Carrie Brownstein

Dear Carrie,

We generally believe that individuals, especially rock musicians, should identify their God-given talents and play to their strengths. Your talent is the ability to wring unbelievable peals of sound and piercing feedback from the bowels of the Gibson SG guitar. This is precisely what you did for ten years and seven albums as a member of Sleater-Kinney, and it was good. For example: The Woods, your band’s likely swan song, is a psych-rock behemoth that is never being removed from this here guy’s iPod, ever.

So we were saddened by the news of Sleater-Kinney’s “indefinite hiatus,” but still hopeful for the future. We even tolerated the fact that you insisted on playing your final New York City show with every one of the house lights on, in the name of filming a DVD that has yet to see light of day. We thought, “surely an incendiary solo career or new band was on the horizon!”

But something has gone horribly awry. While Janet Weiss is single-handedly turning Stephen Malkmus’s once shambling post-Pavement project into a prog-jam powerhouse with a serious case of boom-bap, and while Corin Tucker—who has settled into domesticity with a husband and child—has already managed a handful of one-off solo gigs, you blog for NPR.

Have you even picked up a guitar since Sleater-Kinney called it a day? Your “Monitor Mix” blog offers generally amusing commentary on pop-culture trends and PDX hipsters, and your documented week long experiment where you listened to nothing but Phish in an attempt to “get it” was cute. But it’s far from unique, and somewhat confusing, because while most blogger-critics harbor a not-so-secret desire to be bad ass rock stars, are we to understand that you’d sooner do it the other way around? Is poking fun at a Riot Grrrl Halloween Costume really preferable to melting faces every fucking night during the solo break of “Far Away”?

And you know how whenever an actor puts out a record it immediately invites ridicule? Well, try to enjoy it as I might, that Thunderant! shit just isn’t funny. But this is where the wheels just fall the fuck off.

You’ve gone from “absolute thunder rock star” to “goofy blogger that stars in shitty mumblecore films with that jerk from the Shins” in just four years. A CMG staffer has just been dispatched to your abode with a Marshall Stack and 87 copies of The Woods. This is for your own good.