Sleater-Kinney Road

Exit one oh eight on Interstate Five in Lacey, just east of Olympia, announces a road called Sleater Kinney. The signs have been there for decades. The road was named for two families who lived in the South Bay neighborhood in the nineteenth century: the Sleaters, and Henry and Martha Kinney. It is, by most accounts, an unremarkable suburban commercial road. There are fast food restaurants on it. There is a strip mall.

In the spring of nineteen ninety-four, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein formed a band near that road. Tucker had been a student at Evergreen. Brownstein was still enrolled. They had both come up through the Olympia music scene that K Records and the riot grrrl movement had built across the preceding decade. They named their band after the road because one of their early practice spaces was close to it, and because the name had a sound they liked.

The band Sleater-Kinney went on to make eleven studio albums across three decades and a hiatus, and to be called, by critics who cover this particular intersection of punk and feminism and American music, one of the most important rock bands of the nineteen nineties. Their name is a suburban commuter road in Thurston County.

The name has nothing grand attached to it. That may be part of the point. The Olympia music scene was always more interested in where the work was actually done than in what it was supposed to represent.