“Femaphilia was basically a word that I created as a response to undertoned elements within the queer communities globally of femaphobia, and in the mainstream culture as well,” Barnes says. “Femaphobia,” he says, refers to a fear of “things that are feminine — especially feminine guys.”

“Femaphilia” counters that fear. It embraces “the love of the feminine,” he says, “to celebrate all the positive aspects that I’ve noticed so far on this journey.”

It’s also the name of Barnes’ new single. Alongside producer, DJ and singer/songwriter Rich Morel, Barnes recently began making music under the name SISTR MID9IGHT.

SISTR MID9IGHT happened by chance. Barnes says Morel spotted him performing in drag in 2014, and asked him if he sings. Why, yes, Barnes replied — he’d been singing almost since he was a toddler. So he and Morel began meeting regularly, laying down tracks in Morel’s home studio in Takoma Park, Maryland. The duo’s debut, “Femaphilia” officially arrived Monday.

Barnes says the subterranean and sensual track derives inspiration from ‘70s icons including Iggy Pop, Grace Jones and David Bowie. (The name “Sister Midnight” comes from a song co-written by Bowie and Carlos Alomar, recorded by Iggy Pop for The Idiot.) It’s all about “this hard, gritty, but also very seductive sound.” Barnes wrote the lyrics — inspired by an impromptu selfie session — and he says it reflects his life experience.

By day Barnes works as a manager at a local boutique, but he’s been performing in drag for the last five years. His stage name? Pussy Noir.

“Pussy Noir is this kind of black girl that went to Europe and came back to America and is really that epitome of French, smoking, cool, after-sex seduction,” says Barnes. “You know, [wearing] that gorgeous dress that’s just falling off the shoulder, revealing just a little bit of the nipple.”

Barnes explains that when he performs with SISTR MID9IGHT, there’s not a hard line between Jason Barnes — musician and person — and Pussy Noir. That said, Pussy Noir encapsulates his work to create visibility and sexual agency for the feminine male, who he says can be trivialized in mainstream media and culture.

“We’re there, we’re part of the gay world, we’re in the movies,” Barnes says. “A lot of times [it’s] comedy… [or] a buffer of something else, but not necessarily being a central character who actually is a sexual human being.”

Barnes says Pussy Noir and SISTR MID9IGHT are “branding this idea that I hope people understand and don’t fear it, and will look at it and say, ‘This is part of our world.’”

Barnes says the duo has more music on the way.

March 5, SISTR MID9IGHT makes its live debut at Comet Ping Pong in Northwest D.C.. While there’s no such thing as a typical SISTR MID9IGHT show yet, expect true showmanship from the duo.

“The costumes are coming out,” says Barnes. “I am expecting big furs and all red and body skimming, and a lot of sweat by the end of it, for sure.”

SISTR MID9IGHT performs March 5 at Comet Ping Pong.

“The first time I sang [a song about depression] was the first time I saw someone cry at a show,” says Kilstein, 33. “I thought, ‘Well f**k, this is sort of what I always wanted to do with comedy but I could never do it.'”

A couple of years ago, the D.C.-born performer — who co-hosts the popular progressive podcast Citizen Radio and has appeared on The Conan O’Brien Show and Countdown With Keith Olbermann — opted to take his ranty act in a more musical direction. The change was prompted by a difficult time in his life: the death of his friend and mentor Robin Williams.

“[Williams] helped get me sober,” Kilstein says of the late comedy legend, who took his own life in 2014.

A few years ago, Williams appeared at one of Kilstein’s gigs in San Francisco, and wound up chatting with him backstage. They became friends. Williams would later help Kilstein book gigs and even fund his podcast.

“Robin didn’t really influence me comedically, but more as a person,” Kilstein says. “I think it’s almost cooler when they can inspire you to be a better person.”

After Williams’ death, Kilstein considered quitting comedy. But he ultimately decided that Williams wouldn’t have wanted that. So the performer evolved instead. Now, he takes on the same heated subjects he always has — like rape culture, male privilege, religion, drones and gay marriage — but puts it to music with his band, Jamie Kilstein and The Agenda.

Kilstein plans to release a new album of these musical rants early next year.

Warning: Explicit language.

“It’s by far what I’m most proud of. I said everything I wanted to say, I defended causes I really care about,” Kilstein says of the album. His new material doesn’t shy away from big issues, including adoption for same-sex couples, feminism and Islamophobia.

“The good news is that I’m not really a man of metaphors, so you can pretty much tell what the album is going to be about by the track listing,” Kilstein says. “For example, the first song is called ‘F**k the NRA,’ so it’s pretty clear what that’s about.”

But when he appears tonight at Tropicalia in D.C., Kilstein won’t only stick to politics.

“I thought I used to be so edgy screaming, ‘F**k the church,'” he says. “But to me now it’s arguably more important to be onstage saying, ‘It’s OK to take care of yourself, or feel sad.'”

Jamie Kilstein performs tonight at Tropicalia. His forthcoming album is available for preorder.

Katie Park wanted to make feminist punk rock in particular. Dana Liebelson shared the same dream. They recruited a drummer — Julie Yoder, a founder of the Girls Rock! DC camp — through Craigslist. Their pal Ian Villeda, the sole guy, joined on guitar. Hemlines came screaming into existence.

The band represented a new direction for both Park and Liebelson. Both abandoned their primary instruments: Park swapped out her usual bass for a guitar, and Liebelson traded her violin for a bass.

“I had been in a pretty laid-back indie-rock project and I really wanted to start something that was explicitly feminist, and it seemed like I needed a louder instrument in order to do that,” Liebelson says, laughing.

Hemlines hit their target on All Your Homes, the band’s searing debut EP, released last week on DZ Tapes. The cassette opens with “Agenda,” a track that confronts the negative connotation that word has picked up over the years.

“Agenda” was inspired by a frustrating and all-too-common situation Liebelson came across, in which a college administrator told a sexual-assault victim that she was supporting a type of “rape culture agenda.”

“The phrase ‘rape culture agenda’ got in my head,” Liebelson says. She bristled at the idea that a sexual-assault victim’s pain and outrage could be dismissed as an agenda. “I was thinking, ‘OK, in that case, yeah, I want to reclaim this and say, ‘I do have an agenda. This is an excellent agenda that I want to be behind.'”

Writing a song on the subject proved cathartic.

“I remember hearing about the scenario and being upset about it and not quite sure what to do about it,” says Liebelson. “I channeled that straight into writing. Now I feel better every single time we perform it.”

Also cathartic for Hemlines are songs that deal with more personal matters, like mental health. Women’s mental health in particular, Park says, has historically been given short shrift, chalked up to hysteria rather than legitimate health issues.

“It makes a huge difference to put that into words and then be very loud about it,” says Park. Listeners can find something relatable in the subject matter, too.

The band recorded the EP this summer at Columbia Heights studio Swim-Two-Birds, tracking live and finding synergy with engineers Ryan Little (an occasional Bandwidth contributor) and Brendan Polmer.

“The [D.C.] community is very supportive. I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we’re imposters or we don’t deserve to be up on stage playing an instrument that’s new to us.” — Julie Yoder of Hemlines

“It was a seamless experience compared to other recording sessions I’ve been involved in,” says Yoder. “I felt like the engineers were really intuitive with when to suggest and when to back away. I had a really good time. It didn’t feel like work at all.”

The band always wanted to play punk, but it’s also worked out to be the ideal genre for other reasons, Yoder says.

“I just feel like punk is one of the most accessible genres, especially when you are starting out on a new instrument,” the drummer says. “The community is very supportive. I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we’re imposters or we don’t deserve to be up on stage playing an instrument that’s new to us.”

Yet while D.C.’s punk scene has lain out a welcome mat, the music industry overall can still be a challenging environment for female-identified musicians. Thus the importance of labeling Hemlines a feminist band.

“I would say we’re still at the point where when you get on a stage, that’s a feminist act alone,” Liebelson says, “but I just want to remind people of it. I don’t want to be like, ‘This is kind of feminist,’ I want to be reminding people that it’s feminist.”

Eventually, the band hopes, there will be nothing remarkable about women playing music.

“The act of women getting up on stage and performing should be normal,” says Park. “Yeah, it should be,” Liebelson agrees, “but it’s not yet.”

Hemlines plays an EP release show Wednesday, Sept. 30 at Black Cat.

“Boom hazard hazard/Fallout comes my way,” Yandel sings, diving directly into meltdown imagery. She follows up with “Boom hazard hazard/I can’t get away.”

“I was thinking about it as a really great metaphor for a relationship falling apart,” says the 29-year-old Shaw resident, who also plays drums (but doesn’t sing) in Priests. “The chorus is obviously an allusion to nuclear meltdown, so thinking about Fukushima and Chernobyl and when the nuclear reactors melt down — how it’s just unexpected and things falling apart.”

The imagery might not be the most original for a rock tune, but the lyrical content of “Boom Hazard,” which is the fourth track on Gauche’s new cassette, Get Away With Gauche (on Priests’ Sister Polygon label), is unusually personal for the band. Its songs normally revolve around macro-level issues — society’s structure, identity politics — but this one doesn’t move much beyond the intimacies of a single relationship.

And the source of the hazard?

“In the world of that song, I was very big. Too big,” Yandel says. “I had a bigger impact than I wanted to. I wanted to get away from my impact.”

All this is not to say, however, that “Boom Hazard” is a standard breakup song. “I am not your mirror/I do not reflect you,” Yandel sings during one of the rapid-fire verses.

“One of the things the song does articulate well is that there is this feeling that I’ve been coming up against a lot that women tend to be these kinds of affirmative mirrors for other people,” says Yandel. “I’m actually a person with my own ideas, not just a thing for you to confirm your own identity.”

Of course, the kind of affirmation that Yandel is talking about isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, she points out that her closest relationship is currently with her bandmates, and particularly fellow vocalist Mary Jane Regalado.

“Mary sees me as the person I see myself to be and affirms that in me, and vice-versa,” Yandel says. “Ironically, the thing that annoys me that men do, I do to Mary and she does to me, but because we’re equals, it feels less exploitative.”

Within “Boom Hazard,” though, toxic self-affirmation is exactly what leads to a meltdown, because both parties crave the feeling of being valued as people.

“I think it has to do a lot with that sense, or becoming a tool for confirming something about the men who want to date me,” Yandel says. “I don’t want to be that. I want to be a being, too.”

Like any secret laid bare after years of only furtive acknowledgment, this one has disrupted many lives and caused reactions ranging from rage to self-righteous moralizing to Fuchs’ own remarkably generous forgiveness of those who knew something terrible had happened but didn’t directly respond. (Here’s a good, if incomplete, roundup of responses.) Fowley’s reputation is now rightly destroyed. Other Runaways members and people involved with the band have come under fire and responded. (One of them, Runaways biographer Evelyn McDonnell, is my friend and longtime collaborator, and her comments have expanded the discussion in important ways.) As others shared crucial truths or pontificated, Fuchs herself, now a lawyer, employed her own great eloquence to call for the focus to remain on “holding rapists, abusers and bullies accountable.” Several commenters have mentioned that the 1970s was a time when the exploitation of very young women was often in the media, citing the famous examples of the groupie milieu surrounding Led Zeppelin and the statutory rape case that exiled film director Roman Polanski from the U.S.

Here’s the truth: The history of rock turns on moments in which women and young boys were exploited in myriad financial, emotional and sexual ways. This most sordid secret history lurks in the background, but it’s not incidental: from the teen-scream 1950s onward, one of the music’s fundamental functions has been to frame and express sexual feelings for and from the very young, and its culture has included real kids, the kind who feel free but remain very vulnerable, relating to older men whose glamour and influence encourages trust, not caution. The worst, weakest and most self-deluded of these men have stepped over moral lines, over and over again. It happened in the early 1960s, when, according to Patti LaBelle, her fellow soul great Jackie Wilson attempted to assault her — then a teenage member of the Bluebelles — backstage at a show. It’s happening now, with 23-year-old Warped Tour performer Jake Mcelfresh (who performs as Front Porch Step) facing accusations of sending explicit texts to girls as young as 13.

Examined coldly, these cases really don’t seem to inhabit a proverbial gray area. Men have behaved abhorrently toward young women whose only mistake was in assuming they’d be treated with respect. Yet the music itself, so redolent of pleasure, muddies peoples’ responses. We want to enjoy it and to take its dares. And for young girls and boys, it does express real sexual feelings, often otherwise denied. The craving for that expression has led to a startling number of cases in which deeply inappropriate responses to it have been rationalized or simply overlooked.

Sometimes, as with the Fuchs story, useful public conversations do emerge in light of young people’s exploitation. The trials of R. Kelly, who was eventually acquitted of crimes against several underage girls in Chicago, became a touchstone for those questioning the the enjoyment of explicit music and the celebration of its creators. And sometimes the men involved are so blatantly transgressive that they become pariahs: when 30-something metalhead Ted Nugent became the legal guardian of his teenage lover in the 1970s, all the while recording songs like “Jailbait,” it added to his reputation as a truly unstable character.

But the many more examples of sexual encounters crossing over into criminality have made such behavior almost mundane. Start at rock’s beginning, with a foursome of legends — Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, all of whom had significant relationships with teenage girls while they were major celebrities in their 20s and, in Berry’s case, 30s. This is the foundation of the music. It’s no wonder that such troubles haunt it to this day.

In 1956, Little Richard looked out of a hotel window in Savannah, Ga., and spotted a 16-year-old named Audrey Robinson. He was 24. He pursued her and they became intimate, though not in the conventional way — according to Richard’s autobiography, he liked to watch while she had sex with others. (Robinson has denied this.) Changing her name to Lee Angel, Robinson became a renowned exotic dancer, and she has stayed close to Richard into their old age. Was this a relationship between equals? It’s hard to say. The same question has been asked of the most notorious sex scandal in early rock: In 1958, rockabilly pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gale Brown; he was 22. Myra had the support of her family — her father sometimes played bass with Lewis — but years later, after the couple was divorced, she claimed that Lewis had abused her.

In 1959, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu on a German army base and began dating her. He was 24. He moved her to Memphis when she was 17, but, perhaps frightened into waiting by the scandal afflicting Lewis after his marriage to Myra, waited to marry her until she was 21. That same year, Chuck Berry was arrested in St. Louis, Mo., for transporting a minor across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The 14-year-old in question was a runaway named Janice Escalanti whom Berry met and wooed (according to her court testimony and accounts from other witnesses; he denies any intimacy) on the road. Berry was 33. His conviction and imprisonment demonstrates a racist double standard that put African-Americans behind bars while whites like Presley remained free. Yet this wasn’t an isolated incident; the year before, he’d been arrested for gun possession in St. Charles, Mo., while in the company of his then-lover, Joan Mathis, who was 17.

All of these stories have become part of rock’s lore, perhaps tainting the reputations of some of the music’s greatest figures, but hardly sinking them. The notorious tales just keep rolling on. In 1966, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull was 20 and already a mother when police on a drug raid at Keith Richards’ mansion found her wrapped in a fur rug while tripping, the only woman in the house. While the Rolling Stones survived this scandal unscathed, it led to Faithfull being branded a “whore” in the British media and led to an escalating drug habit. In 1972, Lori Maddox was 14; she met Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page at L.A.’s Hyatt House hotel, where he spirited her away and kept her under lock and key for many nights to shield the fact that he was committing statutory rape. In 1982, Tam Paton, the manager of teen idols the Bay City Rollers, was convicted of molesting two boys as part of the Walton Hop scandal, which eventually took down numerous British music business executives who frequented that all-ages Surrey club. In the 1990s, teen pop mogul Lou Pearlman allegedly demanded sexual favors from many of the underage musicians he managed, some of whom were only 13.

These rock and pop memories are all ones I pulled from the top of my head, without doing any research. They’re not obscure. And they’re being made anew every day. The threat of adult men violating women and boys haunts every era and subculture, because art worlds like these exist within a larger culture that’s fundamentally patriarchal and racist, placing white men in positions of ultimate authority, and men above women, even when people work to cultivate equality. (This is Sexism 101, and many writers have shown how it works in popular music.) Because rock and roll originates within a celebration of the spirit of teenage self-empowerment, girls especially have moved more freely within the spaces it creates than they could elsewhere, and, in doing so, have often found themselves in peril of violation by the very men who would call them queens.

Loving rock and roll requires engaging with a terrible reality, one that the music itself has not solved and sometimes helped its fans to forget. It’s this: The real erotic freedom many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll is always partial and precarious. As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body, that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you. And they may do so even if they’re great artists, “good” guys, even legends. They may do so even if, unlike the clearly amoral Kim Fowley, they mean to do their best.

It’s crucial that the truth that Jackie Fuchs has raised, truth that keeps resurfacing, not be turned against young women. Society needed rock and roll partly because the fact that young people are sexual had been kept under wraps in ways that stigmatized the very people whom moral arbiters meant to protect. But young people are also insecure in so many ways: in their minds, in their social status, in their very bodies. Becoming aware of their vulnerability necessarily changes what we can accept within the wondrous spaces that music can build. The painful knowledge of that tenderness, so easily misused, is what I carry around within my mind as a lifelong fan of loud guitars and the heat they generate — a woman who was once a high school girl getting felt up in the bathroom of a Seattle all-ages club by a local bass player who abandoned me when I almost threw up a White Russian all over his red New Wave pants. My free will put me in that bathroom. I know the rush of feeling sexy and young and wanted. I know what can come next.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Who wouldn’t be [a feminist]?” Lyman says. “That’s beyond Square One. That’s like going up to somebody and saying, ‘Hey, I’m not a jerk.'”

So for Lyman — a former D.C. resident I’ve known since 2004, who’s played in D.C. bands Chain & the Gang and Measles Mumps Rubella — it’s a no-brainer that his Portland, Oregon, record label, M’Lady’s Records, would decide to give women customers a 23 percent discount based on their statistically unequal rate of pay compared to men.

“Mailorder for women living in America will now be 77% of the listed price, the current wage gap according to the Bureau of Labor Dept of Statistics [sic],” Lyman wrote via M’Lady’s mailing list Friday. (That percentage applies to annual earnings sized up in a 2011 report from the Census Bureau, and the gap is even bigger for many women of color.)

In the email blast, Lyman explains how his label’s discount will work: “1. You order things from us. 2. We refund you 23% of the pre-shipping price. 3. Everyone goes home happy. 4. Dudebros that grouse about this will have to pay double.”

An eight-year-old DIY label with about 20 albums and 30 punk-skewing singles in its catalog, M’Lady’s doesn’t wield much influence on a national scale. But Lyman views the discount as his way of chipping away — even just symbolically — at what he considers an overlooked problem.

“There’s been a lot of talk in the past 12 months about civil rights, and human rights, and all sorts of rights. And [the wage gap] always kind of keeps getting swept back under the rug,” Lyman says.

As NPR points out, M’Lady’s isn’t the only entity giving women this kind of discount: A pop-up shop in Pittsburgh did it recently, and so did a bar in Brooklyn. But women-only discounts can be illegal, depending on the circumstances and the court.

Take the tradition of ladies’ nights at bars and clubs, usually instituted in order to attract more women customers. Those have been banned in several states, based on the reasoning that they violate gender discrimination laws. But sometimes, lady discounts are fine — like in the case of a Los Angeles golf course sued by a men’s rights activist over its promotion for women during breast-cancer awareness month. The court sided with the golf course, as Law360 reports, because it determined the discount “was warranted by a compelling societal interest.”

“There’s been a lot of talk in the past 12 months about civil rights, and human rights, and all sorts of rights. And [the wage gap] always kind of keeps getting swept back under the rug.” — Brett Lyman of M’Lady’s Records

An article about unequal pay for women in Travis County, Texas, quotes advocate Freda Bryson as saying, “When I go to buy food or groceries, I don’t get a woman’s discount, I pay the same thing as a male pays. So why shouldn’t my wages be the same?”

Because Lyman can’t change what women earn at their jobs — not singlehandedly, anyway — he suggests that giving his female customers a discount is the next best thing.

“It’s the kind of problem that seems like no one individual or company could ever have any agency over, so nobody ever does anything about it,” Lyman says. “And obviously, this sort of theatrical gesture we’re doing is not going to do anything to change that, but like everything else, you just have to start talking about it.”

Lyman acknowledges that some customers could pretend to be women in order to get the discount, but he’s not sweating it.

“If somebody wants to go through all that trouble of creating a fake identity and getting a fake credit card so they can save $2 or $3 on a record, they’ve totally earned it,” he says.

So far, response to M’Lady’s wage-gap discount has been encouraging. “I got a couple hundred emails yesterday that were all really, really stoked,” Lyman says.

He’s also heard from a few angry folks. “Perhaps coincidentally,” Lyman says, “they were all male.”

What’s their beef? “[They’re] saying that this is discriminatory,” he says, “when really, the only reason we’re doing it is to use the rhetoric and apply the values of discrimination in order to highlight discrimination.”

Their arguments haven’t swayed Lyman. “If I hadn’t taken a logic and reasoning class in high school, I probably would see their side of it a little bit better,” he says.

His detractors have told him, “‘You’re part of the problem!'” Lyman says. “But it’s like, how could I possibly be part of the problem?”

Photo by Flickr user Peter Organisciak used under a Creative Commons license.

At the audio link, hear from women in music — including The Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker, The Pretenders lead singer Chrissie Hynde, Chaka Khan and more — who describe the challenges they faced entering the industry.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Barf Troop started nearly four years ago when founder and Virginia native Aspen Eray — artist name Babeo Baggins — joked about starting a group that would be “rivals to Odd Future.”

The 22-year-old — “going on 12,” Baggins says, laughing — met her future bandmates on Tumblr. They hailed from places like Atlanta, Chicago and Canada, but after Baggins posted a song based on a video-game character she loved, Barf Troop was born across time zones.

Like thousands of budding ensembles that find their creative tools on the Internet, Barf Troop’s members record raps on their MacBooks, email audio files back and forth and self-release music on Bandcamp — and already the ensemble has grown a massive following online. The group’s fans seem to appreciate Barf Troop’s scrappy recordings just as much as its message of acceptance and inclusion.

Now, Baggins is busy plotting Barf Troop’s come up. She has a mixtape called Posi+ive coming in May. Babelien, the group’s newest member, is working on music production. Babe Simpson, Babe Field, Babenstein and Baberella Fox — Barf Troop includes both nonbinary and cisgender artists, so the group uses “babe” as a gender-neutral term — also plan to release music this year.

Meanwhile, Baggins’ latest song is a cover of Lykke Li’s “Little Bit” that finds her singing, reworking the track and adding a verse that flaunts her quick and precise flow.

Recently I met with Baggins on her turf in Columbia Heights, and we talked about why rap is punker than punk, her plans for her upcoming mixtape and what it’s like to be in a rap collective across borders.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: Why did you all decide to work together in this rap collective?

Babeo Baggins: Well, all of us in Barf Troop are very — I don’t want to say out of the “norm” because normal is very subjective. But we really connected on a lot of things that we didn’t really connect on with anybody else. We’re super-into so many different things, and we see things in a very different light and we all agree on that, which we haven’t really found elsewhere.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Tell me about the process of creating music with Barf Troop.

We’re always sending stuff to each other because at the end of the day, we’re a group. Although we’re individuals and we’re going to make individual music, we have to think about the fact that we are a unit and anything that we’re going to put out is going to affect us collectively.

I know I have a lot of people in my life that are inspiring to me and that I respect, but the people in Barf Troop, those are the visionaries in my life, those are the ones that if they hear it and they like it, then I know it’s good.

[About the] recording process, well, before this year, we were recording on my MacBook because that’s how it started, just right off our MacBooks. Before last year, I was mastering everything on my own — which I’m s**t at, so thank God we found somebody to do that. This year, for my tape and for Babe Simpson’s tape, we’ve gotten studio time, which is really cool.

A lot of people hear beats and then write the rap, but we don’t do that. It’s much easier to write a song and figure out a beat to go behind that so it’s natural, versus you trying to make something work just because you think the beat’s real hot. The lyrics are more important than the beat.

When did you start rapping?

I’ve always been musically inclined. I played guitar, bass, piano, ukulele — no drums, sadly — and I’ve always been singing. But rapping is a very new thing to me specifically. I didn’t get into rap music until my late teens because I’m from the country [Southern Virginia], so I was in singing camps for a long time and I was listening to Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco. In my later teens, I started growing out of that and listening to rap.

I love music altogether but rap, specifically, is so freeform. It’s literally the most “punk” music there is, even more so than punk music itself. You can do anything within the rap genre. You have Tupac, Young Thug, Azealia Banks all in the same category because rap is what you want it to be. Rap is what I feel not only represents me as a person of color but as a creative individual.

“Rap is so freeform. It’s literally the most ‘punk’ music there is, even more so than punk music itself. You can do anything within the rap genre.”

How has Barf Troop changed over the years?

It’s changed a lot. When we all started, we were all teenagers. I was definitely in a very different place when this started. This started as a sort of release from a very bad situation I was living in at the time, and it was an escape from that not only creatively, but I could just get away from it for a while.

Now, the music that I’m making is for expression, versus just making a song because I want to think about something else. It’s definitely more of an art now.

What we make has become an art rather than just a hobby. This is what we see as our careers, what we spend our time on, what we talk about 24/7. My music is my main focus and everything else that I do is the part-time now. That’s the biggest change.

What’s the music vibe in D.C.? What’s it like to be an artist here?

I got asked that by a very influential person here in D.C. She asked me how I felt about the D.C. music scene and how I felt about it versus other places. New York and L.A. are definitely heavily populated with musicians, but here in D.C., the musicians feel like a family. Anytime I see my friends perform or go to a show, you feel welcomed and you feel like, “Yeah, we’re a part of this together.”

It’s using what you have to make more for yourself, whereas in New York City or L.A., it’s like dog eat dog. In D.C., it’s like, if I’m eating, you eating, even if we’re not super-close. We’re both musicians and I understand your struggle and you understand mine.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

What’s coming up next for Barf Troop?

We’re working on a lot of visuals this year — more collective visuals. I have something really cool planned for my mixtape release. I’m also working on starting an art collective here in D.C. It’s going to be focused on women, gay community, trans community, queers [and] nonbinaries, so they can have a place to express in D.C. Hopefully that’ll be done by this summer and I want everyone to be involved.

We have a group track coming up soon. It’s constant work. A constant creative work environment.

Why is it important to have a collective of women and nonbinary people?

The cool thing right now is that we’re in a time where everybody is looking into themselves to figure out how they really feel, and they’re becoming more open and accepting of not only themselves but others. It’s important to have a music outlet for people who are finally finding themselves and need people to look to.

When I was little, it was Spice Girls, they were strong, they weren’t singing like, “Oh my God, why don’t you like me?” That was inspiring to me.

Now, at the time we’re in, the kids that are in the position that I was when I was very young — when I was feeling gender-fluid — people need to see that even if you feel like a boy, it doesn’t mean you have to “look” like a boy. Or if you feel like a girl, you don’t have to “look” like a girl. Or if you identify as male but you think dresses are cool, it’s not a big deal.

But it took four 20-somethings from Michigan to concoct one of the most unusual Diane Rehm tributes yet: They named their punk band after her.

The band that would become Diane Rehm began to form in 2012, started by the former members of a hardcore punk group called DSS, or Dips**t System. John Cates, 26, and Dylan Putnam-Smith, 27, started the new band while living together in Lansing. By 2013, they’d recruited former DSS member Miles Murphy, 23, along with vocalist Claire Korejsza.

Korejsza, 26, is an educator and social worker who was teaching preschool at the time. She listened to The Diane Rehm Show every day before work. Sometimes, she took what she heard in the media and wrote about it in her journal.

“I listen to a lot of radio and news, and I realized that the world’s pretty messed up, and there were certain things that would stick with me all day,” Korejsza says in a conference call. She scribbled those things on paper.

When Korejsza joined the band, she turned her journal entries into song lyrics — and the band turned into an unlikely homage to the voice she heard every morning.

“We were sitting around talking about band names, and it was always something that I kind of had in the back of my head — that it would be funny to have a hardcore punk band called Diane Rehm,” Murphy says.

Other heavy bands had named themselves after well-known people. Charles Bronson. Bruce Campbell. This crew decided to do something similar, but with a feminist slant.

“So many people at shows would ask if I was Diane,” says Diane Rehm vocalist Claire Korejsza. “I felt like we were constantly plugging her show to people who didn’t recognize it.”

“I don’t think it was really conscious at the time, but the more I thought about it, I thought it was just kind of funny — that by adopting the name Diane Rehm, we kind of flipped that paradigm [of] having these ultra-macho, aggressive, over-the-top men’s names in a band,” Putnam-Smith says. “Adopting the name of this prominent strong female radio personality is kind of a nod to, ‘Hey, there’s a lot more to what actual strength is.'”

Plus, the name seemed “relevant to what Claire’s lyrics were about,” Murphy says.

Korejsza wrote songs from her own experiences and dove into issues like the sexualization of women’s bodies. She used far more explicit language than what Rehm — who declined to comment for this story — uses on her show, however.

“Claire wrote what she felt, and we were just like, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s awesome, we feel that way, too. Let’s make it a song,'” Putnam-Smith says.

Diane Rehm the punk band started playing shows. They recorded a vicious demo — it starts off with a blast of a song called “Cystic Fibrosis” — and went on a short Midwestern tour. They say most people they talked to about the group’s name knew who Diane Rehm was. Those who didn’t got a short explanation.

“So many people at shows would ask if I was Diane,” Korejsza says. “I felt like we were constantly plugging her show to people who didn’t recognize it.”

But the group wouldn’t go much further than a demo and one tour. By early 2014, they had entered new phases in their lives. Cates wanted to relocate to Detroit to study photography. Murphy had moved to Germany. Amicably, Diane Rehm split up.

Now, Murphy tends bar in a Berlin hostel, and he’s plotting a move to Ireland. Cates joined a band called Violent Mutation in Detroit. Korejsza and Putnam-Smith live in Grand Rapids, where she’s still teaching and he floats from gig to gig, including a stint at a conveyer belt factory. All four ex-Diane Rehm members say they’d love to make music together again, if only they lived in the same place.

But Korejsza and Putnam-Smith have a new band. It’s called Dakhma, named after the “towers of silence” where Zoroastrians traditionally laid out their dead.

Putnam-Smith laughs. “So we went from a non-stereotypical hardcore punk band name to a stereotypical one.”

Both The Diane Rehm Show and Bandwidth are operated by WAMU.

The original version of this post misstated the number of people who hear The Diane Rehm Show. She’s heard by more than 2 million listeners per week, not per day.

Murphy, 28, is now in the process of producing the third annual U+NFest, which starts tomorrow at Baltimore’s Ottobar. For the event, she and her booking partners roped in a couple of D.C.’s best-loved bands (Chain & the Gang, Give) in addition to weighty acts from Baltimore and elsewhere (Screaming Females, Nothing, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat), plus a highly anticipated punk drag show.

Before U+NFest’s kickoff, Bandwidth chatted with Murphy about five years of booking in a small town, aiming for diversity and dealing with sexism in the business.

Bandwidth: How long have you been booking, and why Baltimore?

Dana Murphy: Unregistered Nurse started over five years ago at this point. It sort of started by accident; I started booking the occasional show and it just grew. Why do I want to do it in Baltimore? It’s an interesting city in that it’s had a lot of good music scenes, but it doesn’t have a strong garage and punk presence. It could have more of that, and that’s a lot of what I specialize in.

Do you have a set mantra or mission you adhere to when choosing which bands or venues to work with?

It’s really important to me to pick venues that I feel I can trust, that I feel the people who own them care about what’s going on. That’s the big difference between being an independent promoter as opposed to an in-house promoter, because you need the venues to take care of you. If you’re not attached to one place, people are less inclined to care.

How would your approach change if you were booking in D.C.?

D.C. is a much larger town, so I think it would be a little easier to get people out. Because Baltimore is small, you have to work a little harder. Hanging flyers, rallying people.

It seems like over the years you’ve built a strong base of support, and we’ve seen that with the success of Ladyfest and the return of U+NFest.

It’s grown a lot. I remember when I did my first few shows, there’d be five people there, and I’d text my friends and beg them to come check out these bands. I think people have become more interested in different kinds of music. I was really surprised at the great turnout we had at Ladyfest. That was our first time doing it, so we weren’t really sure what to expect. I think U+NFest has been growing. All fests are trial and error, especially when you’re DIY. There’s no template for how you’re doing it. You keep experimenting to figure out, “What do people like? What do people not like?” That kind of thing.

“I want people to look at our shows and say, ‘These are good shows. Period.’ Not ‘These are good shows, for some girls.'”

When did you go from booking a few shows at a few venues a month, to launching a festival? How does one go about putting together their first festival?

It was something I had always really wanted to do, but it was really important to me to approach the idea of a festival in a DIY way that incorporated punk and other kinds of music, and was interesting and well-curated, and not just a bunch of white dudes. You know what I mean? There’s a fest I really like that I went to three or four years ago, and my friends’ all-girl band played. And it was like, “Oh look, we’re the only girl band on this entire bill, and nobody cares about us.” And I thought it was a terrible feeling for them.

I wanted to do my own fest but make sure it represented bands that I relate to more. Keep it interesting, change it up. I used to do these birthday shows that did really well. One year it was Pissed Jeans and a bunch of drag queens at The Golden West. People asked, “How are you going to top this?” and I said, “I can’t. I’m not even going to try.” But two years later I decided to start doing this fest.

Now U+NFest is approaching its third year and now has its own drag show. How did a drag scene—or interest in drag—emerge from Baltimore’s punk and garage scenes?

I’ve always been really interested in drag culture. I think the people doing it are doing an interesting and unique thing that challenges people and what they think. Mike Farley does a really cool Rough Trade night at the Sidebar, but he incorporates different kinds of music and people are there selling zines—it’s an interesting and diverse thing that I feel no one else is doing right now. I told him I’d love for him to be a part of [U+NFest] because I’m interested in stuff that represents different perspectives, and I certainly don’t think that I could represent drag culture in any way.

People hear “female-run booking company” and they have an idea of what that means. But none of your shows or events I’ve ever attended have been explicitly “feminist events.” The lineups are always all-inclusive.

I’m really glad to hear you say that, because that’s always been the point. I want people to look at our shows and say, “These are good shows. Period.” Not “These are good shows, for some girls.” You can be a feminist and still like music that’s outside of that. Being a feminist is who I am, but I’m also a person that likes different kinds of music. I don’t only book feminist bands.

You have Screaming Females and Iron Reagan on the same flyer.

I think having Downtown Boys and Angel Du$t is the most interesting part. Angel Du$t are playing right after Chain & the Gang, which is going to be an incredible contrast I’m really excited for.

How much collaboration is there between yourself and the bands you book?

One of the advantages of having a DIY booker do your show is that you should be able to communicate. I don’t like viewing bands as rock stars you should idolize, nor do I like viewing promoters as the boss that’s going to tell you what to do and how it is. Those things should be leveled out. I always want the bands’ input, and I always want feedback.

“Being a woman, you get this mansplain-y kind of, ‘You know, when you book shows, you’re really supposed to do this.’ Dude, there’s no template.”

Did you imagine you’d be booking the third year of U+NFest at this point? Did you think you’d be booking for this long? How do you make this sustainable?

I started Unregistered Nurse because I was booking a show and someone asked, “What’s the name of your booking company?” And we had just had a conversation the night before about this name. “It’s, uh, Unregistered Nurse Booking.” I just pulled it out of thin air. It was never really my intention to expand at all. I was just doing the occasional show.

And now you’re doing how many a month?

I’m sort of taking a break right now. This is my second fest in six months, and I was on tour [with a band] for six weeks. Trying to do all of those things at once has put me a little behind. I only have one or two shows for October. There was one month where I did 35 shows, but that was when I had my own spot [Gold Bar]. Being back to not having one specific spot, it’ll probably be five to 10 a month.

What were some of the reactions you got when you first started booking, and what’s your feedback like now?

Being a woman, you get this mansplain-y kind of, “You know, when you book shows, you’re really supposed to do this.” Dude, there’s no template. I won a Best of Baltimore for booking in 2012, and I won [Best Festival] for Ladyfest this year. And both times, I instantly checked Facebook and saw people talking about how much I did not deserve to win. Which is incredible, because every single dude that I’ve seen, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, don’t get that. There’s something about women really wanting to do something, and wanting to be good at it. I’m not just interested in doing something, I’m interested in doing it really well. And some people can’t deal with it.

You want to set a precedent for people in this business, not just women in this business.

Yes. It’s about the idea that you can do something interesting and different and skillful, and you can incorporate your gender but at the end of the day, that’s not what it’s all about.