PRAYERS, PATRIARCHY

Mama Escobedo is going in for a quadruple heart bypass in the morning. Obviously I am terrified, with the bad kind of butterflies in my stomach and dread, not just because a quadruple heart bypass is fucking major cardiac surgery but also because my fear is amplified by watching too much Grey’s Anatomy. “The surgeon says I am extremely healthy,” mom tells me, “and this is a precautionary measure, and it’s really a routine surgery these days. It’s going to be fine!” I tell her, “Everytime someone goes in for a routine surgery on Grey’s Anatomy they wake up with a fucking towel sewn into their chest cavity, or worse.” She says, “That’s what I told the doctor, too, and he told me not to ever watch Grey’s Anatomy because it’s pure ER fiction,” and I say, “That doesn’t change the fact that it has shaped my fortunately limited perception of hospitals.” Because it is a routine surgery and she is extremely healthy and there’s no fucking chance she’s waking up with a bomb and Xtina Ricci’s intern-rexic hand planted inside her stomach lining, I fully predict my mom will be having an affair with her surgeon or a male nurse who’s like, five years younger than I am by the end of her hospital stay.
Secondly, having read parts of the PAzz & Jop 2007 Music Critics music criticism (here is my essay on Rihanna and Dream and MIA), I would like to say that A. Sean Fennessey has the best comments and B. this essay by Christopher Weingarten is excellently conceived and written, and I think he deserves credit for it.
I would also like to say I would not be a music nerd if I didn’t take this opportunity to make one point about Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” that is no fault of Christopher Weingarten’s because it is a commonly held conception: “Kool Thing” is not actually about taking down the patriarchy. And, thematically, it’s one of SY’s most interesting tracks: It’s written from the perspective of leftist white women in the 1960s who fetishized the Black Panthers and perceived them as their saviors, hence the sarcasm-dripping bridge wherein Kim Gordon sneers, “Hey Kool Thing… what are you gonna do for me? … Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” Then guest voice Chuck D comes in, every bit aware of the set up: “Yeah. TELL em like it is.” It’s such genius and is reportedly about Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst and also reminds me of the Weather Underground, the ’60s radicals who paired up with / sometimes tactically co-opted Black Panthers – and whose complicated messages set the tone for identity politics – hello 1990, the year Goo dropped and identity politics were every Bennington College student’s minor.
Kim Gordon’s own words: ”Kool Thing,” the first single, is ”partly a fantasy about Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst when they were leftists, their fancy of the Black Panthers or the black revolutionaries,” Ms. Gordon said. “‘On the one hand, it’s like, what an absurd idea to make a statement like this in a song,” Ms. Gordon said. ”But on the other hand, there is some seriousness in it. I’m not talking to Chuck: there is a third person there, and Chuck is just being himself, reinforcing what I am saying.”
Fascinating, but definitely read the full interview for some prescient statements and righteous feministing. I forgot how Goo was SY’s most woman-centric album, topically.