NYLPM Response: Peaches - "Fuck the Pain Away"

It's a well written piece. I caught Guided by Voices (zzzz... I've never been a fan) and Jon Spencer (half kick ass, half average) at the Siren Fest. Anyway, regarding Peaches, I don't hear much under the shock value that grabs me. The music just doesn't seem all that sexy.

I disagree with the notion that guys haven't been singing this directly about sex. I mean, hip hop gets plenty raunchy. And the aforementioned Jon Spencer says "Full grown woman like to fuck!" Maybe you're talkin' more in the dance vein.

Yes. I'm a sucker for the super-villain Dissolution Queen. Dave, I like yr willingness to change expectations & be surprised. But I don't see the Puff Daddy reference? Is that another article? Anyhow.

You know if you took the blessed B train there that's the last time you will until 2004... sniff...

Granted Gary Cherone is a talentless, pompous clown, but ALL the blame for the VH3 debacle lies with Eddie Van Halen. 'Lead Singer Disease'? Describes anyone with enough nous/personality to cut through Eddie's endless noodling. Well, now Eddie's got what he wanted, an empty vessel he can fill with digital chorus and sub- Daniel Lanois atmospherics (he wanted 'more metaphorical music'!!! Aaarrggghhh! Gimme 'Romeo Delight' NOW!), and I say let him drown in it.

bnw: True, true, true. It just seemed that most of the stuff I was hearing was of a more namby-pamby nature. (Plus, I wanted to link to 'em - kudos to Bran Van for the Boris Vallejo cover art, BTW.) Of course, there's plenty of stuff to the contrary. Right now, though, there ain't much out there (that I've heard) that sounds quite so raunchy. Peaches' album has been out for quite a while, though. And, of course, manipulating facts to state ones' case isn't anything new.

Tracer: Yes, the Puff Daddy / P. Diddy thing was a different NYLPM entry o' mine. I think I'm the only one to have contributed anything meaty / substantial to NYLPM in recent weeks, excepting one post from the pen of fred solinger. Odd. (Darn Tom & his "vacations"...)

And if you guys missed Superchunk, I'll be very disappointed.

Reasons for why-I'm-not-writing-stuff have been gone into on other threads, but here and now I will say a big big thanks to David R and others for keeping NYLPM alive while I can't/won't. Thanks David!

I had actually heard of Peaches a week before Siren (disn't make it, sadly. And I wanted to see Quazi and JSBX too...) when a bunch of friends of mine were all sitting around snickering about Fucking The Pain Away and Sucking on Titties. I didn't get it until Tuesday when I came into the office and downloaded her. It's funny, but it's still not particularly good, and she's an instance when you can't find merit in kitch. She needs to rhyme more, or sing more, or mix her vocals higher, cuz her beats don't bail her out. Her attire is fine.

I thought it was a mighty fine piece. I also then had the damn tune stuck in my head for a day. Which I guess reinforces the point?

I was really upset with TeenageUSA when they put out her ep and not a band called Picastro also from Toronto. The beatbox is boring, her rapping is nothing catchy or tricky and shes not even that vulgar. Gangsta Boo beats Peaches at her own game with such Cash Money Records classics as "Suck A Little Dick" and "Nasty Trick". Peaches on stage has been a bit a buzz. Edgefest (local alt.rawk station outdoor day long concert) her and other local indie bands played the third stage, the one by the parking lot that everyone passes and ignores. So Peaches comes out with Lover's Tities's, "Feeling XXX even though Im double A" or whatever the line is with her shirt stacked with water ballons. The ballons eventually are popped out and tossed at some passing by Limp Bizket fan, waterguns appear and no one is safe from the girl with the beatbox. All the passerbys are confused, the parents shocked and the teenage boys dont know what to make of her invading their hormonal refuge. Peaches in a club is supposed to be even wierder/fun for only those over 19 in the family. Though I dont know if she would bring male dancers on tour with her or not.

The album was fun for a week or so. The line "check out my Chrissie Be-hynde/it's fine all of the time" is classic, I use it one way or another nearly every day. I should have mentioned it in the Catchphrase thread on ILE.

Just gave your article an at-work skim through, David, but I liked it very much.

"Check out my Chrissie be-Hynde"!

NOW I get it!

Oh, shit - it's stuck in my head again.

"one instance when you can't find merit in kitsch"

I no longer know what kitsch is after that bewildering thred on the Bitch. Something to do with art that people don't like and figure they can make fun of.

Making fun of Peaches is beside the point because she invites it, gets it over with immediately, like taking off her clothes: titters and costume are mostly gone by the first song. The show Peaches put on at Bowery Ballroom Friday night was the opposite of a soft-porn triumph of lighting and rehearsal. Maybe that's why she didn't open for Madonna as my friends and I all agree she should have.

"This ain't no fuckin talk show" she snarls in "Rock Show", squatting on a raised upstage platform in red high heels and stockings, whacking a huge imaginary cock, a similarly visually- absent guitar kicking out a crude and blistering jam that rode the shocked crowd of twenty-something bar-hoppers like a sadistic bareback expert. "You came here for a rock show!" she screams, alone on stage, singing to a minidisc.

There were famous people there. A photographer I'd never heard of who's made a name for himself using cheap point-and-shoot cameras for his million-dollar fashion spreads. Somebody said they saw Adam Yauch. The lights went down, an ominously cheap bass line started pounding the walls, and the skin of the place tingled - what would she look like? What would she do? There's no band fer chrissakes, just a mic stand on an empty stage bathed in magenta light. We were in a frenzy. Where was she? At that moment I imagined a perfect Peaches show: the entire show played off her minidisc. No act, no people, just savagely cheap beats and pre-recorded vocals. But I was at the wrong show for that kind of perfection: the ideal form of seamless-mix DJs hidden in the shadows, fleshless tech manipulators. Peaches is about reality: the embarrassing reality of the flesh, of ugly instincts, imagining the girl with braces bending over the bus seat and taking your whole cock in her mouth. Out, damn spot! But the blood showed up: Peaches bounded out of the wings, aviator shades in effect, scowling, a walk that was more like a stumble, mumbled something about "New York City" and lurched into "Set it Off", the dank thuds of bounce-tempo casio beats driving a big fuzz bassline and the chatter of synthetic hi- hats. The crowd was freaking, desperate to cheer this crazy woman, to validate what? Their sense of kitsch perhaps. The $15 they spent on tickets.

But the shared joke among us - that this woman Peaches is a novelty act, hilarious in theory, or for 3 minutes off a hard drive - was left hanging in shreds by the time she'd got down to her red silk panties for "Rock Show", which seemed like some performative point of no return. A singer with a fake band. A performer with no moves. A sex symbol who insists on her own ugliness. Peaches reversed something about the crowd. She made us accomplices. She knows about the girl with the braces. She stands in for her.

Moldy Peaches was the opener. They were all wearing costumes that looked like the band had made them about 5 minutes before the show, and they played sort of strummy folkrock songs with kitchen-table pothead lyrics ("we hate dance and we hate rap / but we like to contradict ourselves / that's our act") and they drew lots of laughs. "Who's Got the Crack" was a crowd favorite. The MP's striaght- up irony was oddly comforting, knowing what static lay ahead. I idly amused myself with thoughts of rushing the stage later on, ripping off my shirt, taking her up on the challenge, to turn a promise into flesh, to turn erotica into porn. Peaches did hop down from the stage at one point and a bouncer to appeared out of nowhere, arms crossed, watching. This is New York after all. No one could see what was happening down front, but after a minute or two the bouncer pulled her up and out of there. "That was fun," she said. And two girls joined her on stage for "Lovertits". Some guy showed up for "Rock n Roll" and got bottles chucked at him. But really, Peaches needed nothing but herself: sometimes not even that. About 3 songs in, a long bass drone slams into the room, the lights go crazy, synth drums pound nonsensically and this stripper with a gut, this junkie Sandra Bernhardt, flips off the whole room, crouching with her mic (having flung the mic stand offstage on the first song) and screams "I don't give a fuuuuuuuuuck.... I don't give a fuuuuuuuuuck....", starts humping the floor, a vocal comes in, clearly Peaches, but she's not singing. Peaches swings the mic violently around her body, twisting the cord, making herself into a bondage doll. She stuffs the microphone in her bra and sings along to herself. She slides it down her pants and hits it with her hand. She wants to break the tool she uses. Or fuck it. Or both.

After the inital thrill had worn off, and the cheapness of the entire evening began to dawn on us cash- card hipsters, the crowd was, understandably, a knot of confused indecision. Laughing was impossible - we had gone well beyond that. Cheering also seemed equally strange - how do you applaud this nastiness, this willful neglect of performative duties, this refusal? And then, finally, the infamous "suckin on my titties" song started up and the ENTIRE CROWD, enormously thankful for some recognizable shard, some agree-upon if ill-remembered emotion, sang the chorus with her - "fuck the pain away, fuck the pain away" - fists raised in air, triumphant. It was not.

Sorry abt the end-of-paragraph pompous short sentence habit.

Beating Ned to the punch here, Tracer, I smell *article*!

Very nice, Tracer!

I don't know if anybody's filling in for Ned while he's away, but I definitely think Tracer's review would be perfect for FT.

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