Occupy The Disco

I really appreciate that she seems genuinely invested in being a positive force and doing something with her success and think her walking the walk so to speak is very admirable. That said, this seems perhaps overly idealistic? I don’t know. I never can tell when I’m being too cynical.

katherinestasaph:

Awesome as in “one of the best musician interviews I’ve read in a while” awesome. It goes a lot deeper than this one quote, but even this quote alone!

What I like about the song “One” is it sounds like dance music, but the lyrics are sad.

It’s a sad song. It has a lot of weird hidden messages. There’s a song called “108” that’s kind of about how I was exploited by some people. I watched this weird Swedish silent film when I was in Sweden about this girl in this mental institution who’s in love with this imaginary man who’s a thousand years old. I mixed both of them together. It was based a little on Laurie Anderson too, with the effects. The Auto-Tune wasn’t a crutch, it was an effect. I can sing without Auto-Tune! I’m making sure my voice is actually showing on this record, because that’s the number-one thing that bothers me, is that people say I don’t sing. But you don’t have to belt like Adele to sing.

I went into this thinking “oh neat, this might be interesting” And then I kept reading. It did have some interesting factoids such as the point about the numerous gay managers, but it portrays gay influence on music, particularly on rock as basically amounting to rockers appropriating gay culture or using ambiguous sexuality to seem more interesting. For example:

“All the young guys in those days could see that gay men were a lot more interesting than straight men. They had nicer cars, more disposable income, flats that young guys could only dream of having, and no family to hold them back. Most kids aspired to have such a life – but of course, without the gay sex”

Yes of course, without all that icky gay sex! Don’t want any of that! So they were really fond of the idea of having disposable income and being able to buy nice things? Sounds like they were really in love with the idea of being affluent, not gay. Though the “no family to hold them back” bit is a marvelous example of taking the alienation and disapproval from your own family that came with being openly gay and somehow managing to see that as cool because you don’t have to answer to mommy and daddy. The whole first half sounded like when I was in high school and I’d have those white people who would honestly say that they wished they had some black or Native American ancestry. They saw the rich history and culture available there as being something “cool” that they could wear like a piece of fashion, but clearly could do without all that bothersome oppression that had went into shaping it.

Other people’s lived experience is not something you can dress up in because you think it makes you seem more cool/creative/interesting/radical/dangerous.

garlandgrey:

feministx:

We are a group of established feminist activists, educators, writers, bloggers and lecturers. We are speaking out as the result of the behaviour and posts coming from some of the online feminist community, which we view as unhealthy for the movement. After some thoughtful consideration, we can…