Cover of Local, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly; image taken from newsok.com
I’ve been trying to get into graphic novels and comic books lately. I’m not a big fiction reader in general, but they seem to read themselves. Plus, you know, pretty pictures. Anyway, I asked some girlfriends for recommendations and one of them suggested I read Local. To quote, ”Buy it right now! It’s about every girl you’ve ever known.” Strong endorsement.
Local is a 12-volume collection of short stories. Each volume documents the year in the life of vagabond Megan McKennan, who is the series’ protagonist, though sometimes a background character. Starting in 1994 when she is 17, each volume takes place in a different city. Megan moves from city to city, job to job, apartment to apartment, boyfriend to boyfriend, haircut to haircut. The only thing that’s ever certain for her is her backpack, her discman, and the road.
I’m not sure if Local is about every girl I’ve ever known so much as parts of every girl I’ve ever known are in Megan.
I also admire Megan a bit. She never lets herself feel obligated to stay when she feels the wanderlust. I guess a lot of folks had difficulty with Megan’s nomadic nature, but I find a lot of bravery in a young woman who refuses to be tied down to a person or a situation she doesn’t want. She’s also tough and resourceful, able to figure her way around whatever city she finds herself living in.
She’s also often alone, though not always lonely. She always has the city and its learned reference points. One treasure of the series is its emphasis on place. We meet her at 17 in Portland, trying to fill her crazy boyfriend’s prescription in Nob Hill. In Minneapolis, we can see every sleeve and promotional poster in the record store she works at. When Megan finds herself in Park Slope, the neighborhood is rendered so particularly that it almost becomes tangible. When she waits tables for bougie gourmands in Wicker Park, you can smell the entrées. And when she confronts the memory of her parents, she does so by visiting Norman to recreate a photo they took as students at the University of Oklahoma.
"Should I stay or should I go?;" image taken from flickr
We also meet other people, mainly dudes, who Megan is connected to in one way or another. There’s a musician retiring in Richmond after his band breaks up. When meet Megan’s skater cousin Nicky, who is suffering through high school in Tempe, we get a sense for the vast flatness of Arizona’s landscape and architecture as he ambles drunkenly from house party to house party. Her damaged kid brother bides his time at Beerland in Austin. And there are the two embittered brothers in Missoula who have a stand-off in a diner.
There’s also Nancy Bai, the precocious art student who’s an admin at 30-year-old Megan’s office in Toronto, who tries to steal Megan’s memories for the sake of art.
We also get flashbacks of Megan’s mother, a loving but long-suffering woman who permits her daughter to be a traveler out of fear that she’ll end up in an uphappy, abusive marriage. With this information, I think that the way Megan’s journey ends in the series is touching. In fact, I owe my mom a phone call.
In addition to cities, Megan always has music. She’s particularly fond of indie music, one time meeting the lead singer of Theories and Defenses, a fictitious band, while in Richmond. He’s a jerk to her, autographing one of his records for her before having her pay him for it.
Importantly, music helped the writer and illustrator shape their protagonist. The end of each issue comes with brief essays from both Wood and Kelly, along with the tracklists they listened to while putting the issue together. I really appreciated this kind of detail, as I liked knowing just what may be in Megan’s discman. Nicely, there are plenty ladies. Guys like The Replacements, The Minutemen, and Junior Boys occupy aural space alongside Cibo Matto, Björk, Sade, Neko Case, and The Be Good Tanyas, as well as mixed-gender groups like Lush and Superchunk. In addition, there are plenty of songs they used that I’ve never heard, so I’ve got some more listening to do.
Guess I’m gonna have to read Kelly’s Demo series next!
She really wants to, as she shared with Pitchfork recently, but no one has asked her.
Seriously, wouldn’t that be awesome? Her music is so cinematic anyway. I’ve been an avid listener for many years and have always thought that the person behind “I’m Just Working for the Man,” “The River,” and “A Place Called Home” (among others) could put together a score that triggers all the right buzz words — haunting, moody, atmospheric, elusive. For further evidence, let’s listen to “Leaving California,” off A Woman a Man Walked By, her new album with longtime collaborator (and film scorer), John Parish.
In my head, I’d like to see her score a western, like her erstwhile companion (and musical counterpart) Nick Cave. If we’re going for the movie of my dreams, let’s say it’s a Campion-esque costume piece that will eroticize boots, chaps, and fringe the way that The Piano did with crinoline, corsets, and ankle boots. If it were directed by Campion and was a lesbian romance starring Tilda Swinton and Susan Sarandon, so much the better.
For now, I guess I’ll have to wait for Spike Jonze’s highly-anticipated Where The Wild Things Are. Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs served as composer for it. Expect a future post.
Season three of 30 Rock ended last night on a high note (ugh, pun). Sending up celebrity charities and benefit concerts will always be funny. You can watch the full episode here.
Now, I could get into a discussion of my qualms with the past season — particularly how episodic it became and how it tended to give the show’s supporting players the shaft in lieu of more screen time for the leads and many, many guest stars.
I could also get into a larger discussion of my feelings about the show’s gender politics (some of which you can read here) — I will say that Pete calling Liz a bitch last night hurt my stomach, and that bisexuality was not invented in the 90s to sell hair products. As the show goes on, sometimes I’m not sure if misogynistic jokes are made as a commentary on misogyny or if they are simply misogynistic jokes. Tricky. But I’ll bracket it for now.
Things I liked.
1. Cindy Lauper: Still drunk after all these years.
2. Norah Jones: Hello, cutie! Like your hair. Hope that Lonely Island makes a video with you for “Dreamgirl,” the song you did together.
3. Why is Sheryl Crow the only one getting paid? Give some money to Mary J.
4. Jenna singing, if only briefly. Jenna singing = comedy gold. Kudos to Jane Krakowski for a) being a great singer and b) mining it for laughs. More of Jenna singing next season, please. In fact, how about a 30 Rock musical episode?
5. The Beastie Boys (minus MCA, where have ya been?) and Talib Kweli rapping about how good things don’t always come in pairs, like heads or attack dogs. I’ll always have love for the Beasties, who’ve renounced their early mookish persona and embraced feminism. I’ll also always love Talib Kweli, who has written celebratory rhymes about fatherhood and childbirth. Yay, dudes who get it!
6. Mary J. Blige’s foundation is still looking for that Loch Ness Monster. Keep hope alive.
7. Clay Aiken is totally Kenneth Parcell’s cousin.
8. Elvis Costello is an international man of mystery, as I’ve long suspected.
9. This storyline a) sent up the vapid, self-serving do-goodery celebrities are known for and b) brought us closer to the inner workings of putting on TGS, two things that I’ve always loved about 30 Rock. It also reminded me of Musicians for Free-Range Chickens, a charity group SNL gave a platform to in the mid-90s.
Cover of Viva! La Woman, released in 1996 on Warner Bros.
Some super-smart feminist friends have been talking about records and musicians that made them feminists lately and it makes me wanna wax nostalgic too. I’m really excited to be talking about Viva! La Woman, one of many albums that made me a feminist but the first that left quite an indelible impression. I basically put this blog together so that I could, at some point, thank Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda for blowing my mind. Thanks, ladies.
Right before I turned 13, I saw the video for “Know Your Chicken” on 120 Minutes, which was the pinnacle of my pre-teen Sunday nights. This video, with the two amazingly cool ladies bolted me upright. I’d get to the clip’s deliberately cheap aesthetic style and its parodying of both the sitcom and the genre’s gendered relational dynamics later. In junior high, I just needed to find out who the ladies were.
Sunday, the day of ritual for many, was also one for me. At 7 p.m., Houston’s alternative station (then Rocket 107.5 the Buzz, now 94.5 the Buzz) would broadcast “Lunar Rotation,” where director David Sadoff would play new stuff and oldies that didn’t make into heavy rotation. At 10, the station would broadcast “Modern Rock Live,” KROQ’s syndicated call-in program. Finally, at midnight, the station would have an hour of “whatever” programming. Usually, some guest would play whatever they wanted. The one that most immediately comes to mind was Self’s Matt Mahaffey serving as guest deejay, playing album cuts from Portishead’s Dummy. It never mattered, because it was always white noise for 120 Minutes, which ran the coolest, newest videos that never aired on MTV during the day.
In terms of feminist reflections on my girlhood, Sunday was this fantastical time where I could hang out in my room (usually playing Nintendo, sometimes reading, sometimes making wall collages out of clippings from Seventeen) and wrap my head around some new music. This was a bit hard to do as my hometown is a bit removed from much of anything new.
But Fridays on MTV gave me another place to access this beguiling song, via their short run of Squirt TV, originally a New York-based public access show that my boyfriend, Jake Fogelnest, would record in his bedroom. Liz Phair also came onto Fogelnest during the show’s MTV run, but Liz will get her own post when I write about my 17th birthday. For now, let’s watch Cibo Matto perform live.
And then they were on House of Style, eating dessert. Then the video for “Sugar Water” came out, which left such an impression that I wrote an entire section of my thesis on it. A short time after that, they were getting a write-up in Rolling Stone, with their album’s genre-melding, cut-and-paste sound being favorably compared (however problematically) to fugu. I would later come to call my college radio show “Cheesecake or Fugu” in tribute. And there they were on my stepbrother’s Tibetan Freedom Concert CD, a bit later, when I was a freshman, yelling “shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!”
So, even though they were on a major label and being promoted on MTV and Rolling Stone, Cibo Matto seemed like they were from Japan based in New York transmitted from the moon. And yet, they’ve followed me everywhere since, making themselves familiar, like a home.
All this hype, but I didn’t get the album until Christmas sophomore year, when I was 15. I wanted the purchase of this album to be special. When I finally got it, I spent hours ignoring the paperback of Wuthering Heights I had to read for school (which also made me a feminist, in opposition) so I could study the album’s packaging. Mike Mills’s cover alone was empowering — the curvy, muscular, perhaps multi-ethnic superwoman standing proudly in her gold bikini and sandals. And the curvilinear sketches that accompanied the lyric sheet was elegant and beguiling. But for me, it was all about the inlay image underneath the disc.
Viva! La Woman inlay
While this image was shot in New York, it looked like another world to me alone in my bedroom in Alvin, Texas. I wanted to know everyone in this scene and be their friends. I wanted to know where Yuka and Miho got those bikes and dresses. I wanted to listen to all of the records people were pouring over. And I actually did pull my stepbrother’s skateboard out of the garage, busting my ass as I attempted to use it. But more than that, I wanted the confident cool that these two women possessed.
The older I get, the more comfortable I feel with myself, and I feel much of this is indebted to Cibo Matto, especially this first album, as to me its basically a declaration for the powers, pleasures, and peculiarities of femaleness. One need only look to the title.
The concept of the album is important. “Concept album” as a construct tends to make me shudder, thinking about bearded dudes noodling with guitars and piles of synthesizers and writing tiresome odes to alienation, but, indeed, Viva! La Woman is a concept album. About food. Eating food. Each track, with the exception of “Theme,” is named after food and all of the songs mention eating or being consumed as if they were food. More times than not, it’s about eating instead of being eaten.
And OMG, they did something totally dirty with their cover of “Candyman,” turning the original, which I always found oppressively, creepily cheerful, and turning into some kind of porn soundtrack/trip hop/bossa nova thing, complete with sampled moaning (*blush*).
On that tack, this album is super-sexy, in ways both obvious and difficult to process. Perhaps it suggests that Asian and Asian American women don’t reflect the limited, servile, infantalized depictions others have circulated at their expense. With “White Pepper Ice Cream,” a slow, rollicking bass line accompanies lines like “black and white, Bonnie and Clyde” suggesting that women and girls can occupy both within themselves at once. And with “Theme,” the album’s centerpiece, what begins as a short story about a chance encounter with a handsome stranger while vacationing in Milan becomes a blind-folded S&M session that collapses into muffled, breathy coos; the music reflects the narrative changes at every turn. I didn’t know what to do with this as a teenager, and am still trying to figure it out as an adult.
Thinking about the constant stylistic shifting that goes on in the album’s instrumentation, I guess the duo’s sample-happy approach brings us to another feminist awakening: everything is connected. Beck gets a lot of credit, via Odelay, for helping set to tone for popular music’s comfort with hybridity the 90s (of course borrowing from The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, bringing on The Dust Brothers as producers). I won’t dispute that. But I’d like to add this album (along with Pavement’s Wowee Zowee and Björk’s Post) into the discussion. If mention wants to be made of the group’s gender, ethnicity, and their relationship with hip hop, so much the better.
Cibo Matto’s use of quotation and musical association was crucial to defining the era, but also bespoke the duo’s attitudes toward femaleness. Because connectedness doesn’t just apply to how they built tracks, but also in how they wrote lyrics. Once again, everything is connected. In “Sugar Water,” black cats crossing one’s path is cosmically linked to a woman in the moon singing to the Earth. Extrapolating further, everything is connected and everything is informative. The personal is not only political, but educational.
And finally, I really enjoy the album’s weirdness. I say this not as a way to other the Japanese American women responsible for its creation or to announce my whiteness alongside it. Literally, the album is packed with memorable, weird, sometimes shouted non sequitors that serve as the songs’ hooks. For example, in “Beef Jerky,” the chorus is “Who cares? I don’t care? A horse’s ass is better than your’s.” In “Know Your Chicken” the bridge is “spare the rod and spoil the chick before you go and shit a brick.” And of course, “Birthday Cake” contains the much-quoted line “extra sugar, extra salt, extra oil and the MSG — shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!” I like to think moments like this suggest the possibilities to rupture, critique, and find humor in living life female.
And sometimes songs don’t end. A song like “Beef Jerky” concludes with the elliptical phrase “let’s eat carrots together until . . .” Indeed, life doesn’t end. It simply builds on itself, layer by layer, line by line, sample by sample. I can’t wait to discover what I find in this record when I’m 35.
Deb and Hunter, meeting cute (naturally); image taken from the WB
Sigh. The things I do in the name of research.
I finished watching the first season of Rockville CA, an irritating Web show brought to the masses via Josh Schwartz, the wunderkind behind The O.C., Chuck, and Gossip Girl. Who knew 20 six-minute Webisodes would weigh down on me like a lead balloon?
Note: After hearing lead fanboy Hunter crack whip-smart for about two hours, I will resist all urges to make a Led Zeppelin reference.
My friend Kristen brought the show to my attention, as she does with many things, after sending me this interesting New York Times piece on it.
So, I’ll be honest. I kind of have an axe to grind with the Schwartz empire anyway. Mainly because it has commodified music geekery in the most generic, bland, pretend-smart, pretend-cool way possible (shooting daggers at you, Seth Cohen).
It could be a knee-jerk reaction. Schwartz’s right-hand lady, music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, who co-produced Rockville CA and, like me, also got her start in college radio, has a job I’d kill for and know I could do so much better if I wanted to use my record collection to underscore beautifully-lit, woodenly-acted scenes of teen angst and lust. In short, my irritation could be simply reduced to “bitch took my job.”
But it’s never that simple.
Or is it? Christ, the things that are wrong with this show are so by-the-book.
1. The set-up. Oh, you know this one. If you’re seen any romantic comedy, ever, you’ve got this one down. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets . . . you know what? Not even gonna finish the sentence. You’ve got it.
2. You know the couple — Deb and Hunter — are in love because they hate each other instantly and start arguing. I don’t know where this narrative contrivance began, but this has never happened to me. Usually, if I like someone, the attraction has nothing to do with wanting to rip the person’s face off until enough people are like “hey, you two would make a cute couple” that I think “you know what, you’re right! This annoying person who I cannot stand is actually pumping my ‘nads.” No, when I purport to not find you appealing, I don’t actually want to go on a date and kiss in the rain or whatever. I actually don’t want to be seen with you socially at all.
3. Perhaps I’m being unfair about my next point in conjunction with point #2, as many romantic comedies hinge on adult couples not meeting cute, but this premise seems very high school. Especially for men, as Hunter sweats and stammers immature misogyny. Through 17 of the 20 episodes, his actions and banter seem to say, “I don’t like her, she has cooties! She scares me . . . I think my body is changing. I’m compelled to her, but I don’t know why. Foul temptress! I was much safer with my comic books, G.I. Joe figurines, and Ramones records!”
In fact, perhaps unsurprisingly given Schwartz’s involvement, this show reads like a high school melodrama. The nerdy hot girl with glasses. The pretty blonde girl who is friends with the nerdy hot girl with glasses that the male lead originally finds attractive (there’s a bit of The Truth About Cats and Dogs in there too). The unattainable hunk that the nerdy hot girl with glasses likes (at school it’d be a football player; here, it’s a bassist). The wise elder who is charmed nostalgic by all the angst and endearing awkwardness. And even though the show takes place at a venue (where the show gets its name), it could just as easily take place in in the high school gym, made all glittery for prom, or in the library, during weekend detention. I’ve been to Southern California. It’s a little dangerous and a little seedy. That’s part of its charm. This show turns it into an American Eagle ad. Or a womb. Whatever.
4. If this is what music geeks are really like, we are insufferable. By that, I mean, if we are, in fact, indexical, socially-inept, commodity fetishists. If all we do is make snide comments, droll asides, and catalogical recitations of bands and their output, we are lame. The show would also suggest that we are completely beholden to capitalism and instant gratification, blind to corporate enterprising’s hold on us, what with the show’s incessant plugging of Heineken. In short, if we are what this show suggests we are, we are sheep.
5. Goddamn, is the music awful. A perhaps promising trapping of the show is that each episode takes place during a different concert. However, almost everyone sounds like a reduced, flattened, laminated version of some pre-existing band (usually Joy Division or U2).
And, as you can imagine, almost all these bands are comprised of white dudes. Earlimart, The Duke Spirit, and a couple others are exceptions, but I’ll bet you know what position most of the women (who are the lone female in each band) occupy. Also, Lykke Li is in an episode, which kinda bums me out, as I like Lykke Li. But I already heard “Dance Dance Dance” at a Victoria’s Secret and “I’m Good, I’m Gone” on American Idol, so she’s already been co-opted.
6. The “clever” banter. Puns are the lowest form of comedy, and any punchline based on making a play on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is lower still. Hunter is the worst perpetrator, but Deb slings her share of barbs as well. Plus, people are never that funny and quick. It was unbelievable in the first half of Juno, when all the characters were always so damn quippy. Like Dawson’s Creek before it, the dialogue is completely fictive in Rockville CA.
Kristen’s big question at the time she sent it was “Web series that codes the music geek as male maybe?” And one thing that is good about the show is that I can say “No, not exclusively.” However, I must qualify . . .
It’s true, Deb is a confirmed music geek. And a music professional as well (fresh out of college, she works in A and R; I hope she finds a nobler calling in the biz soon). Thus, in many ways, Rockville CA is a workplace comedy for her (not so much for Hunter — he basically, and appropriately, sells digital ad space).
Unfortunately, Deb’s not very discriminating, stating that almost every band playing at Rockville is “major” (a doubly-unfortunate connotation, bringing to mind both Victoria Beckham and the corporate label system; indeed, any time she says a band is “major,” she may as well be saying “ready for the majors!”).
Also, while she does get to exhibit geek savvy, like correcting her crush (Syd, the elusive bass player for Australia) when he says Ian Brown was the frontman for Teenage Fanclub (he actually sang for The Stone Roses), she is given the cold shoulder and reminded by Callie, Rockville’s leggy waitress, that guys, um, like, like to be right sometimes and, like, don’t like to be proven wrong. And while Deb vocally rejects Callie’s advice, it doesn’t keep her from looking in the mirror and taking her hair out of its ponytail at the end of the episode (I think the black-out came just before she took off her glasses).
Thankfully, Deb is not alone as a music geek, a fact that Shaun is happy to exclaim. Though Callie and Isabel, Deb’s needy friend who wears stripper heels “ironically” to seduce a musician she hooked up with previously, are a bit regressive — though both seem like true friends to Deb — Shaun has potential. For Shaun, who owns Rockville, the show may also be considered a workplace comedy. Shaun’s presence is heartening; she’s tough, smart and also a hot, older single lady (picture Allison Janey playing Kim Gordon — not the worst, right?).
However, she ends up selling out, signing her bar over to Chambers, a tow-headed poser, and his business partner, who wants to phase out the bands and bring in more DJs. This happened in the finale. I’m hoping that if the show gets a second season (and I can bear to watch it), Shaun becomes a tough entrepreneuse and fights it. I sense a benefit on the way.
By the way, while I love deejays, I take the new (evil, soulless) owners’ hope to maximize profits by bringing deejays in as a way to suggest that the artform (and its raced, classed implications) as being denigrated alongside of the show’s clear investment in rock, perhaps aligning with Lisa Lewis’s assertion that early MTV catered to “rock’s white-male bias” (see “The Making of a Preferred Address” in Lisa A. Lewis’s Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference). There’s several mentions throughout the show that rock is the supreme genre in popular music, suggesting that it is pure and authentic and ignoring the ways in which rock steals from other genres, and the white-washing that occurs in the process.
Which brings me to race. If you’re picturing a bunch of white people bickering with one another when they aren’t kissing or playing, you’d be right. There are two people of color on the show (three if you count Isabel, who is played by Natalie Morales).
One is the doorman, Hugh, who is African American. He kinda had a promising bit at the beginning of the first few episodes where he’d freeze Hunter out of the club because he didn’t like him. This would create moments where Hunter would exhibit painful displays of white guilt by trying to seem down and then fearful that he accidentally said something racist. Deb, who is Hugh’s friend, would get him in as her plus-one. In these episodes, Hugh would be reading a different book, like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In other words, a smart guy with layers who wasn’t charmed by Hunter. More Hugh, please.
The other character is Annie, the Asian photographer who never speaks (the actress, Chris Yen, is Chinese American). SHE NEVER SPEAKS. In all 20 episodes, not a line of dialogue. While it’s interesting that she’s a photographer, and is always snapping shots of the bands and the venue’s denizens, having her be a silent outsider distanced by the camera kinda, you know, others her. Let’s get her to strike up a conversation with somebody. A great instance would be when Shaun threatens to set her on fire if she takes any pictures of her. Kind of an unfortunate line, as I tend to think of this image. Anyway, Annie could totally put down her camera and call Shaun out. But she doesn’t.
And that, in its way, encapsulates Rockville CA. A fair amount of promise, a lot of missed opportunities.
If Michelle Obama’s arms deserve the names “thunder” and “lightening,” than Janet Weiss’ should be called “nuclear” and “atomic.” The drummer for Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Quasi, and the now defunct all-woman power trio Sleater-Kinney, has long been admired as one of the top female percussionists in the rock world for the sheer power and complexity of her beats, and nowhere is that clearer than during her live performances.
My first encounter with Janet Weiss appropriately coincided with my inaugural indie rock show in Portland, Oregon. At this point, I’d never heard a single Quasi track, nor had I learned much about Sleater-Kinney. At the age of fourteen, my younger brother’s tastes belied his years and rural upbringing, and I at sixteen benefitted from his interests. Still too young for our protective parents to release us into the wilds of downtown Portland, my dad and another relative accompanied us to the legendary Crystal Ballroom for a show headlined by Quasi. Overzealously, we arrived at the time shown on our tickets and planted ourselves on the floor next to the stage. We sat through noisy opening acts before Janet finally emerged with Sam Coomes, Quasi’s other half and Janet’s former husband.
Janet Weiss doing double-duty with drums and vocals
While part of the power of this Quasi show derived from its status as a “first” experience, Janet’s role as the band’s drummer made this concert particularly significant for me as a budding feminist. Even ten years later, female drummers are an exception rather than a rule in mainstream bands, and it is even rarer for female drummers to play in a heterogeneously sexed band. Sure, there’s Meg White, Karen Carpenter, Sheila E., and Moe Tucker, but these drummers deploy a deliberately feminine and/or simplistic style, in effect reinforcing assumptions about women and drumming. Granted, it would be masculinist to say that the styles and skills of these women made them any less legitimate as artists, but on a gut-level, they fail to challenge the stereotypes aligning certain sexes with particular instruments.
As a girl, these alignments between sex and gender and rock performance impacted my options for self-expression; I remember asking my mother if I could play drums in the sixth-grade band, and she responded that it wouldn’t be “lady-like.” I even remember her describing women drummers as “butch,” in effect confirming a fear that drumming might turn me into an aggressive lesbian (like that would be a bad thing anyway). To be fair, my mother later back-peddled on her stance, saying that she really discouraged me from drumming out of fear of the noise it would bring into our home, but regardless, my mother’s statement still reinforced what I already felt and knew from experience—rock bands were boys’ clubs that only the bravest women could infiltrate. My feelings of exclusion certainly weren’t unique, since several of my female friends confessed to having similar feelings, and Carol Jennings’ research on girls’ identity formation and rock bands finds similar trends of sexism in local music scenes. (If interested, please check out “Girls Make Music: Polyphony and Identity in Teenage Rock Bands” in Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma Odom Pecora. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 175-192.) In short, there are barriers to participation in rock performance for girls that do not exist for boys.
For these reasons, I gravitated toward the mainstream female singer-songwriters so en vogue in the mid to late-nineties. I accumulated a massive collection of Tori Amos memorabilia, attended not one but two Lilith Fairs, and watched VH1’s 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll with rapt attention. Still, none of this shattered my perceptions the way seeing Janet live did.
I emphasize the “live” element of the experience because Quasi’s composition resulted in a unique spatial arrangement on stage; with only two instrumentalists, Janet’s kit occupied half the stage, allowing fans closer proximity to the drummer than usual. (Note: Quasi added a third member, bassist Joanna Bolme, to the line-up in 2006.) And while Janet herself puts on a stoic game face most of the time, her drumming itself is dynamic, athletic, and unrelenting. I could throw more adjectives out there, but I will just let the drumming speak for itself.
Seeing Janet play did not change my life over night—I never joined a band, and I never bought a drum kit—but as the years passed, I gravitated toward bands like Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, and Le Tigre. These bands not only had roots in the Northwest but also placed women musicians in the forefront, addressed queer issues, and kicked ass musically. In other words, they raised my consciousness and helped me grow as a feminist.
Caption: Janet Weiss (center) with Sleater-Kinney bandmates Corrin Tucker (left) and Carrie Brownstein (right).
These days, I’m seeing more incredible women drummers, both locally and nationally. My 17-year-old cousin took up the instrument, and one of my brother’s bands featured a friend of ours beating the skins named Keely. Hannah Blilie of the Gossip has also knocked me on my ass during several live performances.
Best of all, organizations like Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls are encouraging girls to drum, and social-networking websites like Drummergirl create a sense of community for female percussionists who might otherwise feel isolated in their respective music scenes. While there remains a disparity between the sexes with respect to drumming, these resources (limited as they may be) are a move in the right direction toward correcting it.
But for many women and girls, just seeing a female confidently and skillfully hit the drums is the first step toward breaking through a mind-set in which men are inevitably physical and aggressive as performers, while women must be soulful and subdued. For me, Janet was one of those icons that shifted my paradigms, and for that, I will forever thank her.
Allison brings down the house, takes a bow; image taken from tunedin.com
Last week was a bit of a whirlwind (literally, a whirl of wind), so I didn’t get a chance to properly eulogize Allison Iraheta, my pick for this season’s American Idol, who I feel had more in her.
So, there’s plenty to be sad about. In my opinion, Allison simply has the best vocals in the competition. But to add to her raw talent, she’s only 17 (something I often forget when I hear her whiskey-throated voice), one of the few girls who’s had a real shot at winning (Jordin Sparks won season six at 16, Paris Bennett was 17 when she placed 5th in season five). Also, in a season as white as this one has been, Allison was one of the few people of color left in the competition (she’s of Salvadorean descent). But I also loved her unpolishedness. She wasn’t slick, was a bit loopy, and a bit of a mumbler. And she’d always roll her eyes at Ryan Seacrest — indeed, I think I would too. Oh, and she wasn’t stick-thin and didn’t slim down like some of the other contestants (Megan Joy, I’m looking at you). I appreciated that.
Allison's elimination; photo taken from New York Daily News
And the real tragedy is that she lost after killing Janis Joplin’s “Cry Baby.” And who was spared, you may ask? Danny fucking Gokey. Ugh, the worst. Apart from the fact that he sounds just like Michael Bolton, he butchered “Dream On,” the blandest song by Aerosmith, the blandest band that still endures for some reason. And if you can get through that last note, you’re made of thicker stuff than I.
I have other problems with Gokey too. If you’re watching the show, doesn’t he seem like the most self-serious, humorless, uncool, egotistical guy to you too? He cannot laugh at himself or take criticism. Seriously, anyone that concerned with having a coordinated designer pair of eyeglasses for each outfit has gotta be a jerk. He was pretty much done for me in auditions, when he seemed to using the recent death of his wife as a means with which to frame himself and set himself apart in the competition. The only joy I’ve ever really derived from his presence on the show is making his song selections be about dead wives. For example, take Motown week, when he did “Get Ready” by The Temptations. Take the opening line “Never met a girl who makes me feel the way that you do” and sub out “you’re all right” with “but you died.” Instant funny.
But, at the same time, I have high hopes for Iraheta. The AV Club’s Claire Zulkey hopes that Iraheta gets to show up Disney tween sensations like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato and show them how to really rock without the mouse (though, sadly, still within a major label system). I do too.
My kind of prom queen, ya'll; photo taken from evilbeetgossip.com
So, we’re down to three contestants, all of whom are adult white dudes. We’ve got the inoffensive Christian hottie-next-door (Kris), the high camp rocker that I hope kisses one of his fellow competitors on stage (Adam), and the offensive Christian d-bag (Danny). At this point, I don’t really care who wins (theoretically, I’m backing Adam, but in terms of actual preference, meh). Just please don’t let Bolton Light win. Otherwise, I might have to make like Iraheta and punch him in the chest.
Sometimes moms get a bad wrap, even among feminists. They get lumped as enforcers of feminine gentility or the hardships women of generations past had to endure gets eclipsed or misunderstood by their children. But, bottom line — without moms, we wouldn’t be here. So make sure you let ‘em know.
I’d like to briefly acknowledge the moms in my life and thank them for being rad today. Thanks to Hannah at Karaoke Underground. Thanks to Toni, my partner’s mom. Thanks to my aunt Anna-Marie, who is the mom to many many cats. Thanks to my neighbor-friend Rosa-María, who is helping raise two of the coolest girls I know.
And, of course, thanks to my mom, who signed me out of school from time to time when I was stressing too much or had a bad case of stomach cramps. Thanks for letting me know I could talk to you about anything. Thanks for being honest with me. Thanks for always treating me like an equal.
And, since you’re an artist and a musician, you informed my world view. Thanks for taking me to art museums and the opera. Thanks for introducing me to artists like Pippilotti Rist, Judy Chicago, Jenny Holzer, and Georgia O’Keefe. Thanks for banging Chopin on the piano in the front room. Thanks for keeping an open mind and letting me teach you some things too (like how awesome Björk, Sufjan Stevens, Sigur Rós, and the Sea and Cake are). And, for the purposes of this blog (which you read), thanks for introducing me to Edith Piaf, Kiri Te Kanawa, Lotte Lenya, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and many others. You were the lady who cornered me at 16 or so, when I was listening to Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted and asked “what about the women? What women are you listening to?”
And finally, thanks for giving a lot of other folks the gift of music. I’m so proud of you for being a junior high choir director and giving lots of other kids (particularly girls) the joy of music. Thanks for passing it on.
Truth be told, my musical tastes and my penchant for feminism both developed early on, and didn’t have much to do with one another. I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment that supported women’s rights. I was taught that I lived in a world where sexism existed, but that ladies could still do anything they wanted. As time went on, I realized that this was called “feminism” and that it was pretty cool.
I believe the first record I listened to that coincided with my realization that feminism was a real thing was Ani DiFranco’s Not a Pretty Girl. I was ten when the record came out, but it wasn’t until my thirteenth birthday, when my older sister put “32 Flavors” on a mix entitled “Songs to Get You Through Being a Teenager,” that I heard any songs from it. I listened to this track over and over and over (and over) again. When I would crave more Ani, I would sneak into her room and steal her CD. It was a window into the outside where someone besides my relatives were talking about what it was like to be a lady in that day and age.
It wasn’t until college that I had my second feminist musical awakening when I heard “Deceptacon” off of Le Tigre’s self-titled album. I had recently joined a very rad feminist organization with very rad feminist ladies, many of whom were—dare I state the obvious?—music geeks. Fun, dancey, in-yr-face feminism. I danced to that song countless times, either by myself or in (small or large) groups of people. I think I’m going to go dance to it right now, actually.
The cover of Le Tigre's self-titled debut, released on Mr. Lady in 1999
But you know what records also affirmed my belief in feminism? All those nu metal and rap/rapcore bands from the late ’90s/early ’00s that were always on TRL. It made me a very angry fourteen year old. Actually, it makes me a very angry twenty-four year old. I think I need to listen to “Deceptacon” again.
Liz did not own Korn's "Follow the Leader" released on Epic in 1998
Honorable mention would go to Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing (though her songs were more personal than political), Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (though I was already identifying as a feminist when I first heard this album), the entire discography of Bikini Kill (though that was later in my life, too, because I considered that more my sister’s band, where Le Tigre was mine), and anything Prince did from 1984 to 1987 (because it connected with one aspect of feminism—sex is a good thing and it’s ok for women to desire and be desired).
The moral of the story: ladies rock, and listening to ladies rocking out is a good way to remind yourself of this fact.
.jpg "Cover for Follow the Leader")
