Stereotypes be damned

These chicks rock to an entirely different beat—part electronic, part punk, with a little hip-hop thrown in for extra effect. And if they haven’t made you dance, they haven’t done their job.

Cindy Wonderful and Sarah Adorable, who together form Scream Club, get on stage and send messages of positivity, from girl power to gay pride. Sometimes that includes getting glammed up; other times it means stripping down for a crazy, naked show.

“We try to keep it really fresh, really spontaneous so nobody really knows what to expect,” said Wonderful, the Mohawked, more andro of the two. “We try to really feel the vibe of the crowd. If people are ready to be crazy, we’ll be ready to be crazy.”

The duo’s second album, Life of a Heartbreaker, came out this week, and just as Scream Club’s image has changed—from the two 20-somethings looking vaguely like identical superheroes to having very different styles—the music has changed a bit, too.

“It’s a little more dancy than the first one and it’s a little darker, too,” Wonderful said. “We still have playful songs, but we’re kinda going through different stuff on this album, so we wrote about different stuff, like traveling and breakups.”

No matter the subject of the song, though, Scream Club’s message is clear—be whoever it is you want to be and forget about stereotypes. They are, after all, a couple of lesbian white girls who rap. And they hope that challenging mainstream ideas of what it is to be a woman, or what it is to be queer, will help people embrace their own identities.

“We’re the type of band that will always root for the underdog,” Wonderful said. “We’ll say, ‘Hey, you don’t really belong with anybody, well you can belong with us.’ We’re just normal queers trying to be visible as queer people. We’re having a good time and really trying to portray ourselves as smart, ambitious women with something positive to say.”

Wonderful and Adorable met about three years ago in Olympia, Wash. It was love at first sight. Six months later, Wonderful asked Adorable to join her on stage—she was a solo rap artist, but missed the dynamic of being in a band. And while the two have since broken up, the band is going strong.

“Our first show was at a roller rink,” Wonderful said with a slight chuckle. “We’ve just been doing it ever since.”

You’ll see an homage to the roller rink in Scream Club’s video for the irresistibly catchy “And You Belong,” off their first record, Don’t Bite Your Sister (look for it on YouTube).

Wonderful grew up listening to all kinds of music, from Fleetwood Mac and Black Sabbath to Warrant, The Beatles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. She was a rapper in a band before going solo. Adorable, on the other hand, had never been in a band before, but “her mom plays every kind of stringed instrument.”

In addition to music, they’ve started their own label—Crunk’s Not Dead Records. And true to the Scream Club ideal of defying labels, it’s not about crunk music.

“It’s a takeoff on the classic punk record by The Exploited called Punk’s Not Dead,” Wonderful explained. “It’s more symbolic of two different genres coming together. It’s the spirit of collaboration, the spirit of mixing genres.”

Fusing genres and getting people to dance is Scream Club’s way of including people. They don’t want to be preachy—that turns people off. Instead, they rock out to fun, catchy beats that get the crowd jumping along.

“A lot of times when people try to be political, it can make people want to be closed off because they feel like they’re being spoken to or like they’re not doing something right,” Wonderful said. “We don’t want to make anyone feel like that. I feel like people are more receptive when they feel like they’re part of something.

“Hopefully, by making people dance, we can make them think.”