Recently, Be Your Own Pet singer Jemina Pearl was going through her parents’ archive of articles about the Nashville punk band, who blazed briefly in the mid-2000s. “One of the reviews of our first album said, ‘The slutty Jemina Pearl …’” she says with a grim laugh. “It’s crazy looking back on some of the really sexist, awful things – every review talking about the way I look, as if that matters at all.”
Worse still, Pearl was only 18 at the time – the only girl in a band of four Tennessee teens whose wolfishly catchy garage rock about bikes, adventures and fuuuuun set them apart from the era’s preening indie acts. Their wild gigs were heavy on puking and punching. More than once, Pearl and her bandmates had to fight off stage invaders trying to grab her. She tried to emulate Iggy Pop. But where he leered, “I wanna be your dog,” she snarled “You’ve got me on a leash / A damn damn leash,” and hungered to get free from the constraints of school, controlling boys and gender norms.
