>Peter K. wanted to know:
>
>> what do people think of Ann Powers?
>
>She is a ninny. I recall a column in the Village Voice some years ago where
>she opined that buying one's soaps and lotions at the Body Shop could raise
>one's environmental consciousness.
>--
>Curtiss, grateful that he saw the Ramones live once
RIP, Joey. I saw the Ramones at a Jerry Brown rally in 1992, at which Joey said, "I never fucking voted in my fucking life, but I'm fucking voting for fucking Jerry Brown, man." Can't say I agreed with the sentiment, but I sure loved its expression.
Ann Powers is an amazingly bad writer. Her review of the Chicks on Speed concert in today's NYT is a miracle of awfulness. How were the B-52s "feminist"?
Doug
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New York Times - April 17, 2001
POP REVIEW Clamorous Sounds for Dancing and Feminist Enlightenment By ANN POWERS
The world has previously seen what transpired at the Knitting Factory on Thursday: fiery women dressed in fashionable tatters creating art pieces about propriety and desire only to rip the work, and almost themselves, to shreds.
It might have been a Dada show in Berlin between the wars or a Yoko Ono happening in swinging London. But this was the new trio Chicks on Speed, rekindling the eternal spark of feminist enlightenment.
Chicks on Speed formed in Munich several years ago as an art project that evolved toward music. Self-declared "genius dilettantes" and nonmusicians, this cosmopolitan team works with many producers to create their clamorous dance-based sound.
At the last of three shows, Melissa Logan, Alex Murray-Leslie and Kiki Moorse surged around in white disco suits or paper dresses shouting lyrics about clueless supermodels, sexual warriors and pyramids in the sky.
(That reference, Ms. Logan announced, denoted not New Age mysticism but urban architecture.)
Spurring this whirlwind was music that started hard and minimal and eventually expanded. Stretching from techno to classic rock, the style is rooted where disco met punk, and rock collided with the longer trajectory of feminist performance. Feminist bands like Liliput and the B-52's seized music's technology as others had already sacked the realm of high art, using amateurishness to rip down staid premises.
Chicks on Speed framed its revivalism within today's feminist dance rock. "We don't play guitars!" shouted Ms. Murray-Leslie in front of a video of a male street performer pompously "playing" a stick strung with rope.
By playing down musical skill within a larger spectacle, Chicks on Speed took away the main card male rockers often hold: virtuosity. These women surely know Audre Lorde's adage that one cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. Chicks on Speed trashed the tools and, from the wreckage, built their own motherland.