Watch SNL’s Vanessa Bayer Give ‘Sound Advice’ to Sleater-Kinney
When she’s not a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Vanessa Bayer keeps busy with her faux reality show web series, Sound Advice. On it, she plays Janessa Slater, a pretty awful PR coach to musicians. In the most recent episode, she attempts to offer some sage (albeit misplaced) guidance to Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss – check it out above.
It gets off to a pretty terrible start when Slater asks if the women of Sleater-Kinney met while making “low-budget TV shows” she’s never seen, taking a jab at Carrie Brownstein’s work with fellow SNL alum Fred Armisen on the IFC sketch comedy show Portlandia. It only gets more uncomfortable from there, as Slater takes a new angle on the “all-girl” band interview questions by asking if Susan B. Anthony was one of the original Sleater-Kinney members. When Brownstein deadpans that she believes the iconic suffragette deceased long before the band's inception, Slater quips, “But we carry [Anthony’s] message: Be a girl, get dressed up, look pretty, you know? Guys are running this place, but we can do stuff, too.”
Sleater-Kinney's collective blank stares don't slow Slater down, as she continues by getting the Riot Grrrl movement very, very wrong and asking how many Nancy Drew-esque mysteries the band has solved during their tenure. For the most part, the trio of rockers manage to stay in character, but toward the end of the interview, you can see Bayer, Brownstein, Tucker and Weiss all break out in laughter.
Previously, Bayer has given equally terrible advice to St. Vincent’ s Annie Clark and Tegan and Sara.