The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (7 page)

Part of what made Boucher’s work so exciting this year was her zealous courtship of the zeitgeist, the irreverence of her ambition, that her cultural reference points were young and female. She’s an autodidactic indie artist who pinpoints the unnatural qualities of Mariah Carey’s voice as her greatest influence. Subversion of manga imagery and lost-in-the-mix, baby-voiced cooing are far from the riot-grrrl-influenced rage that we commonly use to verify feminist artistry.

Boucher’s merchandising of “pussy rings” was overtly feminist, though some still wrote it off as a ploy for attention. Boucher had the temerity to manufacture merch that wasn’t a T-shirt—a feminist rebuttal to the cock-’n’-balls scrawled on every dressing room wall. How is a plastic rendering of a vulva so utterly
escandalo
in the Internet age of 2012? (The gender divide on the pussy-ring reporting is stark and telling of just how and who Grimes connects with.) While Boucher can be faulted for some things—is that a rain stick sample on “Know the Way?”—would she really be a more credible artist if she showed less ambition?

Swift, who is a little younger than Boucher and Del Rey, had a year of evolution for her image as well. On
Red
, Swift deflects power with a studied naiveté. Love is something that she falls victim to; men are fundamentally the bad actors. She’s amid an incredibly careful transition from pop’s Virgin Queen into young adulthood, so now it’s slightly less of a big deal to
imply
that she has had a boy sleepover in a song. Swift is nothing if not a cautious star, a multimillion-dollar industry unto herself—she is not going to pull a Miley in order to signal what a big girl she is now. Throughout
Red
, she is frequently seduced, victimized or unable to steel herself against her own desires, as if adult womanhood is a powerful undertow dragging her out to the sea. It’s a curious thing to watch such a powerful cultural force abdicate her own might, but it’s understood that claiming it comes with its own cross.

Swift’s mastery of her own feckless image is as finely-honed a piece of work as any of
Red
’s half-dozen singles; it engages many of the common expectations of girlhood, so much so that it presents us with an impossibly perfected persona. The controlled iterations of Swift are subject to constant remix due to her celebrity status, where her songs conflate with the tabloid fare of her life and create a larger, narrative work. Be they peer, cad or Kennedy, each new Swift boyfriend presents or disproves a song theorem of
Red
. In the latest widely circulated pap shot of Swift, she’s exiting a tropical isle alone via small craft. It reads as forlorn from a distance of a pixelated 30 yards and adds chiaroscuro to “Sad Beautiful Tragic.” Swift’s got a Joni problem now: The interest in whom she’s seeing and speculation over which song is about which dude now obfuscates the merits of her work (though it is hard to suggest any human force could blunt the thundering Max Martin’d chorus of “Trouble,” but alas).

To be galled by these women’s advances upon their audiences is to play the Pollyanna about how any product gets across the transom to us. In their manipulations and fluid manifestations of their images, they each show incredible deftness—a cultural prescience that speaks to their ambition and interest in being understood. All this girlish guile makes their art no less pure.

WE CAN’T STOP: OUR YEAR WITH MILEY

Village Voice
Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2014

Is there a scribe among us—save for
Wire
writers and those whose bylines eagerly accompanied reviews of that Larry Coryell reissue—who didn’t pull down at least $40 for Miley musings in 2013? Perhaps a shocked-and-awed news item, a post-VMAs reaction, a pondering of that preponderance of tongue? If not, I hate to break it to you, but you got ripped off. It was her year, whether we liked it or—well, yeah.

We wrote about Miley perhaps not so much because she fascinated but riled us with her every move. And to be sure, it was the moves—of her masturbatory fingers, nude body, her twerking, her waggling tongue, the way she used other women’s bodies and her own in videos and performances. Her actual album,
Bangerz
, was a tertiary concern at best.

It was a long year for pop aggrievement; exempting Bruno Mars’ five-week run at the top of the year, the No. 1 spot on
Billboard
in 2013 was occupied by white artists. While those Baauer, Macklemore, Robin Thicke, and Lorde hits got their share of controversy and think-piece lather, nothing disquieted us as thoroughly as Miley. She did a mere three weeks with “Wrecking Ball,” but spent the last half of the year as a lightning rod for our censure and outrage; we cut off her head and she just kept writhing, unchastened.

Writing about Miley is simple because she’s impossible to define and easy to vilify—whatever we want to billboard onto her sticks because all at once she is enrapturing, repulsive, hysterical, ignorant, white, young, female, ultra-rich, sexy, scary, skeezy, unafraid, feminist, an artist, not feminist, privileged, talented, sad, visceral, fake, real, too real, and friends with Terry Richardson. What
can’t
we say about her? Apparently nothing. Bad girls are infinite. Miley possesses us in a way that fully clothed Lorde never will.

Yet the sins of Miley were real. She made egregious missteps amid her attempts to telegraph her artistic primacy, appropriating black cultural idioms and playing on historically racist stereotypes. She claimed she doesn’t see or consider race, and of course she doesn’t have to
consider
race—she’s a very rich and successful white woman living in America. To ask her to see the scope of her privilege—to understand what it means to mean-mug and then push in her gleaming grill, to really get how a swipe of her tongue across Amazon Ashley’s ass could play to anyone but herself—is an act of futility. Miley’s defensive assertion that we were all prudes with a problem illustrated how wide the chasm between her actions and her awareness was. It made her naiveté seem willful, emblematic—it made her continual triumph downright enraging.

Then there’s the matter of the paucity of imagination in how Miley served herself to us in 2013, permanently lensed in the pornographic gaze. Every glance was a demand to imagine what it is to fuck her or to imagine ourselves as her, being consumed. By the time the video for “Adore You” was released in December, Miley’s pussy-as-Thor’s-hammer pretext and uncomplicated invitations began to feel ruthless in their continual deploy. Their cheap power was fatiguing.

If there was any discernible deep thought behind the image,
Bangerz
could have been a masterful Top 40 long con, a work of weapons-grade performance art on par with, say, Valie Export’s Actionist peepshow
Action Pants: Genital Panic
. Miley engaged our baseness and biases, only to make us confront how much we want to see, how much we’ve been culturally sensitized to be turned on by a rich, white bitch daring us to want her, watching us as we watch her. By year’s end, she’d utterly failed to shock anyone who was still paying attention. Which, if we’re being honest, was all of us.

In the same week “Adore You” dropped, Miley offered up a hopeful revision of herself to
The New York Times
. If taken at face value, it would seem we’ve misunderstood her all along: She’s a Mandela-mourning, big-tent feminist living in hope for America’s post-racial future. She doesn’t want to be a bad example to the youth, but she’s got a rebel nature. She claims she respected her Disney-branding enough to curtail it till she was legal. The part of that complex equation that actually jibes with the Miley we recognize is that
yoke of Disney
. Her grown-up image requires a constant reminder of her Disnified past to show us just how wayward we should understand Miley to be. They made millions branding Miley as a clean-fun-loving, purity-ring-clasping everygirl; Disney had her formally apologize for taking bikini selfies after the then-teenage singer’s phone was hacked and pics disseminated. It is only natural that even the most tepid, predictable adulteration of Miley’s emblematically pure image would be sensational, that it would have the power to horrify us.

Miley’s
Bangerz
-era story is a transformation fantasy built on proximity to what she was, how we knew her, how fast she went from supersweet to superfreak, suggesting that, yes, she was an authentic bad girl all along under that darling disguise. Her drifting orientation from the Mouse mothership is meant to tell us as much about who she is now as when she cried real tears and writhed nude on a wrecking ball for Richardson’s camera. This is her ceremony to show us, whether we want her or not, she belongs to us now.

LOUDER THAN LOVE:
MY TEEN GRUNGE POSERDOM

EMP Conference paper, Spring 2005

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I was not cool. In 1990, I was 14, almost 15, and just entered the ninth grade at the largest high school in Minneapolis and was orbiting somewhere between loner dork and amorphous weirdo. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of black clothes, a lot of orange clothes, my mother’s business apparel from the ‘80s; I wore cowboy boots and long, unbelted tunics that made me look like I was in a cult. I spent a lot of time alone, sewing hats and reading news magazines to keep up on international politics. The music I knew about was from the radio. I had a few tapes I liked: the B-52’s
Cosmic Thing
, Deee-Lite, the first Tracy Chapman album. I mostly listened to the tapes on the weekend, when I was delivering my newspaper route, though sometimes I would lay in bed at night and listen to the Tracy Chapman tape over and over and cry a little.

Six weeks after I started high school, I was sitting on the bleachers during freshman gym class, which I was already failing for refusing to dress for class, along with all the other weirdos, who were also refusing gym on principle. Andrew Semans, also of the ninth grade, came and sat next to me and asked, “Are you a punk or a hippie? I can’t tell.” I told him I liked The Clash, and he started drilling me about a million bands I had never heard. The next day he handed me a cassette tape, a mix made from a very specific subsection of his big brother’s record collection. Butthole Surfers, Babes in Toyland, Boredoms, BALL, Big Black, Bongwater on side one; Pussy Galore, Voidoids, Stooges on the flip. By week’s end I was a convert and punk-identified.

As punk rock began to ravage and motivate my life, so did my adolescent hormones. I began to pine for for the attention of punk boys, of which I knew three. One of which was Andrew and we could barely stand one another but were bonded by conversations about Sonic Youth. His friend Ted who wore a Jane’s Addiction T-shirt and was on JV bowling; he thought
All Shook Down
was the best Replacements record—making him a no go. Then there was Andrew Beccone, who was in the tenth grade, who wasn’t so much punk as he was proactively grunge.

He became my crush by default, by virtue of the fact that he knew my name and he knew who Hüsker Dü was, and at the time that was more than I had going with anyone else. His look was proto grunge, he wore his hair long and in a middle part, all his jeans were ripped, he wore a faded Mudhoney
Superfuzz Bigmuff
T-shirt and a flannel. He played drums in a cover band of sorts with his college-age brother; they were called Korova Milkbar and their only gigs were in their basement. Their repertoire read like a best-of Sub Pop sampler: Tad’s “Loser,” Nirvana’s “Lovebuzz” and “Floyd the Barber,” a Soundgarden song, a Screaming Trees song, and they usually closed their set with a Mudhoney medley that included an infinite version of “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” that would alternate between the chorus and long drum solos. Because I “loved” Andrew and wanted him to love me back, and though I was approximately 4 feet tall, had a mouth full of braces and looked as much like a 14-year-old boy as I did a 14-year-old girl, I took the only route available—I became a grunge devotee.

The process was simple: I made the rounds to every record store in the Twin Cities, spending my hard-earned babysitting and paper-delivery savings on anything with a Sub Pop logo on it, every release in multiple formats—Mudhoney, Nirvana, Fluid, Tad, Dwarves, Soundgarden, L7 and Dickless. I saved up $100 for the out-of-print
Sub Pop 100
compilation. I mail-ordered five Mudhoney, two Fluid, and one Soundgarden shirt and then made my own Nirvana shirt with a Sharpie.

I parted my hair in the middle, ripped holes in the knees of my jeans, scrawled the names of every band I liked on my Chuck Taylor high-tops in pen. I am not sure why I thought dressing
exactly
like Andrew Beccone might lure him to me, but I wanted to show him we were kindred spirits in the world, toughing out our teenage times with Tad’s
8-Way Santa
in our Walkmans.

Alas, the pose did not end there. I did things like casually wander past his classes as they got out, holding nothing but a Mudhoney tape in my hand, as if that was the only supply one needed for ninth grade. I took the same Russian class as him so that I would have the chance to tell him such things as I was considering getting a tattoo of Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin, “once I got the money together.” My project for film class was a documentary on his band, and it was 20 minutes of carefully edited footage of band practices in his parents’ basement, and nothing but (I got a C-). I went to see Fluid twice that year, despite hating them, in hopes of seeing him at the show. When I saw him that following Monday, as I was artfully lingering outside his AP English class, I said “I figured I would have seen you at the show last night,” he told me he was
no longer into Fluid
. I was crushed. I had spent dozens of hours listening to their records—which I found to be unbearable—fantasizing and prepping for conversations about Fluid minutiae that we would one day have.