God, I wish I had the tapes of the dances I made up when I was 15. But I am old, and Pearls Negras are young, and the above recording is from 2012. In December they dropped a mixtape via Bolabo Records, which is run by Jan Blumentrath and David Alexander, who also produce their beats. (I met Alexander in 2010 when he was producing for Dominique Young Unique and I was conducting her first interview ever; he also helped produce for Yo! Majesty.) I wrote a little background on Pearls Negras for Rolling Stone here, because they are fantastic. H/T: MYSELF. That RS piece is the most contextually informative, but here’s the rest of our Q&A, conducted via email via translator, because I don’t speak much Portuguese and they don’t speak much English. My questions are extremely basic, because I am (and the world is) just learning about them, but I thought they were background-informative enough to put out there, and: I LOVE their confidence and self-assuredness.

You met at a theatre company, is that true? Describe the program and how you knew you would be friends and make songs together?

Alice: It all started in the theater here called “Nos do Morro” where we were acting, singing and taking drama classes. We took a rap class at the theatre with Jackie Brown, who is a well known rapper here in Rio and she began teaching us rhyme classes.

Mari: That day I brought two songs from my father (Claudio Valadares), who is also composer, and Alice brought her own lyrics with her, because she was already into writing songs and playing with rhymes. In the class the Jeckie taught us to rhyme, to understand better the concepts of rapping and making music, helping us to write better words and after a while we started taking it more seriously. Then Jennifer showed up and we invited her to sing a cover of a song by Panteras mc’s with us and we voted to keep her in the group! :)

-What types of music have you grown up listening to? What inspired you to end up with your current sound? Have you been rapping your whole lives?

Alice: We haven’t been rapping since we were babies (laughs) we started only after we met Jackie. I always liked Beyonce and Destiny’s Child, which people always compare us to. And I also love also Rihanna, growing up I identified myself a lot with her.

Mari: I was already involved with music as a child because of my father who is a composer – like Alice, I also really love Rihanna and Beyonce.

-Why did you title your mixtape Biggie Apple?

Mari: It’s the name of the first song on the mixtape and it’s the most catchy song! It rocks and it’s super trendy in the nights haha. It’s very energetic and perfect for clubbing. The title Biggie Apple is about New York (how we call the big apple), just about a big place with energy and fun clubs. We would love to go to New York soon!

I don’t speak Portuguese, but I have read that your songs are an antidote to more traditionally misogynist lyrics in funk carioca. Is this true? (I can figure out some of it, but Google Translate only takes me so far, ha.)

Alice: Yes, female rap in Rio de Janeiro is not recognized very much and we struggle to gain a space here, our songs talk about many different things such as love, fun, parties, and about what is happening in society, about where we live and where we come from.

What’s it like in Vidigal? Is it important to you to reflect your life there?

Alice: Life in Vidigal is wonderful for us, because we are here since we are tiny!haha, and it has a story for us in every little place of Vidigal. People like our music because here is a place of much talent, dance and music. We have actresses, singers, a bit of everything. So now people recognize that stuff that is made in Vidigal has quality and as such are very open to listening to new talent from here.

-How did you link up with the British Bolabo dudes?

Oh, yeah… this was our gig on Morro do Alemão. After the gig Jan from Bolabo approached us, he was very eager to talk to us and we did not understand a word! After we found a person to help the translation we arranged to meet him right here in Vidigal, where he was staying in an apartment.

Mari: We went but did not think it would be anything serious or that would record! We recorded between 7 or 8 of our songs right then!! And he returned to London. After a year him and David returned with the whole production team to make a music video that will leave now.

Alice, you are also an actress in novelas? How does working on TV affect your music group?

Alice: Well, it actually a little busy because of all the rehearsals, its sometimes hard to act as well, we want to give our best on the tour we have in March, so it gets a bit complicated for me, but I can conciliate both at the same time, cause I have focus and faith! I think it can happen to each of us actually, because we are all actresses…but so far everything is working out for us!

You’re doing a European tour this Spring, right? When will you come to the States? What do you have up next–and what do you want?

Alice: What we want is people to recognize our work, We want to mark our space so that people know who the Pearls Negras truly are and how much we have worked to get here. What we want is to rock! And have the success that we deserved and we are confident that we will achieve this! Yes we will be coming to USA soon we hope. JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

Last week, I heard the awesome Code Pink organizer Melanie Butler speak about her experiences at Occupy Wall Street, and how she came to be active about women’s issues within the movement, even though her purpose for joining Occupy wasn’t initially about said issues. Though she wanted to simply protest against corrupt multinational banks and corporations, she said she found Occupy to be a microcosm of the country’s overarching misogyny, so she ended up working against sexism within the 99%, too. One aspect she was particularly focused on was that the media’s coverage of Occupy wrote women from the story; though we are equally represented in the movement, reports on OWS tend to blot us out.

Not to blithely compare revolutionary protest to music criticism, because those of us who do both know it’s a long haul from staring at a Google doc and getting spread-ass to marching against the megalithic money machine with moms, students, organizers, and inevitably off-beat cowbell players. But in thinking about my number two album, London grime rapper Lady Leshurr’s Friggin L mixtape, Butler’s speech came to mind, too. I’ve been concerned with/cognizant of the visibility of women rappers ever since I first learned every word to my favorite song of all time, “You Can’t Play With My Yo-Yo,” and since there is never a paucity of women rappers, I have come to the conclusion that we are failing, as journalists, to be thorough in our coverage. I include myself in this. Particularly in the internet era, when bloggers seem to manage to unearth every obscure man-rapper in the US with half a bar to his name, but sites like 2 Dope Boyz can’t post a rap track by a woman without uttering the condescending, otherizing, and dated term “femcee.” (To that site’s credit, they just linked to a fairly thorough listicle of the top 10 woman rappers to watch in 2012.) The apparent myopia when it comes to female rappers, coupled with many writers’ burning desire to characterize late-2011 rising star Azealia Banks as “potty-mouthed”—because she’s a four-year-old, apparently?—gave me bad dreams all year(with a bit of reprieve here and there, including Banks’ triumphant re-emergence).

Back to Lady Leshurr: she was a firestarter and a salve for me in 2011, devastating beats with casual velocity and staccato incisions. It’s not inaccurate when she compares herself to Freddie Krueger in her riff on “Blowing Money Fast”—and witness her “Look At Me Now” freestyle, on which she sarcastically intros, “I don’t see how you could hate on a little girl, I look 12 years old!” The latter’s a Sun Tzu move; she presents herself as playing defense, then sneaks up and bodies the original rappers on their own track, including Busta Rhymes, finessing triple-time raps smoother and more agilely than the vet. Compare this to my beloved Nicki Minaj, who allows herself on recent single “Stupid Hoe” (a far lesser “Itty Bitty Piggy”) to underachieve into the “female Weezy,” and get an inkling how much more vital rap could be if the long-hungry lady players were invited into the billiards room. Just one “bad bitch,” however bad, is not enough to keep all our voices from getting swallowed up. In Leshurr’s own words, from her “Did It On ‘Em” freestyle: All these dudes is my daughters. Personally, I’d settle for siblings.

The rest of my ballot unintentionally fans out from this frame. Gang Gang Dance’s Eye Contact and Fatima al Qadiri’s Genre-Specific Experience lived as twins in my mind, both projects compelled by women in an audacious vanguard of visual art and feminine experience. While al Qadiri reconceptualized genres like juke and dubstep through the lens of her experiences growing up in Kuwait (check her latest video), GGD frontwoman Lizzi Bougatsos offered a lush interpretation of her group’s love of global music. Both were open, freeing, vast, and embodied the kind of expansive world I wanna live in.

Meanwhile, Gloria Estefan became the first woman ever to debut atop the Billboard Latin charts (2011?! really?!) with an album that returned to party form, thanks in part to producer Pharrell. “Wepa”’s trilingual, cheerleading merengue was, in a year of amazing dancefloor jams, the most jubilant—and motivational enough to forgive that the stupid Miami Heat used it for their stupid theme song. (Go Knicks!) Houston noise-rapper B L A C K I E coincided with Estefan’s joie de vivre for me: True Spirit and Not Giving a Fuck, his second album, was exactly that, complete surrender to the punk clamor of his beats and the revolutionary nature of his lyrics. My favorite track “Warchild” is a protest against racist drone strikes that breaks down into a desperate, frustrated scream: “I DON’T CARE ABOUT AMERICA, NI**A!!!!” It’s as succinct a sentiment about 2011 as any, and one a lot of us can probably empathize with.

But on to the corporeal: Though I have ideological problems with its frontman, Big Black’s Songs About Fucking is the best album title ever, and that’s what Rustie’s Glass Swords was for me. Though it’s mostly an electronic album, every swoop of funk and glimmering pitch shift was a siren call to DO IT, from the swingy, fresh-to-death c-walk of “All Nite” to the eager, crystalline enthusiasm of “Ultra Thizz.” It’s the first time I can remember listening to a song and wanting to fuck purely based on sonics. Maybe it was emitting something like pheremones—the voices that do exist are a pitch-shifted melange of Rustie and his girlfriend, producer/singer Nightwave, so you can imagine they transmuted their chemistry onto the album. And, because you were thinking it: yes, the album cover looks like two giant crystalline boners both going for the same pristine a-hole. This year for me was about optimism, and the unending, silly hope that someday, the underdogs will get everything they ever desired.

Cubic Zirconia Take Me High from Tiombe Lockhart on Vimeo.

My interview with the inimitable Tiombe Lockhart of Cubic Zirconia in Scion’s Dance Fanzine is now outtie (along with profiles of Falty DL, Dillon Francis and French design house Ill-Studio). But there was so much we couldn’t include due to space constraints, yet I feel the world should be able to receive the full spectrum of Tiombe’s total G nature. LOVE THIS GIRL. Here’s the rest of the unedited interview (minus the off-the-record parts) in which we talk about giving birth, black filmmaking, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. ALSO, take note, TT just directed a Y@k Ballz video. And Cubic Zirconia’s album Follow Your Heart is out now on Fool’s Gold Records.

Your videos seem like a trilogy.

I didn’t think of it like a trilogy when it first started, but I did kind of think of them as three things so it was kind of like with Hoes Come out at night, that was on my woman shit, that was from being born to being a gluttonous teenager to being a woman. And then Night and Day was kind of like going into the woods, I wanted it to be where I come out of Central Park and living this life in the city. And have it be this throwback to Sade and 9 ½ weeks, like all this great weird mysterious women that lived in new york city. it was kinda on my man shit like being a singer but i wanted it to feel really lonely, i purposely wanted to shoot it not in downtown in all these spots like hey we’re having a good time. i wanted it to be a woman alone in the bathtub, and kind of witchy. And then take me high i wanted it to be about LADIES.

Spike lee has a lot of being the black filmmaker in like 98 years. Tyler Perry’s cool when you’re high or with your family but. I wanted it to be… I think i just wanted to go with my gut and what i wanted it, logically figured it out in my head w/editing. I wanted it to be a throwback to black musical theatre, church plays, that type of feeling. But also kinda backstage and this mystical world. I wnated it to feel like a musical.

In all those videos, there’s a certain representation of sexuality, and when you’re onstage I feel like you have a sexuality that’s super subversive and powerful.

I don’t think that really, I feel like I’m a shy person. I know that I am. I really am pretty introverted and like okay, if I go to a club I will just sit in a corner and I’ll get fucked up and that’s when I open up. But when I’m onstage and all that stuff I think, that’s my job, to be in it and to just open up, you know what i mean? I’ve been singing for a really long time. and so close and safe and trying to be with PPP it was kinda like okay, but i feel all of these things intensely and the only way that i’ll survive is that if i take everything I feel and just put it back out there. Because if I don’t then it just becomes stagnant and not good for me. But i feel like it’s my job to get really open.

I feel like it’s subversive in a way that you’re almost challenging. It’s not typical “I’m a hot girl” performance, which you would never do.
The women that are hot to me are women like PJ Harvey or Toni Morrisson. That is power. It’s strong and so alive and here, i feel like a woman. Here’s how I feel about this: like if you have a whole bunch of motherfuckers that are just loud in a room, you should be the quietest.
Because there’s weight in words.
I feel like i took this road that is less traveled, and i understand my worth and my power and I don’t need to fake it.

So “Take Me High.”
I feel like I’m giving birth to a baby. With every video, but with this one definitely more. I had a small idea for it, told [Cubic Zirconia’s] Nick [Hook] about it. I’ll have multiple ideas for years and i just let them grow. Daowoud and Nick are cool, they just let me do what I want which is amazing. I feel like with every video i’m learning crazy ass lessons and like i’m being challenged, like I’m supposed to be here and I’m supposed to be doing this, but… who the fuck thought I could edit?

You never had any experience editing video?
No. I was just like, I have to do it. I know ProTools, and I kinda know Photoshop, but I was just like, I have to do this. I got Final Cut and taught myself and would get help from friends if I needed it. And with “Take Me High,” there was so much that I did with production and the wardrobe and the editing. Everything for it. It’s my baby, this little thing that i thought would be really cool, and then it turned into, like, people.

So what was the initial concept?
Black musical theater. It was just like, why is nobody doing this? I wrote that little musical nd was just like, okay. I think because I sing in Cubic Zirconia, which people know, and it’s okay and respected, I feel like I can do anything.

It seems to reference School Daze, with Tisha Campbell doing the torch song.
Yes, very much like School Daze and The Wiz. I wanted it to be this soulfulness, not downplaying anything and just being like, “This is what we are.” This auntie vibe, LADIES. Like, I’m gonna put an outfit on right now. And we’re gonna go out. This whole type that doesn’t really understand the concept of self-deprecation at all. Just like, I just got off work, gonna go home and take a shower, come over to my house and we’re gonna drink some champagne, we’re about to go to a club, ‘80s-style. With gentlemen. And we’re gonna dance, but we’re not gonna pop it. With the furs and stuff, I kind of felt weird, because I don’t really believe in that but I was like, I’m trying to represent this era of black people.

What was your process in making it?
Step by step i was like okay, this is what we’re gonna do, i want as many dancers as I can get, I need it to be fabulous in an auntie-style way. What’s interesting about videos that I’ve learned is that it’s not really about what you want all the time, so you start with your dreams and then mold them into what can actually happen. It was important for us to go with the flow a lot. There was no producer. Nick and Daoud were there whenever I needed them but it was on some shit like running from the make-up chair to the shoot. We filmed it at Music Hall of Williamsburg.

In each of the videos you’ve directed, it seems like you’re going for a certain era. Is there something you’re trying to preserve there?
For “Josephine,” I sent the idea to the director and totally produced it, like we just need to do old Tarzan type of shit, and maybe the black people aspect, just a different take on it.

And “Hoes Come Out at Night” was on some Toni Morrison vibe. It was really deep.
Basically Lex and I recorded that song in between us going out to a club. A 2010 club! Not an ‘80s fancy club. A club. So of course she had to be in the video. But then she got pregnant, and I was like, I can’t put a pregnant woman out of work! So we came up with this concept based on stuff we were both going through, she was pregnant and I was going through this weird transformation. I’m a hippie, so I felt in my gut that things were going to change. So we came up with this concept where it was like girl to woman, like I’m gonna take what I have and baptize myself. That was a special time. It wasn’t like any of the other videos, there were only a couple people there and we were just locked in at a lake next to a waterfall. It was so much. And cherries are just my throwback to David Lynch.

I knew that I would know Lex’s baby, and I didn’t want to have some foul-ass shit. I didn’t want a director making fun of us jumping out of a car. I knew that I would know this baby. And it’s already a video called “Hoes Come Out at Night,” I better do something!

So you love movies?
When I was younger I did some acting and when I went to college for the New School I wanted to be a music engineer or some other behind the scenes thing, I always wanted to be a part of the “boy’s” thing, and kind of be behind it and have that respect. But I never did film.

I always loved women like Millie Jackson and Teena Marie who were very allowed to wear their sexuality and talk shit but at the same time they were women and they were songwriters and doing very masculine jobs. I’ve always admired that. I mean, Toni Morrison was a beauty pageant winner! I mean, shit, really?! So I think there is a lie being fed that people dumb it down, where people say “she’s strong, so she can’t…” No! You can still be feminine and be in control with what you’re doing and roll with the men and have people respect you. Girl, did you ever read Women Who Run With the Wolves?

Yes!
Okay the shit that she talks about. Everytime I pick that shit up it applies directly to my life.

I haven’t read it for a long time but I remember it blowing my mind.
She also talks about creating, always be creating. She talks about how it’s kryptonite for women to be, I don’t want to say rational, but… consistent. We’re women, we can do anything, we don’t need to be firm or rigid. All that bullshit about feminists that they’re just like… shit, I feel like I’m a feminist, and I’ll wear a little baby ass dress and some heels. I don’t care, I’ll shave my underarms and get a bikini wax. Shit.

Out of all the women that I know, you’re up there as far as being a dope ass feminist. Just by how you live your life.
I feel like I am! Seriously, I feel like it’s my responsibility, I’m put here because I like to feel a lot of shit. I feel a lot of shit, it’s physical for me at times, I feel so so much. Then I found out my moon is in Scorpio [laughs]. I feel like my job is to put it out there. I feel like I want to show like, little girls and shit that you can do anything you want to do, especially like ethnic little girls, when shit is so real. Because sometimes our cultures are not encouraging. It’s fucked up but it’s beautiful in a lot of different ways because you see so many things that would make other cultures collapse, and people are still smiling. But there’s a lot to where you’re just like, Damn, really?

When you were growing up did you have role models or idols?
I would sit in front of speakers and listen to music over and over again, and I loved Mobb Deep. I just loved the beats so much. I loved Common, all that shit. Also Sarah Vaughn. I just always have loved women who just talk and do very feminine things but could just like, roll. Like Teena Marie? Faith Evans! I flipped out, like oh my god she wrote this? I was young and that’s inspirational. A teacher once told me you should try to figure out why someone did what they did, rather than copy them. And Teena Marie produced some shit, that was so inspiring. It’s always been appealing to me, these women that could do it all. Most women have a nine to five and you’re in your office and you’re in the boardroom, do your thing, you’re not gonna act the same way around your man or your kids, we just flip into things. That to me is so tight.

Tell me about how the costumes and choreography come together.
My friend Desi did the choreography, the person who I did my musical with. The costumes, I just grabbed them. I went to boutiques and I was just like We need this stuff. We pieced it all together. I really wanted it to be on some lady shit, that’s why I had to have the furs and the black jumpsuits. I bought this wedding dress in Flatbush and I already had white gloves, and the white hat, a woman who’s a preacher randomly made it for the video! One of the boutiques that I went to I said, I can’t have a whole bunch of fancyass black people and not have them in hats. Because I wanted it to be kind of churchy. And the woman was like, I know a woman named Mary who makes hats and she’s a preacher. I was like, Mary, do you have a white hat? She rolled up in her Cadillac and gave it to me and I paid her 40 dollars.

OH AND. If you are dying to hear said bitching sailor voice, on the radio it comes off more like “a high-pitched man doing Quiet Storm.” You can experience this spectacular audio beverage every Saturday on East Village Radio (dot com) from 4-6 PM EST, on my show Universopolis. It’s generally Latin/Afro-Caribbean dance music for raves and temazcals, though I reserve the right to play music from any country of my choosing.

Tomorrow, my special guest DJs/interviewees will be El G and Chancha via Circuito of Argentina and ZZK Records — a chance happening thanks to NYC monsoon season delaying their flights back to the motherland. Here’s my Cluster Mag feature about the incredible Chancha via Circuito’s journey into the heartbeat of Bolivian jungles and Andean mountaintops to make his new record. THIS WILL BE A SPECIAL THING.

I have to talk about ‘Fancy.’ I know I am L8, but I can’t stop thinking about it, mainly because every time my morning alarm goes off, the various ‘rhythmic’ NYC stations to which I’ve programmed the clock radio — mostly hot-9 – play Drake and/or this song. Even now that Lil Wayne is out and making music! DUDES, DIVERSIFY YR PORTFOLIO ALREADY. But having heard ‘Fancy’ 8 million times, both by choice and by force, in work and in leisure, in lucidity and in alertness, today on the train, I thought about the chorus and got a little emotional.

The atonality of ‘Fancy’s MJB and Swizz Beatz chorus, particularly on the sub-chorus [nails done/hair done/everything did] is a melon-carver to the guts. MJB has never been close to a pitch-perfect singer, but the sound of her reaching to harmonize with Swizz’s off-key monotone [dude’s got the all suaveness of a golfing loafer] attains some point of jagged perfection. It’s a jenga tower a piece away from toppling.

Swizz loves atonality. At first it seemed like pitch probs, but witness his vigilant blase-ness when rap-talking over his own beats, compounded by the fact that those beats, when perfectly Swizz, roil in their own cacophony. You’d think he was tone-deaf if you didn’t also think of ‘Roman’s Revenge,’ of ‘Ring the Alarm,’ even ‘Diamonds on My Neck.’ He likes parts to rattle and for the passengers to feel slightly uncomfortable. Imagine a sound installation of those three songs playing at once? Dude, imagine ‘Roman’s Revenge,’ the beat, as a sound installation in and of itself. [Well, maybe the beat and the chorus.]

Swizz elevates ‘Fancy’ with his inherent minor-keyness, broadening it to populace-size, reminding every woman that she can be fancy however she pleases. The uncomfortable celebration of luxury in third-step chords — the cosign of the tried, true tenets of vintage MJB-style upkeep and attitude. Before the Gucci, the Prada, the Margiela… there was the manicurist. Imperfection is the point, because most of us are not in the perfect percentile. All the subtext lies with MJB and Swizz, heavy on the clash. And even though I can never imagine gorgeous MJB without a floor-length white mink, glowing in a halo of highlighter and greatness, she really is forever just the girl with the doorknockers. In that mismatched harmony is an appreciation of ‘the regular’ that feels big even in Drake’s gentle repertoire.

ALSO, CAN I POINT OUT THAT SWIZZ IS SHOUTING OUT NARS???? Orgasm is a great shade of coral-pink that looks good on everyone. Mashonda/Alicia trained him well.

[cross-postered at ze tumblr, where i’m trying to only do short shifts and keep the longies here, but i became verbose.]

Kanye West has reached total skeevemaster flex status, and I’m not saying that because his GOOD Friday singles covers are full of naked/bloodied/dead whitegirls (SEEN IT) or because his wangpiece is all up on your laptop screen (SEEN IT). I am saying that because he has reached the Liza Minnelli-in-Vegas point of his career, where he cannot get through a track now without inviting at least five special guests to join him on the number–propping him up, letting a verse free, as though he must justify its very existence. Normally I’d ‘diagnose’ that he’s filling in the empty crevices of his soul or self-esteem by surrounding himself with people, but any cracks in his egomaniacal armor that make him such a lovable dichotomy feel as though they’re sealing up. Rather, this is totally dude’s prime-time/network television phase–he is inclined to walk around wearing a torso-sized bust of Horus, after all–meaning that every GOOD Friday track has alternately felt like a Bob Hope Xmas special (ELTON!)… or a stoopidcrazyridiculous freestyle cipher from 1996. I am not into either of those because I am under 75 and also a girl. Most of his guests are A. lesser members of the GOOD crew or B. have owned and worn a small crocheted yarmulke at least once at some point in their careers. And sorry dudes but like the songs are kinda really not that awesome–in addition to shit being cluttered like my bedroom and kinda aimless in their ambition, the best tracks have either Yeezers dolo or dueting. Fucking POWER, fucking DEVIL IN A NEW DRESS, YES. Runaway can survive the apocalypse. GOOD Friday, that other one, that other one and that other one, total sleeping bag on the cold ground in the woods at like 4am nahmean.

This new track is just fucking OD, though. It is VEGAS GONE WILD; John Legend, The-Dream, Ryan Leslie, Tony Williams, Charlie Wilson, Elly Jackson, Alicia Keys, Fergie, Kid Cudi, Rihanna, and Elton John. Oh and Kanye is in there somewhere. Actually I take back the Liza, this dude wants to be motherfucking Phil Spector. Is he getting weary of making music? I don’t know but I’m getting weary of hearing lots of people I wouldn’t even hold the subway door open for if they were tumbling down the stairs and carrying a baby. KANYE WE KNOW YOU ARE FAMOUS. I miss old Kanye. College Dropout was his best album, when his sense of humor wasn’t preserved in a jar of self-awareness, like some kind of taxidermied penguin on display at a penguin-themed hotel. (ACTUAL THING FROM MY HOMETOWN [sidebar, ‘THE MANAGER DOESN’T ALLOW JOVIALITY WITH THE PENGUIN’])

Googling the penguin totally derailed this entire operation.

But don’t front on the feature-length video “Runaway” cause that shit is his Mariah Carey’s Glitter and it’s fucking awesome. SO CAMPYYYYY!

SIDEBAR SIDEBAR. PROOF THAT KANYE IS ILLUMINATI, HIS FUCKING ALBUM COVERS MAKE UP A FULL TAROT DECK. BELIEVE IT YALL JAY-Z IS THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT

Last week a tiny corner of the internet was having a small public quasi-freakout over the term “rape gaze,” a fake genre term used to connote an even tinier corner of music that is beat-based, generally depressed, slovenly, greasy (hairwise) and presumably surfing a giant vicodin wave. Salem is the clump-headed flagship band and writers feeling coin-y have also described their genre as “witch house” which is annoying and dumb but servicable as shorthand goes. So another band that kinda falls into this category, Brooklyn’s Creep (one of whose members I am friendly with both in my capacity as a journalist and in her capacity to be rad), jokingly coined the term “rape gaze” as a spoof on the ridiculosity of the “witch house” tag. They had this up on their myspace page for like, eons, but no one picked it up really until last week, when Pitchfork reviewed Salem’s album King Night (awesome record) and offhandedly threw in the term “rape gaze” in a little list of terms that people call their type of music. No context: not really that good an idea! So then a smart friend and awesome dude/writer Zach Baron called up Creep’s Lauren Flax (aforementioned rad chick) for clarification/etymology in the Village Voice because like, yo, what the fuck. She was pretty flip about it in the spirit with which it was coined—basically as a friend-joke between her and her bandmate, Lauren Dillard—then realized the interview required an addendum: “I definitely didn’t express enough that we do not take the term ‘rape’ lightly and would never want to advocate sexual violence against any human being. It was a play on words which we never expected to be used as an actual genre. If there is anyone out there that we may have offended, we sincerely apologize.” After that, Pitchfork removed “rape gaze” from the review and printed a retraction in italics (see bottom of review), which was gingerly worded and kinda came off like they removed it because Flax “disavowed” the term, but was the decent thing to do so I’m not gonna sweat it too hard. Clearly, Creep were referring to critic/professor Laura Mulvey’s definition of the “Male Gaze,” the idea that in film, particularly in its early incarnation, women are objectified, their femininity generally defined by how men choose to view them. I came to read the idea of “rape gaze” as a feminist in-joke that probably should have stayed that way.

BUT THE SHIT WAS PROBLEMATIC AND OUT THERE, so people reacted. Good friends and respected colleagues Sean Fennessey and Rich Juzwiack did a chatty convo about rape gaze and the tentpost of a rape-exploitation (?, from what I hear) film I Spit on Your Grave, recently remade and re-released. Hipster Runoff, a spoofy, sarcastic website written by a person who is probably smarter than a lot of other people, wrote a characteristically spoofy, sarcastic post about the P4K retraction. Meanwhile, a male writer at The Houston Press typed, “That’s why a few overly sensitive people took the whole “rape gaze” thing too seriously, we think: Not that it doesn’t sound like it’s a joke, because it totally does, but because many “legitimate” musical genres also sound like they were named as jokes.” UM CALL ME AFTER YOU’VE BEEN STUCK IN A ROOM WITH SOMEONE WHO’S BIGGER THAN YOU AND IS TRYING TO PRESSURE YOU INTO SEX AND WONT LET YOU LEAVE.

My very good feminist-writer friend Claire V. Lobenfeld and I both froke out to our friends about the term and the flippancy with which it was used. On some/separate occasions, male dudes told both of us we were taking it all too seriously (see above). Really, you think? Here are two other articles and things I read about on the internet last week, on the same days the rape gaze “fracas” was happening: a Yale fraternity marched across campus chanting “No means yes. Yes means anal.” And: College rapists almost always get off the hook, even when they are confessing. Sexual violence is not a construct. Sixty percent of rape cases go unreported. Writers should always consider that words have meaning, and that we sometimes have the privilege of shaping the culture, even in the smallest of ways. Words are like magic fucking light sabre sword pieces. Do not front. Claire and I were fairly beside ourselves about the whole thing and, inspired by Sean and Rich, last Saturday we decided to free-form gchat about it. Our conversation is after the jump.

Julianne: we should talk about RAPE GAZE

Claire: WORST GAZE. i’m sort of weirded out by the thing that was said in that village voice interview that attributed it to “bedroom eyes”

Julianne: i think it’s super interesting that it was jokingly coined by creep—i wonder if they meant it to be subversive in a way. but then subversive shit can’t be contained. the outside world gets hold of it and idiots use the term w/o context as A FUCKING GENRE?!?!?!

Claire: i get that to some people it’s overly sensitive to be mad at something like, but i can’t not be. i don’t know, is it good to try and bring something like that into the hands of idiots because de-tabooing is maybe a good step? i don’t think so, but sometimes i wanna believe that bad things can do good down the line. i just think it’s shitty when progressive people tongue-and-cheekily make reference to it like it maybe isn’t hurtful.

Julianne: agreed. though i’m not sure how rape gaze as a term for a niche, probably fleeting genre of music is going to help anyone understand anything more about rape, how underreported it is, how prevalent. i was just reading an article, too, about the low percentage of rapes on campus that actually get prosecuted, even when the rapists admit to fault. but then i just think of the basic idea of the male gaze, which i think creep was referencing

Claire: just reading the whole train of thought that it’s a pet/joke name for a look they give the camera, “Some people might call it ‘bedroom eyes,’ but no—we call it rape gaze.” just makes me feel disappointed. i immediately thought of shoegaze when it started coming up and people were saying things like, “well, that’s kind of what salem is like”… you know, rapey shoegaze. and i don’t like to pry ever, but i wanted to be like, exactly what is your knowledge of “what rape sounds like”? and then i started thinking about that french movie fat girl, where catherine breillat, the director, essentially clobbers any sense of what the “male gaze” actually means and turns it into something really terrifying because it is about rape and it is about someone who a viewer would never take pleasure out of seeing sexually

Julianne: YES THAT MOVIE WAS INTENSIVO

Claire: and if you intellectualize why rapegaze was coined, i think you and i are both in agreement of these academic constructs, but i don’t think anyone else is necessarily thinking that way—certainly not people picking it up for the buzzy touchstone. the whole thing also makes me realize how insular what we do is, but that’s a totally different conversation

Julianne: i just got really disgusted at the idea that we even have to be having this conversation, actually

Claire: yeah, it’s creepcity, right? and have ANY women addressed this at all? aside from creep, who have been interviewed about it? i’m not so sure. and i’m not trying to say rape is a women’s only topic at all, but it’s interesting

Julianne: it just goes back to the idea WHY WOULD YOU THINK IT’S AN OKAY THING TO TOSS OFF OFFHANDEDLY IN THE MIDDLE OF A LIST OF GENRES THAT WERE CLEARLY MADE UP BY IDIOTS IN THE FIRST PLACE

Claire: i think “witch house” is clever, i think “rape gaze” should just be like, “ok, i get it, let’s keep it movin’ and not have a whirlwind internet week with it”

Julianne: dude yes, because music writing is a giant boy’s club and most feminist writers outside of it could probably give a shit about altered zones, to super generalize (not generalizing about music writing being a giant boy’s club tho).

Claire: yeah, that’s what i was thinking about earlier today—if i said any of those things to my friends, “rapegaze,” “witchhouse,” “chillwave” they would be like, “what are you talking about?” i am pretty sure pitchfork got too “weird” for the people i know at some point, so it’s a really small problem, in the grand scheme of things, but i think since we’re all so attached to reading our friends and colleagues, it’s hard not to feel like its presence is so big and it becomes menacing when i feel like, “am i gonna be uncomfortable when i go through my google reader today because of this buzzworthy thing happening?”

Julianne: exactly exactly exactly. also, thinking about the idea of salem (a band i like) or whoever being “rapey shoegaze,” if that’s really what people think, i’m like, “Do I have to feel uncomfortable at their shows now?” ALSO. Is that the point? What is the construct behind this genre of music anyway, this idea that spookiness and discomfort along with varying levels of talent (ha) and junky equipment is so big right now. why do people want to feel uncomfortable? not all these people are on syrup and isn’t shit already pretty fucked?
and then it makes me think about privilege. i don’t want to be reductive but there’s a certain privilege in tossing off the word “rapegaze” [although i’m actually not including creep in that statement]. does that make sense? where i’m going with this

Claire: yeah, i know exactly what you mean. i think it’s kind of the same thing as progressive people jokingly using “gay” and “no homo,” like, i am so above homophobia, i can say “no homo” and it means the opposite. it’s like meta-insult
like, not only am i not being homophobic when i say something is gay, i am also making this insular criticism about people who use it as a pejorative with no remorse. like, we can use rapegaze because we’re all totally above gender bias in this super underground music landscape and so when we use rapegaze, we get to funny or jokey about it because we don’t really mean it

Julianne: yes. which is, of course, privileged bullshit. that line of thinking is basically crawling up yr own asshole Also WHO THE FUCK JOKES ABOUT RAPE?!!!?!!! No really, tell me, so i can stay away from them
durga just came into the room and we started talking about how people use the word as a verb offhandedly, like “oh he totally raped you” if you got ripped off or something

Claire: i hate to say it, but dane cook has a really good stand up bit about that, addressing the hillary duff psas about using “gay” to mean lame. he’s like, “where are the ones about rape? i don’t think losing in halo is anything like what someone goes through.”

Julianne: HAHA oh god. oh my god. [TOTALLY EMBEDDING THAT IN THIS POST PS]

Claire: contextualizing the whole thing, though, in that it comes from a place of privilege i think is what i have been looking for, to at least make sense of why this happened, and why it wasn’t just merely a point of shock and turned into a touchstone. i’m weirded out by how easily it was adopted

Julianne: exactly. that people use/d the term without questioning the meaning behind it, or really thinking about what a “RAPE GAZE” is or could be, again, reiterates how much people have crawled up their own assholes, like this whole woozy music scene is so insular that real-world things cease to matter

Claire: whatever, i am starting a CASTRATIONCORE band

Julianne: HAHAH CAN I JOIN