Tuesday, September 11, 2007 lady bitch ray
Occasionally some brave soul will speak up in the theorysphere and say that not only should porno be defended, but that it should be made, and made better. For instance, the Love and Terrorism blogger has announced his own porno project. IT’s money shot post still provokes responses, such as this indirect one from Naught Thought - and I believe IT has hinted that she has the utopian hope for better
porn in the future, something that would be erotic and overthrow the old, crusty structures of the Oedipal complex. Angela Carter, in one of her best essays, Sade and the Sadeian woman, announces the same project, which flowed into what is, for me, her finest novel – The Passion of New Eve. But – perhaps due to the language barrier – the academic who has actually crossed the line is hardly known in the English world. I’m talking about Ladybitchray, aka Reyhan Şahin. She is, as ralkorama puts it, “firstly a bitch, secondly a turk, and thirdly an academic.”
Actually, schlampe here really should be ‘slut’. On her website, she has posted a rather bizarre french video of herself in which she claims to be the whore of Germany. There are also three songs on the site. Now, yours truly truly does not like aggro rap. Ladybitchray is the only German rapper we can really stand. Partly this is because her voice does not produce a harsh or hard effect, as though it were trying to close itself off and become that bullet in your ear that goes through and takes out all your brain matter – which is how Bushido sounds to us. At the same time, Deutschland siktir lan is a great example of what makes Reyhan Sahin interesting. Siktir lan is turkish for fuck you. As Ladybitchray, Sahin straddles the polysemy of fuck, the insult and the caress intertwined there, just as she loves to place herself atop other cracks – the Turkish/German one, for instance. There is a notorious anti-Turkish element among some German rappers, so this is a position that holds a real risk. And that she plays with it by playing with the whole patriotic German thing is, well, admirable. But fucking, whether in Turkish or German, is not the word she is famous for. She is famous, in Germany, for her constant use of ‘pussy’ and ‘cunt’. She was dismissed from Radio Bremen when the owners of that station discovered that she used ‘inappropriate language’ on her internet videos. Being a very good self-promoter, Şahin peddled that story, plus some T and A, to Bild, a news magazine that combines the delicate sensibilities of Maxim with the investigative reporting style of the National Enquirer. It has long been the mainstay of the reactionary media empire built by Axel Springer. Sahin correctly bet that T and A would overcome the bias against a guest worker’s daughter.
On the other hand, the bigotry she evokes flows pretty effortlessly in the German press. Here’s a typical review from Citybeat:
“The woman suffers from a penetrating exhibitionist’s need to show herself, and is obsessed about building a career no matter what the price. We are talking about “Lady Ray”, alias Reyhan Sahin, from Bremen-Gröpelingen. This underclass rapper created in the beginning of the year a private broadcast that she advertised in the Bild paper and in Boulevard Magazine, after which, out of easy to infer grounds, her collaboration with Radio Bremen was pulled. The ‘female rapper’, whose demo seems to be the underclass of the underclass, is thus just of the type who drops out of the 8th grade and tries for a career a la Bushido.”
Before she became a pornorapper, she was a student in the sociology of communications. In this Spiegel interview, Şahin proclaims that she is bringing pussy style to Germany, but her fashions are not exactly avantgarde eroticware. The camera follows her to a library table in the Rosa Luxemberg institute at the University of Bremen. And she explains her double personality by grabbing her tits – one representing Ladybitchray, one Reyhan Şahin, I suspect that she is referencing one of the famous cliches of German literature, Goethe’s ‘two persons, alas, live within this breast”.
I suspect this because she has gone from a rapper to a surrealistic talk show host, and her show is cluttered with phrases and innuendos making Germany into a magpie’s nest – here horror, here a puppet, here a strudel. For who else would feature a puppet named Dr. Mengele, a dreadlocked pianist, and a stolid looking German hausfrau cooking, on a set that centers around a bed? On which bed she invites her guests, German rappers, to lie with her. She inevitably introduces them as guys with “big cocks”, and casually talks about her pussy, her tits, and her need to fuck, which – when her guest is a real asshole – can lead to pretty hilarious results