#against women & music

[stuckinapril]

megan thee stallion is the perfect example of unbothered energy. nicki has repeatedly vagueposted about her, gone on unhinged rants about her, gone so far as to mention her dead mother (such a classless low blow), threatened her on live, and has now released the tackiest diss track in history. and what has megan done? literally nothing. she straight up ignored her, aside from that one ig story where she posted herself laughing (which was perfect btw). she is the epitome of “i will not dignify that w a response.” i love it.

[intersectionalpraxis]

"idk your feminism isn't sitting well with me when it's only loud about hairy armpits and barbie and not countless women unable to access bare minimum feminine care, no anesthesia during childbirth, shortages in sanitary products, women shelters closing down, Iactating mothers being a higher risk for malnutrition, young girls having no access to education, food or water, and the list worsens" [tiktok video uploaded by a person behind the screen with this caption above while the viral song "labour" by Paris Paloma plays in the background with part of the chorus: "All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid/Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant/Just an appendage, live to attend him/So that he never lifts a finger..."

[intheholler]

the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!

my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.

nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned

so, as y'all probably know, a lot of appalachian folk music grew its roots in scottish folk (and then was heavily influenced by Black folks once it arrived here, but that's a post for another time).

they existed, as most folk music does, to deliver a narrative--to pass on a story orally, especially in communities where literacy was not widespread. their whole purpose was to get the news out there about current events, and everyone loves a good murder mystery!

as an aside, i saw someone liken the murder ballad to a ye olde true crime podcast and tbh, yeah lol.

the "original" murder ballads started back across the pond as news stories printed on broadsheets and penned in such a way that it was easy to put to melody.

they were meant to be passed on and keep the people informed about the goings-on in town. i imagine that because these songs were left up to their original orators to get them going, this would be why we have sooo many variations of old folk songs.

naturally then, almost always, they were based on real events, either sung from an outside perspective, from the killer's perspective and in some cases, from the victim's. of course, like most things from days of yore, they reek of social dogshit. the particular flavor of dogshit of the OG murder ballad was misogyny.

so, the murder ballad came over when the english and scots-irish settlers did. in fact, a lot of the current murder ballads are still telling stories from centuries ago, and, as is the way of folk, getting rewritten and given new names and melodies and evolving into the modern recordings we hear today.

305 such scottish and english ballads were noted and collected into what is famously known as the Child Ballads collected by a professor named francis james child in the 19th century. they have been reshaped and covered and recorded a million and one times, as is the folk way.

while newer ones continued to largely fit the formula of retelling real events and murder trials (such as one of my favorite ones, little sadie, about a murderer getting chased through the carolinas to have justice handed down), they also evolved into sometimes fictional, (often unfortunately misogynistic) cautionary tales.

perhaps the most famous examples of these are omie wise and pretty polly where the woman's death almost feels justified as if it's her fault (big shocker).

but i digress. in this way, the evolution of the murder ballad came to serve a similar purpose as the spooky legends of appalachia did/do now.

(why do we have those urban legends and oral traditions warning yall out of the woods? to keep babies from gettin lost n dying in them. i know it's a fun tiktok trend rn to tell tale of spooky scary woods like there's really more haints out here than there are anywhere else, but that's a rant for another time too ain't it)

so, the aforementioned little sadie (also known as "bad lee brown" in some cases) was first recorded in the 1920s. i'm also plugging my favorite female-vocaist cover of it there because it's superior when a woman does it, sorry.

it is a pretty straightforward murder ballad in its content--in the original version, the guy kills a woman, a stranger or his girlfriend sometimes depending on who is covering it.

but instead of it being a cautionary 'be careful and don't get pregnant or it's your fault' tale like omie wise and pretty polly, the guy doesn't get away with it, and he's not portrayed as sympathetic like the murderer is in so many ballads.

a few decades after, women started saying fuck you and writing their own murder ballads.

in the 40s, the femme fatale trope was in full swing with women flipping the script and killing their male lovers for slights against them instead.

men began to enter the "find out" phase in these songs and paid up for being abusive partners. women regained their agency and humanity by actually giving themselves an active voice instead of just being essentially 'fridged in the ballads of old.

her majesty dolly parton even covered plenty of old ballads herself but then went on to write the bridge, telling the pregnant-woman-in-the-murder-ballad's side of things for once. love her.

as a listener, i realized that i personally prefer these modern covers of appalachian murder ballads sung by women-led acts like dolly and gillian welch and even the super-recent crooked still especially, because there is a sense of reclamation, subverting its roots by giving it a woman's voice instead.

meaning that, like a lot else from the problematic past, the appalachian murder ballad is something to be enjoyed with critical ears. violence against women is an evergreen issue, of course, and you're going to encounter a lot of that in this branch of historical music.

but with folk songs, and especially the murder ballad, being such a foundational element of appalachian history and culture and fitting squarely into the appalachian gothic, i still find them important and so, so interesting

i do feel it's worth mentioning that there are "tamer" ones. with traditional and modern murder ballads alike, some of them are just for "fun," like a murder mystery novel is enjoyable to read; not all have a message or retell a historical trial.

(for instance, i'd even argue ultra-modern, popular americana songs like hell's comin' with me is a contemporary americana murder ballad--being sung by a male vocalist and having evolved from being at the expense of a woman to instead being directed at a harmful and corrupt church. that kind of thing)

in short: it continues to evolve, and i continue to eat that shit up.

anyway, to leave off, lemme share with yall my personal favorite murder ballad which fits squarely into murder mystery/horror novel territory imo.

it's the 10th child ballad and was originally known as "the twa sisters." it's been covered to hell n back and named and renamed.

but! if you listen to any flavor of americana, chances are high you already know it; popular names are "the dreadful wind and rain" and sometimes just "wind and rain."

in it, a jealous older sister pushes her other sister into a river (or stream, or sea, depending on who's covering it) over a dumbass man. the little sister's body floats away and a fiddle maker come upon her and took parts of her body to make a fiddle of his own. the only song the new fiddle plays is the tale about how it came to be, and it is the same song you have been listening to until then.

how's that for genuinely spooky-scary appalachia, y'all?

[iamneosoul]

XXX

[lust-for-ultraviolence]

Nonbinary version: https://www.tumblr.com/lust-for-ultraviolence/730136051074596864/favourite-nonbinary-musician-dorian

[gaycrashbandicoot]

If anyone is interested in discovering some trans musicians who aren't c*vetown especially if ur into punk/pop punk/emo/indie/queercore/folk punk music then boy do I have the playlist for you!

This is a work in progress playlist I've been making of trans + nonbinary artists :3 only canonically and out trans artists not people who there's speculation about. Ftm, mtf and nonbinary artists included!

There's some popular artists and some less well known ones on there so hope u enjoy!

[disastergay]

apparently "transfems have bad taste in music" is a stereotype now. anyway, here's a list of transfem musical artists you should go support:

Shea Diamond (Pop/Soul)

Sateen (Retro/Pop)

Teddy Geiger (Pop/Punk)

Ah-Mer-Ah-Su (Indie/Electronic/Pop)

KC Ortiz (Rap/Hip Hop)

Laura Jane Grace, formerly part of Against Me! (Rock)

Black Dresses (Noisy Pop)

Diane Ross (Electronic)

Coyote Grace (Country/Americana)

feel free to add on ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[junebugwriter]

Transgender Dysphoria Blues

It was around 2005. In my dorms, I made a lot of different kinds of friends, and because it was the mid-2000s, we passed around CD's to show new music to each other. Back then, one of my friends introduced me to a band of theirs from their home state, a band called Against Me!. I said I enjoyed punk and emo stuff, and he said I'd like this band.

From the first moment, I heard the raw voice of the lead singer. This person was straining, yelling, screaming with melodic intensity and purpose, laser-focused on the rage, frustration, and despair that comes with young adulthood in the Bush era. They talked about love, and death, and how our future was sold out from under us. They sang

"Baby, I'm an anarchist and you're a spineless liberal We marched together for the eight-hour day and held hands in the streets of Seattle But when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window You left me all alone, all alone..."

I was enthralled. I had never encountered anything like this music before. Well, that's not true. I'd heard punk before--older stuff, like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, stuff that spoke to a moment in time that seemed ancient to me but was only a couple of decades before--but not punk like this. Not punk that actually had some fucking teeth. Not punk that wasn't afraid to be proudly anarchistic, nakedly political, and darkly poetic in this way.

In 2007, I got the newer album, New Wave, and again, this was more of the stuff I loved. Sure, New Wave was a bit more polished, but it was still filled with all those rough emotions that spoke to a disaffected young "man" like me. There was something to the way the lead singer belted out those bars that really nailed something within me, something ineffable, intangible at the time. Something gestating quietly within my brain, a feeling that something wasn't quite right with me, but couldn't be named.

The final song on New Wave, "The Ocean," threw me for a loop. These lyrics... were different.

"And if I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman My mother once told me she would have named me Laura I'd grow up to be strong and beautiful like her...

There is an ocean in my soul Where the waters do not curve..."

At first, I thought this was simply poetic license, imagining a different life, imagining one in which they could be completely different, living a humble, domestic existence far from the drugs and rock and roll. One of simplicity, happiness, bliss. But... something gnawed at me. Why a woman? Why that name? Mysterious to my young brain.

I had not yet heard the word "transgender." I didn't have any context for it. But I knew the ocean in the soul, whose waters did not curve. I knew the depths that dwelled beneath. I knew that there was so much more to my being that even I couldn't quite understand.

Time passed. I graduated from undergrad, and had moved on to graduate school. In grad school, I had more education about LGBTQ+ issues, and had drawn closer to being in the "ally" camp of things, even in the Methodist church. I was drawn to the cause, yet couldn't quite understand why I identified with so many of the struggles they faced.

Near the end of it, a year before I graduated, news came out about the lead singer of Against Me!. She was transgender. Her name was Laura Jane Grace.

My mind raced. Wait, what? The singer with the raspy, raw, and to my mind, thoroughly masculine voice... was a woman now? I googled furiously. I had to learn more. I read every article about her. I drank deep of the news. I had to understand how this turn of events could be. Wait, someone can just... be a woman? And not know it? You can simply do that?

I watched some interviews with her. She seemed thoroughly natural in more feminine clothing. She smiled far more than I thought possible, knowing what she looked like before. She was... happy.

I was worried. What would happen to this band, now that their singer was different? Would her voice change? Would their songs change? I was nervous. But also... I was oddly excited. I knew what a trans person was. I knew that it was a thing you could be. But now, it suddenly became personal in a weird way. Because now I knew a trans person, if not personally, but through the art they made.

A couple years later, they came out with a new album. For whatever reason, I never took the time to listen to it. I had moved out to the country, and buying CDs was becoming passé, but I didn't know how else to buy music now, because I didn't want to bother buying songs through Apple. So... I never listened to it. Until recently.

Here's the title track of the album.

I no longer worried about the band. I knew that they were the same, just... actually wrestling with the thing that lurked within the ocean of Laura Jane Grace's soul.

With the kraken within the depths of my soul.

I was partly afraid of listening to the album. I was afraid of change. But I'm learning I'm more courageous than I thought I was. I'm learning to face the beast down in the depths, the dysphoria that stares back at me from the mirror each day. It has a name now. It has dimension, and weight, and yes, some days it is overwhelming and too much.

But I can fight it.

She wrestled with it in this album, highs and lows. Regrets, memories, eulogies for lost friends. All through the funhouse lens of gender dysphoria. And suddenly, all the rage, all the fury, came roaring back to the fore. The rage had an edge, and the edge cannot be dulled because it is an edge piercing all the way down to the spinal column. The cracks in the voice, the strain of the vocal cords, the tears and the joy and the endless, rocking waves of emotional turmoil... they can be viewed clearly now. They had a name.

It's a good album. I think every trans femme ought to listen to it, especially if you like punk. Because all the anarchist fury and anti-establishment wit is still there, just with a different set dressing, with a different lens, a different focus. If anything it's sharper. More raw. More powerful.

Happy Pride. This is the anthem of the month for me. I'm trans, and I'm going to help burn this world down build a better one in its ashes.

Thank you, Laura Jane, and Against Me!. You helped me understand the weapons in my hands better than any other band.

[rahabs]

My petty 2024 wishlist includes the ability to ban Six the Musical posts from both The Tudors tag and the general tags for Henry VIII's wives.

[allamericanb-tch]

no girl taylor isn’t blocking you from the chart maybe your music just isn’t as good and you aren’t as popular?

[wayward-sherlock]

mutuals sorry for the barrage of 60s music polls but that’s like. my favorite thjng

[paulmccartneyofficial]

i am so fed up with taylor swift besties im so sorry but we as a collective can do better. make 2024 the year of giving another woman who actually gives a shit about others and actually represents female power this big of a platform

[luminalunii97]

Equality Anthem by Iranian Women

This song is called sorood-e Barabari (سرود برابری) or equality Anthem. You can find it on both Spotify and SoundCloud. Different parts of it came to life and was put together along the years (2005 to 2011) by different feminist poets and musicians. With the recent women revolution in Iran the anthem was revisited and sang. The video on the song is a mix of footages from Iranian women inside and outside of Iran.

Lyrics:

«جوانه می‌زنم

به رویِ زخمِ بر تنم

فقط به حکم بودنم

که من زنم، زنم، زنم

I will bloom from the wound on my body

[The wound that is there] because of who I am,

because I'm a woman, a woman, a woman

چو هم‌ صدا شویم و

پابه‌پایِ هم رویم و

دست به دستِ هم دهیم و

از ستم رها شویم

If we raise our voices together,

if we walk together,

if we take each other's hands,

we will get rid of oppression

جهانِ دیگری

بسازیم از برابری

به هم‌دلی و خواهری

جهانِ شاد و بهتری

We will build another world with equality

A happy and better world

out of empathy and sisterhood

نه سنگ و سارها

نه پایِ چوبِ دارها

نه گریه‌هایِ بارها

نه ننگ و خوارها

No stoning, no gallows,

no repeating cries and tears,

no shame and disgrace

جهانِ دیگری

بسازیم از برابری

به هم‌دلی و خواهری

جهانِ شاد و بهتری

We will build another world of equality

A happy and better world

out of empathy and sisterhood»

[starry-bite]

Rules: reveal the titles of the documents in your WIP folder and tag as many people as there are documents. Let others ask questions about the ones that interest them and post snippets or explain the contents as you see fit!

honored (and a little shocked tbh) to be tagged by lovely @cleverlycrusher thank you friend! this is a handful of works that are in slow development over this year, mostly responding to yotp prompts! you're welcome to ask anything you like about them. (PLEASE, SLOW WORK IS SO HARD.)

circus au (great comet)

as above, so below (hadestown)

a walk for two (against women and music)

dovesso au (good omens / the school for good and evil)

to all left unfinished (star trek picard)

untitled verity-era laris x raffi opus (star trek picard)

tagging anyone who wishes to share! i want to hear you (yes, you) howl about your work!

[mypimpademia]

My heart will never not go out to Megan she’s such a beautiful person who’s been through so much and has no one in her corner

[lowrisedjeans]

taylor and beyonce sporting each other with attending the film premiere’s 🥹🥹🥹