Filed under: Amy Ray, deleuze, Dirt, Divine, Dust, exploration, exploration as joke, freedom, Funeral Songs, gay rights, God, hangover, Haunting, Jesus Christ, Jimmie Rogers, Laramie, lesbian music, Meat, Meridian, nihilsm, nothing, nowhere, Spooks, suicide, Terroir, testosterone, violence, Wyoming
She’s Got To Be
Taylor Black
July 2011
When I was very young I wanted to be a witch. No, not in the sun and moon-worshipping, pentacle-wearing way, but a real witch, the kind you see in movies. In fact, my obsession was specifically with the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, and until I was around seven or eight years old I not only idolized her mentally and emotionally but also dressed as her more often than not. Cloaked in black, witch’s hat in place and riding around my family’s house on a broomstick, I felt most at home in my own skin.
As the years passed and all the confusing feelings and sensations brought on by puberty began to wax, all the imperiousness and dark glamour that influenced my idea of myself as a young witch transformed into what might be generously called a bourgeoning gender and sexual identity. As I ceased riding around on broom sticks and began to ponder my life as a matured adult being I then began to slowly cultivate a different idea of myself as a person found myself drawn to women that were, like Miss Witch: cold, commanding and horribly imposing.
I then spent the rest of my teenage years basking in the glow of these women and this wicked, feminized vision of myself. Luckily, I then found myself able to manipulate my icy form of majestic detachment as a sort of self-defense mechanism as I hurtled through all the drama one might expect for a depraved young faggot growing up in the oppressively masculine, drab Bible Belt South. More tragically, I suppose, I also felt a certain distance —from other people, from lovers, from myself, from my own body.
Living in the ivory tower of my fantasies, I began to feel all alone. And then soon I was. Everything would be okay, would stay in its rightful place, so long as I didn’t look into a mirror. Sex felt alright if I didn’t have to be touched or feel anything good. Friendships were okay if I did all the talking but none of the sharing. Being a member of my family was fine just as long as no one mentioned or thought about my future as a human being, much less as a gendered one.
Fast-forward to my sad, stony face staring around New York City, my new home. Running just as fast as I could out of North Carolina and pointing my toes, or my broomstick, due north, I landed on its shores at age 18, expecting something of a community and some kind of solid sense of identity to come my way. The queer world I found myself in was not one I was able to fold myself so easily into. Drunk on (post-)identity politics and the prescriptive narratives and vocabularies that went along with it, I felt even more failed than before. Knee-deep in sinners presumably like myself and settled into a community of queers and a city full of failures, I still felt my obvious lack of identification and hope for my sorry state of sexual abjection and gender dysphoria to be a burden and a source of that same loneliness I’d become so accustomed to.
Which brings me, however belatedly, to the song that I intended to focus squarely on this week, but that got waylaid by this little confessional. Not just the title for this mistaken autobiography of mine, but also the title of the second song off of Amy Ray’s most recent solo record Didn’t It Feel Kinder, \”She\’s Got To Be\” is the closest to an anthem or to a trans/queer audiobiography that I might be able to relate to.
Odd as it is, I find a lot of myself in this road-weary, road-worn song Amy Ray has written about her butchness and her own relationship to gender dysphoria. Across generations, bodies and sexualities, I find this very personal, yet complicated and even cagey, “anthem” of hers comforting. For better or worse, the song stands out on the album it appears on, but also in the whole of Amy Ray’s catalogue. Following behind the 
the bass and the beat comes Amy Ray singing in a boyish falsetto. Her voice is deceptively sweet, sounding almost like some sort of fucked up version of David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. If you don’t listen carefully to the lyrics in the first verse it would be easy to think of the song as a love song for another woman.
She’s got to be with me always
To make sense of the skin I’m in
Sometimes it gets dangerous
And lonely to defend
Marking time with every change
It’s hard to love this woman in me
The first time I listened to the song was at a concert, standing just a few feet from Amy Ray and her band as she closed her eyes and started in on this devastatingly personal and personalizing ballad to her self. Mind you, I’d heard the song a whole lot of times in the weeks leading up to the show on record, but I hadn’t listened to what it was saying. More than that, though, I don’t think it would have willfully occurred to me that a song sung about queerness might have anything to say to me, isolated as I have become in my mixed-up, useless image of myself.
Amy Ray’s song romances the sadness I’ve always had but never clearly felt or understood. “She’s Got To Be” is everything I need it to be: an anthem about losing gracefully. It is resigned, undone, incomplete and, at least to me, absolutely gorgeous. As I’ve said, you can’t sing a song in praise of some-thing about yourself that you didn’t create or do. If you try and sing triumphantly about a game you can’t win, you’ll lose out in the end. You lost before you began. But, what you can do is sing in the name of your failure—not to over-essentialize or lionize it, but to wrap yourself in it and feel at home. You can stop fighting against yourself if you stop pretending you might be able to win.
She’s the one that stills the seas
Finds the truth in this anarchy
Dives the depth of every age
Keeps this body and knows the shape
The chorus sounds anthemic, but is really more of a spell that Amy Ray casts in her singing of it. Instead of celebrating, it’s creating. It’s resolving. You’ve got to be to be free.
I will love I will protect this love
It was hard to get
I will love and I will protect this love
And it’s anarchy
Standing at the show, drunk on gin and staggered by the weight of what I was suddenly hearing, I began to cry quietly—something, as you might imagine, that doesn’t come naturally or easily to me. The revelation in the song is in Amy Ray’s willingness to give in to herself, to stop fighting and start becoming. Central to my own melancholy regarding any queer or trans narrative I might be able to apply to myself is a recognition that my fantasies and desires—of my self, my body and my sexual expression—can’t translate into anything. This song, like me, is resigned to its failure and in love with its chaos.
The thing that made me cry is the impossibility—of gender, cohesion, language, existence—Amy Ray realizes and demonstrates in her performance of the song. I cried not because I was sad for her, though, but because I knew what she was expressing, felt what she was admitting to have failed at. From my early years on a broomstick to my isolated attempts at finding a home for myself and a useful meaning for my desires, I stood rejoicing in this sweet little song of hers about giving up and staying put. In order to love yourself and become you’ve got to learn to leave well enough alone. Instead of breaking you down, failure can be full of capacity, a way of being and becoming in and of itself.
As I have come to believe in my twilight: when there’s nowhere to go it can feel a lot less lonely and horrifying to stay put, to remain right where you seem to belong. “She’s Got To Be” isn’t a queer anthem, but it’s an anthem to queer-ness; to self-love, instead of misguided self-praise. In place of the noise of rebellion and the silent echoes of loneliness came this song of self-love and affirmation to save me. In every subsequent listen, I remain to be wooed by its sweet sounds of failure, caught up in the romantic melody of resignation.
Filed under: 1990s, Amy Ray, Benediction, booze, Brandon Teena, brother, bullying, butch, butch lesbians, Camille Paglia, Cube steak, Dirt, dumb dumbs, dumdums, Dust, Elena Glasberg, freedom, Funeral Songs, gay rights, God, hangover, Haunting, homonationalism, homophobia, it gets better, Jesus Christ, Laramie, lesbian music, Matthew Shepard, Meat, melissa etheridge, Meridian, MTV, neil young, nihilsm, nothing, nowhere, queer theory, Red Dirt, Spooks, suicide, Terroir, testosterone, Uncategorized, violence, Wyoming
— Again
Elena Glasberg
November, 2010
hunting season's over
I’ve got a queer hangover and it is NOT getting any better. Actually, it’s getting harder and harder to be me. I mean at 51, finally the world cannot stop speaking of my categories in the most emotional and righteous of ways. If it’s not Israelis killing innocent Palestinians in the name of God-knows-what, it’s gays beaten and killed by “neighborhood bullies.” Or, as some lament, not being allowed to kill (unlike those universally conscripted Jewish Israelis) for their country. And now, “gay suicide”: gays killing themselves before anyone gets the chance.
Life for gay kids was once easier. Before the “It gets better (so you can become normal)” tidal wave gathered and struck. I remember as an undergrad at Purchase College in the late 1970s I had a chance to take a course on gay culture with a now-foundational anthropologist. She was a Jew and a butch. No way, I thought. Why would I want to study what I already knew? I was so dumb! I could’ve caught a case of identity studies as it was on the rise and begun a profitable career in my self. But no. I took astronomy and Medieval literature, though I was neither sidereal in nature nor was I of the past. I was just trying to live my girl-obsessed punky little life. I showed up one time to the (newly forming) gay undergrad club that met in a room in the basement of the dorm. Scanning the room of fatties and dweebs and seeing not one female who didn’t make me hate myself almost as much as I was likely to come to hate them if I stayed, I fled back to the light of apolitical prettiness and joyful exclusion.
Forgive me, Amy. I didn’t know any better. I was a rocker. Loved Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Television, Neil Young. Screaming guitars. Lucinda, Dylan. I did not associate with lesbian-feminist women’s music festival any more than I could tolerate Melissa Etheridge’s middle American high school version of the lesbian loner peeking in straight girls’ windows. Earnest and direct politics worked for Woody Guthrie. But for everyone else, it’s musical death. But with typical missionary zeal, Junebug showed me the error of my ways. Now the scales have fallen from out my ears holes, I can hear Amy Ray’s commitment and her experience with multiple communities and genres: rural kids, Homocore, women’s music, bluegrass, Native land rights, protest songs, anthems. And as it turns out, she was weary, weary of the coerciveness of communities of outlaws and of the highjackings of injury and loss of the normative movement of gay politics. Given the recent and seemingly natural (or as they say on the internet where everything happens now, “viral”) expansion of national gay rights production of an evidential “epidemic” of gay bullying and suicides in the “It Gets Better” videos, it just might be time for a second time around with Ray’s 2001 Song about Matthew Shephard’s murder, “Laramie.”
Amy Ray sings the connections of the US landscape, from the old fields and plantations, dirt roads, and highways. She’s been riding the rails between a place called home and the road, like a good American troubadour. When she’s on the road she’s dreaming of a dirt road. When she’s sitting at the end of that dirt road, she’s singing about getting back on that open road. That’s what troubadours do; they trouble space and the air with their songs. When she’s not hurrying on to some woman down that road or trying to make her way back to the one she shouldn’t have left, Ray’s road songs are actually thinking about those spaces, fences, and networks that trace and create the political landscape of the US. Now is the time to revisit one of those places at the end of a road, Laramie.
The road to Laramie is a weary one. “We all heard about that mess.” We’ve been hearing it and replaying this dirge of young men martyred in the name of hatred. Or was it freedom? The campaigns for so-called “gay” marriage and for open military service and the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell policy more than ever define gay politics. These moral, political goals leave behind the “mess” of actual sexual politics as it forms bodies and classes of people not unlike the way barbed wire created the Plains by fencing things in and keeping things out.
Laramie’s liquid la la syllables invoke the “open plains” of cowboys and Indians. Of course cowboys and Indians has never been a simple set of stories. Laramie’s associations of conflict, enmity, and racialized hatred have deepened since Matthew Shepherd met his end on the side of a road, leaned up against a barbed wire fence, the same cheap and flexible fences that helped create the “open” space of the plains and a cattle industry. The same fences that helped drive under Native ways of living on that land.
The “road to Laramie” comes at you with a heavy downbeat. It comes with Neil Young’s electric guitar distortion, catching at your mind like the barbs on the wire catch at the animals, the weeds, all the lives trying to pass through. And it comes now with a new myth, one to replace the dead Indians and the wide open: a little blond boy beaten to death by ignorant, hateful and doubtless desirous white thugs from hometown Laramie.
With a dolorous atonal chord Ray calls out, “Hey coalitions/ Lay down your mission/aries” to skewer the morality of the aggressive new missionary mode of gay politics. And it applies even better to this understandable but no less lamentable recent move to counter-missionize “at-risk” youth. The viral “It gets better” videos point to the truth of the slur that gays “recruit.” They missionize. Of course they do. Surely, MS was on a mission that night at the bar in Laramie – to get laid, to find friends and acceptance. What he ran into were the fences and the barbs. But Laramie wasn’t any different from the rest.
it gets better
Ray won’t give into urban-centered myths of freedom: “those boys just doing what the fancy people think.” They’re the cowboys who unrolled and strung out the bales of wire fencing that made the plains. But more often as not they’re just frat boys now, bewildered and diminished manhoods roaming the range to which Amy Ray aims another wall of noise: “Hey motherfuckers! Party season’s over…” Not just for them, but us too. Those boys in Laramie are not a party, a people “out there.” They are not an enemy. And not only are we not martyrs, the martyrs are actually not us. Despite the outpourings of facile identification and developmentalism implied in the “It gets better” viral reproduction, no one really knows what it was like for the suicides. Or for Matthew Shephard. Further, these deaths and failures to connect, victimizations and murders may not add up to anything we know call homophobia. For example, few consider the persistent utility of homophobia in the expression of so many religious leaders as more an effect of historical sectarianism than a real hatred of gay people. In fact, with the “It gets better” campaign the public gay movements now slavishly imitate religions, states, and as the term campaign also suggests, military strategy. In other words, Ray suggests that the Coalitions are missionary. Imitators of what they seek to upend.
For coalition, Ray offers Neil Young, a connection through rock n roll, distorted guitars, songs like “Pocahontas” and “Powder Finger.” And it makes sense Ray has been covering these relatively obscure Young songs for her young-er audience, carrying on the tradition of redressive resistance. “Pocahontas,” despite its creepy moccasin-fever, animates the myth of the dead Indian: Pocahontas is a living, seeing presence in the aural landscape. “Powder Finger” is a Faulknerian take on coming of age with Civil War. From its opening alarm, “Look out Mama, there’s a white boat coming down the river” it tells the story of the brief life of a boy caught up in a war that comes to his quiet town. American history never sounded like this, it never looked like this. The boy might have just as easily been on the banks of a river in Viet Nam, too. All the rivers, like all the roads converge on a young man “just turned 22” and not going to make it to the last line of the song, dying in a war he had no idea of.
There’s a connection Ray is trying for, between Young’s generation of the Vietnam War and civil rights protest movements and the contemporary resurrection of that national sacrificial figure. Now, post-nation, “post” civil rights, we get gay martyrs as representative of a real rights-bearing category of civil life. Before “all [this] mess,” Matthew Shepherd might have been another boy dead from war, drinking, class anger, syphilis, AIDS. But now that sexuality fights its way through injury towards a rights-bearing condition, a gay martyr emerges from the murk of people just doing wrong. And it is no accident that he was – and is – that type of the white male citizen, soldier, martyr. Yeah, we all heard about that mess. “But that town ain’t any different from the rest.” The sentimental attachment to male martyrdom and to suicide in particular distort understanding of what can change politically – and for whom — in the area of sexual freedom and policy (or rights discourse).
Laramie was also the end of the road in the gay rights imaginary—both an impasse, or a turning point in time where they said ‘enough’s enough,’ invigorating their homonationalist campaigns for rights at the end of the century. Imagine all the concerned left and east coast homos who descended on Laramie in the years following the incident like ‘49ers, picking at the memory of this poor dead boy and mining that poor dead town for all the political and cultural metaphors they could fit in their knapsacks and take back home with them, back on the campaign. Can a town’s political metaphors/usages be stripped mined out until the landscape is bare? Will the fair-haired white gay martyr continue to be the gold standard of the gay rights movement at the expense of the all the land, the rest of the people, a fuller accounting and connection through history and geography?
When this country or this gay rights movement can use a different kind of martyr, well, the need for civic sacrifice will itself most likely have died out. “Party time” will one day be over. In that case, with Amy Ray, I say RIP.
Filed under: Dirt, Dust, freedom, Funeral Songs, nothing, nowhere, Southern Gothic, Uncategorized | Tags: Comparative Literature, Lady Gaga, Queer Theory, Quentin Crisp, Roland Barthes, Taylor Black, Weegee
fit to be tied
Taylor Black
May 5, 2010
No Thoughts on Writing
My reading of Roland Barthes’ S/Z could not have come at a better—or, depending on how you look at it, worse—time in my life as a thinker and reclusive academic. Telling as it may be, most of my energies and worries lately have been about my profession and my professional community. Specifically, I have been concerned about the prescriptive and sometimes limited ways in which scholarship and critical discourse get carried out and received in contemporary academia. You see, I have had a sinking feeling over the past few years that the well of what we call “critical analysis” might have run dry long ago—that maybe there are only so many arguments that we can make as academics and cultural theorists without eating ourselves alive or, worse, devolving into a world where everyone is arguing and no one is listening.
Thankfully, M. Barthes’ essay seems to be heaven-sent: sent at just the right time and delivering just the right message for my world-weary soul. While it seems to have been decided that both academic labor and cultural theory ought to be affirmative, positivist and invested in the endless production of arguments and new ideas, S/Z focuses on the creative aspects of writing and reading in order to imagine new ways of thinking about conducting flows of thought, literature and ideology. The classical, prescriptive concept of a text is a religious one. Even in spite of years of post-structuralism and deconstruction, there is still a certain reverence and awe given to pieces of literature and philosophy that holds onto the assumption that there are definitive answers, connections, metaphors and clues imbedded inside the pages of a book that, with the proper equipment and know-how, can be dug up and put on display for all to see.
The compulsion we as academics have to argue the truth or the validity of a text treat the process of reading in a liturgical manner. The goal of these sorts of academic regulations and conventions represent a literary ideology: a “monster” that those of us employed in the profession of scholarship and academic reading that makes dead objects of pieces of literature and paranoid consumers out of its poor, pitiful readers.[1] All the rituals—the ten minute talk, the twenty page paper, the conference presentation, the question and answer period, the research, the thesis, the argument, the point—that we maintain in the holy name of professionalism and what’s often referred to as good academic work are only ways in which we foreclose the creative in the name of the critical, leave out the listening in the name of the prescriptive reading and unfortunately allow for the kind of prose that even the writer themselves can’t bear to read once it’s done.
There are, even as I’m writing these very words, scores of undergraduate students whispering to each other in the cold, dead halls of English departments across the world, trying to figure out what this text or that essays is about or represents so that they may walk into class with a confident air about them, prepared to tell their teachers just what they’ll expect to be hearing. This habit of approaching pieces of literature as dead object that contain within them mummified information that the professional scholar must necessarily be able to seek out and cite like some sort of necrophilic archaeologist is what Barthes refers to as “the readerly.” The ultimate goal of the readerly reading of a text is to sort out right away and without a doubt what it is that a book represents. Sort of like writing an obituary, this kind of consumption of a piece of writing proclaims with theological certainty how an object of literature should be remembered. It carves it into stone.
Failure to comprehend a literary work or piece it together so that it might be explained to those poor, lost sophomoric souls roaming the halls of academia everywhere is exactly what the readerly attempts to avoid in its self-confident, almost scientific rendering of a text. The same finality that gets carried by an obituary is, in Barthes own words, a product of the readerly: “To depart/to travel/to arrive/to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify—one might say this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection.”[2] The idea behind readerliness, and indeed behind what’s considered responsible literary scholarship, is that professional duty lies in the academic’s ability to succinctly and effortlessly piece various works of literature together—both in and of themselves as well as in conjunction, or religious association, with each other. Once someone is able to successfully defend and articulate their own positions on this or that literary body then they can call themselves—at least to those who will listen—an expert, nay a doctor of literary analysis.
So, while Barthes refers to the readerly text as simply what we conceive of as a “classical text,”[3] as a thing, I also believe he has imagined it for us as a process. The experience of consuming a classical text allows for a certain kind of freedom, he says, that allows them to decide “either to accept or reject the text.” Readerly reading is, then, “nothing more than a referendum…[representing] what can be read but not written.”[4] Both the archaeological ways in which, as I have described, works of literature get approached, taken apart and put back together as well as the pious manner in which literature gets remembered and associated weigh this freedom that Barthes lays out for us. The “right” of scholarship and academic reading lies in the ability of the professional critic to have something distinctive and utterly, horribly communicable to say about the mass of literature that they indulgently refer to as their “field of research.”
There is no pleasure in the holy kingdom of academic literary studies, only proclamations, theses and one defended paper after another, marching off into the abyss. The rolling hills of this great dark land are filled with the gravestones of classic, readerly, texts and teeming with busy-bodied academics and critics searching, digging and scratching away at surfaces looking for the one last idea that hasn’t yet been uncovered, the decomposing trace of something, anything, that hasn’t already been said.
And then there’s academic writing. We have become so professionalized, so very guarded about what it is we say and do as professional scholars that we have let our fears and conventions get the best of us. Just as there is no pleasure in the act of readerly reading, there is also no fun in the writing of critical analysis. When what you’re told you have to do is make an argument, prove your point or exhibit some sort of fool-proof comprehension of a text then there’s little room for mistake. The failure of completion—whether it be of your own vision of a book or body of work or simply of the weight of your argument itself—that makes readerliness such a paranoid, safeguarded venture saturates what we now know as academic prose. The thing that makes a thesis good or worthwhile in the world of academia is its ability to convey confidence, finality and achievement; likewise, the one thing that makes a piece of professional scholarship itself is no real person–or even, really, academic person—would dare read it!
Literature, in our minds, expresses, and its use language creates metaphors. The job of the professional scholar is to uncover, situate and show an astute understanding of how these things are imbedded in whatever body of work they are approaching and defending to death. The essay is, then, a kind of challenge, an investigation of the individual academic’s fortitude; the professional reading of the essay, in turn, works to declare whether or not a scholar has succeeded or failed at showing and expressing their total comprehension of a text and of literature in general. Just like the undergraduate students I painted earlier in this piece who stand outside of their classrooms explaining texts to each other and getting the gist of what’s happening in their literature classes so that they can be examined once they walk in and take their seats, literary scholars of all stripes attend conferences and pore over peer-reviewed journals in search of holes in each others’ arguments, looking for a way into the great academic party. Our writing, then, is really just an expression of readerliness, as it gets soaked with the weight of referendum that Barthes has described for us. In the name of professionalization and academic success, we mask our failures—of understanding, of investigation, of comprehension—with conventions and false confidence.
Good academic prose isn’t supposed to express, that’s what, at least as we say to ourselves, literature does. Instead, our writing distills our knowledge, it represents our abilities to read. Even now, I am working against my better judgment that says that even though I have been assigned to respond to a text that really I should be showing an omnipotent understanding of it—that there should be less of me talking and thinking through my own reaction to my reading of S/Z and more of me making definitive statements about it and clear associations with the bodies of scholarship that I have found myself invested in. What I ought to be doing, or rather, what’s come to be known as a proper academic response to something, is making claims about Barthes’ book, searching for an argument in order to situate my essay amongst all the other essays that have already been written about S/Z. But, to situate myself is to do away with myself; to make a claim that can be rock steady and can live on its own. Never mind the text itself or even the event of my reading it, the real goal of the scholarly—or, if you’d rather, the readerly—is to record my own success over a literary work. After this, my response can live on its own, and if something as unfortunate as publishing happens to my piece of scholarship, my arguments can crystallize and lay waiting until some other wayward academic soul comes and shreds them to bits.
The problem with scholarly writing is, as I’m sure I’ve made abundantly clear, that its fascinated with its own success—indeed, to argue at all is to be invested in the business of being right and proving value. But, what if writing didn’t argue? After all, to concede yourself to an argument leaves open the possibility that you might—and considering the fastidious energy of literary critics, probably will—be wrong. The answer to this conundrum, and the way out of this wicked fantasy of success that academic inquiry holds so close to its heart is a kind of wonderful failure, a resignation and romantic dedication to what Barthes calls “the writerly.” Instead of working to overcome disorder in a literary object, the writerly text is only focused on the experience, or the event of the language being heard and read. Unlike the scholarly paper, which attempts to codify and broadcast the academic’s success over a work of literature and makes arguments that are past even before they’ve been published in journals, the writerly text is, in Barthes’ terms:
“A perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitable make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing before the infinite play of the world (the world as function is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”[5]
So, if the readerly text ought to be read authoritatively and the scholarly argument is meant to convey success and completion with a kind of religious fervor, then I would like to humbly suggest that the writerly response necessarily be a record of failure—to investigate, to piece together, to associate, to understand, to communicate. Instead of reading to understand and writing to explain, we could write to write, respond to respond and express what is already expressing. While people read books like treasure maps and write essays like Bibles, the writerly text can write the things that need to be heard. Writerly readers can listen to language the way we allow ourselves to listen to songs—to be taken over by them, to be perhaps discombobulated by them, or even to be confused or ambivalent about the content that they may or may not carry with them as they are uttered and echoed off into the distance. You can argue and defend your self into oblivion or maintain your rights of failure and expression. Instead of training myself to succeed at this academic profession I have placed my gilded toes upon, I will dedicate myself to protecting and expressing the kinds of personal failures—to explain, to be critical, to be scientific and precise—that got me here in the first place.
[1] Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970. 97-98
[2] S/Z, 105
[3] S/Z, 4
[4] S/Z, 4
[5] S/Z, 5
Filed under: booze, butch lesbians, freedom, Funeral Songs, Lucinda Williams, nothing, nowhere, Southern Gothic, Spooks, testosterone, Uncategorized | Tags: hairdos, Hillary Clinton, lonely girls, pretty hairdos, rhinestones
Taylor Black
03/31/10
lonely girls
Forgive me, for, try as I might, I cannot let the hag thing rest. It’s like a song that won’t ever get out of your head.
With this entry, I would like to think about/clarify my own romantic inclinations towards ruined femininity and all the sweet silent solitude awaiting me and all the other lonely girls of the world who live their lives at the end of the bar—living a whole life like it was the end of the night, dancing alone and pretending like we’ve got somewhere to go.
Even as I write this entry, I feel guilty, in part, because I feel I’m just repeating exactly what I said about myself last week—that I longed for the hag’s life; that I have always imagined myself waiting my life out alone at the end of some bar, always there at closing time cloaked in false hope and averting glares behind false eyelashes.
lonely girls
lonely girls
But, sometimes there’s nothing to do but repeat yourself. More staggering than whatever hesitations I have about blogging and, to put it kindly, doing critical analysis about myself the music I listen to, is the image that’s glaring back at me off the computer screen: the image of a lonely girl nursing a gin and tonic that she wishes she could weep into (for dramatic and literary effect, of course) who doesn’t even know how to cry, who can’t even think of something worth getting that upset about.
heavy blankets
While it might be easy to assume that my attraction to failed femininity might have something to do with being a white, gay male, that stock narrative doesn’t work for me…try as I might. You see, my taste tends less toward what you are imagining in your stock narrative of gay masculinity than it is actually, legitimately and tragically aligned not with icons of tragic femininity—Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Whitney Houston, Hillary Clinton—than it is with the actual nameless ruined and destitute women that are, as I speak, sitting by themselves, waiting for something good to happen and singing all the sweet, sad songs that lonely girls do sing. You see, believe it or not, there’s not much irony in what I’ve been trying to convey lately. Forlorn and busted are not qualities that I appreciate, they’re what I am, what I will become.
So, if you’ll allow me one last siren song to close out this hag’s trilogy I promise to be less personal and less overbearing in entries to come. But, with my apologies and defenses out of the way, I’d like to riff off of this song that wrote me long before I tried to comprehend it, that sings the song not only of my life but also of the whole constellation of down and out ladies who are joined with and adhered to me. Their lives rhyme with mine, and together we make up one great big song that never ever ends.
heavy blankets
heavy blankets cover lonely girls
Like the song that I’m burying these thoughts in, the story my face tells and the song that I’ve got to sing about myself doesn’t really go anywhere, even though it probably ought to. Lucinda’s “Lonely Girls” is the first song on Essence, the album immediately following her hugely successful, career-changing Car Wheels on a Gravel Road—a foundational record in the annals of what’s referred to as alt-country, but also simply a whole collection of brilliant narrative-driven songs.
“Lonely Girls,” as you can see, doesn’t have a story to tell…at least that’s not what it’s content is focused on doing…the song really doesn’t even have much content to it in the first place. Like the lonely, ruined women I have been conjuring up the past few weeks as I have attempted to characterize my own romantic image of myself, this song stands alone. There are no metaphors in the song you see before you either, not really even what we think of as artistic expression.
The things that make and cover over lovely girls are not things at all…not descriptions or literary devices but productions, connections, events, stains and always-echoing echoes. You sing the song long enough that you become it.
Rocking back and forth both melodically and rhythmically and not moving beyond the kinds of lyrical descriptions and musical associations normally destined for the first verse of a song, “Lonely Girls” doesn’t go anywhere. However, because of the way the song moves and repeats itself it becomes more like an echo even before you’re a minute in—and when it’s over it’s hard to know how long you’ve been listening; you ask yourself if, perhaps, the song has accidentally gone on repeat.
So goes the life of a lonely girl: destined to repetition and bound to always be too late. I should know.
sweet sad songs
sweet sad songs
sweet sad songs sung by lonely girls
This last verse, I’ll admit, has sunk into my bucket of regularly used phrases—and, if you’ll notice, my blogging—without my even knowing I was doing it. “What a wonderful way to put things, Lucinda,” is the phrase I must have looked over the first minute I uttered the phrase “sweet, sad songs,” assuming it was something I’d come up with myself. But, to her credit as a songwriter and as an alibi for my “creative” plagiarisms, I’d like point out that this is what function a song should play: it sings the story of your life that knew you before you knew it; it makes you a part of the world it creates—fixing you into its lyrics, its cracks, its seams, itself.
Lonely girls may be coming apart at the seams, busted to the gills, broken down and made fragile by their place in the world, but they’ll always have each other; even if they only know themselves through their own personal, languid, remote locations, they know they’re not the only ones out there waiting for their last-call, partner-dancing all by themselves and picking up the pieces that were fractured before the start.
lonely girls
lonely girls
lonely girls
lonely girls
pretty hairdos
pretty hairdos
pretty hairdos worn by lonely girls
sparkly rhinestones
sparkly rhinesstones
sparkly rhinestones shine on lonely girls
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
I oughta know
I oughta know
I oughta know about lonely girls
An hour and a half in and I can’t remember where I began. The song’s been playing on repeat for twice as long as that. Filling my glass with one last gin and tonic before bed, I’m getting used to the idea of leaving this piece unbalanced and unfinished…how in the world am I supposed to close a piece up neatly that didn’t really even ever properly begin?
I oughta know.
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
Lonely girls
Filed under: Amy Ray, butch, butch lesbians, Elena Glasberg, freedom, lesbian music, Meridian, nothing, nowhere, testosterone, Uncategorized | Tags: Amy Ray, Bedknobs, Broomsticks, Bruce Springsteen, chicken wire, Elena Glasberg, Joan Crawford, labor, Lesbians, loss, real men!, resignation, sweet sad failure, Taylor Black, Throats, Wayne Koestenbaum, Witchcraft, Woody Guthrie
The Butch’s Throat: “She’s Got To Be” and \”Stand and Deliver\”
Elena Glasberg
03/10/10
I’ve been way too intense these days, way too dramatic. My tendency to take myself too seriously or romantically — let’s call it my tendency in mid life to “fall in love with the first woman I meet/ Put her in a wheelbarrow, and wheel her down the street”– puts me in the Dylanesque category of wizened boy troubadour. It’s an insouciant masculinity based in lusty misogyny and ultimately timed to keep moving on. Though Dylan did once write “Tangled Up in Blue,” about the best most sustained plaint on companionate marriage ever sung. So good that I recognized it long before I ever married, long before I ever broke. I must have known it just from being born to woman and man. But for the most part, Dylan’s love sick blues are lonesome. He’s always showily singing to some idea of a woman and his anger is getting to sound more and more like stand up. “Hell’s My Wife’s Hometown,” another cut from Together Through Life, makes me laugh every time. Dylan stopped singing about real people and feelings a long time ago, though he still reaches me on the deep level of myth and song.
But any protection I might seek from the damage I do to other women and to myself in my wavering, weary boyishness and my inconsistency and bravado breaks down when I pay attention to Amy Ray. “Stand and Deliver” and “She’s Got to Be” are both relationship songs, and in that they are a dime a dozen. Cheesy, even. I’ve never enjoyed the feeling of being hailed by TV ads (phone ads are especially manipulative) or pop tunes. Of course part of maturing or becoming human for the queer child is becoming open to popular feelings, even feeling normal. And now that queer is a brand name, a new way to be incoherent and individual just like every other tattooed sexual deviant out there, I’m even more resistant to the sound track. But oppositional reading and selective insertion of my desires into even the greatest musical fabrics has limits. When I listen to Amy Ray I recognize my nonsense. I feel read, exposed, and even normal. I hear my own struggling voice.
Baby’s got a lot of tears
Enough to cry a thousand years
Enough to cry a thousand seas
Enough to break a boy like me
I want to stand and deliver
Be the one who makes it better.
“Stand and Deliver” deliberately plays with anthemic production modes and structure, the kind intended to hail large rooms of thronging fans. But what theme exactly does Amy Ray seek to politicize? Butch-femme relations? Can an anthem represent queer relations and not monumentalize or reify the fluidity once offered by (and for) sexual resistance?
Even if the answer to these leading questions were not obvious, I’d still enjoy “Stand and Deliver” for precisely daring to speak for me, a lonely striving butch who never feels good enough. Not good enough for womanhood in general, and certainly not good enough for any woman. You can talk about pride and self-knowing, and you can even be really successful with getting men’s wives to sit on your lap (it’s easy, actually). But there’s a part of every deep-in-the-bone butch that can never believe any (real) woman would have her. That’s the butch’s throat, the wondrous contralto from the uncertain center of an unsung identity. Cue the swelling strings and the Robinhood garb:
All I’ve got’s this little chalice
Born of fear and forged with malice
All I’ve got’s this coat of mail [male?]
But in its time it served me well.
It’s useless now as I wither
Why can’t I just deliver?
Forget Robinhood, it’s almost Wagnerian in its endless, swelling drive to cement the lovers and heal the wounded hero with love-death. Sometimes Ray stands behind her electric guitar and delivers, drives forth her contralto from down in her chest, the covered place. This is not a natural voice. I know. I remember one summer vacation in the Catskills making the decision to break the shyness and order an icecream cone. I pitched my voice low, threw it down that hole, tried to feel it supported by my solar plexus, the fundament of my social projection: chocolate cone, please. From that utterance on, that pitch stuck in my butch throat.
No one ever enjoys hearing themselves played back on tape (it’s way more disturbing than a glimpse of yourself unawares in a mirror). The discomfort probably stems not from judgment but more likely from misrecognition: we do not hear ourselves internally the way the sounds come back through recording technologies. Feedback is not so much a reflection as a harmonic disillusion, a rending of our imagined wholeness. Ray, unlike most other butches, spends much of her time working out the mechanics of her voice, its reproduction and circulation. When not standing and delivering she practices the studio croon, the intimate delivery that became possible with the advent of miked recording on radio. In a youtube video, a relatively dolled-up Amy Ray strums directly into the camera, into the microphone, crooning to an imagined audience one swooning femme at a time. It’s a more anxious performance than the one on Wouldn’t It Be Kinder and I’m not sure it suits.
There’s another youtube video of just such an early version of “Stand and Deliver,” lovingly recorded by a fan. It works. Listening, I find myself holding my breath, sort of the way you do at the ballpark when the underprepared kid gets up to sing the national anthem – a notoriously difficult and unlovely vocal obstacle course – and you wonder if they can hit the highs and lows. The same feeling comes over me in this solo acoustic version. The vocal range and delicacy necessary to belt out the prayer, to cast the spell, to produce the butch voice, even more than to seduce the femme (who’s got her own thing going, and I’ll let it alone), makes me wonder, is she gonna make it to the end of this note, to the end of the song?
In the video and on the recording Ray shifts at the end of the song to falsetto, the quintessential male pop voice. I don’t think I any other female singer has ever used falsetto, and there’s a reason: Amy Ray is the butch’s throat, not Patti Smith’s wonderful but still ventriloquized gender masquerade in “Gloria.” No, Amy Ray don’t sound like a man. Close your eyes; there’s no double take/ double listening. Amy Ray is the butch throat. And in “Stand and Deliver” her butchness is cast in relation to doing right, to making whole another woman. It’s not ventriloquism, but something more contrapuntal. Not univocal; it’s anarchy.
As anarchic as it may be, the butch voice springs from one unifying throat or position:
She’s got to be with me always
To make sense of the skin I’m in
Sometimes it gets dangerous
And lonely to defend
Marking time with every change
It’s hard to love this woman in me
She’s the one that stills the seas
Finds the truth in this anarchy
Dives the depth of every age
Keeps this body and knows the shape
I will love. I will protect this love
It was hard to get
I will love and I will protect this love
And it’s anarchy.
Only Ray can occupy the con-tralto boy-like-me position and bypass soprano, the female high voice, bypass also the African-American infused gospel alto that had belonged to singers like Odetta. Ray’s depth and range is less spectacular than K. D. Lang’s virtuoso croon. It’s less self-assured, less placed, more liable to break down and to shift key and pitch mid song and between songs. Her voice is anarchy, the pitched battle of internalized gender.
“Is this body just a cage?” Well of course it is. And that’s why the voice, emanates from the body and yet speaks outside it. This variation on the old body-mind split I call the Gomer Pyle syndrome, after the suspect southern TV army recruit who gaaw-aawl-ied with a country accent, but who burst out in operatic baritone. The voice, unlike the body, does not betray class status or sexuality but does the opposite, it soars away from Podunk, and away from the Viet Nam war. It offers a better alibi than Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Jim Nabors through his voice became a whole, national crooner, the hopeless white southern faggot no more. Voice can uncage the body, transform status, fool the ear if not the eye. It is always projecting and projection.
But voice is also placed. Voice teachers speak of placing the voice, meaning techniques for producing “head” voice, “chest” or some other foundation for the sound waves to be produced from forced and controlled air through the “pipes” of the larynx and the containing cavities of the torso and skull. Amy Ray’s butch-ly placed sound may overlap with some critiques of the mezzo sound as hooty or covered or dark. But there’s also a boyish brightness or white gospel clarity to her tone, if not emanating from its placement, then from its intention, its innocence and yearning qualities. If the body is a cage, a place for the production of gender and trouble, it is also a staging for a projection. When Amy Ray switches to falsetto, she performs an aural gender trick beyond even the most complex of Strauss’s late trouser role in Der Rosenkavalierbecause it is not only the context of the reception of the voice that changes, and not only how the voice is produced that creates the aural difference, but the final falsetto is a new move in gender’s voiced and performed history: a woman singing low, quoting a man singing high. And the body does not, cannot change. Nor is it a cage, exactly. It is, Amy, a vessel, a location, a passage for air, a bag of wind, a bottom plexus of flesh and energy: it’s anarchy. It’s politics.
Amy Ray is at times as good as Woody Guthrie or Bruce Springsteen when it comes to getting away with politics in song. I could argue that the line “I spent all day pushing tissue roses into chicken wire” from “Put It Out For Good” is the most riveting, alarming, activating image of meaningless and underpaid factory labor in all of rock n roll. But that would be strange, isolating praise. Rock protest tends towards self-promoting anthems of youth and resistance. Even great anti-consumer culture songs like “take this job and shove it” or “(Can’t get no) Satisfaction” prefer the anger of a duped man who thinks his life should matter to scarifying details of other people’s unredeemable labor.
Amy Ray can write an anthem too, though. But people don’t necessarily understand where she’s coming from. It used to be suburbia – the “tramps like us”? . . . Well, maybe not. That was Springsteen’s word for the unsung. Continuing in the American song protest tradition, Ray sings in “Put It Out For Good” for the tramps not like “us”:
All the punks and the queers and the freaks and the smokers
. . . A new gender nation with a new desire.
But lately I think Ray has exhausted the singular field of identity crisis. Reports are that she thinks about the land. She roosts back on that bloody soil of the Las Americas del Sud. The American South. Georgia’s on her mind and in her body. Through Guthrie and Springsteen’s masculine outrage on behalf of outsiders, deportees, the people of the land caught among the map’s shifting borders and their insane walls and real porosity, Ray sings in the voice of the people. But the people never cohered. That’s why Ray’s people are all trannies. No one’s got a home – and no one’s got a righteous purchase on the land. Ray can agitate for the rights of the indigenous, for the people of place, the placed people, even as she speaks for the “new gendered nation,” the people of suburban anomie and placelessness, in a moving voice of contradiction with the power to transport. Long live the butch’s throat!
She’s Got To Be
Taylor Black
03/10/10
When I was very young I wanted to be a witch. No, not in the sun and moon-worshipping, pentacle-wearing way, but a real witch, the kind you see in movies. In fact, my obsession was specifically with the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, and until I was around seven or eight years old I not only idolized her mentally and emotionally but also dressed as her more often than not. Cloaked in black, witch’s hat in place and riding around my family’s house on a broomstick, I felt most at home in my own skin.
As the years passed and all the confusing feelings and sensations brought on by puberty began to wax, all the imperiousness and dark glamour that influenced my idea of myself as a young witch transformed into what might be generously called a bourgeoning gender and sexual identity. As I ceased riding around on broom sticks and began to ponder my life as a matured adult being I then began to slowly cultivate a different idea of myself as a person found myself drawn to women that were, like Miss Witch: cold, commanding and horribly imposing.
I then spent the rest of my teenage years basking in the glow of these women and this wicked, feminized vision of myself. Luckily, I then found myself able to manipulate my icy form of majestic detachment as a sort of self-defense mechanism as I hurtled through all the drama one might expect for a depraved young faggot growing up in the oppressively masculine, drab Bible Belt South. More tragically, I suppose, I also felt a certain distance —from other people, from lovers, from myself, from my own body.
Living in the ivory tower of my fantasies, I began to feel all alone. And then soon I was. Everything would be okay, would stay in its rightful place, so long as I didn’t look into a mirror. Sex felt alright if I didn’t have to be touched or feel anything good. Friendships were okay if I did all the talking but none of the sharing. Being a member of my family was fine just as long as no one mentioned or thought about my future as a human being, much less as a gendered one.
Fast-forward to my sad, stony face staring around New York City, my new home. Running just as fast as I could out of North Carolina and pointing my toes, or my broomstick, due north, I landed on its shores at age 18, expecting something of a community and some kind of solid sense of identity to come my way. As evidenced in my last piece on Le Tigre’s ode to transmasculinity, the queer world I found myself in was not one I was able to fold myself so easily into. Drunk on (post-)identity politics and the prescriptive narratives and vocabularies that went along with it, I felt even more failed than before. Knee-deep in sinners presumably like myself and settled into a community of queers and a city full of failures, I still felt my obvious lack of identification and hope for my sorry state of sexual abjection and gender dysphoria to be a burden and a source of that same loneliness I’d become so accustomed to.
The central question, at least to me, posed in my bitchy little entry on “Viz” was about the subject of queer anthems, and specifically whether or not the two terms work together at all. While an anthem is meant to celebrate and praise some sort of body—of work, of land, of a person—queerness, at least in my case, is a description for someone who lacks the sort of necessary cohesion to be sung about in such a praiseworthy manner, or even to be praised at all.
Which brings me, however belatedly, to the song that I intended to focus squarely on this week, but that got waylaid by this little confessional. Not just the title for this mistaken autobiography of mine, but also the title of the second song off of Amy Ray’s most recent solo record Didn’t It Feel Kinder, \”She\’s Got To Be\” is the closest to an anthem or to a trans/queer audiobiography that I might be able to relate to.
Odd as it is, I find a lot of myself in this road-weary, road-worn song Amy Ray has written about her butchness and her own relationship to gender dysphoria. Across generations, bodies and sexualities, I find this very personal, yet complicated and even cagey, “anthem” of hers comforting. For better or worse, the song stands out on the album it appears on, but also in the whole of Amy Ray’s catalogue. Following behind the slow drawl of the organ and the almost funky, soulful push given by the bass and the beat comes Amy Ray singing in a boyish falsetto. Her voice is deceptively sweet, sounding almost like some sort of fucked up version of David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. If you don’t listen carefully to the lyrics in the first verse it would be easy to think of the song as a love song for another woman.
She’s got to be with me always
To make sense of the skin I’m in
Sometimes it gets dangerous
And lonely to defend
Marking time with every change
It’s hard to love this woman in me
The first time I listened to the song was at a concert, standing just a few feet from Amy Ray and her band as she closed her eyes and started in on this devastatingly personal and personalizing ballad to her self. Mind you, I’d heard the song a whole lot of times in the weeks leading up to the show on record, but I hadn’t listened to what it was saying. More than that, though, I don’t think it would have willfully occurred to me that a song sung about queerness might have anything to say to me, isolated as I have become in my mixed-up, useless image of myself.
Unlike Samson’s epic ode to her fabulous gender presentation, Amy Ray’s song romances the sadness I’ve felt of not having either. “She’s Got To Be” is everything “Viz” song isn’t: resigned, undone, incomplete and, at least to me, absolutely gorgeous. As I’ve said, you can’t sing a song in praise of some-thing about yourself that you didn’t create or do. If you try and sing triumphantly about a game you can’t win, you’ll lose out in the end. You lost before you began. But, what you can do is sing in the name of your failure—not to over-essentialize or lionize it, but to wrap yourself in it and feel at home. You can stop fighting against yourself if you stop pretending you might be able to win.
She’s the one that stills the seas
Finds the truth in this anarchy
Dives the depth of every age
Keeps this body and knows the shape
The chorus sounds anthemic, but is really more of a spell that Amy Ray casts in her singing of it. Instead of celebrating, it’s creating. It’s resolving. You’ve got to be to be free.
I will love I will protect this love
It was hard to get
I will love and I will protect this love
And it’s anarchy
Standing at the show, drunk on gin and staggered by the weight of what I was suddenly hearing, I began to cry quietly—something, as you might imagine, that doesn’t come naturally or easily to me. The revelation in the song is in Amy Ray’s willingness to give in to herself, to stop fighting and start becoming. Central to my own melancholy regarding any queer or trans narrative I might be able to apply to myself is a recognition that my fantasies and desires—of my self, my body and my sexual expression—can’t translate into anything. This song, like me, is resigned to its failure and in love with its chaos.
The thing that made me cry is the impossibility—of gender, cohesion, language, existence—Amy Ray realizes and demonstrates in her performance of the song. I cried not because I was sad for her, though, but because I knew what she was expressing, felt what she was admitting to have failed at. From my early years on a broomstick to my isolated attempts at finding a home for myself and a useful meaning for my desires, I stood rejoicing in this sweet little song of hers about giving up and staying put. In order to love yourself and become you’ve got to learn to leave well enough alone. Instead of breaking you down, failure can be full of capacity, a way of being and becoming in and of itself.
As I have come to believe in my twilight: when there’s nowhere to go it can feel a lot less lonely and horrifying to stay put, to remain right where you seem to belong. “She’s Got To Be” isn’t a queer anthem, but it’s an anthem to queer-ness; to self-love, instead of misguided self-praise. In place of the noise of rebellion and the silent echoes of loneliness came this song of self-love and affirmation to save me. In every subsequent listen, I remain to be wooed by its sweet sounds of failure, caught up in the romantic melody of resignation.
Filed under: Amy Ray, booze, butch, butch lesbians, Elena Glasberg, freedom, lesbian music, nothing, nowhere, testosterone
"Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off," Diane Arbus
Elena Glasberg
02/05/10
Sober Girl
–Amy Ray
I’m a sober girl
not for any good reason
I found myself on this road I’m on
It felt a lot like treason
To my last girlfriends
Who could never understand
When it comes to love I wanted ….. purity
I felt alone in this world in the city so I got out of there
I found myself at the end of a long dirt road
It felt a lot like nowhere
To my last girlfriends……..
When I was young in every camptown song I sung
I was aching just to be …… with someone
Who could lay me down, where rivers run
who was able, who was free…….
Free of this man made world
And all the bargains we made with fear
They slowly whittle us down to nothing
It felt a lot like despair
But I found someone who was still standin when it was done
And with the purest heart she said these words to me:
When I was young…..
Purity. That word that just doesn’t fit in this song and I could never hear it, had to have Taylor translate it for me, several times, in fact. The lyric, its rhythm, just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the song – it always ends the line so awkwardly, against the driving beat. The word is musically unintelligible. It seems to exist on another register of meaning altogether. Who but a lesbian would end a rock lyric on love with the non-rhyme “purity”? But then Taylor’s got to translate so many of Amy Ray’s lyrics for me – I’m trying to get into their heaven, but I seem to live in a far distant psychic world. I’m a Yankee, for one. And a terrible lesbian.
I’m never sure to what extent I care about those sobriety narratives. Or lesbian music culture, which everyone knows exists, if only in some idealized, non-commercial form. Personally, I never listened to lesbian music – no Melissa Etheridge pressing her nose to the heterosexual window, threatening to seduce those straight girls. No Indigo Girls! Only Amy Ray solo for me. These days Amy Ray makes true, complicated butch music. Love her contralto, and her mixedness. I’m interested in the way “Sober Girl” mixes hard rock n roll and the “camptown” songs Amy Ray was subject to in her southern religious upbringing. Funny how the music that accompanies even the most oppressive dogmas probably saved more people than the teachings themselves. Even in my heathenish way, I often feel saved by religious music. I might even say that all music is based in religious practice – in parables and incantations (spells). It can lead to ecstasy — like the twinned guitar solos taking off at the song’s fade out.
“Sober Girl” is the moral-religious soundtrack of contemporary lesbianism. What does it mean to be sober? As a goal it lacks “reason.” And leads to isolation: “treason.” Sobriety requires social revolt and risk. The singer moves from alienated religious childhood, to the bar girls of her young adulthood, finally to achieve self-possession. The song collides on its divergent origins, the church organ entering the ripping guitars and stuttering, free drumming at the “bridge.” Here, the lyrics about wanting to find “someone who would be still standing when it was done” fold into themselves, rondo-like, and it turns out that that “someone” was you all along. The alienated church girl turned into an equally alienated righteous lesbian. Those last girlfriends, “who could never understand” are only the latest exemplars of the ‘man-made world” she needed to flee. I guess you could say, Amy’s (and my) “life was saved by rock n roll” without choking on the irony that a man wrote those lyrics.
The song describes the way I feel about lesbian righteousness and the sub culture’s sad tendency toward censoriousness (that would include a lack of appreciation for lou reed, the rock n roll animal). You know, the identity wars, butch-femme drama, enforced folksiness and general culture of political earnestness that continues in different dress today. Sober is such a loaded term. I’ve always been the sober one at the party. But that’s not the same as being righteous or the one “standing when it was all done.” No, all those drunks can weigh you down. Once (an obviously very castigating) girlfriend even suggested I was a “dry drunk,” a person who, without actually having the fun of boozing manages to display all the pathologies of unsobriety. Well, talk about high and mighty! Sometimes escaping back out that long dirt road seems less like victory than, well, treason. And does treason sort of rhyme with the last word, “free’? Freedom can be more isolating than alienation – at least alienation’s an identity. Freedom can just feel like lost.
For a sober butch in a lesbian culture drunk on righteousness… being the sober butch has always felt a lot nowhere. And now there’s a new substance – testosterone. Everyone’s drunk on masculinity in a bottle, whether they’re taking it themselves or just rubbernecking. For a middle aged butch this is one more scene that “feels a lot like nowhere”…..
Junebug versus Hurricane 