acknowledging how cool it is she played some part, no matter how small, in making that an option.

And this is where the Bratmobile/Bikini Kill tape pops back into my head in a whole new way - because here we are, thirty years later, and I’m introducing a voice from the tape to a person who wouldn’t even be in the scene I grew up in until I was out of college and well towel-thrown-in on my punk rock ambitions.

We agree there’s something in the water in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area, but honestly, this is how all creative systems actually persist. It’s not through marketing or endowments or institutional planning. I do that for work, I can call it here - that’s not happening and even if it was it wouldn’t be working here. What’s going on is you have people showing up, staying visible, and creating the conditions where young people can see that this is possible.

When Allison talks about parents bringing kids to Bratmobile shows, it’s happening. Everywhere they tour. Any time you get multiple generations in the room, you’re doing it. And to think she's nervous around the people who influenced her too, because she’s always going to be a fan (of Penelope from Avengers like she said as a prime example) while simultaneously being someone else's influence without fully knowing it, and loving that nuance can exist.

I didn’t have a word for this. Maybe I still don’t. I want to call it some type of secretive, unseeable generational relay so that’s where I’m planting my flag for now. It’s a situation where you're always in the middle of it, no matter what you do, and you have to accept that as true, whether you recognize exactly what’s going on or not.

It happens where you allow yourself to grow roots. You get centered. And, with a little age, you stop being an exclusively influenceable person and you start to become a person of influence. Maybe you become an actual influencer along the way, and maybe you just become part of the wallpaper of the town. But, you can exert something.

There’s a choice to make here, and it’s half opportunity for you, and half opportunity for others. When you spend enough time in any one community, you can start to see the influence ripple too. Where you exist on it.

And if you’re seeing it, maybe you need to pay closer attention. Or, maybe you need to make some more noise. Nothing worse than not being influenced or influential the more I think about it this way.

Because happiness, as they both suggested, isn't found in a single experience. It comes in layers of experience - like the initial discovery, the shared creations, the teaching of how to do stuff, the witnessing of others carrying it forward, etc. And you have to be somewhere, in some community, to feel that arc.

To anybody reading this who feels like they’re genuinely and authentically building something creative - whether it’s art, or music, or community, or just something that matters to you as much in the process as the output, I hope this conversation and note helps you see you're part of a generational relay whether you acknowledge it or not.

You watched someone do what you’re doing at some point in time. Maybe not exactly. But enough so that you figured you could try.

And now? Someone’s watching you. Right now. No, not like that, I hope, but - BOO - ha. Ok. You know what I mean.

The question isn't whether you influence the next generation. That’s big and ambitious but let that go at least as the aim. The real question is whether you'll stay around long enough to see it happen, by allowing your place to as much with the people in your scene as of the people in a scene.

That's the real circling back. That's what Allison and Brianna both understood, how you leave to learn, but you come back to witness, and you never stop.

And if you do all that, the full circle reveals itself. It’s a beautiful thing. From a cassette to a podcast to a whole refreshed attitude on making sure kids see cool stuff in my valley, I get it.

ps. Listen to the full conversation with Allison Wolfe and Brianna Collins on Just Press Record - available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and distributed through Panoptica.