"Step into your grace"

I dig Tori's advice about how women should navigate aging. I think she means embracing the process, and owning the value in it. But I quibble with the word "grace", mostly because it has such well-behaved connotations. When bestowed upon women, its a word rewarded to a very obedient and composed kind of beauty. Its also, in my experience, a substitute for "careful".

I guess it suits Tori, because she's made her icon outta princessy high femme, and so the "great queen" is, for her, a fittingly regal progression; but I really enjoy seeing older women being loud and subversive, crashing their way through old age, wearing purple and really fucking things up. 

Sometimes I've got the jungle under my skin

I wrote this, in response to Chuck Klosterman's beatdown of Tune Yards and their Pazz and Jop win. Seems like a pertinent time to post some of my Feb 2011 conversation with Merrill that didn't get published in the final interview, mostly the parts concerned with age, beauty/gender standards, feminism, facial-hair and finding freedom in queer/androgynous voices.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/26/chuck-klosterman-tune-yards

*** 

ME: You said in a previous interview that, “in my experience that its really good for women of all ages to see other women being weird and bizarre and loud, so I wondered if we could talk about what weird, bizarre loud women have inspired you, and also I would add to that that your dad pointed out earlier that a lot of the work you put in (to Tune Yards) was during your 20s and that you didn't really start feeling like you were successful until after 30s, which is really empowering considering that the majority of successful pop women tend to be under 30.

MERRILL: Isn’t it weird?  Which unfortunately also connects with what physical image they’re able to convey at that age. I mean they’re beautiful, model-ish, but - and I’ve talked to other women musicians about this - its hard to be un-groomed, no make up - as a woman

ME: Anywhere, let alone on stage.

MERRILL: Exactly. Its been really hard for me, even in pictures of myself that I think are great - they don't always get a good reaction from people because I don't….maybe I have…I don't, an atypical image for a woman to present.

ME: Just the fact that you even have to be aware of that is upsetting.

MERRILL: I know. Men have a lot of pressure, but they have a way wider range, they can be a really doofus-looking  dude, like real pot belly, and still get respect for what they’re are. Even stuff like…having hair on a woman’s upper lip….I’ve noticed….and that was a huge deal for me growing up. All these things that keep coming up are like teenage things for me, like shaving every hair on your body. When people see pictures of a woman with hair on her upper lip, its like - she has a mustache and that makes her too masculine for what is considered beautiful. 

ME: It's the gender binary.

MERRILL: Mmm hmm. And every woman I know has hair on their upper lip, and most of them shave that shit, or wax it. If I were ten years old right now, I wouldn't know that. I wouldn't have any examples of women with facial hair in the imagery I see. And so to be a woman with hair on her upper lip….I don't wanna be "the girl with mustache", necessarily, but I do wanna provide…and that's with everything, I mean, that's one example.

ME: Do you feel like your always having to navigate whether you stay true to what you believe in or do you compromise who you are?

MERRILL:  Totally. And I usually chose not to compromise who I am.

ME: I wax, and every time I do it I feel like I kinda betray some of the things I believe in, but I had a conversation with my mum, and she said the things is, as women, there are already so many obstacles laid out in front of us, so you have to pick your battles. As an artist, you’re allowed to fuck things up a little, there’s more of a space for you to do that.

MERRILL: I know. Its true. I may, at some point, say I can’t stand this anymore. On the comment boards, every comment is about my facial hair, more than it is about my music. It hasn't really been like that - that's more like the nightmare in my head. But I think, unfortunately, that's so in this culture, involved with image, that’s the first thing that happens; Its not about the music, its about what the picture is…and I don't wanna be the poster child for this one thing, I wanna be my artist self. And there are enough hurdles, so at some point, there are these things I have to give myself permission for, and that means, you know, the way I dress and things. Its constant; like, do I wanna fight this battle? I just wanna do something where I don't have to explain myself.

ME: Kathleen Hanna said she had very few women to emulate when she was growing up, and had to be the idol that she wished she’d had.  I can think of many women in pop who had facial - not that that's your defining feature, of course…

MERRILL: I mean Patti has always been someone who embraced the masculine image, and…not embraced, took it! Like, “this is MINE now”. She appropriated it. And I appreciated that. I mean Ani DiFranco, I always say although with her…I was a freak for her when she first came out because who else was doing what she was doing when she came out…her voice, it was gnarly at the edges, and she was all about not being pretty and conventional, and being fiery, and while I don't connect with the music as much any more, it was so important for me to have that. She was the like the primary female icon in a world of….I mean even like, I can love Tori Amos at times, but there was a femininity with her that I didn't connect with. And then there’s thee women like Miriam Makeba, who come form different cultures, who’s voices are allowed to take on this different character. People ask me sometimes if I’m ever compared to Nina Simone and I’m like….yes, but no, that's not like…her voice is so epic, and so her own, that I hate to make that comparison,  but she has that “what gender is she?”

ME: I remember asking my mum the first time she played me a Nina record - “is this a man or a woman?”

MERRILL: Totally. Listening to her, I realised that in music, there is this ability to shake off those stifling ideas about what women are 'meant' to be.

Mansplained

"Mansplaining is such a fantastically accurate term for an all-too-common phenomenon. However, it is often controversial. This is mostly because it calls out men for a behavior they often don’t know they’re doing, and this in turn raises the defensive hackles. Mansplaining is generally defined as any instance in which a man explains a subject to a woman despite that woman’s personal experience with said subject or proven expertise in that subject."

via http://www.lawsonry.com/891-look-kitten-i-am-too-a-feminist-fauxminism-and-men/

Leafy crackle underneith my feet, a good beat/crunch beat crunch beat

"Their sound may be a mix of eclectic record samples and new-school GarageBand beats, but they place themselves proudly in the wider tradition and legacies of groundbreaking hip hop women. “We’re definitely a part of that. None of them gave a fuck,” says Cat with approval. “Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Lil’ Kim. They said whatever they wanted to say. And Missy! She sung, she rapped.” “And she made her own beats,” adds Stas. “That’s really important to us.”"

My interview with Stas and Cat, of rad Seattle/Sub Pop rap duo THEEsatisfaction, which also appears in the Wears The Trousers 2011 Yearbook.

So scratch my name on yr arm

Behold! The mighty Stardust pencil, one of the most coveted stationary items of my early school years. I was a super imaginative Piscean child, prone to serious and perpetual daydreaming, and I remember being very clearly convinced that the Stardust, with its iridescent constellation pattern clustered over lacquered cosmic black, would double-up as both treasured writing utensil *and* magic wand, a little like The Magic Paintbrush. I had no idea they were still being manufactured (h/t to Paperchase).

Down the vagina trail

"This journey has taken me to Afghanistan where I had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of Afghanistan under Taliban. I was dressed in a burqa and I went in with an extraordinary group called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and I saw first-hand how women had been stripped of every single right women can be stripped of, from being educated, to being employed, to being actually allowed to eat ice-cream. For those of you who don't know it, it was illegal to eat ice-cream under the Taliban. And I actually saw and met women who had been flogged for eating vanilla ice-cream, and I was taken to secret ice-cream eating place in a little town, and we went in to back room where women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us, and we were served vanilla ice cream, and women lifted their burqas and ate this ice-cream, and I don't think I ever understood pleasure until that moment, and how women had found a way to keep their pleasure alive"

"It did not start with Stonewall"

Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup