Celebrating Milwaukee’s Female Musicians to Help Kids Rock

The Riverwest Public House was filling up with people eager to attend the show that Tyler Mantz, who was celebrating his 23^rd birthday, had put together. While a show being held at the Public House one recent October evening is nothing out of the ordinary, the artists performing weren’t exactly similar in genre. What they did have in common, however, was that all of the performers that night were female. While the event was a celebration of Mantz reaching the age of 23, he had a more selfless purpose of putting it together. All of the money made from the show at the end of the night was donated to Girls Rock Milwaukee.

Girls Rock Milwaukee, a local non-profit organization, is a summer day camp for girls ages 8-16. The camp is held at the Helene Zelazo Center on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s campus. While at camp, the girls form bands. Each band consists of a vocalist, a guitar player, a bass guitar player, a drummer, and keyboard player. The girls learn an instrument and then write a song over the course of a week. At the end of the week, they perform the song in a showcase at a local venue. The girls also take self-defense lessons and learn about the history of women in music.

Mantz has been involved in the music community since his senior year of high school in 2010. He started booking bands to play in his parents’ garage in his hometown of Richfield. Mantz moved to Milwaukee in 2011 and eventually started booking shows in the city once he had enough connections and venues to host them at. He began dabbling in music of his own after living in a house full of musicians, picking up the bass guitar and playing in several Milwaukee bands and even going on tour across the country. He currently plays the bass in the bands Ash and Statures.

The show at the Riverwest Public House contained four music acts. Originally five, solo act Lauren Ruka had to drop due to feeling ill. Siren, the performance moniker of Kaitie Lafond, opened up the show with several acoustic songs. Audience members knew the words and sang along to her song “Queen Medusa.” Hip hop artist Zed Kenzo followed with her own unique brand of hip-hop, accurately described on her Facebook page as “fun alien turned weird.”

She kept the audience at attention with her sporadic stage presence and fast paced vocals. Afterwards, singer Fivy mellowed the mood with her blend of jazz, hip hop, and soul. The show concluded with a performance by the all-female super-group Ruth B8ter Ginsburg. On top of an assortment of songs utilizing the various voices of the group with harmonies, the group performed an emotional acapella song about the mother of Dontre Hamilton, an African-American man who was gunned down by a Milwaukee police officer in 2014.

Earlier this year, Mantz held a fundraiser for Girls Rock Milwaukee at the Borg Ward, an art gallery-turned-concert venue. The lineup contained a mixture of both female and male artists, with a total of fifteen acts, mostly of the punk genre.

“Over the last year, I’d noticed a ton of extraordinarily talented women in other genres of music that I traditionally didn’t listen to,” said Mantz. “That being said, I tried to book artists that were outside of my normal network of friends and musicians, to have a more varied show and get new faces out to the event to hear about Girls Rock.”

The October 10th fundraiser raised $400 for Girls Rock Milwaukee, an impressive achievement for a show with a significantly smaller lineup than the first fundraiser. Donations are important to Girls Rock Milwaukee as the organization pays for all of the equipment that the girls use, including the instruments.

Gender equality is an issue in many different settings. In the music scene, women are more often than men perceived as sex symbols, and a female member amongst a band of mostly all males is spotted like a sore thumb and often focused upon as “the girl in the band that plays this instrument.”

“Music, especially in certain genres, has always seemed to have this patriarchal sense about it, where men play the music and women involved are considered just fans and groupies,” said Mantz. “The big problem for me is seeing very talented artists not taken seriously due to their gender.”

Siren, who opened up the show on Oct. 10, knows too well the struggle of being a female musician in a mostly male dominated community.

“I was terrified to start performing as a teenager. I would have killed to have the opportunity to have a woman tell me to be unafraid and go for it,” Siren said. “This lineup was special to me. The females involved are not ‘female musicians’; rather they’re badass performers who kill sets regardless of their gender.”

But Mantz hopes that he can continue to create gender equality in music, at least by doing his part in his neighborhood and at the shows that he puts together by making sure that he continues to book female artists and by making sure that females who do attend his shows feel safe and included. Mantz plans on continuing to support Girls Rock Milwaukee. He is hoping to host the Ladies Rock showcase, where the girls from the summer camp will perform the songs they’ve written, at an all ages venue.

“Seeing the showcases and the looks on the participants’ faces as they perform for the first time is sincerely heartwarming,” said Mantz. “I hope this means that in a few years, I’ll be able to see those same girls forming more bands and showing Milwaukee that girls too, rock.”