The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

by Jessica Hopper

  It’s almost too big of a question to ask. I start to ask this of myself, to really start investigating, and stop, realizing full well that if I get an answer I might just have to retire to an adobe hut in the Italian countryside and not take any visitors for a long time. Or turn into the rock critical Andrea Dworkin, and report with resignation that all music made by men propagates the continual oppression and domination of women. Sometimes I feel like every rock song I hear is a sucker punch towards us. And I feel like no one takes that impact seriously, let alone notices it. It is “just” music.

  My deepest concerns about the lingering effects of emo is not so much for myself or for my friends—we have refuge in our personal-political platforms and deep-crated record collections—but rather for the teenage girls I see crowding front and center at emo shows. The ones who for whom this is their inaugural introduction to the underground, whose gateway may have been through Weezer or the Vagrant America tour or maybe Dashboard Confessional’s Unplugged. The ones who are seeking music out, who are wanting to stake some claim to punk rock, or an underground avenue, for a way out, a way under, to sate the seemingly unquenchable, nameless need—the same need I know I came to punk rock with. Emo is the province of the young, their foundation is fresh-laid, my concern is for people who have no other previous acquaintance with the underground, save for these bands and their songs.

  When I was that age, I too had a hunger for a music that spoke a language I was just starting to decipher, music that affirmed my ninth grade fuck-you values—music that encouraged me to not allow my budding feminist ways to be bludgeoned by the weight of mainstream, patriarchal culture—I was lucky I was met at the door with things like the Bikini Kill demo, Fugazi and the first Kill Rock Stars comp. I was met with polemics and respectful address; I heard my life and concerns in those songs. I was met with girl heroes deep in guitar squall, kicking out the jams under the stage lights. I was being hurtled towards deeper rewards. Records and bands were triggering ideas and inspiration. I acknowledge the importance of all of that because I know I would not be who I am now, doing what I do, 12 years down the line, if I had not had gotten those fundamentals, been presented with those big ideas about what music and, moreover, what life, can be about.

  So now I watch these girls at emo shows more than I ever do the band. I watch them sing along, to see what parts they freak out over. I wonder if this does it for them, if seeing these bands, these dudes on stage, resonates and inspires them to want to pick up a guitar or drum sticks. Or if they just see this as something dudes do, since there are no girls, there is no them up there. I wonder if they see themselves as participants, or only as consumers or—if we reference the songs directly—the consumed. I wonder if this is where music will begin and end for them. If they can be radicalized in spite of this. If being denied keys to the clubhouse is enough to spur them into action.

  I know that, for me, even as a teenage autodidact who thought her every idea was worthy of expression and an audience, it did not occur to me to start a band until I saw other women in one. It took seeing Babes in Toyland and Bikini Kill to truly throw on the lights, to show me that there was more than one place, one role, for women to occupy, and that our participation was important and vital—it was YOU MATTER writ large.

  I don’t want these front row girls to miss that. I don’t want girls leaving clubs denied of encouragement and potential. As lame as punk rock can be, as hollow as all of our self-serving claims ring—that the culture of punk is truly different somehow than that of median society—at its gnarled foundations still exists the possibilities for connection. There is still the possibility for exposure to radical notions, for punk rock to match up to what many kids dream, or hope for punk DIY to mean. But much of that hinges on the continual presence of radicalized women within the leagues, and those women being encouraged—given reasons to stay, to want to belong—rather than diminished by the music which glues the community together.

  Us girls deserve more than one song. We deserve more than one pledge of solidarity. We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us.

  CHANCE THE RAPPER

  A truncated version ran in Chicago Magazine,

  June 2013

  Chance the Rapper doesn’t want to go home. He just came from there, he says. The 20-year old rapper is in the passenger seat of my car. We were slated to drive around his South Side neighborhood, Chatham, where he grew up and now lives with his girlfriend. There are a flurry of excuses: It’s hot out. It will take too long and he has to be at the studio in an hour. The ‘hood where he lives is just where he lives, he says. His story, of how he went from half-dropped-out burner kid to Chicago’s next big thing, he insists, “happened here.” He motions to indicate that here means exactly where we are—this few-block stretch of downtown surrounding the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library.

  Despite his casual air and congenial charm, Chance is very aware of his image, his origin story and how much it constitutes his appeal. Beneath his earnest demeanor lies a kid who has mapped every inch of his hustle. Chance is a favorite with high school kids, in part, because his story could be theirs. He paints himself as the one kid amid the overachievers at Jones Prep who did not care about his future. Likable but a loner, he got busted smoking weed while ditching class at Millennium Park and spent his subsequent 10-day suspension recording a mixtape of songs that birthed his rap career. His is a ground-level stardom, someone kids can touch and talk to when they see him on the train or in the street—he is someone they could ostensibly become. The young MC is very clear on the importance of his apocryphal tale and that is the only one he is inclined to tell. And so we will not begin our story of Chance the Rapper in Chatham, we will begin where he says it began: downtown.

  We park and step out of the car outside of the Columbia College dorms. There is the waft of marijuana and someone yells “Whattup, man!” A former classmate from Jones appears and pulls Chance in for a half-hug, and explains, “He was the craziest motherfucker in school!” The old friend passes Chance his joint. Chance plugs his upcoming mixtape by name and street date. They exchange numbers after the kid offers his in case Chance needs a hookup for weed.

  It is difficult to ascertain whether Chance is famous citywide, but in this six-block proximity of where we walk, he is the Mayor of the Underage. He is greeted constantly, by name, with handshakes, pounds, dap. He gamely poses for pictures, is offered lights for his ever-present cigarettes, and kids prod his memory to see if he remembers the last time they met—at the library, in the parking lot of their school when he was selling tickets to one of his shows, that one time their cousin introduced them.

  We head down the street to Juggrnaut, the hip-hop clothing store that has hosted all of Chance’s mixtape release parties, drawing hundreds more kids than they can accommodate in the tiny space. Owner Roger Rodriguez brags that they’ve known him since back when he was “Just Chance. Before he was Chance Thee.” In the store, the half dozen dudes shopping look up but play it like they are not noticing Chance, who refers to the store as “home.” He would sometimes spend six hours a day there, writing rhymes or just hanging out. That doesn’t really happen anymore. Two middle school-age boys in uniforms pass by and pause to gawk when they catch sight of Chance through the open door. Chance gives them an acknowledging wave. They wave back before running away.

  After Juggrnaut, we head east on Washington and make a left on State and head into the YouMedia center on the ground floor of the library. “The first time I came here was to rap,” he explains. Kanye-obsessed Chance was in a duo with a friend (“We were terrible”) and had heard that the library had free recording studios. The center also offers free workshops; “Production, software, piano lessons, music theory—I took all of them.” He quickly became the star of the popular Wednesday-night open mics. “This place made me what I am today.” He swings open the door to the recording studio and pops his head in. Five teenage boys are inside, one is behind the
mic, the rest behind the computer. “Y’all recording?” he asks. “I used to be recording in here—I don’t mean to hold up your session.” Chance acts oblivious but the boys are stunned silent. This is a little like Derrick Rose suddenly sidling up while you’re free-throwing in the driveway.

  By the time he ducks back out a minute later, nearly a dozen boys have amassed in a semicircle. “All y’all rap?” he asks them. They all giddily introduce themselves by names they rap under. Dre Valentine, E-Man, Vic-Ivy, Psycho Ten Times. The iPhones come out and there is a group shot. They are all 15, 16, 17—the same age as Chance when he started camping out at YouMedia—and all of them are from the Chicago’s South Side, too. A kid who raps as Esh explains, “Everyone knows this is where Chance made 10 Day.” We decide to leave, as it becomes apparent that every kid in the library has realized Chance is here.

  Within the next half block he is stopped and recognized by the a janitor from Jones Prep, he takes pictures with three girls he knows from YouMedia, the cousin of his DJ and three rappers he knows from street ciphers. I ask one of them, Pres, why Chance’s success is so important to Chicago. “Everyone feel like he’s on his way up. He’s the voice of the youth in the Chi—but he is just part of it. He’s the lightbearer.”

  VIVA LA FILTHY NOISE!:

  COUGHS’ SECRET PASSAGE

  Chicago Reader, October 2006

  Every time Coughs count off a song it’s like a ticking toward detonation; every show they play is rumored to be their last, threatening both explosion and implosion. These locals’ most recent “last show” was last month at the Empty Bottle, during The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music fest, and their fiercely kinetic cacophony was as tight as it’s ever been, awing and frightening an already timid crowd. (People who can afford a $15 cover are not Coughs’ usual demographic.) The audience formed a polite arc at a safe distance from the stage, but the band refused them their distance—only four of the six members stayed behind their monitors. Front woman Anya Davidson took to the floor, shuffling around like an expiring windup toy, her eyes shut, bumping gently but obliviously into people as she screamed out a dialogue with a talking pimple (“Life of Acne”). And keyboardist and saxophonist Jail Flanagan barreled into the front row, charging ass first into the laps of the people sitting on the steps as she blew sick, squalling runs. You could almost see what the crowd was thinking: These people are wet with sweat and stink and they are trying to touch us.

  Coughs use every instrument as a percussion instrument, not just the trashed, monolithic two-man megakit at the back of the stage—a multicolored heap of snares, cymbals, soup pots, floor toms, metal barrels, and bass drums mounted flat like tabletops. The guitar and bass pile on with more banging and chomping, and even the vocals and saxophone steer clear of melody—the songs could be sketched out with only two or three symbols, one for the thuds and another couple for the breaks and scree between the thuds. There’s little that compares to the sound Coughs make, unless you abandon bands as points of reference: it’s like a massive conglomeration of screeching worn-out cab brakes, assembly-line machines, and pneumatic nail guns, the whole thing driven by the maniacally rapid heartbeat of a small mammal. The closest aesthetic antecedents are either early Boredoms or a car crash.

  On their new album, Secret Passage (Load), they play like they’re trying to tear apart the songs themselves and maybe take down whoever’s listening as well. But the mushroom cloud rising from this destruction has a silver lining—the explosion is more like the Big Bang, and it feels like something huge is happening inside that bubble of blast heat. Coughs’ intensity makes them seem bigger and more important than just a band; they stand for the destruction of contemporary pop with all its rote prescriptions and attendant soul death. They’re a cleansing fire purging the earth of the swagger of the Stones, the tired aggro posturing of punk and hardcore, the vapid “I can’t live without you”’s of R&B—their music clears a space for the clever-whatever that’s coming in their wake. Direct and unmediated, not referencing much of anything, it’s at times purposefully ugly, even gloriously so. But the fury doesn’t come out of hate; it’s pure-hearted, boldly altruistic. On their Myspace page, the “Sounds Like” box says “genres collapsing.” That is in fact what they sound like, and they’re doing us a favor: lighting a path out, delivering us to the future via filthy noise.

  When I saw Coughs play for the first time this spring, I was filled with prommy sentiment: I leaned and yelled into the side of my best friend’s head, “I don’t want this night to ever end.” But I’ve also seen the band bring out the worst in an audience, usually when some deeply-damaged Reagan babies try to up Coughs’ ante with extra insolence. This summer at a Coughs show in some crumbly warehouse, I watched a modelescent girl with long golden tresses and expensively wrong clothes stand amid the surging crowd and carefully hock gobs of spit onto Davidson. The girl’s pupils were pinpricks and she had blood on her face, like she’d gone over her handlebars on the way to the show. But she couldn’t add to the chaos or top the damage Davidson had already done to herself: her too-small dress was shredding and slipping off her as she heaved, screaming, her hands pulling at the nest of her hair.

  The way Davidson acts is just not how you ever see women present themselves in bands. Even when the most ferocious and confident women perform, there’s almost always an allusion to the expectations they’re sidestepping—to come across as “bad girls,” they need the rules hovering close at hand. But Davidson doesn’t seem aware those rules ever existed—half the time she doesn’t even seem aware of the audience. I’ve never seen a woman so naturally give less of a fuck. You could call it feminist if she seemed more conscious of what she’s doing—it’s like she was dropped here by aliens and never suffered the USA damage that makes girls kowtow involuntarily to the watchful eyes of convention. She’s our very own Iggy, unzipping her pants to expose the delicate print of some Hanes Her Ways as beer drips from her hair, howling like Patti Smith if she’d come up on bunk acid and small-town metal bands instead of blues and Baudelaire. She’s Niki de Saint Phalle, riddling her canvas with bullet holes out of love and rage.

  The other members of the band—a motley, Bad News Bears assortment—are hardly cookie-cutter personalities themselves. Percussionists Jon Ziemba and Seth Sher play standing up, often shirtless, like they’re trying to beat their way out from behind the piled-up barricade of their gear with constant colossal rolls and the martial rattle of a meth-powered high school marching band. Guitarist Vanessa Harris, who often sports a crooked coonskin hat, is the band’s melodic glue, though that’s not saying much—air-raid-siren squeals and one-note unsolos are her specialty. Bassist Carrie Vinarsky dresses like a hausfrau—last time I saw her she was wearing a turtleneck, high-waisted pleat-front jeans, and an embroidered vest—but her bass tone is so punishingly swampy it’d make the guy from Killdozer jealous.

  Coughs began in 2001 as a cross between an experiment and a dare—no one in the band was allowed to play an instrument she already knew how to play. Their earlier recordings are rippin’, but their haphazard spazziness makes them sound like the product of an accident rather than a collective aesthetic decision. From its first atonal bleat, by contrast, Secret Passage pounces with a purposeful ferocity. Coughs’ wretched, razor-sharp skronking still has a homemade charm but now it has a keen and assaultive focus, proving that they’ve figured out how to engage their instruments for maximum damage. Their early insistence on learning as they went has made their playing more idiosyncratic and unsettling as they’ve developed chops—though “chops” is a relative term, of course, and in this case it just means they can stomp and churn in unison when they want to.

  Secret Passage is also a joyous record, positive and uplifting, despite its calamitous clanging and murder screams. Davidson may sing like she’s trying to punch a hole through a wall with her voice, but her lyrics are genuine, colored with a strange innocence. You’d never guess, watching her force every ounce of air from her lu
ngs till she’s beet red, that she’s screaming about mountains, birds, dreams, gardening, freedom, or pining for a lover who arrives on goatback. On “15 Hole,” when she barks “Je suis bombe atomique,” it’s as much a promise as a threat.

  SWEET THINGS

  Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2006

  Dear Sufjan,

  I enjoyed your new album about my city and state and I am wondering if you are available, one day soon—perhaps when you are less busy being a newly famous Christian troubadour—to drive around Chicago and listen to “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison over and over, and see who cries first, you or me. I do not know what “losing” would consist of—crying first or not crying. It wouldn’t be a date or anything weird like that, just a friendly contest. Then I could show you the cool things around town that you did not sing about on your record. We could drive under the Green Line tracks where a car chase from The Blues Brothers took place, visit the fern room at the Garfield Park Conservatory, the top-floor atrium of the Harold Washington Library where the floors are marble and cool and very clean and no one is ever there so you can lay on them and look up into the downtown sky or just read the books you checked out, the Soul Vegetarian vegan soul food restaurant run by the African Hebrew Israelites, the Baha’i temple in Wilmette which gets a lot of god in the architecture and is ringed with seven gardens. If you aren’t scared of dark, isolated places there is always the train-line land bridge that runs through the industrial corridor to downtown where there are tons of baby rabbits and great discarded things—last time I was up there there was part of an old fair ride and the sign for a mid-’60s hair salon with fluttering, sequiny letters. We could sneak onto the elevators at the Drake Hotel and look at the lake at night—and if it’s fall they have apples in baskets in the hallways that are for decoration, but if you are me, they are for stealing and eating.