The New Riot Grrrl
This Sunday The Cedar welcomes tUnE-yArDs, a.k.a. Merrill Garbus, back for what I believe is her first headlining gig in the Twin Cities (please correct me if I am wrong).
This will be the third time I've gotten to see Garbus perform, as she has previously opened for Dirty Projectors here at The Cedar back in 2009 and opened for Xiu Xiu at The Entry in April 2010.
It could not please me more for Ms. Garbus to have just released a new record, to be back at The Cedar this week, and to be generating such great discussion about feminism in rock music.
A recent post to NPR's The Record by Ann Powers discusses the Complexity of Pop and cites Garbus (as well as Beyonce, Lady Gaga) as examples of women making noise in the pop genre. They are heralded for incorporating hip-hop, dance, and electronica into more tradtional pop song structures. While Powers recognizes that this is not a new trend, as The Talking Heads have had great success with the same technique, she does suggest that Garbus is accomplishing something that her pop star siblings have not. She is able to make music that is equal parts vocal and instrumental sound. She is not afraid to mask her voice with other sounds - which seems impossible given the power of her voice.
Another mention of tUnE-yArDs comes in the 13th edition of Why We Fight by Nitsuh Abebe on the Pitchfork site which pays tribute to feminist rock reviewer Ellen Willis. I will admit that I was unaware of Willis until reading this piece, but I am proud to say that my Alma mater's press has published a collection of her work, and it will surely jump to the top of my reading list.
The article uses Willis to dicuss the "problem" of modern music losing meaning or quality - for more on this see Veronica Fever's post from yesterday.
Abebe posits that what is happening is a shift in the artist intention and audience expectation, from preaching a certain idea to inspiring a ceratin feeling. Artists are no longer inciting their audiences to thwart the mainstream in a literal way but instead are trying to establish community through shared energy. One example she uses is Animal Collective; a group that has a vast and dedicated following and creates dreamy, spacey jams populated with yelps, rather than political anthems.
Tangent: In some ways I think Abebe's argument extends beyond music to the hipster culture. Whereas subcultres of years past were united by causes (such as hippies or punks) the hipsters are without a unified cause. But it's possible that, like this trend Abebe is witnessing in music, hipsters "carry their context with them" and are united by a desire for a certain energy or feeling rather than a more literal cause.
If this is true, what place does riot grrl have in hipster culture? Is what Garbus is doing segmenting hipster culture? For whether intentional or not, her music certainly carries a feminist sentiment, as well as one of individualism.
One of the records Abebe singles out as a successful example of inspiring feeling rather than action this, is tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l which came out last month on 4AD. Inspired by Bjork and Colin Stetson, Garbus' yowls and chirps, her raw and primal delivery is loud and hard to ignore. She is self-aware and gains a certain amount of power and respect from that as well.
But Garbus is modest. She attributes her looping abilities to her time spent doing puppetry, and though she draws on African culture (she spent time in Kenya) her interviews almost make her sound guilty about this borowing, as she doesn't feel as though she is yet in a position to give anything back.
when a girl feels so alone
what a tease to throw a bone
should've just stayed at home
when a girl feels so alone
why'd you think I'd put out your fire?
why'd you think I'd put out your fire?
don't you know I breathe in fire?
breathe out fire?
what if my own skin makes my skin crawl?
what if my own flesh is suburban sprawl?
what happened between us makes sense if I'm nothing
if I'm nothing at all
These might not be the lyrics you would expect from a face of femnist rock, but that's just it. Nothing about tUnE-yArDs is predictable.
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I'm not the only one super psyched about powerful women in music right now. Last month the Utne Reader filled their whole music sampler with just that. Readers of this blog might recognise artists like Dengue Fever, The Unthanks, and Those Darlins. The April edition is no longer available, but they do a pretty incredible job of collecting tracks every month. The May edition is available for download here.
tUnE-yArDs
In and around 2007 Merrill Garbus creates tUnE-YaRdS. She thinks the exasperating capitalization will buy her some time.
“Merrill! Can you hear the songs?
“Listen! as though listening were humanity’s life-buoy.
“Recycle! as a noble form of thievery.
“Do-it-yourself! because it makes you feel good.
“Mutate!”
tune-yards came from parents who sewed their lives together with music, and at age seven she proceeded to hum her way through days. She hummed her way through the family record collection: old timey fiddling, Revolver, Django. She hummed her way through mid-‘80’s pop radio and an obsession with Christmas music. She hummed her way through folk music camp, through Smith College and a theater degree, through anarchist puppet training, through brazen, all-women a cappella singing, through heat rash in Kenya, through deeply scrutinized puppet performances in Europe, through her lonely, swirling 20’s. The hum slowly became a yell.
