When I was 15, I joined an all-girl punk band as a desperate attempt to find myself. I wanted to be a part of something so badly that it didn’t occur to my naive mind that the intentions of the people around me were not always reputable.
When I met my bandmates and started writing music together, I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be at the time. Kiara Caban was on the drums, Ellie Likes was on the bass, Quynn Lubs did vocals and I played the guitar. It felt really pivotal to be a part of an active movement.
We wrote songs about women being seen as sex symbols and police brutality, among other things. We gained the attention of many people, especially from our home town Santa Clarita, and began playing shows every weekend.
It felt like playing music was a doorway to all of the freedom I had been searching for. It was an almost unexplainable release that I had desired. It was hard to come face to face with reality once things started to get unsafe. We would disguise our dysfunctional actions by the word “punk” and get involved in altercations and drug abuse.
“It was glamorized,” A close friend of band members Kiki Lerma said. “We were all just distracting ourselves.
It was all a big distraction from reality, which at times made me feel like I was living a double life. It was exciting to disappear in the night and perform before crowds of people exactly like me. It wasn’t until the end when I started to see people take advantage of power and freedom in order to gain control.
I realized that I had witnessed a lot of this floating around the inner workings of my band “Princess Cut” throughout the year that I was involved. I came to a difficult understanding that being a part of this band was not only harmful for me, but the people around me.
It was shown to me that everything Lubs had done was a ploy for praise and control, and they had strung me and my two other bandmates along with hopes of creating back support. It was never about the music or our message to them in the end.
It was about withholding power over people in order to feel superior inside. It was disappointing that someone so close to me was capable of real destruction and deterioration. I had always viewed it a certain way in my mind and had romanticized the feeling of being in a band and all that comes along with it, but actually experiencing it and seeing all of the power dynamics and abuse in the scene was a real wake-up call.
“What once called me no longer keeps me,” Lerma said.
Referencing the feeling drawn in by the looks of the glamorous and sugar-coated outside, but uncovering the swollen abscess which was the destruction of “Princess Cut”.
