Besties Michele Weinberger and Romy White; image courtesy of infoplease.com
Tonight’s post is in honor of girlfriends. Here’s to the ladies who are supportive, give us perspective, and make us laugh. I intend to have some quality time with one of my close ladyfriends this weekend. Kristen and I are gonna boycott New Moon and catch a matinee showing of Precious instead.
So, when we think about Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” in conjunction with Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the daffy blonde buddy comedy starring actresses who went to Harvard and Vassar, most people are probably imagining this scene.
Admittedly I find this scene, wherein the nerdy millionaire Sandy Frink (played by Alan Cumming) finally gets his high school crush Michele Weinberger (played by Lisa Kudrow) to dance with him at their ten-year reunion, to be silly and charming. And I also appreciate that Michelle won’t dance without her BFF and roomie Romy White (played by Mira Sorvino). But there’s a bit of heterosexual recouperation in this configuration. While the boy has to share the girl with another girl, he still gets the girl. If only Janeane Garofalo’s outcast Heather Mooney got to dance with them instead. She’s clearly my favorite character.
Man, I never thought I’d argue that a romantic assemblage that involved Alan Cumming resulted in heterosexual recouperation. The proudly bisexual actor seems to delight in queering everything around him. I am usually delighted as well.
Alan Cumming's cologne -- pun intended; image courtesy of mirror.co.uk
But I’m referring to this scene.
Apart from the obvious, at-times hilarious age disparity between the thirtysomething actors and the teenaged versions of their characters, I find this scene to be really sweet and moving. For me it captures how hard it is to be the weird girl and how sometimes having a like-minded ally is as essential as air or water. Also, I think it’s hella queer, even if lesbianism is something the girls claim to have ruled out (at least if they’re still single at 30). To review.
1. Rather than match their corsages with some dudes’ cumberbands, they chose to go as each other’s dates and have coordinated their outfits accordingly. In doing so, they are announcing themselves as a pair instead of as two high school girls who couldn’t get boys to take them to the prom.
2. Just as they served as each other’s date, I have no reason to believe that they didn’t make the outfits themselves. It is well-established that Romy and Michele make their own clothes, eventually opening their own boutique at the end of the movie (with, ugh, Sandy’s money).
3. Romy and Michelle are both dressed as Madonna. Romy is representing the Material Girl’s be-Gaultier‘ed Blonde Ambition period and Michelle staying true to her early Boy Toy heyday. Each girl is an individual, but complements the other.
4. By aligning themselves with the Material Girl, they are connecting themselves to girl fandom and gay iconography.
5. By dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” they link up with another 80s pop star with a memorable look, a notable girl fan base, and a big LGBTQI following.
6. And by accepting Michelle’s offer to dance after being stood up by her lunkhead crush Billy Christiansen, I think it’s pretty clear who Romy really loves.
I finally got around to rewatching Linda Linda Linda last week, a Japanese movie released in 2005 I saw for the first time last summer after several people told me “you gotta check it out, you’ll love it, it’s totally your kind of movie.” And it really is. In fact, it might be your kind of movie too (especially if you’re my friend Caitlin, and I’ve been meaning to watch this movie with you for over a year). A touching, feel-good movie about a group of teenage girls putting a band together for a school festival? It’s pretty much a crowd-pleaser, especially for feminist music geeks who like movies.
The plot is as follows: guitarist Kei Tachibana (Yuu Kashii), drummer Kyoko Yamada (Aki Maeda), and bassist Nozomi Shirakawa (Shiori Sekine of Base Ball Bear) have a band and are playing Hiiragi-sai, their school’s annual festival. They’ve got a great set list of covers from The Blue Hearts, a popular Japanese rock band. Problem is, their singer-guitarist has quit the band, leaving them down a frontwoman days before their gig. They need a replacement and are adamant about it being a girl. They decide on Son (Bae Doona), a shy exchange student from South Korea whose Japanese is shaky and has never sung in front of an audience before. They rise to the occasion, with a little bit of struggle and growing along the way. Might sound like familiar territory, but it’s totally delightful.
One thing I really enjoy about this movie is how rehearsal is central to the girls’ interactions. For one, the time and effort they spend in practive, is critical in any band learning how to play together and key to their homosocial interactions. While some movies might document a band’s progression in one “rockin’” montage, this movie devotes several scenes to the band’s improvement, as well as the frustrations and tensions that result from feeling like they’re not getting their sound right. In their first rehearsal, they muddle their way through The Blue Heart’s hit “Linda Linda,” only to giggle at how horrible it was before trying again. Later, we find the girls forced to practice quietly at Kei’s ex-boyfriend’s studio space well into the night.
I also enjoy their commitment to the band. While the girls do have ex-boyfriends and crushes, they choose to balance boys with other issues their band usually comes first. In a key scene, Son is asked out by a male classmate named Mackey at school. The rest of the girls look through the window of an abandoned classroom, watching their lead singer choose the band, and her friends, over some guy who happens to like her but that she doesn’t know.
Sometimes the band wears on the girls, and the movie reaches a climax when the girls have worked so hard that they collapse after an all-night practice that makes them late to their gig. Their ambitions sometimes eclipse reality, as is clearly evident with Kei dreams about opening for The Ramones while sleeping through much of the festival. Yet, their drive still gets them to the gig, with their talent ultimately ensuring a rousing success at the festival and the promise of this new band.
Kei Tachibana, future seasoned professional; image courtesy of cinemastrikesback.com
I do find the girls’ fandom of The Blue Hearts, whose songs they cover, to be quite interesting. For one, girls identifying with a fast, hard-rocking all-male rock band, while at no time talking about how cute certain members are, seems to suggest a wider range of possibilities for who can influence a girl. The band even goes so far as to call themselves Paran Maum, which is “blue hearts” in Korean (an indication of Son’s importance to the band). There’s a lot of talk on this blog about the importance of women and girls influencing one another in popular music. However, we shouldn’t short shrift what it means for girls finding their sound and voice through boys and men or ignore the progressive and possibly queer potential in girls identifying with boys. Like Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, and Sleater-Kinney before them, these girls don’t plug in and rock out to be with the band — they are the band and want to thrash just as hard as the boys.
Nozomi, Kyoko, and Kei help Son learn The Blue Hearts; image courtesy of cinemastrikesback.com
And, of course, we cannot ignore the obvious queerness of an all-girl band who work closely together to perform a song clearly written for a girl from a boy and maintaining the boy’s words and intent. It’s where the movie gets its name and the band gets its purpose, after all.
As there are queer dimensions to the girls’ fandom, they also have an interesting relationship with fashion, ethnic identity, and music history, perhaps in some ways analogous to Mitsuko’s relationship to Elvis Presley and rockabilly fashion in Mystery Train. Kyoko rocks a Joan Jett-style mullet and weave punk fashion into their school wardrobe. She also shorten the length of her skirts, sport funky sneakers, and plays with accessories. Son and Nozomi opt out of fashion-plate status, feeling more comfortable in frumpy attire, while Kei prefers a more athletic, clean-cut look. In short, while they’re all required to abide by standardized dress, like many girls, they figure out a way to create and play with looks that better reflect their personality, and some are clearly influenced by rock music in constructing their identity.
Just as Paran Maum are influenced by The Blue Hearts, The Blue Hearts are clearly influenced by The Ramones. I don’t want to suggest that the Japanese cherrypick through relics and artifacts of bygone western pop culture because they are uniformly obsessed with American culture. For one, The Blue Hearts were active and popular in Japan during the late 80s and early 90s, in large part because they were heavily informed by classic British and American punk.
For another, The Ramones themselves had a similar relationship with their own American past, turning to surf rock and girl groups from the 50s and 60s. For them, while most 70s rock bands were trying to set a record for the longest organ solo, rock music needed the return of the three-minute pop song.
In addition, it’s worth pointing out that the movie itself has an interesting relationship with Japanese and American music culture via the presence of former Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha, who is Japanese American and composed the movie’s instrumental tracks.
As this movie depicts a band’s need to improvise, make quick decisions, and embrace makeshift situations, encouraging girls to be independent thinkers, so to does it showcase ingenuity. A tremendous example of this for me is Son’s ability to find surprising rehearsal spaces like empty karaoke rooms in order to become more comfortable with her voice and the microphone. In a lesser movie, Son’s scene in the karaoke bar would come off as oppressively quirky. Here, I find it touching. We see a girl negotiating with a male employee over the room and witness her becoming increasingly comfortable, if not still a bit awkward, with her voice, an unfamiliar language, and a developing stage presence. That she’s doing it on her own, in a space she’s found for herself, seems as good an example as any of how girls have to be creative and free-thinking for the assurance of their own maturity.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen too many Japanese movies and have nothing more than a cursory, Criterion-approved understanding of Asian cinema, along with its influence and heterogenity. One thing that struck me is how much like a Wes Anderson movie Linda Linda Linda felt in terms of its reliance on long tracking shots, wide angles, deadpan humor, panoramic framing, and meditative pacing. That said, I hasten to add that Anderson has stated an indebtedness to the French New Wave and American directors like Hal Ashby, I’m assuming Japanese filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu left an impression as well. Having never seen an Ozu movie at the writing of this post (though I do have Good Morning at home), I can’t help but wonder if Linda Linda Linda is actually continuing its nation’s film tradition and that the only folks who’d argue an Andersonian influence are just Western viewers with a shallow scene of cinephilia.
I’m also not entirely clear about the nature of Japanese schools. I came through an underfunded, less-than-superlative Texas public school system. Thus, Paran Maum’s school seems like a tony liberal arts magnate where teenagers are given considerable support and resources for their artistic inclinations, thus implying that the students come from respectable middle- to upper-middle-class families. But I’m not sure if this high school is exceptional in Japan or an indication of the country’s to education and their status as an economic superpower. So while I initially feel the need to mention the classed dimensions of privilege that allow the girls the fine arts education and leisure time to form a band (instead of, say, take jobs or quit school to support their families), I don’t want to suggest that what I see as an American viewer is in accord with Japan’s classed realities.
That said, despite my unfamiliarity with Japanese culture and my clearly raced position as an American white woman, I felt the band’s ambition and spunk tremendously inspiring and universal for anyone wants to see girls tear it up. I rooted for them through their hard times and had a smile on my face when they plugged in and finally let it rip.
Like Kei, I'm really glad Son is in the band; image courtesy of bateszi.animeuknews.net
Literally just got back from a sneak preview of Fox Searchlight’s new potential sleeper Whip It! Gotta say, I really enjoyed it. Good job, director-lady Drew Barrymore. Good job, cast of rad ladies. If you follow this blog and like what you read, I think you should see it. Let’s watch that trailer one more time.
I’ll admit that certain things are problematic, like the “hey, we’re at Waterloo! Hey, we’re watching The Jerk at the Drafthouse,” feel of certain scenes. And there’s certain a potential argument to be formed out of how white roller derby appears to be, based on the movie (Eve is the only woman of color I saw represented, playing Rosa Sparks, a member of the Hurl Scouts). Also, Hurl Scout teen rookie and protagonist Bliss Cavender has a coming-of-age romance with an indie rocker named Oliver that, while it ends up being far-from-idealized, is unnecessary to me. Finally, I think the movie gets a little too plot-heavy at the end — I really don’t mind a movie that focuses more on character development instead of pushing action forward. Though most of the movie was shot in Michigan, it takes place in and around Austin. We keep it relaxed here, and I feel like the movie really flies when it keeps story structure loose.
That said, I found it to be a delightful, feel-good movie with a great feminist message: be your own hero. So let’s run through why I think you should see it when it comes out later this month.
1. Ellen Page brings it as Bliss. I still don’t know if it’ll catapult her to mega-stardom, but these sorts of roles fit her like a worn-in pair of jeans.
"Oh, I got this part down"; image courtesy of aceshowbiz.com
2. Alia Shawkat plays Bliss’s bestie Pash. She a) is totally awesome and funny, b) should be in more things, c) rocks a hot vuluptuous body, and d) should be my friend.
BFFs Pash and Bliss; image courtesy of aceshowbiz.com
3. Ellen and Alia are totally convincing as friends, both on- and off-screen.
4. To that end, all of the female homosocial relationships are interesting — especially the intergenerational ones Bliss forms with mentor Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), nemesis Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis), and her beauty pageant enthusiast mother, Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden). Most of the characters, almost all of whom are female, are thoughtful and well-developed.
Juliette Lewis's Iron Maven and Bliss Cavender's Babe Ruthless don't meet cute, but in the end make friends; image courtesy of trailertracker.wordpress.com
5. Some good dude allies, particularly coach Razor (Andrew Wilson) and proud papa Earl Cavender (Daniel Stern).
6. Interesting class touches as well. Bliss is decidely lower-middle class. Her mother works as a mail courier. Bliss’s team-mates seem to suggest similar class backgrounds. Wiig’s Mayhem is a single mom. Kick-ass stunt woman extraordinaire Zoë Bell, who plays former Olympic figure skating contender Bloody Holly appears in scrubs, suggesting that she is either a nurse or a med student. And Drew Barrymore’s Smashley Simpson plays Austin’s most popular Whole Foods bagger.
7. Neat little feminist music geek touches abound. Note that Bliss gets Oliver to start talking to her by escaping a house party scene to play an album in an empty room upstairs. Giggle at the scene when Bliss and Pash dance together at their part-time job at a local greasy spoon, reconfiguring the words to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” to be about the sad failure that is their hometown of (fictitious) Bodeen. Show your Texas pride by clapping along to Bliss and Oliver’s a cappela version of “Deep In the Heart of Texas” (we did at our screening). And beam at the realization that Bliss’s beloved Stryper t-shirt comes from her mother’s closet.
8. Girl-on-girl dancing and, I believe, implied girl-on-girl romance between Rosa Sparks and Ari Graynor’s Eva Destruction. When they shoo derby emcee “Hot Tub” Johnny (Jimmy Fallon) away from the jacuzzi at a house party after a meet, I think it’s just as much because they’re into each other as they aren’t into him.
9. Girls fall down and get bruised and get right back up. Sometimes someone helps them. Sometimes they help themselves. But they never stay down, even if they don’t have their next move plotted out yet. Always a good lesson, one that I hope will inspire many ladies to join a derby league or start playing some other sport. Fuck, now I wanna strap on some skates myself.
Someone To Drive You Home cover, Rough Trade 2006/2007; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
Two areas I don’t recall covering in the blog so far are 1) bands whose songs focus on cinephilia and 2) female musicians who use their visual arts training in the service of their bands. Today, we can focus on both by considering The Long Blondes’ debut full-length Someone To Drive You Home and lead singer Kate Jackson’s artwork for said album.
So I’m new to this band, who I guess are no longer a band. That’s a bummer, but at least I’ve had fun pumping this album at full volume in my car this past week as the skies became increasingly overcast. And singing at full volume. As my friend Brea mentioned in her entry about records that made her a feminist, it’s important for women and girls to find singers whose vocal ranges match their own. It’s really true. Perhaps we could think of it as double-identification — being able to relate to a female singer’s persona as conveyed through her lyrics, performance style, fashion sense or whatever on one level and being able to replicate, mirror, or blend her tone, pitch, and timbre with your own. However we want to theorize it, I’m glad that my notes can work with Jackson’s strong, supple alto.
Matching a singer’s range also makes shouting easier. I love Animal Collective, but screaming along to Avey Tare doesn’t make any sense for me. We can try and make it queer or whatever, but it really just feels silly and strained to my throat and ears. Screaming “Edie Sedgwick! Anna Karina! Arlene Dahl!” along with Jackson, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.
Edie Sedgwick; image courtesy of fashionista.com
The opening track, appropriately titled “Lust In the Movies,” is a good transition into the defunct band’s cinephilic leanings. Indeed, the movies are everywhere. Specifically movies from the post-war era, a considerable amount of them of the film noir tradition or have some kind of sinister edge, while others are campy b-movies that have since cashed in on retro chic.
Imagined film snob boys corrupt willing schoolgirls with Russ Meyer films in “Fulwood Babylon.” Girls want to be cool enough for the movies that play in film snob boys’ heads in “Lust in the Movies.” A boy and a girl compare themselves to C.C. Baxter, The Apartment‘s love-lorn protagonist in “You Could Have Both.” Obscure references to British celebrities of the 1940s and 1950s like Hattie Jacques and Peter Rogers thread through break-up narratives like “Five Ways to End It.” Greta Garbo is looked upon with envy (and irony?) as the woman who snagged all the handsome men in “Never to Be Repeated.” “Only Lovers Left Alive” is inspired by Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, a romantic sentiment perhaps echoed in Jackson’s sleeve art, which references Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s frenzied lovers in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
As many of these movies are classic Hollywood, iconographic art house, and/or have the Criterion stamp of approval, we might call them films instead of movies, if the writer of this blog held fast to making such a distinction.
Now, we could get into a discussion of what this means in terms of preference and why more clearly feminist classics don’t get shout-outs like, say, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Maybe they haven’t seen these movies. Maybe they thought the last movie I mentioned was boring (the 200-minute running time has kept me from seeing it, though it is in my Netflix queue). However, I’d hazard to guess that the Russ Meyer reference in “Fulwood Babylon” might be done with a bit of feminist cheek, and while I have trouble reading the nuances of intentional camp in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I’m sure my friend Curran would smile and nod in recognition of the reference.
And yet. I find how film references are used in these songs to be particularly interesting. For one, I think especially in “Lust in the Movies” and “Fulwood Babylon,” a critique is being made by Kate (and her chorus of singing fans) against the sorts of boys who live in movies (perhaps including Dorian Cox, a former Long Blonde who co-wrote the majority of the album with Jackson). These boys are too busy looking for Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina, and Arlene Dahl to notice the real woman in front of them. Fools.
For another, I find the blurring between fantasy and reality, the projected and the lived, the fantastical and the mundane heartening and relateable. Many of these songs are not actually about being in the movies, but wishing you could be or pretending you are to get over a failed relationship, get through your boring day job, get ready for a night out, get in the car to leave town, or simply get through your 20s.
There’s some humanity in these songs, particularly between women and girls. Two lonely girls flee their humdrum lives together in “Separated By Motorways.” A spurned lover hopes her ex’s new love fares better than she did after the break-up in “Heaven Help the New Girl.” A twentysomething tells a 19-year-old girl that she doesn’t need to resort to mutilation to get through that stupid, cursed age in “Once and Never Again,” a solidarity anthem so catchy that I just requested it be added to the Karaoke Underground song list.
And while the movies being referenced aren’t explicitly feminist (or argued and/or championed as such by theoretically florid film scholars), I’d argue that there’s much going on with the female movie icons that Jackson’s and her songs’ protagonists (which may be iterations of herself) identify. Having brought up Sedgwick, Karina, Dahl, Garbo, this is where I’ll fold in Jackson’s spare, mysterious cover. The woman in the cover is recognizable to many as Bonnie Parker, as played by Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a divisive and galvanizing movie that marked a sea change in American cinema, upped the ante for screen violence, reflected the shift in generational values, presupposed the turbulent year that would be 1968, and made thousands of women cut and straighten their hair into sleek bobs by Dunaway’s influence. It might have made them want to tote guns, fire bullets, and rob banks too. In short, this was seen as a dangerous film that still holds some influence as a countercultural text that appeals to men and women.
Some of those women may still be shuffling through their 20s, figuring it out. They might not be compelled to rob a bank, but they might be tempted to quit their job, or at least bitch about work at the local bar. Hopefully they won’t bitch about each other as much, as this cattiness is evident on the album and something I’d like us to rise above. But there’s something nice about being reassured that someone, whether a movie character or a friend, will be there to drive you home. Even if your car is riddled with bullet holes.
Daria thinks this is all so typical; image courtesy of doree.tumblr.com
So, Daria is coming out on DVD next year. This is very exciting news. My only hope is that it comes out on my birthday, like The State did this year. Is it weird that I’m stoked about the future sick day that will enable marathon viewing? I’m also excited at the prospects of having friends over to watch it. I might even have to dress up as Ms. Morgendorffer for Halloween. Yes, I’m that excited.
Daria came into my life thanks to Beavis and Butthead (the one show my mother wouldn’t let me watch so I had to follow it obsessively). She was the bored, rebellious girl who hung out with them when she needed amusement. But I really fell in love with her when she got her own whip-smart show in 1997, created by Beavis alum Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn. In it, our titular heroine plotted schemes with like-minded best friend Jane Lane, clashed with her popular sister Quinn, and rebelled feminist-style against the high school machine. Often, Daria and Jane would work together, thus exhibiting that girls could have subversive, productive, supportive homosocial friendships. Daria also clashed with a hip female magazine editor who is clearly modeled after Jane Pratt. I’ll have to watch that one again too.
Jane and Daria, having none of it; image courtesy of listal.com
Kathy M. Newman reminded me why I loved this show when I read her essay in Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culturewhile chilling in the Nasher Sculpture Center garden this weekend. Newman brings up Daria’s primarily harmonious relationship with Jane, which I wonder if it is queerable upon reviewing. I also like her discussion about how the show uses irony in a myriad of ways — it employed a movement-based form like animation to convey suburban high school stasis, it used animation to create a rare girl character who was often desexualized, it suggested nihilism in a teenage character who was actually quite politically motivated and proactive, and it showcased socially marginalized characters who were often empowered and more interesting than their more popular counterparts. It even suggested that characters could grow, mature, or deviate in ways that belied its flat, outlined visual style. Witness moments when Quinn wanted to be more than just pretty and popular. Or any closing credit sequence, when the characters were usually configured in tableaux that often referenced figures and/or moments in popular culture that seemingly had little in common with the characters in those poses.
In addition, I wonder how popular music and sound will play in all of this. How will my theory-head process the diegetic use of pop songs written and performed by real people being listened to and commented on by un-real characters? Hmmm.
To ramp up excitement, let’s revisit “You’re Standing On My Neck” by Splendora, the show’s theme song. Unfortunately, I cannot find the original opening credit sequence. Until the DVDs become available, enjoy this fan-made montage that features the original song in its entirety plus several closing credit tableaux.
It’s Mother’s Day weekend and to celebrate, I thought today I’d write up a tribute to some awesome women who balance and blend the dual identities of musician and mother in their own ways.
First up, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott.
Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, sharing the spotlight
So much to love about these two. They’re smart, talented, politically conscious, unconventionally beautiful, and have earned plenty of mainstream recognition but choose to stay on the fringe of popular culture.
Also, they’re autonomous women who have opted out of a conventional family unit. Both are unmarried. Badu had son Seven and daughters Puma and Mars from her relationships with André 3000 of OutKast, The D.O.C., and Jay Electronica, respectively. Scott is divorced and welcomed the birth of her first child, Jett, with her boyfriend, Lil John Roberts, last year at the age of 36.
And finally, I love that they’re friends, came up from the Philly “neo-soul” circuit together, and often perform together (as evidenced from the photo above; see also their stirring performance of “You Got Me” on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party). I like to imagine that they hang out together a lot, helping each other write, sing, or think through the struggles and joys of daily life.
Next up, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.
The Gordon-Moores, rocking out on "The Gilmore Girls"
After being married to bandmate Thurston Moore for about ten years, Gordon (who kept her name, thank you) gave birth to Coco Hayley Gordon Moore in 1994, thus bringing presumably one of the coolest girls into the world as a result. I like to imagine that Coco was schooling her classmates about Merzbow by the sixth grade. Also, a friend of mine’s sister used to babysit Coco, and says that she is a really nice, well-adjusted kid. Yay!
I like that Kim had Coco — an only child — on her own time and later in life. It probably reminds me of my mom, who had me (and only me) at 36. Plus, Gordon and Moore performed a song with Coco on The Gilmore Girls. How cool is that?
Speaking of cool moms, what about M.I.A., who welcomed her first son Ikhyd into the world with fiancé Benjamin Brewer earlier this year?
M.I.A. at the Grammys, days before giving birth; image courtesy of fashion.mirror.co.uk
Unfortunately, I can’t find a hi-res version of the Grammy performance of T.I.’s “Swagga Like Us”, but I really love it. I love that M.I.A., whose song “Paper Planes” is sampled and provides the song title, opens the performance. I love that she interacts with the other rappers, who seem to be treating her as an equal. I love that the men she shares the stage with, all of whom are African American and thus stigmatized by the racist, sexist stereotype of the wayward, absentee black father, seem to be excited and happy for her. I love that she’s ready-to-burst pregnant in public and is wearing a tight, short, see-through black and white dress, thus confronting and subverting the conception of the sexless matriarch (in fact, she got a lot of flak for the dress; some people dubbed it “slutty” and “trashy”). I also love that she paired the ensemble with sneakers, because pregnant ladies gotta be comfortable. And most of all, I love that we haven’t seen much of baby Ikhyd since he came into the world, suggesting that the family wants their son to grow up a person and not a tabloid ficture.
Another low-key mom is Yoshimi Yokota, legendary drummer of Boredoms and singer/guitarist of OOIOO.
Yoshimi and OOIOO, debating whether or not to spare the rod
Like Gordon, she’s got one daughter, and seems to be pleased with that. But like M.I.A., she’s not forthcoming about her personal life, particularly the family she’s creating for herself. And finally, I love that unlike what we may expect from mom musicians, Yoshimi doesn’t think her entrance into motherhood has changed her music.
And finally, the mother of all cool musician moms, Björk.
Quality time with Björk and son Sindri; image captured from art-gallery.com
So, Björk is interesting for many reasons. Like Badu, she had two children with two different partners (son Sindri with former Sugarcubes bandmate Þór Eldon; daughter Ísadóra with artist Matthew Barney). There’s also an unsual age difference between her children. Sindri was born in 1986, when Björk was 21. Ísadóra was born sixteen years later in 2002. And, despite her diminuitive figure and elfin looks, Björk is fiercely protective of her children and their privacy (anyone remember when Björk went off and beat up a journalist who waved a microphone in Sindri’s face at the airport?). Don’t fuck with mom.
But these moms are just a few examples. Who are your favorite musician moms?
