I had the pleasure of catching Dessa‘s set last Friday at Red 7. She went on second, after Astronautalis and before headliner and fellow Doomtree rapper P.O.S. Now P.O.S.’s set was electric, crackling with verve, wit, and high energy. If you haven’t listened to P.O.S.’s Never Better, it was one of the strongest releases of last year.
However, Dessa’s A Badly Broken Code is a strong contender for my album of the year, bringing continued attention to the Minneapolis-based hip hop collective and troubling the acclaim bestowed upon Spoon’s Transference and Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me. If you haven’t listened to Dessa’s first full-length, get on that. Make sure you’re sitting down when you hear it, lest her flow fly at such a clip with such a force as to knock you over. The woman born Margret Wander has a way with words.
Women in American hip hop have always been an anomaly. Unfortunately, this is just as true for independent artists as those working in the mainstream. Some of these women have yet to cut an album despite doing incredible work on other (male) MCs’ albums, though I patiently await albums from Lionesque and Joyo Velarde. That said, those who are currently working underground are amongst my favorites: Jean Grae, Psalm One, Invincible, and Dessa. I like Kid Sister fine, but I want these women to run the game.
In many ways, Dessa reminds me of Grae. Both share an assured flow, pointed elocution, a deliberately casual look, and a hard-luck attitude toward love. But Dessa also brings a jazzy alto to her work, along with a poet’s ear for meter. This is much to her background as a spoken word artist, a term with a lot of cultural baggage. It’s hard for me to hear the words “spoken word artist” and not recall two characters from Medea’s Family Reunion improvising a mixed-media piece on a date or the hacky sack scene in She’s All That. Others have lampooned spoken word and its practitioners’ tendency toward self-important hackery, like Zadie Smith did in On Beauty or Dave Chappelle did in a rejected sketch for Chappelle’s Show that combined Def Comedy Jam with Def Poetry Jam.
But Dessa, much like Sarah Jones, The Last Poets, and Gil Scott-Heron before her, pulls off spoken word by incorporating it into her sound, thus expanding its aural possibilities. Dessa trades in words, which are conceptualized by some to be masculine and in contrast to a sung melody’s feminized, abject emotionality. But the way in which those words are delivered — whether as a rap, a vocal line, a verse, or some combination of all three — allow her to manipulate time signatures and rhyme schemes, giving her greater freedom to explore sound and verse. That her songs are often wry, smart, candid inner monologues about family, childhood, addiction, and relationships make me even happier that I’m hearing a female voice articulate them. Even when she threads cover songs into her own material, as she did with Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (or perhaps Jeff Buckley covering John Cale covering Leonard Cohen), I need only hear the voice and see it coming out of the performer on stage to know where it’s really coming from.
As perhaps evidenced by the clip above, witnessing her performing this sort of word jazz live was really something to behold. Her set-up was spare — simply her microphone and deejay Plain Ole Bill‘s turntables. And yet, the minimalism showcased the immensity of her talent. She was also really funny and open on stage, which helps orient where those songs come from and only adds to her magnetic presence. I especially appreciated her recounting a story about being in the lady’s room at the gig and the lights turning off. She took pride in the other occupants checking in on each other instead of running for the exit. She has a lot of faith in women and girls’ capacity for survival should the apocalypse come. I have a lot of faith in her potential as an artist. Dessa’s mic sounds nice.
I’ve yet to visit Portland but know it by reputation. Many friends call it home, even if none of them currently claim it as residency. I’ve often taken the opportunity to razz them about their Pacific Northwestern biases, but I understand the affinity. As an Austin transplant, I’ve imagined Portland as this city’s wetter, more overcast fraternal twin. It’s the home to Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls and Bitch and boasts establishments like Powell’s Books, Food Fight!, and Voodoo Donut. Like Austin, it’s got an independent music scene nurtured by DIY enthusiasts. Pass me one of your microbrew dogs and I’ll twist open a Shiner for you. Let’s hang.
One Portland band that’s been on my radar since early last year is Explode Into Colors. I missed them during the last SXSW but am fully prepared to catch them this time.
As if their sound wasn’t enough, word circulated that they’ll be accepting mixtapes as cover for their upcoming Holocene gig. When they come to Austin for SXSW, I hope they’ll be taking other fans’ mixes as a good will gesture.
Explode Into Colors; image courtesy of holocene.org
I’m an ardent supporter and maker of mix CDs. I value them as an aural marker of someone’s history and treasure them as homemade gifts made and traded by friends. Each tracklist tells a story, as does the presence or absence of liner notes and album art. I believe my friend Kaleb of Karaoke Underground proposed the idea of a mix CD swap. I fully support this and would be happy to participate. Expect lots of cuts from Vince B.’s A Reference Of Female-Fronted Punk Rock: 1977-89 anthology, pulled directly fromKängnäve.
Tapes have been on people’s minds lately. Rob Sheffield used mixtapes to shape his autobiographical Love Is A Mix Tape. On 3o Rock, TGS star Tracy Jordan offered to make General Electric executive Jack Donaghy a Phil Collins mixtape as a token of their burgeoning friendship (Donaghy accepted because he has “two ears and a heart”). More recently, Simon Reynolds and Marc Hogan wrote some interesting essays outlining the wave of acts associated with glo-fi (or “chillwave” or “hypnagogic pop“) and the surge of upstart tape distros. With nostalgic fondness for “failed” technology and a desire to re-experience music as something less immediate and more holistic than an mp3 file, many people are returning (regressing?) to tapes. Perhaps Dennis Duffy was right. Technology is cyclical, at least for some.
I’m certainly intrigued by this deliberate move toward difficult and faulty antiquated technology. I’m also a bit of a cassette enthusiast. As a deejay, I recorded several of my shows on tape. It was around this time that I inherited my grandmother’s Mercury Grand Marquis, which I drove until it had to be traded in. As installing a CD player proved too costly, I often played my broadcasts in the car, along with holdovers from my youth, like The Pet Shop Boys’ Discography and The B-52s’ Cosmic Thing. I like that tapes forced me to listen to sequences rather than tracks. The tapes from my show are still in the glove compartment of my Mazda 626, waiting to be lodged into a tape deck.
I love most when a tape warps, changing the speed and sound of the recordings and making tracks at once familiar and foreign. Tapes may document a moment in time, but their vulnerability toward degradation makes them unreliable historians. To bend another 30 Rock character’s words, tapes (like Donaghy’s ceramic cookie jar collection) are alive. They change shape as they age. I hope Explode Into Colors keep the stacks of mixtapes they may be inheriting from their show at Holocene. Who knows what they’ll sound like or conjure up over time.
On Tuesday, I wrote about the cover of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which photographer/video director Maria Mochnacz designed. As Mochnacz has been working with Harvey since the start of her recording career I thought, “oh right, why don’t I devote a post to outlining their work together?” So that’s what this is. As I couldn’t find all of the clips she directed for Harvey, you should refer to this section of Mochnacz’s Web site. Below are the clips I could find on YouTube. Unfortunately, “A Perfect Day Elise” from Is This Desire? was not one of them.
“Dress” Dry
“Sheela na Gig” Dry
“C’mon Billy” To Bring You My Love
“Is That All There Is?” (cover of the Peggy Lee standard) Basquiat OST
Cover to "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea" (Island, 2000); image courtesy of wikipedia.org
People sometimes refer to Polly Jean Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea as a kinder, gentler sound from the English singer-songwriter. Frankly, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s to do with the relative lack of drama involved in the album’s recording process, as Rid Of Me and To Bring You My Love were reportedly fraught with tension. It can’t be its content. Harvey may not make her lover lick her injuries, compare her selflessness in a relationship to a Sheela na Gig, or forsake heaven here, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. It may be love that she’s feeling, but it’s still potentially destructive and dangerous in its power, especially when let loose in (pre-9/11) New York City. It’s evident from opening track “Big Exit.” She wants the fucking gun, people.
If that isn’t enough vitriol for you, may I direct you toward “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” and “Kamikaze,” two songs that may be responsible for the extraneous parental advisory notice printed on my copy of the album.
Stories From the City was my PJ record for a while, though Is This Desire? would later come to challenge my ears and ideals more. The first album I had was To Bring You My Love, which I got for Christmas my junior year along with The Chemical Brothers’ underrated Surrender. It was a profoundly upsetting listening experience. After listening to it all the way through, I listened to “Teclo” a few more times and hid the CD under the bed, a place that I’ve only since reserved for The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Its intensity scared me. But once I got used to it, Harvey’s intensity became one of her most clearest assets as a musician. It became especially appealing when juxtaposing her out-size voice, guitar playing, and stage presence against her shyness.
Some people also categorize Stories as her love album, which I also don’t understand, regardless of whether or not this album is about a rumored affair with Vincent Gallo. For one, I can’t pick an album of her’s for you that doesn’t focus on love. But this album seems most closely fixated on how love evolves, rather than obtaining it or being dashed against the rocks by it. Perhaps these were the same folks who quoted the lyric about Harvey watching her lover undress in the “This Is Love” and thought no more about it.
Did they hear “A Place Called Home,” “This Mess We’re In,” or “We Float”? Yes, these are love songs in a sense, but they are not about the beginning of a relationship but the restlessness or disillusion of it and the hope that it can become good or something else. There is no stasis here. Harvey’s bombastic guitar playing and Thom Yorke’s presence as a guest vocalist, most notably on “This Mess We’re In,” only ramp up the tension.
Even songs like “Good Fortune,” which seems to be an ode to wandering around New York’s streets with a lover, ends with the protagonist ready to uproot her sense of home.
I came to Stories during the winter of my senior year in high school. I was just about to break up with my first boyfriend. We dated for over a year, were totally unfulfilled and bored in our relationship, but were fairly a popular couple amongst the social circles of Alvin High School, which also made us kind of obnoxious. I was tired of being in his shadow and ready to move on. The album’s erotically charged content drifted me toward fantasies of galavanting around New York City with a mysterious stranger I met on the subway. This led me to project the album’s feelings on to the boy I started dating a week after I broke up with bachelor #1. It’s something I might share with fellow Harvey fan Rory Gilmore. Yes, songs like “One Line” are that powerful.
But the more I listen and reflect on Stories, the less I think about it as an album about the love shared between two people. Instead, it seems to be about the love a woman has for her interior life and how that’s manifested in her engagement with uncertain, sprawling terrains. These areas inform the album’s title and its content. For me, its most evident in Harvey’s engagement with the street, defined by longtime collaborator Maria Mochnacz‘s cover. Note that Harvey’s sunglasses, which protect her eyes from all that neon, present the illusion that she’s looking at you. It actually appears that she’s looking over her shoulder, perhaps confronting what may loom behind her. I think this freedom bewilders and excites her, as it does for many women who take time to acknowledge what a politicized act it is to walk a city street alone. I don’t do it near enough. When I do, I’m very aware of my size, sex, and, gender. I need to be more comfortable with it. I need to reclaim it.
It’s this love of the street that motivates her to study geography, navigating her environment alone in order to acquire a sense of fluency, since she has no interest in finding home beyond the journey toward it. Sometimes this leads to danger, which can also lead to epiphany. Sometimes these travels lead her to find someone to walk with, but can just as often prompt her to leave if her partner can’t or won’t keep up. This seeming departure from the wild, romantic gesticulations that characterize her early period into more mature, complex, and unresolved inter/personal reflections continues to inform her subsequent work (I’d argue it’s evident on Is This Desire?). Even if she doesn’t identify as a feminist, I’ll still follow the woman traversing the crosswalk alone.
In preparation for the Oscars, I’m catching up on my “quality” viewing. I saw The Cove yesterday, which is nominated for Best Documentary and might officially get me to stop eating meat. I also saw An Education, which I previously mentioned having an interest in seeing because protagonist Jenny Miller is shown playing a cello in the preview.
Run away, Jenny Miller!; image courtesy of pastemagazine.com
A lot of people are into this one. And there’s a lot to love. Lone Scherfig directed it. There’s a girl protagonist played by Carey Mulligan. The cast of supporting actresses is substantial. And Peter Sarsgaard mines unexpected pathos in his portrayal of David Goldman, a man who is in essence a sexual predator. I wasn’t so enamored with it, but I thought it was good.
For me, it played out less like a coming-of-age narrative and more like a horror movie, thus enforcing that oftentimes the genres come together. I saw Teeth earlier in the week, but An Education was much scarier. A bright teenage girl succumbing to the dubious charms of a much-older shakedown artist (who, as unfortunate stereotypes go, is also Jewish)? Her parents going along for the ride because he is a man of means that might allow their daughter to bypass going to college though they have no idea who he is or what he does for a living? Aforementioned brainy girl protagonist potentially throwing her life away for the romantic idea of a life with a man who exhibits obvious signs of creepiness (apart from swindling and picking up teenage girls at bus stops, I’m never going to think about a banana the same way again)? That said girl blinds herself to the reality that she couldn’t be the first girl he’s preyed upon (and, we discover later, isn’t)? The fact that all of this is based on Lynn Barber’s memoir and thus “actually” happened? Danger, Will Robinson! I literally said “it’s a trap” and shook my head “no” several times during the screening. And as much as I’d like to think gender politics have changed since the 1960s when the story is set, there are still girls who fall for suspicious men and parents who fall right along with them.
Thus the content of the story has informed my enjoyment of the movie. And while the movie is well-made, I find it more than a little disconcerting how race, class, and gender inform outcomes and expectations for girls. Miller almost throws her life away for a man she knows very little about, but still gets to go to college despite skipping her entrance exams. This has much to do with being a middle-class white girl as it does with her intellectual capability, which of course is nurtured by her private school education. Juxtapose An Education with Precious, another period piece that instead focuses on an illiterate, fat, poor, dark-skinned black girl with an extensive history of family abuse. The disparity between our societal expectations and allowances for white girls and black girls is profound. One girl goes to Oxford despite making poor personal decisions because she’s guided by her heart. Another girl is a single mother living with HIV in inner-city New York because the system is set up against her. These girls are never going to cross paths.
But one thing that I thought was interesting about An Education and wished got more emphasis is Miller’s relationship with music. She does play the cello, though not on her own accord. Her father has her take it up so as to seem well-rounded to Oxford’s admissions board.
That said, she does have knowledge of classical music and is a fan of Maurice Ravel. And in the pantheon of white girls in cinema who use phonographic technology in their bedrooms, Miller is but one more example.
Miller with her record player; image courtesy of vogue.co.uk
It’s especially interesting what she listens to. Miller is a Francophile and loves Juliette Gréco. In the scene highlighted above, Miller is listening to Gréco’s No. 7. The movie also features Gréco’s “Sous Le Ciel de Paris,” an idealized take on the city of lights that was recorded by Édith Piaf in 1954.
Miller’s fandom is much to the chagrin of her father, who believes her love of French chanteuses takes her away from with her studies. As he doesn’t feel the same way about her boyfriend, there’s potential for queer panic. However, I think in her father’s case it’s more consciously informed by the belief that interests and hobbies cannot elevate the social status of girls as much as being paired off with a man. I’m glad Miller ultimately chooses her own livelihood over the wishes of men. I hope she kept the records too.
We're talking about a revolution -- the women of Olivia Records (from left: Judy Dlugasz, Meg Christian, Ginny Berson, Jennifer Woodul, and Kate Winter); image courtesy of maggiesmetawatershed.blogspot.com
The other day after work, I caught a screening put together by UT’s Center for Women and Gender Studies for Dee Mosbacher’s Radical Harmonies, a documentary about the emergence of women’s music starting in the late 1960s. My friend Carrie was good enough to let me know about it, and I’m glad I went.
I’ll be clear. I know very little about women’s music, apart from it developing out of the lesbian separatist movement of the second wave in the 1970s. I have a cursory awareness of continuations of the tradition, particularly evident in the work of Ani DiFranco, The Indigo Girls, and (my personal favorite) The Murmurs.
I went into the screening with some background knowledge about cult figures like Malvina Reynolds thanks to Jessica Hopper‘s Tweets about getting into her music.
And I recently attended a trans education workshop put together by OutYouth, where GRCA volunteer Paige Schilt gave an great presentation that outlined instances of transphobia from within the feminist movement, touching on the ongoing rectification of exclusionary policies that dictate the parameters female-only spaces at women’s music festivals.
Going in, I had some hesitations. While I appreciate the efforts of these women, the earnestness behind much of their efforts was a bit off-putting at first. For one, with some exception, women’s music is most closely identified as the work of college-education, middle-class liberal white ladies. I’ll map out the ways in which they were cognizant of this and resistant to it in a moment, but at first hearing I felt a little uncomfortable about the precious sentiments in some of this music, particularly in songs like Margie Adam’s “Song to Susan” and Cris Williamson’s “Joana.” To be clear, I wasn’t embarrassed by what they were singing about, but how they went about delivering their message. As I described it to Kristen at Act Your Age, the music has a very “I held hands with my lover in the park” feel to it. Ugh. Eye roll. Insert ironic comment to offset my discomfort. LOL.
I think my initial misgivings speak most closely to a different generational sensibility afforded to women my age who are allowed to have an irreverant, sardonic attitude toward romance, sex, and sexuality. While considerable gains still need to be made for the equality of LGBTQI folks, attitudes have changed that my peers may take for granted. But in the late 1960s, a woman performing a song about being a lesbian was grounds to shut down a concert. This very thing happened to Maxine Feldman when she had the “nerve” to sing “Angry Atthis,” an ode to her lover and a wish to not have to live life in society’s closet.
Cover of Closet Sale (Galaxia, 1979); image courtesy of maggiesmetawatershed.blogspot.com
In addition, these women were fighting rock music’s sexism and misogyny. Not only were they up against having to prove that they were musicians and not groupies, but they were also in opposition to rock’s use of euphemism and suggestion. One need only look toward the mainstream success of rock’s bad boys The Rolling Stones, whose catalog boasted songs like “Brown Sugar” and “Under My Thumb” to get a sense of what women’s music was fighting against. Within folk music, some male artists like Tim “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” Buckley were denying any responsibility past their own carnal interests. Even a woman like Joni Mitchell wasn’t safe from rock’s patriarchal strangle-hold, as she was once given the dubious honor of being named Rolling Stone‘s Old Lady of the Year early in her illustrious career.
Actually, Joni Mitchell seems pretty unwilling to be Graham Nash's old lady in this photo; image courtesy of morrisonhotelgallery.com
So I understand the mindset of these women. These songs seem to say “not only are we going to sing about the complex poetics of lesbian desire, but we’re going to make absolutely sure that you know exactly what we’re singing about and to whom. For good measure, we’re going to sound as stripped down and intimate as possible.” Take that, Glimmer Twins.
That said, some associated acts with women’s music knew how to shred. Take Fanny as an example. Boasting Philippine American sisters June and Jean Millington on guitar and bass, the group was, at their time, one of the few all-female bands recording and touring with support from a major label (in their case, Reprise). They also rocked.
As mentioned earlier, women’s music tended to be a white woman’s game. That said, there were women of color on the rosters of female-only record labels like Olivia and Redwood. Some of these acts, like Sweet Honey in the Rock, did not identify as lesbians but were on board with Redwood’s pro-woman message. Leader Bernice Johnson Reagon, who was a member of The Freedom Singers and founded Sweet Honey after being moved by Joan Little’s case, could also identify with the label’s political leanings.
Other artists, like Gwen Avery, Judith Casselberry, and Deidre McCalla were openly gay African American women and developed substantial followings. Apparently Avery developed quite a following with her song “Sugar Mama,” which was featured on Olivia’s Lesbian Concentrate compilation.
Cover for Lesbian Concentrate, rendered in direct opposition to Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman/world-class homophobe Anita Bryant (Olivia, 1977); image courtesy of queermusicheritage.us
In addition, I really appreciate women’s music’s emphasis on historical context and continuation. In addition to their fandom of older artists like Reynolds, artists like Holly Near helped resurrect the career of artists like Ronnie Gilbert, once a member of a fairly obscure country band called The Weavers. By the 1970s, Gilbert had gotten her therapist’s license and come out. By connecting with a younger generation of listeners and working with younger artists, Gilbert helped to forge links between queer and straight women across age ranges and strengthened women’s historical significance in popular music.
As musical artists began developing their repertoire and labels like Olivia, Redwood, Goldenrod, and Ladyslipper took shape, more women forged careers in technical positions. Musician Linda Tillery was perhaps Olivia’s most noteworthy producer. In addition, women like Olivia Records’ co-founder Ginny Berson taught fans how to become concert producers so that her artists had gigs to play, which were usually run by female-only personnel. Some of these fans, notably Kristin Lems, started events like the National Women’s Music Festival in 1974 because no female artists were deemed good enough to play a local festival.
Linda Tillery behind the drums; image courtesy of stanford.edu
One thing festivals like the National Women’s Music Festival and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival emphasized was inclusion of women with disabilities. As a result, ASL interpreters like Susan Freundlich and Sherry Hicks developed reputations as instrumental virtuosos. They also allowed for many deaf women to experience music for the first time.
Sherry Hicks; image courtesy of aslfestival.com
While I find the notion of the ASL interpreter as instrumentalist to be fascinating, it cannot be overlooked that sign language is culturally developed and thus has regressive potential. In the documentary, Reagon talks about an interpretter tugging on her nostrils to sign the word “Africa” and requested she spell it out instead.
Another thing I was surprised about is where these festivals started to develop. They didn’t originate from the coasts, but instead in parts of the Midwest — particularly Michigan and Illinois. They also caught on in parts of the South. Thus, it can’t be overstated how brave these organizers were. Many of them had no professional experience putting together gigs and events. Several of them also had not yet come out to their communities and faced considerable opposition, if not outright threats to their livelihood.
The one big elephant in the room in this documentary is the transphobia that maligns feminist history. In addition to many festivals’ exclusionary women-born women policy, some feminists were far more invective against transgendered women. Janice Raymond wrote The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979, a book wherein she reportedly espoused that transgendered women were she-males, male rapists, and associated with Nazis. She also went after Olivia recording engineer (and UT faculty member) Sandy Stone, organizing a boycott of the label’s output.
Transphobia is an ugly presence in feminist history, but one that I think requires greater context besides the uncomfortable head nod and polite smile. Here’s hoping that future feminist historians confront it, learn from it, and work to correct it.
Admittedly, female characters don’t seem to star too often in music videos for male artists. If they do, they tend to be in the object rather than subject position (think Tawny Kitaen’s work in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and “Is This Love?”). But today I came across two new music videos that seemed worth mentioning, as they feature female protagonists.
Both clips involve young women attempting to overcome an obstacle. One is attempting to destroy a statue. The other is taking on a series of opponents in a tennis match, one of whom is herself. One is an animated clip. The other is live action and appears to be indebted to a vague notion of Pan Asian culture perhaps most closely aligned with Martin Roberts’s read on Japanese cult media’s appeal to “cool” American and European audiences. One has an unsettlingly open ending. The other is problematic in its pairing of a white female with a tall black woman, a Samurai, rapper Lil Jon, and RZA from Wu-Tang Clan (who served as the aural authority on ”blackness” and “Asianness” as a composer for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series). One clip supports an instrumental hip hop artist. The other one promotes one of indie rock’s most contested bands of late. Both involve the colors red, black, and white, but only one of them has Joe Jonas and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Deru
“Peanut Butter and Patience” Say Goodbye to Useless
Directed by Howie Shia
Vampire Weekend
“Giving Up the Gun” Contra
Directed by the Malloys
Wristbands for SXSW went on sale today. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the music festival is my favorite time of the year. I get no sleep, somehow go to work during the day, my feet hurt real bad, I smell like garbage soup come Sunday morning, and I usually end my nights with deliciously greasy food to soak up the beer. Absolute best. But since I know the proceedings can be a little overwhelming, I thought I’d offer some tips.
First, some petty bullshit.
-Calling it “South By” sounds like you’re trying to break into the industry. If you keep going, you’ll find that “South West” rolls right off the tongue. Okay, you can call it “South By.” Especially if we’re friends. I won’t correct you or make a face. But I will call it “South By South West.”
Now, some practical information regarding comfort.
-Relaxed dress code, ya’ll. Many follow the impulse to get styled out. And hey, power to you if you’re young and like playing with clothes. And if you decide that leather jodhpurs look great with your aunt’s vintage blue sequined tube top and later discover that you’re horribly wrong, Vice or Look At This Fucking Hipster might still take your picture and you can tell/text/Tweet your friends. I’m more casual, however. Hence why you haven’t seen me. The best you could hope for from me is being the brown-haired girl in a red hooded sweatshirt standing almost out of frame smirking at the girl wearing a tube top and jodhpurs.
-Keep in mind that you’ll be on your feet 98% of the time. You’ll be standing in lines or in front of bands or walking to places where you’ll be standing in lines or in front of bands. Some of these places will be outdoors where you’ll kick up dirt. It could rain. Some asshole might drop a full beer bottle or step on your toes. This is not the time to break out those pointy flats, gladiator sandals, platform pumps, peep-toe booties, jellies, or whatever fashionable shoe begs an audience. Think sneakers or, if you must be cool, flat-heeled boots. Also, since the 90s are back, maybe you still have a pair of floral print Doc Martens. If you have them in a size 5 and don’t want them anymore, give them to me.
Want; image courtesy of blackdovevintage.blogspot.com
-Free beer is great. If candy be dandy, then liquor be quicker. But you’re gonna need to drink lots of water. Dehydration is not the move.
-Remember that deliciously greasy late-night food I was talking about? Might I recommend Star Seeds or the vegan-friendly Kebabalicious for your cravings? Can’t go wrong with a treat from Mrs. Johnson’s either, especially since you can get a fresh glazed donut for free. I haven’t been to the 24 Diner yet, but it might be worth pursuing. If you wanna go the drive-thru route, What-A-Burger is Texas’s gift to tourists. I’m not so into Kerbey Lane or Magnolia Café, but they get it done. These are just some after-hours options. Entertaining the idea of what restaurant to eat at in Austin is a decision to step into a larger world. We’ve got good food locked down. If you’re looking for vegan fare, Lazy Smurf was good enough to provide a comprehensive list of restaurants. Happy eating!
-Sunscreen is a buddy. Earplugs are buddies too. But I always forget to bring them.
And now, the music.
-If you wanna gadabout and maybe see some shows, there’s lots of options. The festival offers tons of free, all-ages stuff put together by good people like Todd P. They’re even nice enough to offer those listings in neat little indexes you can fold in your back pocket. But if you want to see specific acts, particularly buzz artists covered by The Onion, Pitchfork, NPR, or others, you’re most likely gonna need a wristband. This is an international festival. Venues fill to capacity. If you can’t make this happen but you’re a student on spring break or can take off work, day shows and after-hours parties are your buddies. You can see a lot of up-and-coming acts that will be playing in the evening for little to no cover.
-Even if you can make it happen, take some time to enjoy the day shows. KVRX always delivers. TerrorbirdMedia put together great showcases. Yard Dog is for sweethearts. NPR is a buddy. GRCA is putting together a great day show.
-If you are coming in from out of town, please make sure you check out our local talent. Austin’s touted as the live music capital for a reason, as the city is lousy with awesome bands. One only needs to check out Matador’s Casual Victim Pile compilation for recent evidence (note: the title is an anagram for “live music capital” — har har). As a local, I tend not to see so many local bands during the evening because they’re around and I have to prioritize. But if I didn’t, I’d see as many Austin bands as I could. You should too.
-If you like an act, check to see what label they’re on. Chances are you might like another band on the roster. If you do, it’s probably worth checking out the label’s showcase. Some record labels I follow: Merge, DFA/Astralwerks, Warp, Kill Rock Stars, K, Stones Throw, anticon., XL, 4AD, Carpark, Kranky, and Sub Pop. They usually put on day shows as well, sometimes with other labels.
-If you feel like exploring new sounds or are intrigued by an act because of its name, do a little investigating. Might I suggest checking in with that thing called MySpace as a starting point? It has to be good for something.
-Don’t be afraid of bands you don’t know. Trust your friends and their tastes if you have evidence of compatibility, because you might discover something really special. In 2005, I remember going to the Church of the Friendly Ghost (RIP) to see a band because someone I knew thought I’d really like them. They were a British dance band and I don’t believe they had a deal in the states yet. They were a polite, brainy bunch who put on a great show and had lots of energy. They even did a charming cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Miracles.” Their name is Hot Chip and I haven’t been able to catch them since.
Hot Chip: officially too big to call me back; image courtesy of guardian.co.uk
-Build a schedule. You can do it through SXSW’s Web site. Print it out or plug it into your phone. You’ll want it with you at all times.
-Stay connected. I posted this today, but acts will be added up to the last possible minute. Check SXSW’s Web site, Twitter, Facebook, listservs, various e-mags, etc. I will also update this post as more acts I like are announced.
-Finally, I’ll offer up lists of bands I’m planning to see so that setting a schedule can be a bit more manageable. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather my list. I’m not interested in being a tastemaker. I’ve taken the liberty of putting my selections in tiers. Tier 1 are acts you can only see during SXSW (last year’s example was Flower Travellin’ Band, a 60s-era Japanese psych-noise band). Tier 2 are the acts I’m really hoping to see. Tier 3 are the acts that have a lot of hype around them or staying power to them and are worth seeing. The Texas section is self-explanatory, and is all-killer, no filler. It’s a hierarchy, but it keeps things tidy. Also, I provided links to every artist so you can check ‘em out.
Earlier tonight, I caught a screening of Radical Harmonies, Dee Mosbacher’s 2002 documentary on lesbian folk artists and women’s festivals. Inspiring stuff about a topic I know very little about. But I need time to unpack what I saw. Plus, I taped my neighbor’s drum practice in exchange for guitar lessons, which start next Tuesday. What is more, I’m still reeling over some very exciting professional news. Starting in April, I will do an eight-week stint as a guest blogger for Bitch. I’ll be doing a series on the intersections of television and music culture, in keeping with some of the entries I’ve posted here. So I made a nice dinner and had a little happy happy joy joy time.
It’d be easier to celebrate if Germans would leave female artsts alone and stop using copyright infringement as a front, as some have been doing recently. For one, a Munich court banned Beyoncé’s hella-problematic “Video Phone” clip because of a supposed intellectual property violation against underwear manufacturer Triumph, who own the rights to the Iskren Lozanov-designed, Pablo Picasso-inspired skivvies she’s wearing. Also, a bunch of German folks who own the rights to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hack . . . er . . . rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar are refusing to let Peaches stage the musical as a one-woman show.
Peaches Christ Superstar; image courtesy of ew.com
I’m not particularly concerned with the fate of “Video Phone” (or Rihanna’s new clip, “Rude Boy,” which recycles much of the same racist, sexualized imagery by way of dancehall and M.I.A.’s “Boyz“). I think that claiming panties as a legal battle ground is silly, but it also speaks to the fashion industry’s need to be economically viable during a recession while serving consumers who are increasingly drawn to ready-to-wear retail collections and renting couture. But I think Peaches not being allowed to perform Jesus Christ Superstar is ridiculous for two reasons.
1. Really, it’s not like she can do any damage to what is already awful source material. Her involvement only improves it in my mind. At least she’d bring a different, campier lack of subtlety to what is . . . well, obvious. If you haven’t seen the musical, you should do something fun with those two hours that would have been wasted on it. All you need to know is that Jesus was the original rock star.
Well, Peaches is a rock star too. And a smart, hairy, queer, Jewish, gender-bending, politically subversive, sexually autonomous feminist rock star at that. A rock star who, unlike Webber’s Jesus, doesn’t need guitars to melt faces and underwear. The boys wanna be the persona Merrill Nisker embodies, but some of them are totally scared of her.
2. Legalese aside, I think the real issue here is the threat to patriarchal order that motivates fearful types to dictate the terms of “fair use.” I’m sure there would be no problem with, say, Michael Crawford doing a one-man show of Jesus Christ Superstar (though he’d probably do a Vegas revue). But a queer Jewish feminist drawing on source material she loved growing up so she can play Jesus and Mary Magdelene. No no no. “Blasphemy.” And that’s absurd.
I hope Peaches gets to do the show somewhere. She’s welcome to convince me of the musical’s worth by performing the stage show in my garage.
The first time I saw the trailer for Sofia Coppola’s third movie, which featured New Order’s “Age of Consent” . . . the word you’re looking for is “stoked.” I watched the movie several times when it came out. Indeed, the subject of my first grad school conference presentation (originally developed as a term paper) was about the use of popular music in Coppola’s movies and paid particular attention to her third feature.
Some friends at the time dismissed the song selection as evidence that this was to be Coppola’s A Knight’s Tale. To me, this suggested short-sightedness (short-hearedness?). While I wasn’t sure whether the movie was going to be good so much as pretty, I knew the meaning of this biopic on Marie Antoinette would be gleaned from the music. Selecting a song about coming of age and its desperate, doomed implications from a band who, at the time of the song’s recording, had reformed after the recent loss of their young lead singer to suicide at the dawn of the Reagan/Thatcher era? Using it to frame the inevitable tragedy of a young woman who unknowingly inherited a fallen regime? Pitch perfect, if you ask me. You can say what you want about Coppola’s movies, but she knows how to pick a song. Or at least she knows how to pick a song selector, in this case music supervisor Brian Reitzell, to clear some post-punk classics from her youth.
The movie itself appears apolitical, as would seem appropriate as it focuses on a clueless and ridiculously wealthy group of young people who have no idea what kind of tragedy they’re about to inherit after generations of neglect. The audience, on the other hand, know Marie Antoinette’s life will end at the hands of righteously pissed poor French people who cut off her head. Some characters clue others in on the contentious relationships France has with itself, Austria, Poland, and a set of colonies that was becoming the United States. Most people are too busy buying shoes, throwing parties, trying to extend the family line, or having affairs.
The musical selections serve to politicize the movie. The deliberate use of anachronism intrigued me, particularly when creating analogues between the political unrest of pre-Revolutionary France and England’s recessionary 70s and the early days of Thatcher’s reign. Class distinctions aside, it’s easy to draw connections between the unseen revolutionaries and the somewhat subcultural art school punks and New Romantics, many of whom drew from this era in their own work. Thus, I was thrilled that Coppola’s imagining of Versailles last days included Adam Ant, Siouxsie Sioux, Bow Wow Wow, and Converse sneakers.
Take the opening sequence as an example. The movie begins with an opening credit sequence accompanied by “Natural’s Not In It” from once-anti-capital post-punk band Gang of Four. The song indicts the empty pleasures of consumerism. The screen is black, with personnel credits appearing in hot pink. Only one vignette is shown during this part of the movie. It is of the young queen complying with the mythology of the frivolous heiress. In this scene, she lazes while an attendant puts on her shoe. She absent-mindledly runs a finger across an elaboratedly iced cake, licks off her treat, and addresses the camera with a decided air of self-satisfaction. Let them eat cake off my finger, bitches.
In tribute to my friend Kit, who could watch this scene on a loop; image courtesy of tinkersdamn.wordpress.com
Unfortunately, Gang of Four sold out big time. Did anyone see catch reunion tour? I didn’t, but I heard they charged $20 for merch. Upon hearing this news, I let out of a sigh, looked up, and nodded to irony’s unseen deity.
There are several moments where post-punk is used. One scene uses a cover song to highlight the sexy but empty promises of commodity fetish from a pre-fab band with a pre-teen girl singer who was marketed as sexually available by their Svengali. Another scene highlights the spoils of youth during moments of celebration with a song performed by a band that were supposed to be Joy Division but became New Order. The scene at a masked ball suggests a Western mindset that criticizes the packaging of girls like consumer goods with a song that has racist assumptions about Eastern traditions from a female punk who played with fascist and Orientalist imagery. The last scene seems to endorse the belief that sexual awakening, like many white people’s romantic notions of a monolithic Native American culture, is primitive and innate. Yowza. Of course, if you don’t know these songs you may lose these layers of interpretation. Thus Coppola’s movie demands that you listen as well as look for meaning.
Coppola also does a good job stealing from other people’s movies. The jump cuts suggest indebtedness to the French New Wave and the mise-en-scène recalls Barry Lyndon and The Leopard. But musical cues suggest other cinematic references. Witness Antoinette’s morning routine, which is shown three times during the movie. It’s scored by Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto alla rustica,” originally composed in the early 1730s. These scenes are supposed to convey the repititious and dehumanizing nature of her existence. The song is used the same way in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, except instead of playing as a young heiress gets dressed in front of the female members of the court, it scores a director-choreographer pounding Dexedrine and Alka-Seltzer.
Coppola hedged her bets by casting Steve Coogan, perhaps because of his performance as Factory Records impresario/post-punk godfather Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24-Hour Party People, as the queen’s long-suffering advisor who knows Versailles, like Rome, is about to fall. It could also be argued that Marianne Faithfull serves a similar function in her role as Antoinette’s mother Maria Theresa. Not only did she inherit a matrialineal heritage of Austrian nobility, but she’s also a hardened, toughened relic of the swingin’ Sixties and a survivor of the sexism behind its free love ideals.
Marianne Faithfull as Maria Theresa; image courtesy of artandmylife.wordpress.com
This movie could’ve been really great. It sets out to do something fresh and modern with period pieces, deliberately disorienting the viewer with moments of anachronism, not only in music, but also in dialogue, characterization, and costuming. Coppola said the intent of these moments is to humanize the people behind this history, some perhaps interpretting the movie to be autobiographical. But I don’t think Coppola ever fully humanizes her subject. I also don’t believe the movie is really supposed to be about her, her jet-set life, or the ridicule she received for her performance as Mary Corleone in the final installment of her father’s Godfather series. Though if you want to read Marie Antoinette as Coppola’s attempt at a biopic, she does cast her boyfriend Thomas Mars in the movie, whose band seranades the young queen.
Coppola does accomplish something far more interesting here: by distorting place and time to such an extreme, she obliterates the idea that period pictures adapted from historical biographies ever attempt to be historically accurate. Indeed, there is no real history. The past then becomes open to interpretation, with no reading a true, definitive version. Indeed, history as a discipline becomes an unreliable narrator.
But the movie never quite works for me as a text so much as a theoretical exercise.
I hate to blame the success of a project on one person, but Coppola made was unwise in casting Kirsten Dunst. Past her performances in Little Women, The Virgin Suicides, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, and what I’m told is a noteworthy turn in Interview With a Vampire, Dunst is a limited actress. I used to think that Dunst was believable in her portrayal of the young dauphine and that, once she had to play the queen of France and had to demonstrate (or believe she was demonstrating) emotional maturity, I was kicked out of the text. This opinion presents an interesting challenge, which I’d pose to Kristen at Act Your Age: what does it mean when an adult actress can convince an audience that she’s 14 but not 30? Also, I think the movie should end once Marie Antoinette is crowned. By stretching on into her adult years and stopping short of her death, the movie no longer seeks to revise the period biopic and instead becomes one.
But upon review, I find that I don’t buy Dunst at all. She gives a servicable performance if Coppola set out to turn a magazine photo shoot into a movie, an argument I remember my friend Karin making. The movie could be so much more than Nylon‘s take on Versailles, but Dunst can carry it. I don’t buy her losing her dog, having a baby, embarking on a torrid affair, or saying goodbye to the palace and her life. I also never believe the complex angst she’s supposed to be feeling about her sham marriage to late-bloomer Louis XVI (played by Jason Schwartzman) or all of the ridiculous expectations placed upon her narrow shoulders.
This is about as close as Dunst gets to inner turmoil; image courtesy of iwatchstuff.com
One scene completely kicks me out of the movie. Leading into the buyer’s remorse porn of the “I Want Candy” montage, the dauphine breaks down and decides to rebel against the court by turning spending sprees into a lifestyle. This could be a very powerful moment in an ornately feminine movie about one of the most maligned and notoriously well-appointed female figures in European history. The camera is uncomfortably close to the subject, peering at her convulsing face and heaving chest with voyeuristic intent. This could be an ugly scene with a decidedly feminist subtext in line with Linda Williams’s reading on the abject qualities of melodrama, horror, and pornography in her seminal essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Except there is nothing to see. Dunst provides no tears, no facial distortions, no gutteral sobs. It’s easily one of the prettiest and most detached fit of hysterics I’ve seen.
It would seem that this is the performance Coppola wanted, and that Antoinette’s release comes from shopping. This also suggests that Antoinette can’t cry, and that her upbringing does not allow her the ability to lose composure. But I have to wonder if it would be easier to empathize with a character played by someone who is acting instead of modeling. For a movie that attempts to humanize a villified historical subject, this scene actually suggests that she’s inhuman. Perhaps it’s because she’s a theory and not a person. And if that person isn’t presented as complex, at least the theories that cultivate her existence are a minefield.
