Generative Rage
How do we creatively refocus our energy?
I’m one of the featured guests for the 100 Day Project newsletter this year, and my week of prompts starts this Sunday (they’re all focused on the theme of community). I hope you will follow along. Sign up here. // A new print or card might boost your mood
The other day, a friend asked if I would hop on the phone and talk through a creative conundrum. I was just off an interview and had that kind of intense energy that comes when you have a surge of ideas. I was also over-caffeinated.
I paced back and forth in my studio as we commiserated and complained about some things. It was definitely a bitching and whining session. We were a little petty, but we were also railing against the larger elements, the infrastructural parts.
Eventually, we switched over to brainstorming some ideas of potential projects. We riffed. While the complaining felt like a release, letting off some steam, this felt quite different. Energizing, building forward momentum. For a tiny second it felt like maybe there were some answers, or at the very least, there were options, and they were fun and creative options.
We had taken pissed off energy and turned it into something more generative.
I’m feeling a lot of rage these days. Anyone else out there? I know I usually try to keep a cool demeanor here, but there really is a lot to be pissed about. Tech platforms stealing creative content in order to earn a profit. Federal dismantling of essential services and jobs. Taking down everything from libraries to science to critical health infrastructure. Billionaires. Oh, and did someone say financial markets? I don’t need to go on. You get the idea, you know how it all feels, day in and day out
Here is the question that I keep coming to:
How you turn rage into something more generative?
Generative rage. Is that a thing?
I googled it. “Generative AI is all the rage” was the fourth hit. Nope. Absolutely not. Now I felt even more enraged.
But I did come across an essay by Chantelle Ohrling all about anger, what she defined as “righteous rage.” The focus here is particularly on the rage and experience of oppressed, colonized, and marginalized communities.
“Righteous Rage is a moral anger that is sparked in response to injustice against inherent human rights. From systemic to interpersonal, this anger fuels appropriate reaction which builds and heals.
Righteous rage is the sacred, ancestral fury that knows injustice is not meant to be swallowed but spoken, screamed, sung into being. It is the riot which brings freedom from slavery, fuels the gay-liberation movement, and keeps land and water defenders rallying in the face of police brutality.
Righteous rage is not simply anger; it is love in its fiercest form, the refusal to let oppression go unanswered.”
She cites numerous community leaders who have turned rage into action, anger into cultural power. Fiery anger can ignite a new way forward. Ohrling cites a quote from Maya Angelou:
If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry.
But Angelou points out that we have to be mindful of how that anger is transformed.
You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.
Anger is not the problem, it’s what we do with it. Rage, after all, is energy, and energy can be shifted, transformed, refocused.
Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s, if I need some inspiration for generative rage, I don’t need to look any further than my own backyard. Thinking about this question, I went and looked at the original Riot Grrl manifesto.
There’s also this flyer, made in 1989 and designed so that it could be folded up small with “trust” written on top.
“Are you listening to Bikini Kill??” my husband asked me yesterday afternoon.
“Well I’m pissed off about everything, what else am I supposed to do?”
Probably worth stating here that I am not punk. Much to my chagrin, I did not listen to Bikini Kill in my younger days. I have never dared veer that far off the edge of what’s conventional, and punk music was not the background to my youth. But as I get older, as politics lean more and more right and tech behemoths get bigger and bigger, stealing our attention and our creative work, the more I feel that I want to push back. The more that tone starts hitting a chord. Maybe I do want to be a little more punk.
We’ve been primed to be anything but.
We create for likes and stats and growth. We take every opportunity to optimize, polish our personal brands. We curate beautiful lists and roundups, all to craft an aesthetic that hits a certain tone, allows us to compete in a game that was never designed for us the individual to succeed.
It’s exhausting, and it’s boring.
Where did the fun go? Where did unpolished work go? Where did the photocopied flyers with handwritten text, simply crossed out and written again if there was a spelling error, go? Where are the weird colors, the grainy edges? Everything is so clean, so curated, so perfectly branded and aligned that it’s hard to even see our own reflection in the sheen of the mirror. It’s so blinding we realize we’re not even there.
I came across the Corners of the Internet Database recently thanks to
, and there, in a spreadsheet, there seemed to be a little glimmer of what I was after. A hint of nostalgia, yes, but also a reminder that there’s still space for all the things that are simply a little weird, a little on the edge, a little obscure. You know, like trying to make a drawing with MS Paint, if for no other reason than to remind yourself that in the grand scheme of things, the flood of digitally created art we see these days is so very new. There was a time when these platforms made things much harder. You would have absolutely chosen to go back to your analog methods.I don’t want to wear a black jacket, shave my head, or spike my hair. The general punk aesthetic has always been a little intense for me. I want something a little softer, a little slower. However, it’s the ethos that this movement generated, and continues to generate—the DIY culture, the pushing back against the mainstream, the resourcefulness, the trying to figure out how to do things differently—that draws me in.
And I know the movement wasn’t perfect. After all: what is? But we have room to evolve, things we can do better, history we can learn. Decades later, Martina Camacho, a Gen Z teenager, wrote about how she was inspired by the rebelliousness of the Riot Grrl movement, even if in the 90s was not always safe and inclusive. Punk’s Black roots have often been erased, but people are trying to change that.
Rachel Greenwald Smith spent hours sifting through the Riot Grrrl archives, pondering how the push for individualism could also lead to “a recipe for homogeneity.” And yet:
“…despite the historical problems with punk’s masculinism, its whiteness, and even its own individualism, I’m convinced that it continues to provide an important example of how art, especially in its most illiberal variants, can insist upon the role of the collective, draw lines, and force its audience to publicly choose sides—in short, to make politics visible.”
That ability to capture rage, to create an artistic outlet for it? It fuels you with a little extra energy. No wonder several years ago so many of us quickly passed along the video of the Linda Lindas playing ‘Racist, Sexist, Boy’ in a public library, screaming their young hearts out. Maybe there is hope.
Here's a line I like from the Riot Grrl manifesto:
BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.
Create our own meanings.
If rage can do that, and we can do it together, then I would say it’s generative.
-Anna
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I don’t often listen to music when I’m writing, but occasionally some instrumental stuff slips in. I was thankful for
’s new release of his Vol. III songs as one seamless playlist this week. 40 minutes of uninterrupted instrumental music that’s sure to help unlock some creative flow for you.- did a month of entirely almost entirely analog note-taking, brainstorming, etc.
From my favorite punk publisher Microcosm Publishing, this gem.
Mistakes make the brain grow, catalogue your screw-ups. In line with that is
’s latest newsletter which is all about “things I am bad at.” I think both of these make pretty interesting writing prompts too!Hire a GenX-er with an art degree before it’s too late. (this might be my favorite thing I read this week)
To anyone who writes poetry:
is looking for submissions to . More info here.
I, obviously, love everything about this. I read your suggestion of “you should hire a Gen-Xer…” after and they are a perfect pairing. Gen X (and Gen Y, I’m never giving up the label) remember how to photocopy their face in a Xerox machine and after reading your piece I am inspired to do so.
Yesss! Let us channel our rage into creative solutions! 🔥