SOUNDTRACK: MANNEQUIN PUSSY-Patience (2019).
I saw Mannequin Pussy two years ago and they were dynamite. I’ve been waiting for a full length to come out and this release (while only 25 minutes) was worth the wait.
“Patience” opens with fast drums and rumbling bass. I love that the lead guitar is playing some riffs that meld in perfectly with the rest of the band’s chugging along. At just over two minutes, as it fades out it seems like there should be more, but it segues right into
“Drunk II” is a classic-sounding alt rock song from the 90s. The guitars are just fantastic–catchy but diverse enough not to be obvious. Dabice’s voice ranges from screaming to cooing “I still love you, you stupid fuck.” It’s also got a super catchy chorus. At 4 and a half minutes, it’s the longest song on the disc, and even though their other songs are much shorter, they can keep a four minute song sounding great. This song also has one of the few (long) guitar solos from Athanasios Paul.
“Cream” is a roaring punk song with screamed vocals, some grooving sliding bass from Colins Rey Regisford and pummeling drums from Kaleen Reading. I love that even though the song is not even two minutes long they have time for choruses, verses and even an instrumental break.
“Fear /+/ Desire” slows things down with an acoustic guitar and Marisa’s gentlest vocals as she sings clearly this updated lyrics
When you hit me
It does not feel like a kiss
Like the singers promised
A lie that was written for them
…Is this what you wanted?
Holding me down makes you feel desired
“Drunk I” is less than a minute long and lurches between a really catchy guitar riff and gentle vocals and roaring full out choruses (or vice versa). Again things slow down for “High Horse” with lovely echoing guitars and Dabice’s soft, clear vocals. Until the loud chorus with anguished screamed vocals–the shift back to delicacy is really well done.
“Who Are You” is a catchy bouncy song with a terrific chorus. Midway through, the song moves to double speed and gets even catchier. It’s followed by the thirty eight second “Clams” a blistering screaming duet of noise, chaos and intensity.
It’s followed by the awesome, harshness of “F.U.C.A.W.” Between the dissonant guitar and the screamed vocals is the middle of the song which is practically shoegaze, before the noise ending wraps things up in under two minutes (with some sounds ringing out for a bout fifteen seconds).
The disc wraps up (already) with “In Love” the second longest song. It’s got cool sampled sounds and a piano., but the song is still all about the guitars (and terrific bass). The song has a kind of mellow jam to the end–that nifty sample for the melody and some guitar soloing.
There’s so much packed into these twenty five minutes that you can easily start it right back up for another ride. I’m really looking forward to seeing them live again.
[READ: September 29, 2020] “The Work of Art”
There was so much going on in this story, I really liked it a lot.
The narrator begins unfolding the story of an incident at an (unspecified) museum.
A guard named Cliff arrives on the scene and his coworker Geraldine tells him that the woman in the burqa has been staring at ths one piece of art for hours–unmoving.
The painting was Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith.
In reality: Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were two Black men who were hanged in a spectacle lynching in 1930. A photograph was taken by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. He sold thousands of copies of the print [which is amazingly disturbing and I can’t imagine who would have bought them]. In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher from New York City saw a copy of Beitler’s 1930 photograph which “haunted [him] for days” and inspired his poem “Bitter Fruit” which was published in The New York Teacher in 1937 (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan). Meeropol then set his poem to music, renaming it “Strange Fruit” which Billie Holiday recorded in 1939. In 2007, artist David Powers supervised the creation of a mural, titled American Nocturne, in a park in downtown Elgin, Illinois. The mural depicts the bottom half of the Beitler photograph, showing the crowd at the lynching but not the bodies of Shipp and Smith. The artwork was intended as a critique of racism in American society. It had been displayed without controversy for nearly a decade until 2016 when someone posted images of the mural and lynching photo together on social media, and its origin was seen. The mural was permanently removed from public display.
That background is important to the story, but the story does an excellent job filling it in for us if we didn’t know.
So in this story, the painting Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith was created by a white South African woman, Sonia Middleton.
The woman in the burqa returned the next day and sat on the floor in front of the painting for the duration of the day–not even leaving to go to the bathroom. She was causing a bit of a stir just sitting there. Cliff was irritated by her but there was nothing against their rules about it.
Nevertheless, she became a story and soon people were tweeting about it #artofprotest and #appreciationorapproprtaiton. Think pieces were written and a petition was created to take down the painting.
But was this censorship?
Sonia Middleton made an online statement saying she never intended to sell the piece and that it was making comparisons between apartheid and Jim Crow. She asked that the work stay up to keep the conversation going.
Then her website was hacked.
Cliff is friends with Mike, an artist and gallery worker. The narrator is also friends with Mike and the two of them were talking about this whole incident. Then Mike and the narrator visited Cliff and they discussed the painting. They learned more from Cliff than from the news, at this point.
Then a few days later someone posted the painting for sale on eBay. But while the narrator and Mike were discussing this, someone set the painting on fire (while it was still on the wall of the gallery). Cliff had tackled the assailant. How come this wasn’t front page news?
They ran to the the gallery. Cliff wasn’t there. He’d been told to avoid the gallery for a few days [hopefully with pay] while things settled down. They could see the scorch marks on the painting.
It turned out that Cliff hadn’t tackled the arsonist. The woman ran and tripped over her burqa–her headpiece falling off as she fell. The woman thought about suing, but it turned out she wasn’t Muslim. She was a white artist from Brooklyn.
The story recounts another (true) account of a woman in Kabul , Farkhunda Malikzada, who was falsely accused of burning the Quran. She was set upon by bloodthirsty men who killed her.
The end of the story ties up the lifecycle of the painting but leaves open ended the question of racism, sexism, and the place of art.
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