So, I recently revisited Björk’s Vespertine because, as followers of the blog can probably guess, it made me a feminist and I will be posting about the hows and whys of it at length in the not-too-distant future.
But one thing I forgot about the album that really impacted what I listen for in other people’s music is non-traditional instrumentation. Of course Björk would extend these musical explorations further with her follow-up, Medúlla, which was largely an a cappella record that explicitly configured the voice as an instrument, and often a percussive one at that (hopefully the feminist possibilities of using the voice –both explicitly female and degendered through digital manipulation – as such an integral part of song construction are obvious). But with Vespertine, she and production team Matmos often constructed beats out of surprising, often small, seemingly non-musical objects often associated with leisure pursuits or the domestic, like a deck of cards or cutlery.
Listening to the album again reinvigorated my interest in hearing weird objects be used as instruments. Today, I offer up toys as possible instruments and present bands Y Pants and CocoRosie as evidence. Representing New York at two very different times (early 80s and present-day, respectively), these two bands have members who employ rudimentary electronic toy pianos, noisemakers, and other gadgets that seem swiped from a long-abandoned bargin bin.
Y Pants; image courtesy of waylonhatchet.com
CocoRosie; image courtesy of nymag.com
For Y Pants’ Gail Vachon and Virginia Piersol, the toy piano and drums became an interesting way to reconfigure the sound of dub and reggae, two key interrelated musical movements for both punk and post-punk that had probably become too predictable as white-appropriated touchstones by 1979. As Y Pants were associated with no wave, with ukelele player Barbara Ess once a member of Theoretical Girls, another seminal band of the period formed by guitar visionary/cranky drunk grandpa Glenn Branca, there’s an excellent chance the band was rebelling against post-punk’s intellectualist posturing and angular guitar lines. What better way to piss off the scene than making messy music about the joys of eating with factory-produced shiny plastic toys?
(Note: Apologies, but I cannot find a live performance for Y Pants. As with much no wave, which was reviled by pretty much anyone with ears at the time and only recently became cool, despite the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation, there’s not a lot of recorded evidence of the band in concert. The only thing I’ve seen that really documents the scene is Downtown ’81, but Y Pants were just about to break up by then. Which is too bad, because apparently they were all about unconventional performance spaces. So if you have any leads on where to track down a clip, let me know. In the meantime, check out Y Pants, a repressing that combines their self-titled EP with their only album, Beat It Down.)
With CocoRosie, the instrumentation conveys something a little more transparently disturbing. Sierra Casady’s sweet, at once jazzy and operatic vocals contrast with wheezy, out-of-time bleeps and bloops from sister Bianca’s various toy instruments, which foreground songs that tend to focus on death, drugs, doomed love, incest, AIDS, abuse, and co-dependency. The toys, which may one day expire or be discarded, then become a symbol of betrayed innocence, the cold assurance that childhood — girlhood — is going to end in loss. At least you have your sister, who may also be your lover.
As an aside, I can’t bring up CocoRosie without pointing out that they’re really problematic in terms of race. They’ve dabbled with cholo fashion, perhaps in acknowledgement to the multifaceted dimensions of their Native American heritage, which they have also hailed in their attire and music.
Racially dicey sister-lovers; image courtesy of beastnation.com
In addition, they’ve made me a bit queasy in their appropriations of blackness. They consciously try on the voices of African American jazz singers like Billie Holiday. In addition, on ”Jesus Loves Me,” a track off their first album, La maison de mon rêve, the girls uses a certain racial slur when singing that God’s only son loves them, but not their wives, or their black friends. And Bianca has long been a fixture at Kill Whitey parties in Brooklyn.
That said, to borrow a phrase from Seth Watter’s Dusted review of Y Pants, both bands’ use of toys help build minor manifestos that sound like “a small explosion in the bedroom.” In his essay “The ‘Feminization’ of Rock,” Tony Grajeda argues that the bedroom is a domestic, queerable, intimate space where most lo-fi music is written, rehearsed, and recorded. While he was thinking about primarily-male indie rock acts like Pavement, the bedroom is clearly where Y Pants and CocoRosie belong as well. Just don’t pretend there isn’t anything subversive about what these ladies do in there.
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