The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (3 page)

Within the next half block he is stopped and recognized by the a janitor from Jones Prep, he takes pictures with three girls he knows from YouMedia, the cousin of his DJ and three rappers he knows from street ciphers. I ask one of them, Pres, why Chance’s success is so important to Chicago. “Everyone feel like he’s on his way up. He’s the voice of the youth in the Chi—but he is just part of it. He’s the lightbearer.”

VIVA LA FILTHY NOISE!: 
COUGHS’
SECRET PASSAGE

Chicago Reader,
October 2006

Every time Coughs count off a song it’s like a ticking toward detonation; every show they play is rumored to be their last, threatening both explosion and implosion. These locals’ most recent “last show” was last month at the Empty Bottle, during
The Wire
’s
Adventures in Modern Music fest, and their fiercely kinetic cacophony was as tight as it’s ever been, awing and frightening an already timid crowd. (People who can afford a $15 cover are not Coughs’ usual demographic.) The audience formed a polite arc at a safe distance from the stage, but the band refused them their distance—only four of the six members stayed behind their monitors. Front woman Anya Davidson took to the floor, shuffling around like an expiring windup toy, her eyes shut, bumping gently but obliviously into people as she screamed out a dialogue with a talking pimple (“Life of Acne”). And keyboardist and saxophonist Jail Flanagan barreled into the front row, charging ass first into the laps of the people sitting on the steps as she blew sick, squalling runs. You could almost see what the crowd was thinking:
These people are wet with sweat and stink and they are trying to touch us
.

Coughs use every instrument as a percussion instrument, not just the trashed, monolithic two-man megakit at the back of the stage—a multicolored heap of snares, cymbals, soup pots, floor toms, metal barrels, and bass drums mounted flat like tabletops. The guitar and bass pile on with more banging and chomping, and even the vocals and saxophone steer clear of melody—the songs could be sketched out with only two or three symbols, one for the thuds and another couple for the breaks and scree between the thuds. There’s little that compares to the sound Coughs make, unless you abandon bands as points of reference: it’s like a massive conglomeration of screeching worn-out cab brakes, assembly-line machines, and pneumatic nail guns, the whole thing driven by the maniacally rapid heartbeat of a small mammal. The closest aesthetic antecedents are either early Boredoms or a car crash.

On their new album,
Secret Passage
(Load), they play like they’re trying to tear apart the songs themselves and maybe take down whoever’s listening as well. But the mushroom cloud rising from this destruction has a silver lining—the explosion is more like the Big Bang, and it feels like something huge is happening inside that bubble of blast heat. Coughs’ intensity makes them seem bigger and more important than just a band; they stand for the destruction of contemporary pop with all its rote prescriptions and attendant soul death. They’re a cleansing fire purging the earth of the swagger of the Stones, the tired aggro posturing of punk and hardcore, the vapid “I can’t live without you”’s of R&B—their music clears a space for the clever-whatever that’s coming in their wake. Direct and unmediated, not referencing much of anything, it’s at times purposefully ugly, even gloriously so. But the fury doesn’t come out of hate; it’s pure-hearted, boldly altruistic. On their Myspace page, the “Sounds Like” box says “genres collapsing.” That is in fact what they sound like, and they’re doing us a favor: lighting a path out, delivering us to the future via filthy noise.

When I saw Coughs play for the first time this spring, I was filled with prommy sentiment: I leaned and yelled into the side of my best friend’s head, “I don’t want this night to ever end.” But I’ve also seen the band bring out the worst in an audience, usually when some deeply-damaged Reagan babies try to up Coughs’ ante with extra insolence. This summer at a Coughs show in some crumbly warehouse, I watched a modelescent girl with long golden tresses and expensively wrong clothes stand amid the surging crowd and carefully hock gobs of spit onto Davidson. The girl’s pupils were pinpricks and she had blood on her face, like she’d gone over her handlebars on the way to the show. But she couldn’t add to the chaos or top the damage Davidson had already done to herself: her too-small dress was shredding and slipping off her as she heaved, screaming, her hands pulling at the nest of her hair.

The way Davidson acts is just not how you ever see women present themselves in bands. Even when the most ferocious and confident women perform, there’s almost always an allusion to the expectations they’re sidestepping—to come across as “bad girls,” they need the rules hovering close at hand. But Davidson doesn’t seem aware those rules ever existed—half the time she doesn’t even seem aware of the audience. I’ve never seen a woman so naturally give less of a fuck. You could call it feminist if she seemed more conscious of what she’s doing—it’s like she was dropped here by aliens and never suffered the USA damage that makes girls kowtow involuntarily to the watchful eyes of convention. She’s our very own Iggy, unzipping her pants to expose the delicate print of some Hanes Her Ways as beer drips from her hair, howling like Patti Smith if she’d come up on bunk acid and small-town metal bands instead of blues and Baudelaire. She’s Niki de Saint Phalle, riddling her canvas with bullet holes out of love and rage.

The other members of the band—a motley, Bad News Bears assortment—are hardly cookie-cutter personalities themselves. Percussionists Jon Ziemba and Seth Sher play standing up, often shirtless, like they’re trying to beat their way out from behind the piled-up barricade of their gear with constant colossal rolls and the martial rattle of a meth-powered high school marching band. Guitarist Vanessa Harris, who often sports a crooked coonskin hat, is the band’s melodic glue, though that’s not saying much—air-raid-siren squeals and one-note unsolos are her specialty. Bassist Carrie Vinarsky dresses like a hausfrau—last time I saw her she was wearing a turtleneck, high-waisted pleat-front jeans, and an embroidered vest—but her bass tone is so punishingly swampy it’d make the guy from Killdozer jealous.

Coughs began in 2001 as a cross between an experiment and a dare—no one in the band was allowed to play an instrument she already knew how to play. Their earlier recordings are rippin’, but their haphazard spazziness makes them sound like the product of an accident rather than a collective aesthetic decision. From its first atonal bleat, by contrast,
Secret Passage
pounces with a purposeful ferocity. Coughs’ wretched, razor-sharp skronking still has a homemade charm but now it has a keen and assaultive focus, proving that they’ve figured out how to engage their instruments for maximum damage. Their early insistence on learning as they went has made their playing more idiosyncratic and unsettling as they’ve developed chops—though “chops” is a relative term, of course, and in this case it just means they can stomp and churn in unison when they want to.

Secret Passage
is also a joyous record, positive and uplifting, despite its calamitous clanging and murder screams. Davidson may sing like she’s trying to punch a hole through a wall with her voice, but her lyrics are genuine, colored with a strange innocence. You’d never guess, watching her force every ounce of air from her lungs till she’s beet red, that she’s screaming about mountains, birds, dreams, gardening, freedom, or pining for a lover who arrives on goatback. On “15 Hole,” when she barks “
Je suis bombe atomique
,” it’s as much a promise as a threat.

SWEET THINGS

Village Voice
Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2006

Dear Sufjan,

I enjoyed your new album about my city and state and I am wondering if you are available, one day soon—perhaps when you are less busy being a newly famous Christian troubadour—to drive around Chicago and listen to “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison over and over, and see who cries first, you or me. I do not know what “losing” would consist of—crying first or not crying. It wouldn’t be a date or anything weird like that, just a friendly contest. Then I could show you the cool things around town that you did not sing about on your record. We could drive under the Green Line tracks where a car chase from
The Blues Brothers
took place, visit the fern room at the Garfield Park Conservatory, the top-floor atrium of the Harold Washington Library where the floors are marble and cool and very clean and no one is ever there so you can lay on them and look up into the downtown sky or just read the books you checked out, the Soul Vegetarian vegan soul food restaurant run by the African Hebrew Israelites, the Baha’i temple in Wilmette which gets a lot of god in the architecture and is ringed with seven gardens. If you aren’t scared of dark, isolated places there is always the train-line land bridge that runs through the industrial corridor to downtown where there are tons of baby rabbits and great discarded things—last time I was up there there was part of an old fair ride and the sign for a mid-’60s hair salon with fluttering, sequiny letters. We could sneak onto the elevators at the Drake Hotel and look at the lake at night—and if it’s fall they have apples in baskets in the hallways that are for decoration, but if you are me, they are for stealing and eating.

Maybe you wrote songs about that stuff for your Illinois record, but they did not fit on the album, or the choruses were weak, or the song about Decatur was more fun to sing because of those half-funny half-rhymes (“aviator?!”). If you did not already write those songs, you are going to wish you had.

Yours very truly,
JH
Chicago, Illinois

AND WE REMAIN,
EVER SO FAITHFULLY, YOURS

TINYLUCKYGENIUS, January 2006

What you forget when you do not drink, when you do not hit the bars on the weekend, when you are not on the streets as the goodtiming people float or straggle out; what you forget is the particular sound of drunken Midwestern girls with that high Cicero shine to their voices, so sharp it can cut through the sound of a downpour a half block away. Heeled boots stutter-scraping along, keep slopping clip-cloppity time to her liquid chattering that pierces.

It is on my short list of why I will one day move to the woods. Nothing is grosser than people after last call. I want barn owls in their place.

My night was long. It is sometimes strangely lonely doing stories, out by yourself, glued to the makeshift notepad, noticing, noticing, scribbling blindly, looking for the point of interest. But on the way there, to those points of interest, that may or may not be of actual interest until they matriculate and get interpreted when you are typing it all up hours later, en route, there are bands that feel like violence and punks who vomit on the floor like it is their job. There are people that laugh at vomiting punx, then there are those that stifle a gag, then there are those of us grateful our purse is made of rubber as beer and gyro meat flecks its side, as it rains from the singer of the Functional Blackouts’ mouth, in between choruses, for the third time.

Tonight, point of interest, was ladies’ mud wrestling in an abandoned warehouse. People were contained to one room, with a bathroom line so long people were pissing in hallways and out-of-the-way spots, hawking for a good spot from which to best eye some exposed, muddied titty. After 40 minutes in one room, everyone was acting ratty, idling, as it was past capacity, and the wrestler-folks were limiting the amount of people in the wrestling room because the floor was weak, structurally. There was no heat and it was BYOB and by 11 p.m., a third of the room was pirate-eyed, slack-faced, screaming and rowdy, tired of waiting through bands, demanding wrestling honeys now. Twenty minutes later, I was sandwiched between a mudcaked pansexual orgy in the front row and a sea of dudes making comments about every wrestling girl, every move, what every leopard-print bra discarded in the ring amidst the chaos exposed. All 70 of the dudes cheered and clucked when the ref would instruct the girls to get on their knees at the start of the rounds. I think, in times like this, with my ear cocked to all this bullshit, that such greed is our most natural nature. To consume with appetite infinite—never satiable. My humanity stiffens—reporting this, writing this out means I have to process it, I have to take it all in, and it feels like a burden.

I concentrated on my notes and tried to duck when the ref slam’d his hand into the mud when he did the pinning counts—it sent the mud arcing through the room in threes.

The final round, where a lucky raffle-winner boy from the audience wrestled two girls, was overtaken by an audience-on-audience mud fight. I scrawled long notes about the scrawny boy, clad in a thong, joyfully allowing himself to be pinned, his shameless boner like a gift to the world, mud caking his smile. When it was over, I turned my shirt inside out so not to endanger my still pristine Paddington yellow coat, which I had hid far from the vomiting, beerspilling and mudsplatting. I headed out, passed the cops and rollergirls and boys talking about asses and bands, and went outside, walked a few blocks and waited for the bus. Stupidly, I assumed with all the mud soaking my hair and much of my face and being that I was dressed like a child in a story book, in my wader boots and canary coat, and that I was seated at a bus stop—you know, I thought that I did not look like I was out to turn tricks... but alas, no. I forgot, if you are a girl outdoors after midnight on a weekend, you might as well put groundeffects around your pussy. A dude in a Benz, a cabbie, and another dude cruising his sparkletrash with a spoiler—a woodbead crucifix from the rearview—all sought me for some service. I didn’t react in the way I used to when I was a young woman, which was get close enough and then spit in their faces. Instead I watched the muffler shop’s sign blink from time to temperature, time to temperature for 23 minutes until the 77 showed.