Since my last Bitch Mix was all about country's feminine side, I decided to give punk the same treatment this time around. I tried to cover the spectrum of old to new, dance-y to hardcore, and personal to political. Enjoy!
The forthcoming Kanye West and Lady Gaga tour/collaboration/alliance/bizarro-pop-Voltron makes sense for so many reasons. Primarily: Kanye and Gaga are both famous because they do weird things in public. Do you like their music? Do you not like their music? It doesn't matter! What did you think of the weird thing? Did you think it was weird? Because, if so, they have succeeded! And even I, an earnest unpacker of Meanings for lo these many blog posts now, have to admit that I enjoy Kanye and Gaga primarily because they make Meaning effectively useless.
How do you listen to Canadian music?
With your ears, eh? Silly…
Sorry, must have been the feminist jokes post from earlier today that inspired that one.
Anyways, we are indeed heading to the Far North for today’s B-sides as we rock out with Nova Scotian and lady tune-weaver Leslie Feist.
Performing as Feist, the woman who made counting fun again ("1,2,3,4"…) has been on hiatus since her last album, "The Reminder" came out in May 2007. Come back!? Please?!
Oh, yay! It's time to demonize Courtney Love! Again! The ever-convenient target for would-be-rock dude misogyny has come under fire, yet again, for Activision's use of an unlockable Kurt Cobain avatar in Guitar Hero 5.
The autumnal equinox is still a few days away (and today is unseasonably warm), but I’m ready to break out the sweaters and hear the leaves crunch under my step. My last mix said hello to summer, so now I’ll usher in the next season with these songs that speak to my autumn mood – either through lyrical reference or tone.
You know what's fun about this New York Times article about how the Twilight soundtrack might save the money-hemorrhaging record industry? That it has only one mention of who is most likely to buy tie-in Twilight products.
My internship at Bitch ended this week and just recently I got a grown-up job. In a perfect world, those two things would not be mutually exclusive, however I am super happy with the full-time gig, feel fortunate that during a recession I was able to land something with benefits and good pay and I'm still contributing to Bitch (like, right not for example) so it works out pretty well. In honor of work and time clocks and general employment, I am bringing you this week's edition of BitchTapes: The Lady Business Edition. I tried really hard to keep it to just songs by the ladies, for the ladies, but the two I included that aren't, I think, are fitting nonetheless.
For one thing, you can tell just by looking at her that she’s an odd duck. She is prone, for instance, to wearing poof-y shouldered ’80s jackets and things with polka dots. She claims to have intentionally gained weight because, as she put it in a recent Guardian article, "I don't want to be 'pretty'. I don't aspire to be like the Pussycat Dolls…I want to be an artist who people can believe in."
But it’s Blay’s songs that really do it. The twentysomething British songwriter goes by the name thecocknbullkid, and she has created her own musical world, one filled with equal parts quirky soul-pop (Macy Gray-ish), zingy synth-pop (Yaz-ish), and lo-fi computer zings (Midnight-Star-ish).
Let's face it. Male musicians (and some female ones) have been writing songs about their female muses ever since the first teenybopper swooned for some nerd holding a guitar. The girl's-name-for-a-title song is an important part of the pop music aesthetic, and one that I personally love. A song that is a straight-up ode to a woman I'll never meet has always held a certain mystique for me, as it lets me speculate about who she is and what her relationship with the musician is really like. So today I bring you nine songs written about nine ladies: The I Call Your Name BitchTapes.
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