Carrie Brownstein: What ‘Portlandia’ is really about

Carrie Brownstein first rose to fame in the 1990s thanks to her all-female rock band, Sleater-Kinney — a group crowned by ”Esquire” as “the best band ever.”

“I like the transformative quality of what a stage allows you to do,” Brownstein says. “It creates this sort of buffer between your quotidian self and your performance self, and you are just allowed within that sphere to explore. And there's so few real life pedestrian moments where you're allowed to express anger or even sheer sort of unadulterated joy or danger. I mean people can't do that, it's not appropriate,” Brownstein says. 

Sleater-Kinney has recently gotten back together after a 10-year hiatus, and Brownstein is now writing about her experience in the band as part of her new memoir “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.”

Take the song “Jumpers,” from a Sleater-Kinney album, a piece Brownstein says is about depression. 

“There was a brief period of time when I was living in the Bay Area. I felt very displaced down there. There was such a disparity between these bright, beautiful, cloudless days, and this encroaching depression. I was reading an article in The New Yorker called ‘Jumpers.’ It was about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge,” Brownstein says, “What I wanted to write about was how this strange combination of something that signifies, you know, architectural prowess and structure and solidity and a symbol of progress in the city. That it could both be that and a place of despair and the ways that people cannot find meaning in their life, their last hope is that they'll find it in their death. That to me is very sad, and I related to it a lot then.”

In her memoir, Brownstein details some of her struggles with depression, and why the band went on hiatus.  

“My body had kind of been rejecting tour for years. Tour is a very fragmentary existence. It's peripatetic, it's destabilizing. And so my body had kind of been screaming out for years like 'Please stop, please slow down.' In some ways I felt like I was touring emergency rooms,” Brownstein says. “I was having panic attacks and my back was going out, and it just kind of all came to a head in Belgium in 2006.”

In Belgium, a moment she writes about in her memoir, Brownstein actually punched herself in the face in front of her bandmates. After that, the band finally took a break — a 10-year break in which Brownstein went “cold-turkey” from music. She wrote for NPR, worked for an ad agency and eventually started working with Fred Armisen on the comedy series “Portlandia” that satirizes the subculture found in Portland, Oregon. 

“When I talk about immersing myself in a very earnest world of of music … that is intense. And I think Portlandia in some ways has allowed an unmasking, a levity that I think I really require and appreciate. So to me, they compliment each other,” Brownstein says. 

Brownstein considers herself a participant in Portland’s subculture, but still enjoys poking fun at it. 

“If we are hyper concerned about, you know, organic versus local…certain kinds of worries are just a privilege. Sometimes I think that narcissism of small things can start to be corrosive and you think 'Huh. I wonder if we're heading in the right direction with this preciousness.' And I think Portlandia — we’re not sitting outside of it looking in, we're very much engaged in it and so I think we're trying to be part of an ongoing conversation that's already happening where people are wondering ‘Huh. These highly curated selves that we're projecting, these highly curated neighborhoods that are just reflections of our highly curated selves — is this actually making us better people?' I think some of us are wondering whether maybe that's not so true anymore and that's essentially what Portlandia is about,” Brownstein says.

This story first aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.