I try to stay out of the fray, contemplating sweetness and light, maybe spend a weekend morning perusing the NY Times Magazine — then some schlock like this comes along and ruins it for me.
For such an overlong article, the writer amazingly either didn’t do research beyond swallowing CocoRosie’s glittery PR pill whole or was so rapt while the Casady sisters prophesized the mystical properties of thrift store clothing that she figured the only fitting sacrifice she could offer was a 10,000 word hymn of praise. If she had, she would have come across this Washington Post article from a few years back profiling Brooklyn’s “Kill Whitey” hip hop dance parties, at which young upwardly mobile mostly white people unleash their inner clichéd booty dancers while aiming to “kill the whiteness inside of you.” This Dionysian revelry was enabled the knowledge that real live black people – like the kind who invented hip hop – were unlikely to show up. The article mentions one Bianca Casady, one half of the precious freak-folkies CocoRosie:
“It’s about being nasty, people come to grind on each other,” said Casady, 23. “It’s like friends being sexual with each other.”
Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitey partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men “really hard-core.” In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that “it’s a safe environment to be freaky.”
Yeah, it definitely complicates things when you are totally terrified of the object of your fetish. But alas, you can’t have it both ways. Now I’m not trying to get all Kandia Crazy Horse here, but there is no reason why a serious writer should let them off the hook – it serves no meaningful interest. Consider this litany of highlights from the Times piece in light of the WaPo piece:
“Sierra’s anti-humanity, into nature, lightning, physical endurance. I’m into hustling, selling, cheating people, creative vandalism.”
Her lyrics included refrains like “Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends/Or their nigger lives.”
“Nowadays, who would want to be white? But back then, in farm country, anything other than button-nosed blonde didn’t fly.”
In the rehearsal studio, the producer and sound engineer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, was playing one of Martin Luther King’s speeches to see if it could be profitably added to CocoRosie’s habitual blend of barnyard noises and broken toys.
“If there’s a poetic to our work, a weird continuity of deliberate mistranslation, it’s what comes off the streets and is purified and reduced by the dollar stores,” she said. “I’ve been reborn by the idea of artificial paradise, an urban hustle. We are finding our way to God through the dollar stores of this world.”
But the Casady sisters’ love of raunchy dancing, Salvation Army slumming, and talk of “urban hustle” must, as the WaPo piece suggests, be considered in light of class status:
[CocoRosie] has just opened an art gallery and tea shop in Montmartre, which exhibits works by CocoRosie friends and protégés. In Paris [where they have an apartment], where they regularly make the covers of style magazines, the sisters are revered as fashion icons, queens of a vegan generation who find their inspiration in a Salvation Army bin rather than on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
More:
“I used to wear this rainbow Afro and these periwinkle vinyl bell-bottoms: this was when nobody was into baggies yet, or the idea that vinyl could be anything but skintight.
Bianca, 26, who is tall and curvy, with an Artful Dodger swagger (she quite often wears a black mustache penciled on her upper lip), tends to dress in a rather sardonic takeoff of homeboy style. That day, she had on a pair of supersize purple-and-gold Adidas sweat pants in velour, with matching sneakers, a black XXL T-shirt bearing the logo Black Pit Bull and a riding coat constructed from two quilted nylon dressing gowns, one of them red tartan, the other pink-and-green-flowery, with large Japanese Manga-esque appliqués sewn on them. Her headdress consisted of waist-length artificial black dreadlocks, surmounted by a crushed velvet mobcap with gold studs. Her face was adorned in white pancake makeup and turquoise eyeliner — and one fake pink eyelash.
Sierra, on the other hand, claims she “wanted to finish high school, go on to college, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They said it would destroy my creativity. They were so right.”
Here’s the kicker:
For CocoRosie, this waifishness is an extreme political stance, a way of countering everything from consumer capitalism to the war in Iraq to environmental collapse: if mainstream rock ’n’ rollers play at being perpetual teenagers, the Casady sisters’ “secret garden” is by contrast almost prepubescent, Edenic, a place where the subversively marginal can flourish and be free.
So the future of emancipatory politics rests in our collective willingness to regress into our own fetal “secret gardens”. Well, if I am taking all this a little too seriously, you can rest assured that CocoRosie aren’t, because, actually, they “don’t even like music.”
The sisters Casady offer some pretty low hanging fruit here but if they could be written off as merely airy posture-happy fashion-clowns I’d leave them well enough alone. But these attitudes are a big part of the cultural zeitgeist around here. I’m not going to take cheap shots at Williamsburg. It has many qualities I’d want in a paradise, but it’s ever on the verge of becoming the “artificial paradise” CocoRosie and their ilk so obliviously revel in.
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July 14, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] convinced an editor at the Times mag that that was enough to warrant a story. And that’s what blogs are [...]