St Vincent and what feminism might look like

Sometime  in 2011 or 2012 I went to see St Vincent play in Providence at Lupo's. I didn't know *that* much of her catalogue, but I knew enough to be excited. It was a good show. She is a very slight woman with curly hair and that night she was wearing black leather shorts I remember. Actually, some kind soul has posted video from that night (looks like it was May 3, 2012):

These two videos I found give an idea, but they don't show the part that really made that night memorable for me. 

That happened in a few places where Annie Clark really really rocks out on that electric guitar and shreds. Shreds the way dudes do on the guitar-- both intricate, amazing finger work and the occasional wall of screeching sound. It's not my favorite sound usually, but that night, watching Annie Clark abandon everything to a spectacular display of electric guitar virtuosity-- often crouched down at the very front edge of the stage, next to the screaming crowd and occasionally in the crowd at the front-- it was suddenly magical.  That night, Annie Clark was a freaking guitar genius--she was on fire and I was overcome with a euphoric sense that actually everything is going to be okay. That things do get better. In this case, that impression had to do especially with the feeling that things have gotten better and are getting better and will get better still for women in a world still calculated against them and in the face of ongoing and constantly shifting confusions, complications, and demands made on women in popular culture, politics, and so on. But Annie Clark was shredding her way through the glass ceiling of rock that night and I was totally buying it.

 

So, now it's 2014 and St Vincent has a new album out and Damian and I went to her concert here in London on Thursday. It was another good show and I enjoyed it. While there remain serious, beautiful electric guitars there are some new interesting developments going on-- Annie wore a mini dress and really high heels with her guitar and microphone and has incorporated some choreography that fills the time between singing and guitar playing. Sometimes Annie and the keyboardist/bassist Toko Yasuda had little synchronized moments of dancing and playing. 

Like this (only with way more sound, especially bass): 

 

Here's a bootleg from the gig I was at: 

http://youtu.be/gvJFBe5XGSk

http://youtu.be/7xu1XZi1pqM

I had a funny feeling about it. I thought it was kinda cool and entertaining, but that mincing walk and rehearsed dance movement also gave me a knee jerk feeling that it was sort of "artificial" or calculated seeming compared to the way I perceive "sincerity" in rock music as rocking out and not caring how you look to other people because you're so lost in the music making -- just like in classical music I always think the soloist who is swaying and weaving to their own music making is kind of embarrassing but also it's exciting to feel like the music is so powerful and important that they no longer care if they look silly or undignified. Or actors who act out ugly emotions or humiliating situations-- I always think to myself I could never do that. 

Well, I'm also a performance studies scholar so even though I have those reactions, I also find myself interrogating such notions pretty thoroughly too. And I thought to myself first and foremost: why do I automatically privilege a performance I perceive as uncontrollable as more "real" and more "authentic"? Obviously, because we are all trained to in western society which obsessively favors the "authentic" over the "theatrical," the "natural" over the "artificial," and the "real" over the "fake." There is a romantic impulse to believing in the spontaneous expression of some true sentiment, some sincere expression of ecstasy through music. And as many scholars and feminists before me have pointed out, these binary notions have been incessantly gendered along binary lines. Women tend to lose out on both sides of the equation, alternately classed as closer to "nature" and therefore irrational, less capable of intellectual refinement and culture or as dangerously imbricated with "artifice" in their use of fashion and makeup, a reputation for dishonesty that spread beyond dissembling appearance to forms of intellectual dishonesty like gossip (two-facedness), triviality, and so on. 

And so here's St Vincent and my first thought is that I distrust the "artificiality" of the choreography and deliberate physical movements in the new concert. And then I thought of how we could think of those movements as feminine--not only for how artifice has been historically coded as feminine, but also because the movements are delicate: mincing steps in high heels, delicate wrists bending and isolated. I wondered then if my internal measure that evaluates musical performance on the basis of perceived spontaneous "authentic" expression is one already skewed by the weight of gendered assumptions.

And then I thought, maybe St Vincent is offering me a new way to hope for a more equitable future for men and women. She's already proved that girls can rock as hard as the boys. Now maybe can we reclaim some apparently "feminine" performance tropes for rock awesomeness too. Maybe we can look at her ability to mix her delicate frame (yes, Annie Clark is conventionally beautiful, albeit quirky--discussing beauty privilege is another post.), sky high heels, coy choreography with hard, loud guitar awesomeness and musical ecstatic abandon as another model for making it okay to be whoever you are, attempt whatever musical stylings move you, whatever your gender, or body, or musical persuasion.

Postscript: here's a longform piece about St. Vincent's process for the new tour. I haven't read it all yet, but it starts out with relevant and interesting information: Village Voice.