girl instrumentalists « Feminist Music Geek

Posts Tagged ‘girl instrumentalists

Jan

A night at home, streaming a Pixies documentary

Nearly five years after everyone else, my partner and I finally got a Wii. I’m not a gamer, though I will destroy your entire family at boxing (well, unless your family includes my pint-size neighbor). But if I can marinate in my privilege for a minute, using the Wii for Netflix Instant is pretty awesome. Granted, I’ve been streaming stuff on my laptop for some time, but projecting it onto the living room TV is so nice (I also don’t have to worry about my television overheating and shutting down). I haven’t had cable since 2005, so being able to watch Louie or Now and Then or Exit Through the Gift Shop or season two of Parks and Recreation (season three begins January 20!!!) whenever is beyond luxurious. At some point I’ll watch that Harry Nilsson documentary, though I hope locals forked over $2 to see it at the Drafthouse during this week’s Music Mondays screening. Immersion with this gadget kind of kept me from writing, actually. When you’re battling a wicked case of cedar fever and it’s dark by 5, why not cuddle up on the couch to an entire season of Man v. Food?

I’ve also been pruning my queue, which I always hold at capacity. Capturing the Friedmans took up space for some time and now it’s haunting my dreams. loudQUIETloud, Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin’s documentary about the Pixies, has clogged up my queue since late 2006. I was pretty “meh” about seeing it, but thought it’d be good to watch while I was playing my guitar.

The Pixies (from left: David Lovering, Kim Deal, Frank Black, Joey Santiago); image courtesy of nytimes.com

I’m kind of prejudiced against this band. I acknowledge their greatness and like many of their songs. I’ll stand by “Debaser” and “River Euphrates.” The first Pixies song I heard was “Isla de Encanta,” which I originally encountered during the closing credits of Married to the Mob, one of my mom’s favorite movies. Since I came of age in the 90s, songs like “Gigantic,” “Here Comes Your Man,” and “Monkey Gone to Heaven” were modern rock retro cut staples. Most everyone knows Fight Club ends with ‘Where Is My Mind?” And I’ll always remember accompanying an old roommate to a disconcerting wardrobe fitting for a drag show at the clothing designer’s studio apartment, where she was blasting Pixies songs in tribute to a friend who just died of an overdose.

I probably take them for granted because bands like Nirvana made the band’s singular dynamic structure (signposted in the documentary’s title) so commonplace. Mainly I just get tired of Frank Black’s petulant genius routine and project contempt onto his rabid fan base, who I always imagine as sweaty white dudes who think they’re better than you because they read science fiction. Plus, Kurt was right. Bassist Kim Deal should have written more songs for the Pixies. Since Black tightened his grip on the band as they continued, she left and formed the Breeders with her twin sister Kelley, which I got to first and happen to like more. Talk about a band with pop hooks and dynamic tension.

I actually don’t have too much to say about this one, as it’s a pretty straightforward piece about the band reuniting in 2004, paving the tour route for dozens of other indie bands who cashed in on their prestige with reunions throughout the decade (though I think Pavement made it safe for nostalgia acts to make cameos on reality TV). Some noteworthy parts for me are how Deal commits to sobriety, drummer/magician/puka shell enthusiast David Lovering struggles to do so, Deal’s sister follows the band around with a camera, Black gets jealous that the twins are holed up in the bus writing songs for another Breeders’ record, and secret weapon lead guitarist Joey Santiago is too grown for any nonsense.

However, a few scenes make this documentary worth viewing for feminist music geeks. At one point, the band encounters a superfan bass player. She became enamored with the group after reading Louisa Luna’s Brave New Girl, a YA novel about a teenage girl who’s obsessed with the band. The fan gives her copy to Deal, who studies the excerpts about her band flagged with green highlighter. The documentary closes with this girl, whose band covers ”Monkey Gone to Heaven” during the closing credits. They’re fleeting but effective moments that demonstrate the bond shared between musician and fan, and how a woman with an instrument and a girl inspired by her can be a mutually beneficial connection.

Nov

Connie Souphanousinphone, fiddler

By Alyx Vesey 2 Comments

Categories: Feminist Music Geeks Turn on Their TVs
Tags: Aisle 8A, Arlen, bluegrass, Bobby Hill, Chane Wassonasong, Connie Souphanousinphone, girl instrumentalists, Greg Daniels, Hank Hill, Kahn Souphanousinphone, King of the Hill, Lauren Tom, Netflix, New York Philharmonic, Parks and Recreation, The Bluegrass Is Always Greener, The Office, violin

Connie Souphanousinphone on fiddle and Bobby Hill on soda bottle; image courtesy of wikia.com

One of the recent joys in my life is Netflix adding seasons of King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation to its Instant queue. This provided me with solace over the past week as I attempted to rid a seemingly endless stream of sinus waste from my nose. Also, these delightful Greg Daniels-helmed sitcoms make up for The Office outstaying its welcome long before Jim and Pam walked down the aisle.

I’m revisiting the sixth season of Hill, a show I’ve already established my fandom for in an earlier post about another female musician in the cast. However, I must’ve either missed or forgotten about “The Bluegrass Is Always Greener,” wherein overworked violin prodigy Connie Souphanousinphone ditches music camp in Fort Worth to enter a bluegrass competition in Branson with neighbor Hank Hill and his buddies.

Connie is one of the show’s most interesting characters and played wonderfully by Lauren Tom. She is smart, shy, and well-mannered, yet critical of her parents’ materialism and stubborn toward her dad’s wishes that she dump boyfriend Bobby Hill, date the more superficially suitable Chane Wassonasong, and become an accomplished violinist. She’s the protagonist of “Aisle 8A,” which focuses on her getting her first period while staying with the Hills while her parents are away on a business trip. It’s one of my favorite episodes of the show’s run and perhaps one of the few episodes that considers an animated girl character’s foray into menstruation.

Connie’s parents Mihn and especially her father Kahn put a tremendous amount of pressure of their only child to excel in school and extra-curricular activities. The dimensions of their involvement are complex. They at once take pride in their Laotian heritage and also out of a need to prove themselves as fully integrated into American bourgeois society, supposedly a world away from the fictional suburb of Arlen, Texas. Connie takes pride in her scholastic achievements, but as a musician isn’t as interested in becoming the New York Philharmonic‘s principal violinist as she is in having fun. She becomes interested in bluegrass after hearing Hank jam with the neighbors in the alley. Fed up with her father’s hovering (and possibly also the stereotype of the Asian American violin virtuoso), she skips out on a bus to Fort Worth and gets the gang together for the trip to Branson.

Connie's backing band, minus bloodhound Lady Bird (from left: Jeff Boomhauer on banjo, Bill Dautrive on washboard, Hank Hill on acoustic guitar, and Dale Gribble on keys); image courtesy of flavorwire.com

Things take an interesting turn, however, when Hank reveals he may share more with nemesis Kahn than the same letters in their name when he puts too much pressure on Connie and takes the fun out of performance. She quits the band and starts playing on a street corner with Bobby. Admittedly, she and Bobby have troublesome delusions of meeting poverty-stricken Appalachian families to get back to the “roots” of bluegrass. However, the episode resolves with all parties convening and Connie reconnecting with the personal joy she gets from playing music.

Jun

Lisa Simpson, saxophone player

By Alyx Vesey 1 Comment

Lisa Simpson; image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Recently, my partner got season nine of The Simpsons on DVD. Perhaps suggesting our age, this was the last season either of us watched in its entirety upon original broadcast. We’ve caught episodes from season ten on in syndication, and I marvel at how the show has maximized high definition’s potential. We also saw The Simpsons Movie, which was more remarkable for the assuredly bombed woman who sang loudly to herself, yelled at Maggie for being a “cunt,” and called us “asshats” for telling her to be quiet before being escorted out of the theater. But for both of us, the ongoing series peaked 13 seasons earlier. The show may be sporadically hilarious and subversive, but like many successful television shows that go on for too long, it has also exhausted premises, developed a frantic tone, got further away from the family’s class struggles and feelings of mediocrity that made the show especially poignant in the early seasons, and dispensed with much carefully-crafted character development.

This last point seems especially true of Marge and Lisa Simpson to me. The show was never especially savvy with what to do with the tower-coiffed matriarch, who has dumbed down considerably in my estimation. The show’s predominantly male, Ivy League alum writing staff admit as such in several episode commentaries, noting that they rarely provided her with friends, struggled with ideas for a character so doggedly sensible, and sometimes relied upon female personnel to give her character development and narrative action (ex: season seven’s “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield” was written by Jennifer Crittenden).

But the family’s spiky-haired middle child prodigy was always the show’s center for me growing up. What’s more, Lisa episodes were penned by male writers and rank among the best of the series for me, though they tend to focus more on her relationship with Homer than with Marge. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein’s “Lisa Vs. Malibu Stacy” is my absolute favorite, but it’s in rich company with Jon Vitti’s “Lisa’s Substitute,” Dan Greaney’s “Summer of 4 Ft. 2,” Mike Scully’s “Lisa’s Rival,” Greg Daniels’s Emmy-winning “Lisa’s Wedding,” and David S. Cohen’s “Lisa the Vegetarian” (note: Oakley and Weinstein were show runners from seasons 7 and 8 and were replaced by Scully for 9-12 to develop the animated series Mission Hill; Greg Daniels went on to co-create King of the Hill and adapted the American version of The Office). So you’ll excuse me if I get snotty and say that Lisa has no business lip-syncing Ke$ha’s butt-stupid “Tik Tok.”

Much of why these episodes work so brilliantly, apart from the writing, is to do with the animators and animation directors working in accord with voice actress Yeardley Smith, whose distinct performance captures so much nuance around the heartache, loneliness, and ironic detachment that often comes from being the kid sister of a popular kid and is too smart for her surroundings. As creator Matt Groening often points out, Lisa is the only character he envisioned leaving Springfield. He and many other show personnel counter this by claiming her as the show’s tragic character whose ideas and actions are often thwarted or go unnoticed. Several smart girls can relate.

However, while I have noticed a slight lapse in Lisa’s all-too-precious perspicacity as the series has gone on, I recognize that she’s still a smart girl committed to change. To echo Jonathan Gray’s claims in Watching The Simpsons, Lisa remains the longest-running feminist character on television.

One thing I especially like about Lisa is her interest in music. Assuredly, she’s motivated in many other areas, including environmentalism, writing, and film-making, among others. But I always delighted in seeing Lisa strut out of Mr. Largo’s band practice while belting out a saxophone riff, as the director clearly doesn’t know what to do with free-thinking talent who have exceeded his teaching abilities. She has also used her musical aptitude toward political change, rallying her father Homer and his co-workers with her acoustic guitar and an impassioned protest anthem when they staged a strike at the power plant for better health benefits.

Having recently watched season nine’s “Lisa’s Sax” (written by past and current show runner Al Jean), I was touched while relearning the origins of how Lisa came to the jazzy woodwind instrument. Unable to afford admission into a ritzy private day care for their accelerated toddler, Marge wracks her brain for a way to encourage her daughter. Homer ends up forking over money he was saving for a new air conditioner when a chance visit to a music store presents Lisa with her artistic calling. I think it was a wise investment.

May