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V-sides: Defining “vagina music”

Music post by Andi Zeisler, June 24, 2009 - 3:53pm; tagged cock rock, ladyparts, Lilith Fair, Michigan Women's Music Festival, Missy Elliott, music, rock, Tori Amos, vaginas, women's music.

I’m not really sure where the term “vagina music” originated. The first time I heard it was in Nicole Holofcener’s awesome film Walking and Talking, when a male character complained to his female car-trip cohorts, “Are we gonna listen to this vagina music the whole way there?” (“Yes!”) The second time was almost a decade later, on an episode of Six Feet Under wherein one of Claire’s art-school friends demands , “You guys are gonna have to change this vagina music immediately.”

From these, we can infer that vagina music = music that others feel subjected to and wish to avoid.

Nonfictionally, in my own life, it’s come up in less confrontational instances, usually in discussions of the famed Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—which was originally founded to showcase what was specifically called women’s music—or the once-mighty Lilith Fair. I used the expression just last weekend to refer to a band playing Portland’s Pride festivities whose skinny jeans and self-conscious rattails screamed ’80s synth revival ,but whose amps bleated out something much more Indigo/DiFranco.

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Action Jackson

Luscious Jackson's Kate Schellenbach on Blondie, basketball, and building her own musical all-star team

An interview with Kate Schellenbach by Tom Kielty, published in 2000; filed under Music; tagged Beastie Boys, female artists, Lilith Fair, Lollapalooza, Luscious Jackson, music festivals, music industry, record industry, women in rock.

Kate Schellenbach is cool. Cool not because, after starting the fanzine Cheap Garbage for Snotty Kids in the early '80s, she was the first to take a seat behind the drum set for the Beastie Boys. Not because nearly 10 years later Luscious Jackson, the band she formed with friends from New York clubs like Hurrah and Tier 3, was the first band signed to the Beasties' Grand Royal label. Not even because since putting Luscious together the band has shared stages with the likes of Bettie Serveert, Urge Overkill, and R.E.M. Kate Schellenbach is cool in that intangible way that the person you chat casually with in the bookstore is cool—she’s smart, funny, and unassuming. On the verge of Luscious Jackson's national tour with labelmate Ben Lee, supporting their new record Electric Honey, the band played a radio show broadcast from Foxboro Stadium outside Boston alongside the Pretenders, Natalie Merchant, Sugar Ray, Melissa Etheridge, and Blondie. In between playing her set and jetting back to the stage to rock out to the Pretenders, she found time to have lunch with me.

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