The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The sound of women singing with their tongues ripped out

April 2001

Mr. Lady is a label from Durham, North Car­olina, that puts out unpredictable, punk-based music mostly by women. Its best-known band is Le Tigre—Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman and JD Samson. The 1999 album Le Ti­gre, made with Sadie Benning, was an all-night party of intentionally crude sampling, especially of the trio's own voices; it was smart, celebrated and terribly self-conscious. The 17-minute seven-song Le Tigre disc From the Desk of Mr. Lady is slammed with inten­sity—and a lot more fun. "In seeking specific technical information, we discover that behind the hysteria of male expertise lies the magic world of our unmade art," shouts the belea­guered newspaper comics heroine Cathy out of the art printed on the CD. She raises one hand manifesto-style; the other clutches the phone she answers for a living.

Le Tigre

The screaming voice you hear on the first song (''GET OFF THE INTERNET!") seems to carry the argument further, but the deadpan countervocal ("Destroy the right wing," it says, in the slightly irritated tone of someone asking you for the third time to please turn off the lights when you leave the house) owns the music. The clunking dance beat retains such a building block quality you get the idea Le Tigre made it up with a sample kit one of them bought on sale at Radio Shack for $9.95; that is, you get the idea anyone could do this, in her spare time. Just listening to the repeated hesitations in "Yr Critique"—it starts with a man asking what, in this post-feminist world, is the problem now—is at once com­pletely seductive as a matter of people play­ing with sound and as a portrait of a society whose women might as well have had their tongues ripped out. The piece is incredibly funny, just like watching someone fall on his face and then try to pretend it didn't happen is funny—so long as you don't make the mis­take of seeing yourself in his place. This is ra­dio music: the lovely toy-pop melody of "Gone b4 yr home" would sound right on al­most any station. More than that, it's music you can figure a radio would dream up for its own pleasure, generated out of other peo­ple's mistakes, self-censorships, uncom­pleted thoughts. But if you imagine the 18 numbers on Calling All Kings and Queens: A Mr. Lady Compilation on the radio you might also have to imagine someone sneaking into your local college station at 3 A.M. and locking the regular DJ in a closet.

California Lightening is two women from Oakland singing and playing drums and guitar; people as self-composed and determined—as unfoolable—as they sound on "Lugosi," the first cut on Calling All Kings and Queens, aren't much heard in public anymore. That's because today public speech, whether political or musi­cal, is meant to please whoever's listening. Here the loud noise the guitar makes could be walls to keep you out. The drama in the mu­sic—the way it takes off like a plane halfway through the song—belies the resignation in the voices, and vice versa. Play me again, the song seems to say. See if I'm kidding.

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Like a cocktail lounge pianist showcasing his big from-the-heart number—the one he does right after "Star Dust"—the drag team Kiki & Herb give a Sleater-Kinney tune a full Barry Manilow: "I'm not waiting," the man shouts to heaven, "Til I grow up / To be a woooo-man." The Butchies, playing "Disco" live, hit a spooky, insinuating groove, making you strain as if from the crowd for every word: "You've got blue eyes, no you've got green eyes, no you've got gray eyes," and suddenly you're trapped in the middle of New Order's "Temptation," as transcendent as it ever was and as ordinary as it never was.

You could strain for weeks to catch the words at the center of Heart Beats Red's song, if they weren't in the title: "Set Me Up." So that's what they're saying—as if words could even begin to contain the desire the three women from Portland, Oregon, put into them. It's a desperate sound, as unfancy as the Bob­bettes 1957 hit "Mr. Lee" but burdened with going on half a century's worth of knowledge. It's beautiful, in its way, but hard to listen to, and the listener isn't prepared. The song starts with a quiet, irresistibly reverberating guitar riff—a smooth path that opens into a field full of rocks.

Then there's a little fuzztone riff at the end that's just—terrific. You move on to the next cut (PME's "Cherries in the Snow," as it happens, which is terrible). But by the end of this record, as with Le Tigre's, it seems as if very little with the name Mr. Lady on it—Sarah Dougher's The Walls Ablaze, as passionate as its title, or the Butchies' new Butchies 3, with its slowly un­folding "Wedding Disaster"—is just anything.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, April 2001