By gaiJEN, stranger in a strange land
f I were to write a screenplay, wherein a plucky orphan from the wilds of the Deep South finds herself, at the tender age of 18, with twenty-five dollars in grimy bills tucked into the left cup of her bra and a greyhound bus ticket shoved in the back pocket of her stone-washed jeans, speeding towards New York City at 55 miles per hour on New Year’s Eve, 1983, with nothing more than her wits, her colloquialisms, and a star-bright desire to become the most powerful burlesque dancer in all of Manhattan, I would imagine a soundtrack of nothing but Gossip songs.
Gossip is a pop/punk band fronted by one Beth Ditto. Ditto is so famous overseas that in 2006, London’s New Musical Express voted her the coolest person in rock. In 2007, she was nominated NME’s ‘Sexiest Woman of the Year’ and the following year she won Glamour’s ‘International Artist of the Year’. In 2009, Beth Ditto graced the cover of Love, a British fashion magazine, her Rubenesque frame displayed sans clothes. Even Karl Lagerfeld is obsessed with her. Yet, here in her home country, she is just another fat-lesbian-feminist raised out of backwoods Arkansas, living the life of a minor domestic celebrity.
It is useless to talk about Gossip without discussing the personality that fronts the band. Beth Ditto, loved by European fashionistas and courted by people whose photos routinely end up on fan sites and tabloids, is the opposite of all of them. Except that she isn’t. The praying mantis-thin women and their oppositely gendered counterparts function as the glossy finish on an industry that is operated in large part by small-town eccentrics that fled the backwater and banded together in the bigger cities where their sexual preferences and flair for individual style wasn’t ruthlessly punished by either fists or blunt remarks. Fashion nerds love that Beth is loud and large and flamboyant and smart – whip smart. Her refusal to be anything other than herself must seem completely refreshing in an industry so heavily reliant on artifice.
Listening to Gossip, it is hard not to throw on a white tank top and boy cut jeans, march out of the house and get something irrevocably changed about yourself. Like Joan Jett or Heart, Gossip is responsible for making music that kicks up the heat under the sort of low simmering frustration most women feel in the day to day, the end result a roiling boil of something that feels suspiciously like victory. That isn’t to say that Gossip isn’t accessible for men. It could be. The man in my life doesn’t hate it. I just can’t imagine listening to Gossip as anything other than a woman. I once had a male friend of mine tell me that sexual harassment didn’t happen, and if it did, which he discounted, the woman should find it flattering. He and I couldn’t see eye to eye on that particular issue and our friendship fell off a few months later. It wasn’t that he disagreed with me that I had a problem with. He and I disagreed about most things. It was that he couldn’t even conceive of a world where any egregious injustice done to a woman wasn’t somehow explained away by her shape, face, gender, sexuality or weakness. If you are a man that doesn’t believe that inequality still exists between genders, then probably Gossip isn’t for you. You might like the dance beats, the punk stylings, the timbre of Ditto’s soaring contralto – just don’t listen to the lyrics.
I like the album Music for Men with no particular favorites. I generally just play the album through, start to finish, and crank it up to 11.
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