The clip below was sent to me by a friend and it is simply too awesome not to share.
I love these kinds of Internet mash-ups (like Gwen Verdon’s performance of Bob Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast” routine rescored by Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and Unk’s “Walk It Out” — for further inquiry, check out Priscilla Peña Ovalle’s Flow column). I especially love bringing Miss Piggy and Peaches, two very unruly females, together.
So, my partner just turned 28, escaping music’s cursed age. In honor of it, I think some party-down videos are in order.
Peaches
“More”
I Feel Cream
Directed by Frederic D
CSS
“Alala”
(self-titled)
Directed by Cat Solen
It’s pretty easy to objectify and make normative lesbian sex (for more on the subject, I recommend Ann Ciasullo’s essay “Making her (in)visible: Cultural representations of lesbianism and the lesbian body in the 1990s” as a starting point). Music videos, which already have a bad rap for objectifying female bodies for a (presumably) male audience, are no exception. But what happens when the musician is having sex with herself. And not just masturbating, but going to town on her twin?
First up, we’ve got Björk.
And, more recently, P!nk.
I for one think this is awesome — simultaneously an assertion of the self, the self’s sexual desires, and the self’s fragmentability. Also, this assertion is channeled through queerable female bodies (Björk as cyborg; P!nk as a model of “butch feminine”). An assertion from famous, marketable pop stars, no less.
In her rad book Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference Lisa A. Lewis (drawing from Angela McRobbie’s seminal essay “Settling Accounts With Subcultures: A Feminist Critique”) recognizes that the street as a cultural space traditionally off limits for women and girls, both in subcultural practices and music video representations, as rape, harassment, and objectification could befall them. McRobbie argues that these gendered standards of space are formed out of a broader system of social inequality, which Lewis believes is resisted through “female-address” music videos, or music videos that feature female artists in a subject position, which can reconfigure the normativity of male privilege through appropriation of the street with female subjects interacting with it.
So, tonight I’m going to post two new(ish) music videos that show ladies and girls engaging with the street. Enjoy!
Yo! Majesty
“Don’t Let Go”
Futuristically Speaking . . . Never Be Afraid
Note: NSFW, but worth watching at your desk if you’re chained to a cubicle.
Wye Oak
“Please Concrete”
If Children
Directed by Caleb Stine and Eric Diga
If you don't get why I love this artist's work, we cannot be cool
So, my partner, Chi Chi, is reading 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You by Tony Wilson, the recently deceased yet immortal Mancunian television personality and, more importantly, one-time proprietor of Factory Records. Cheech keeps relaying to me humorous anecdotes and anarchic folk tales, reminding me why Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Party People is one of my favorite movies. The movie’s subject was post-modern before music biopics were post-modern.
However, there are two things I’ll point out as unfortunate about the movie that documents Tony Wilson’s life (in which he is but a minor character) and they both involve the absence of women.
1) Where is ESG? They were a New York-based punk-funk sister-act that Martin Hannett (the label’s go-to producer) helped commit to record and who opened the The Haçienda, Factory’s night club, the womb of Madchester. But more later. I have a feeling we’ll be talking more about them in subsequent blog entries.
2) More importantly, where is Linder Sterling, a Mancunian art student and leader of overlooked post-punk band, Ludus? She was circulating in the scene in the late 1970s, around the same time that Factory was signing A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, and a little band called Joy Division (they don’t need a link, do they . . . oh, okay).
Hmm. Maybe her absence from the movie has something to do with how she proclivity to wear black dildos and raw meat in Ludus’s performances (despite being a vegetarian — the lengths some will go to for art!). Missed opportunity, Winterbottom and company. This imagery sounds like cinematic gold to me. (Note: For more on this, I recommend reading Lucy O’Brien’s chapter “The Woman Punk Made Me” in Punk Rock: So What?)
Anyway, Linder was there too, I swear. She got her start at Manchester Polytechnic, piecing together collages out of magazines, suturing pornographic images, sports, shiny cars, and even shinier appliances into something thoroughly punk and thoroughly British. Something like this.
The only proper way to watch polo
However, she got her start putting this little bit of business together for the Buzzcocks. Observe the cover she made for their single Orgasm Addict. Maybe you’ve seen it before.
Slippery female bodies and irons, together at last
Anyway, she’s awesome. In addition to music and art, she dabbled in making accessories. She’d fashion earrings out of coat-hanger wire and lint, dipping them in glue and red paint so that they’d resemble used tampons. Appropriately, she called these pieces “menstrual jewelry.”
And even though she’s become a part of history, as all of punk has, she’s still vital and working today. She’s welcome to any hypothetical dinner party I throw, as long as she throws a tampon into the (veggie) shepherd’s pie.
