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ladyhistorypod · 4 years

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Episode 2: Lady Pirates? I’m Hooked

Sources:

Ching Shih

History vs Women: The Defiant Lives That They Don’t Want You To Know

History Erased Ssn 1 Ep 3: Ching Shih the Pirate Queen

Atlas Obscura

Further Reading: Rejected Princesses

Anne Bonny

National Parks Service

Smithsonian Magazine

Crime Museum

The Way of the Pirates

Anne Bonny Pirate

Rare Irish Stuff

Mariners Museum

Gráinne Ní Máille / Grace O’Malley

National Archives (UK)

History Ireland

Women’s Museum of Ireland

Anne Chambers – THE biographer of Grace O’Malley

The Irish Post

Royal Museums Greenwich

Grace O’Malley Whiskey / Gin (drink responsibly!)

Further Reading: Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O'Malley c.1530-1603

Click below for the transcript!

Alana: Lexi in the last episode you called me out for wanting to be a Chicago improver as if that's not also your dream. As if that is not also your goal.

Lexi: Oh, it was projection. Yeah it was– it was me projecting onto you.

Alana: Yeah clearly like both of us that's the goal that's what we're doing.

Lexi: I'm mirroring myself off of you. Like that's what's happening here yeah. Psychology.

Alana: I also, like, I don't just want to be a Chicago improver I want to be like– I wanna podcast like the wife of a jaded youtuber because I want to be Katherine Green.

Lexi: Okay that makes sense that that would be the goal for you.

Alana: The best of the Green brothers, Katherine Green.

Lexi: Yeah the best Green brother there is out there so…

Alana: It’s true. I mean, Sarah is great too but like Katherine's the best of the Green brothers Lexi: She's the best. The best there is.

Haley: Is that Hank's wife?

Alana: Katherine is Hank's wife yeah and then Sarah is John's wife.

Haley: Which one has kids? Hank?

Alana: They both do.

Haley: I thought it was only one of them.

Alana: No, Hank has a son. He's almost four now. Hank has a son who's almost four and then John has a son and a daughter. The daughter is six–

Haley: You know way too much of their life.

Alana: –and the son is ten.

Lexi: You’re… You’re a little stan.

Alana: I am a stan. Well because I've been following them since like 2012 like I remember when this child was born.

Lexi: That's true that's kind of how I feel about Rhett and Link. I kind of like know their whole life by proxy like I remember their kids being born but I don't I don't know them.

Haley: See I kind of feel that way with like the Duggar family but it's also that like my friends and I were just obsessed with the Duggars in like 2012.

Alana: No exactly. Also like I met John and Hank. They signed my copy of Paper Towns when I went to VidCon.

Lexi: That makes it real.

Haley: Once you get like an autograph you know that person. Like Kara Cooney with her autographing my like– I think it was the woman's book not the like specific…

Alana: Not the Hatchepsut one?

Haley: Yeah it was the one that was like the women who changed the world or something and then she put like my name in hieroglyphs.

Lexi: Oh my god that’s so cute!

Alana: That’s so cool!

Haley: Yeah I fangirled so hard and then it was I made my mom go cause it was National Geographic doing it for like my small town, so I got two tickets, we were in the front row, I was taking notes, my mom called me a nerd. But afterwards and granted this was like right after I graduated so I was coming off the high of having an archaeology degree AKA really scared I wouldn’t find a job and dealing with my family.

Alana: What an interesting way to describe a high.

Lexi: Well I mean, I don't know if you’d get it unless you’ve felt it but we've all felt it. So, maybe dear listeners will be like I graduated college knowing I'd get a job and I'm not an archaeologist. (laughing)

Haley: No like I had grad school but still like there is this feeling that (laughing) I did a really, really poor choice. Like in the line it was all kids and then me fangirling and all these kids were like fangirling for the fact that this is like an Egyptologist not Kara Cooney as like the woman she is. (laughing)

Lexi: And I mean archaeologists are just nerds with Egypt books who didn’t grow up.

Haley: Exactly.

Alana: That’s true.

Haley: And she was just talking to me and she's like “oh like you seem to know about this” like I guess like I gave that impression it was like “yeah I actually just graduated from GW with an archaeology degree” and she– oh my god this is like, I've never felt– this was the peak of my life besides elementary school this was my peak she goes “Hey everyone we have an actual archaeologist here”

Alana: Oh my god!

Lexi: Oh my god!

Alana: Oh my god!

Speaker 1: And like I was at the somewhat back of the line and all these kids who are saying that like they love Indiana Jones they want to be archaeologists and she's like “we have another real archaeologist she just finished her degree” and I turned to my mom, winked, and said “can you tell that louder so she can hear? She had to pay for the degree.

(Alana laughing)

Haley: Also like that led into Kara Cooney just being like, because so many people were asking her why how or how she became an Egyptologist and her first response she was like “I was privileged like I had the privilege to get a great education.”

Lexi: That is such a good answer.

Alana: That’s such a good answer.

Lexi: I'm gonna steal that.

Alana: That’s amazing.

Lexi: I’m gonna plagiarize that answer.

Haley: I already have. I like, I know I very much know. You know even like with history and doing this podcast we can easily be doing some other like paying job but like we're taking the three hours to do this we have that privilege to do it. I love it. I'm gonna ride that train cuz I know once I graduate in December it’s not gonna be there.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good the bad and the ugly ladies you missed in history class. I am virtually here with Lexi. Lexi, do you remember the last time you dined in at a restaurant?

Lexi: Oh goodness. With you, I think?

Alana: Yeah

Lexi: Six months ago?

Alana: It was March 9th 2020 and it was all three of us at Tonic.

Lexi: That’s right!

Alana: That third person is also in this Zoom meeting, of course, Haley is here too. Haley do you remember what you ordered at that meal?

Haley: We definitely split some tots cuz I made you, and then I got the like zazzy mac and cheese. It had some bread crumbs that's all I remember.

Alana: It did have some bread crumbs. I don't remember what I ordered. I do remember that I had two margaritas and they were expensive because I forgot to ask for bottom shelf tequila.

(Lexi laughing)

Haley: It was great because I like– I was the first person to look at the receipt and I said oh no no no. Cuz it was like Patron put as two separate shots so she had to pay for the margarita mix and the tequila separately.

Alana: And I'm Alana and I've forgotten how to spell my own name on multiple occasions.

Haley: I am terrified of birds, it's not a good thing.

Lexi: So if you lived on a pirate ship…

Haley: I couldn't.

Lexi: Okay. So if you lived on a pirate ship– you couldn’t live on a pirate ship, but if you did the bird would be the worst part?

Haley: Yeah.

Lexi: But you know who knows how to take care of birds?

Alana: Who?

Lexi: Pirates. That's probably not true, they probably treated them like– real poopy. But honestly I don't even know if that is the is that myth true?

Haley: I was about to ask that!

Lexi: Do parrots– my pirate did definitely not have a parrot there was no mention of a parrot.

Alana: No mention of a parrot for me either.

Haley: That was. Yeah.

Lexi: Wait what if my whole life is a lie because fun fact about me I have a parrot named Sergeant and a Portuguese water dog named Captain and my whole life is based around the nautical-ness and you can't see but in this room I have these paddles which is like a form of sorority art– long story we won't get into it– and they all have nautical themed paintings of my pets and if parrots and pirates don’t really go together, I'm stressed.

Haley: So okay, I have a theory on like why this is like a theme. Because they traveled all through like the Caribbean islands where those birds were just like flapping around so I think they're like “oh new exotic toys? swell.” So like they saw them and maybe like obviously took some back because like so many pirates just took things from where they like landed–

Lexi: That’s true.

Haley: And just like took over other ships. That's where I think it came from because nowhere in like my research– because I talk about like one, two pirates in mine– and doing like other research with like pirates in general no where was like “there was a parrot named Coconut on the ship.”

(Lexi and Alana laughing)

Lexi: Well they might have like taken them and sold them.

Haley: Yeah that's like.

Lexi: That seems more pirate-y to me.

Haley: Yeah that’s true.

Lexi: In my personal pirate opinion.

Haley: I also used to think Christopher Columbus was a pirate but that's a whole other story.

Lexi: I mean–

Haley: It’s close enough.

Lexi: I mean…

Alana: I mean…

Lexi: I mean…

Haley: Maybe like small Haley was on to something but I definitely remember thinking like explorers were pirates at some point. Like a wire was crossed in my education.

Alana: I think small Haley was onto something. Maybe that crossed wire put you onto something.

Haley: There's so many moments of like me remembering my childhood where I came up with something that was like inherently wrong but like now looking back on it I was like nah I was fucking genius.

(Alana laughing)

Haley: I knew my stuff.

Lexi: Arrrre ya ready ladies?

Haley: Yes.

Lexi: Oh, the answer–

Alana: I wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob as a kid and that’s a personality trait.

Lexi: The answer was “aye aye, captain” and neither of you got it. Let’s try again.

Alana: I wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob as a kid!

Lexi: Let’s just try it one more time. Arrrrre ya ready ladies?

Haley: (laughing) Aye aye captain!

Alana: I don’t know

Lexi: Okay, well anyway… I will be talking about Ching Shih, whose name I'm trying very hard to say correctly but I may be messing up. I actually called upon my former roommate who is my lifelong friend who– she is Chinese so I asked her “how do you say this” and she sent me a recording of how it’s said but it was one of those recordings you can only listen to one time and then it goes away forever. So my best interpretation is [Chung Shih]. But it's actually spelled C. H. I. N. G. which–

Alana: I was gonna say–

Lexi: shows you how complicated Chinese language is. But technically the pronunciation I got from a person who speaks Cantonese is [Chung She] so… do with that what you will. I do speak Korean which is completely unrelated and in no way useful in this situation. Cantonese is not in my wheelhouse… no I don't speak Asian. Thank you. Okay so–

(Alana laughing)

Lexi: I actually picked her because when I asked my brother to… my brother one of his, like, side dreams is to become a filmmaker but he doesn't really want to do it because someone in the family has to make money with their career choice. So when I ask him like what historical story he would make into a movie if you had like a big budget news a famous director he said he would make a biopic about Ching Shih because by virtue of being a woman and a pirate her story is both empowering and naturally full of a diverse cast of characters so you wouldn't have to force diversity into the story. It's a historical story that has a really diverse cast so I thought that was really insightful of him so he just got really really interested in Ching Shih and also another preface: getting information on Ching Shih is pretty difficult and a lot of the information we have about our life comes from speculation and oral history because she was a criminal so it's not like people really recorded a lot of the things she did and she was a woman so it's not like China at the time she was alive people really cared what women were doing, unfortunately. So I will do my best to rely on like recorded oral traditions and some primary text sources, not like speculation in this description but inherently by virtue of her story there is a little stuff that's like open to interpretation up in the air. Do with that what you will check out she was basically a queen of pirates, and records of Ching Shih's birth and childhood do not exist. All we know is that directly before she became a pirate she was working at a Cantonese brothel in southeastern China and in 1801 her life changed forever when she married a man named [Chung Yi] who was the commander of a group of pirates called the Red Flag Fleet. This is like the most notorious group of pirates in China at the time, and the legend says that he sought Ching Shih as a bride because of her cunning nature and her skills wielding power over like wealthy, powerful men, which she had learned while working as a prostitute in a brothel which I think is a pretty interesting... interesting way of looking at that job. I think a lot of times people look down on that job but her husband wanted her because of the skills she obtained in that job. And after marrying a pirate overlord, Ching Shih realizes that a pirate's life was for her (Lexi making rimshot noise). So she's starting to–

Alana: I liked that joke. That was- amazing.

Lexi: Thank you, thank you, pause for laughter.

(All laughing)

Lexi: Thank you. I'll be here... all day because I'm in my house and we're stuck at home. So, yeah, she started to get involved in the family business, she really liked the pirating. And maritime trade was, like, super popular at the time. People were calling it like that the Maritime Silk Road, so it was a very big time for maritime trade in this early 1800s in East Asia. And, so it was really common for pirate families to span generations, so, like, a grandfather, father, and son or like you know a mother and son would have many pirates that they rule over together. But she was the biggest pirate family. Her family was the biggest pirate family. And with her help, her husband's pirate empire got like really huge, with some accounts suggesting that they commanded upwards of eighty thousand pirates though some sources do differ on this exact number I've seen as low as forty thousand as high as a hundred thousand but eighty thousand–

Alana (audibly sarcastic): Forty thousand that so few. That’s not really impressive.

Lexi: I mean, would you like a comparison to stick to really stick it home?

Alana: Yeah sure.

Lexi: The notorious pirate you may have heard of, Blackbeard? We’ve heard of Blackbeard? Haley: Definitely like twenty.

Lexi: Three hundred. So just like for scale, for comparison… Ching Shih had a lot of pirates. And in 1807 her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died. One written record suggests that he was murdered, another one says that he had an STD. So we're not totally sure which one but he died and he had no blood heir, the two of them had not had a child yet. But he did have an adoptive son who was also his lover, which at first I was like wait that's really weird but apparently in this era in Chinese history if you wanted to like give power to someone to like take over your family business you would adopt them legally as your child even if they were an adult. So he had this male lover he wanted to give the business to so he adopted the male lover as a son. But basically everyone's assuming that this guy, this adopted son, is going to take over the family business and he will become the the pirate emperor, if you will. But at this point Ching Shih is like not ready to give up her power. She is in control, she's in charge, she wants to stay in charge of the pirates so she decides to take up her favorite old method of getting what she wants: seduction. And she starts hooking up with her husband’s son-lover and then marries him. So, through her skills of manipulation and seduction, she maintains her position as a leader of this massive pirate brigade. And oral tradition suggests that many nations’ navies fell victim to her pirate fleet, including the Portuguese, British, and Chinese navies. All of them lost naval ships to Ching Shih. The Chinese government realize that Ching Shih was a big threat, that she was so powerful there was no way they would ever defeat her fleet by force. So they decided to reach an agreement with her, almost like a treaty, but not a treaty since it wasn't between two nations it was with a criminal. So they offered her immunity or like the ability to not get charged or punished if she agreed to stop pirating, but she was not gonna go down without a fight. So she accepted only if the Chinese government would allow her to keep all of the loot that she'd already acquired. So she's agreed to stop pirating, but not to give back anything that she had acquired while pirating. So she ended up this really rich woman who opened a brothel in South China and just chilled for the rest of her life. And the really crazy thing about Ching Shih is her lasting legacy. Even though most people never heard of her she's actually been referenced a lot in pop culture. She was mentioned in two Assassin’s Creed spin-off games and she inspired a character in the Pirates of the Caribbean series Madame [Chung]. They also featured her in Rejected Princesses which is a book about like famous women from history who could be princesses but don't fit the traditional role of what a princess is. So I thought that was really cool, and I would love to see an edgy movie about her life and her history. That's Ching Shih.

Haley: I love that. I feel like I knew her name when I saw you putting it on the spreadsheet, like I– I was like oh I know that from somewhere like I feel like I knew her story.

Alana: I love that I think that's cool.

Haley: Alright, so you know how I did Amelia Earhart last week, we don't know what happened with her death? Same train. Or same boat, if you will.

(Alana and Lexi laughing)

Haley: We just– I'm gonna do Anne Bonny who's like a famous pirate. She's a famous Irish pirate. And I only knew this because when I started dating Robert who's hundred percent Irish I was like oh let me just Google some like famous Irish people think it's like as a joke like slip it into conversation and she came up and I just always, kinda thought about her. I also thought about her but also she comes up as more of a legend type of thing like for some parts of the story there are parts where I was like this doesn't seem real and other parts like this is fact. I also have a great pirate joke if I could tingle your taste buds with it.

Lexi: Go for it.

Haley: What does a dyslexic pirate say?

Alana: Rrraaaa? I don’t know

Lexi: I see what you were trying to do.

Alana: Thank you. What do they say?

Haley: ARRRRG. No, wait... I read it wrong

(Alana & Lexi laughing)

Haley: It’s GRAA. I’m a little dyslexic to begin with and I have some trouble reading and I just f-ed my own joke. This is one of those jokes that you uhh have in your brain. I saw it on a t-shirt when I was like in Florida, years and years back and it’s always and it has always been in my brain for that long. Alright! So let’s get hooked for this golden age of piracy. Uh. She was born and like raised in Ireland and we are going to talk about Ireland a little, but she was more active in the Caribbean.I couldn’t find, Lexi, what you were talking about with your gal about inspiration for some of the pirates in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. She's known as like a pirate well known in the active pirate Caribbean circle but I couldn't find of her influence in like in modern. Maybe I just like wasn't looking in the right places. But she was born like the late 1600s and we're already off to a rocky start with her story because she was born to an attorney William Cormac who had an affair with the family maid, Mary Brennan and because of this whole affair William's wife left him. So like immediately there's just some family struggle Mary gave birth to Anne and it was kind of like a weird situation where William acknowledged and as his daughter but in a secretive sort of sense like Mary and Anne lived removed from the family. William would visit and he became fond of her but also didn't want her to be like here’s my daughter and like out in society as his daughter so to avoid any scandal he was like a-ha I'm gonna dress Anne up as a boy and introduce her as like the child of a relative. All my friends in the town and like my attorney friends won't know she's my child and also they’ll think she's a boy. But she's like still a relative of mine. Like that's why we look so similar. So already that's just opening up a whole can of worms of identity and just family issues. Lexi is giving me a face. Yeah no it's a lot. And this is great, for one of the sources, quote “when Anne's true gender” (nervous laughter) and parentage was discovered, William and Mary were like okay we can't be in Ireland anymore like let's peace and I believe they're in like the town of County Cork. Robert informed me is not where he's from, he's from Limerick and got real mad that I confused the two.

(Alana laughing)

Haley: But we peaced from Ireland, and now our story is going to Charleston, South Carolina or what is now Charleston, South Carolina. It was like known as the Carolinas area. And Mary died somewhat soon after and 1711. Anne was going through her angsty teen years. Instead of listening to that good emo music, she turned into quote “a fierce and courageous temper.”

Alana: Me too.

Haley: But like, hold up, because I don’t think you like, murdered people. Like she–

Alana: That’s true. I was gonna be like “you don’t know that” but also I shouldn’t implicate myself for murder on a podcast. I did not kill anybody.

Haley: No no no. She reportedly murdered with the many articles and sources called a servant girl with a case knife which I'm not a hundred percent sure what a case knife is. I tried googling it but all the knives looked different to me. And beating - this is kind of like honestly this part I'm not I don't have so much problems with - beating half to death a dude who tried to rape her. Like that was self defense like I don't know why that being slipped in.

Alana: Yeah, good. Amazing.

Haley: I guess she got that power of “cool I can do some damage I can defend myself” because she later turned into a pirate. But we're not there yet. We’re at the part where William is just not a fan of how his daughter's acting. It was more not out of sense of protecting her, but more protecting his reputation because along with this fierce and courageous temper there were rumors of her sleeping around with the fishermen and like the other quote unquote drunks in the different bars and taverns that they had that you just go to. He said it was like bad for business. And he's not an attorney anymore; he owns a plantation. I didn't find out like what the plantation was where it was blah blah bla. But that's not important, we're here for Anne. Anne married a small time pirate which honestly is like a fancy name for poor sailor in this area, named James Bonny. Honestly I couldn't figure out whether he was a pirate already or like a small time pirate or a sailor because like from all the sources I read that mentioned him like he's real small potatoes in her life story. He was on a boat, loved the fish, maybe had a pirate friend, a bird, a parrot. But he's definitely the source of her leading into the piracy gang. Her father disapproved of James immediately and basically disowned her in the sense of like kicking her out of the house and was like, no if you’re going to live like this, then I’m not helping you, trying to instil that fatherly sense. And this is another great quote. From the National Park Service so the literal sentence after this whole kicking out situation - “Anne may have burned her father’s plantation in retaliation (she was known for her temper.)”

(Alana giggling)

Haley: I tried, this is where I tried to like Google the plantation and everything. I couldn't find anything concrete of like, this plantation and this burning, but like she could’ve burned down her father’s plantation.

Alana: Maybe that’s why you can't find anything about it, because it burned down.

Haley: Honestly, good point. So sometime between 1714 and 1718 Anne and James moved around like the Bahamas area and at this maybe it's still called this but at the time it was known as like the Republic of Pirates, so it's like the collection of the Bahama islands and you just sail around it. And it was like this sanctuary for English pirates so it's kind of under English law but really it's small defenseless islands with more pirate ships they couldn’t take over. And they kind of like lived– like I couldn't find out like what I think it was like Nassau but that's like the modern name for the Bahama island. But I couldn't find out like exactly where they landed or if they just landed a cluster of islands. They kind of just like lived in that area. James did whatever James did. But Anne hung out at the local taverns. I want to be a regular at a bar one day. And that's where she met John “Calico Jack” Rackham and the fun nickname of Calico Jack was from the colorful pants he wore. He was the captain of a ship or boat called “Revenge” and every time I saw the name “Revenge” it was all in caps like bolded, just like you gotta know this boat’s named “Revenge.” Anne realized that she wanted to be with Calico Jack and not James but James refused to get a divorce. He was like no, we’re married, death do us part, blah blah blah. Anne was just like “nah.” Jumped ship from that marriage.

(Alana laughing)

Haley: And joined Calico Jack as a crew member aboard the “Revenge.” And over the next years, they were active in and around like Jamaica doing what pirates do; capturing other vessels, taking their riches or like spoils, collecting all the booty. This vessel or one of these vessels included another female pirate, Mary Read, and she basically infiltrated the pirate ships, infiltrated the ranks of the pirate ships by dressing as a man. I don't know if like– they have like this– I like– I imagined Anne like walking on the ship, bumping into Mary, and being like “No. You're a woman dressed up as a man, I know this” and then Mary being like “whoa, you’re a woman too? No way.” Like having some sort of like face to face, heart to heart because they became like best friends.

Alana: Were they gal pals? Were they best– best friends? Were they roommates? Were they gal pals?

Haley: I don’t know, they were definitely gal pals and they definitely got into some mischief together. I. E. in October of 1720 ish Calico Jack and his crew were captured by a ship called “King's Ship.” It was like under the commissioner like under the government of like Jamaica. So, a pirate hunter, Jonathan Barnett, was kind of like “Ah, you guys are coming with me, you’re pirates, that's a big no no.” So during this capture most of the men were just like hiding at the bottom of the ship in the barracks or something and it was Anne and Mary who are like kicking butt on the top deck. Like many of the sources made a point to stress that like it was Anne and Mary really kicking some butt and everyone else was hiding during this like siege. In accordance with English common law, Anne and Mary were like given a stay of execution because like once they're captured it’s like y'all are going to be hanged. Like we don't have a jail system up and running yet. Execution. Only way to go. But since they were pregnant, or claiming to be pregnant, we don't super know, they were allowed to live until the children were born. If they said that they were pregnant, that’s another few few months to live.

Alana: We love prioritizing a fetus over a living woman.

Haley: Yeah.

Alana: We love that. That’s gonna be a big old slash S from me, kids.

Haley: Yeah. Now we get to the point where there's no official record but I'm– I'm gonna speculate that there's no official record for a lot of this. Like not so scholarly sources nonetheless, oral tradition is still a thing. We’ll listen to it, we'll speak about it. We get to the point where like they're both in prison but Read– uh, Mary Read dies of the fever. So like she doesn't last to like give birth, somehow get out of the get out of it saying there was a fetus inside me I don't know why this fetus isn't growing. And then for Anne, at least, some people say that you just like died in prison and like eventually was like hanged. Others say that she escaped from prison and went on to just be a pirate again, master of disguise, she loved doing what she wanted to do I guess. But the real like meat and potatoes of the legend is that her father paid for her ransom to get back to the Carolinas. And so after she gave birth, she was actually pregnant with Calico Jack’s child. They never mentioned Calico Jack and I'm assuming since he was a dude he was just executed because like he couldn't give birth to some, like, to a child. So he died and she basically was like “I'm gonna move on, I have this child I'm in the Carolinas again” and met another guy named Joseph and they had like ten kids. Raised those ten kids, and she died like a respectable woman at age 88. That's like literally where it leaves off. Went back to the Carolinas, her dad paid ransom. And there's more about like the dad paying ransom than any of the other accounts.

Alana: Wow.

Haley: That's our pirate Anne.

Alana: So, I told some of my internet friends about this theme. I didn't say who we were doing because that's spoilers. But one of them asked if we were gonna talk about the lady pirate who would fight dressed like a man, and then right before she killed people would like, pull out one of her tits. Is that this person?

Haley: I think that's Mary. I think that's Mary. I think that's her buddy.

Alana: I was gonna say– I feel like it was one of them.

Haley: I didn't read any of that for Anne.

Alana: I also, like so the source for that I remember seeing is literally from Tumblr, and I take my Tumblr history lessons with more salt than the Dead Sea.

Lexi: Oh. Oh, yeah that is the only way. that is the only way to take the Tumblr history lessons.

Haley: More salt than– that’s awesome. I want that on a t-shirt.

(Alana laughing)

Haley: Yeah she has her own website Anne Bonny pirate dot com which I like perused at.

Lexi: Which is like a fifty year old man in Florida who learned how to code…

Haley: And that is really where I got like the legend stuff because like National Park Service literally put we don't know what happened to her and I wanted to sprinkle in some mystery.

Lexi: Put a little spice.

Haley: Yeah, but like, Smithsonian Mag did a piece on her, there's like another blog of– called “Rare Irish Stuff.” All the museum stuff, National Park Service, was coming from here is what she did in the early stages of life and here's what she did as a pirate, all the blogs are like this is the legend of her death.

Lexi: Alright, Alana?

Alana: Okay. My turn. I'm so excited for this, I'm so glad that like it wasn't my idea to do this one second, like someone else was like “can we do pirates second” I was like I was going to ask to do pirates second! Okay. So I'm also talking about an Irish pirate but, like, a hundred and fifty years before Anne Bonny. I'm talking about Gráinne Ní Máille [Grawinya ni Mawila] or Grace O’Malley. Shout out to Susan Johnston for that pronunciation help. Love her. Miss her. Doctor Johnston I hope you're listening and I miss you and stay safe. Anyway Gráinne is born circa 1530 ce ish somewhere near… Some sources say Clare Island, some say Achill Island. Either way those are islands in Clew Bay, which is Northwestern Ireland. Her parents Owen and Margaret– or Maeve in Irish– Ní Máille… that one’s cute because we'll see later but like she names her first son and her daughter after them. Gráinne has like a leg up when it comes to pirating, because her family made their living at sea, instead of other families in that area other clans in that area were mostly farming. So already she was on the water. There is a legend– a lot of her stuff is legend– but there is a legend that as a child she wanted to go travel or maybe it was a trading expedition to Spain with her father but her father was like “no no no. Your hair is gonna get tangled in the ropes you can come with us.” So she cut off all of her hair. And this is how she gets the nickname Gráinne Mhaol [woil] and Mhaol means the bald. Like it means short haired or bald. And she's like so cool and so badass that– she does have an older half brother named Donál– but Gráinne inherits her father's land and his title instead of the brother. I am trying to do the Irish names just because I feel like that's more…

Haley: Look you’re so ahead of me. I asked Robert. I should have asked Susan Johnston.

Alana: You should’ve asked Susan Johnston. I– so, lowkey, Lexi you can decide whether or not to keep this in. I wanted to ask Johnston because I wanted to like lowkey find a way to tell her we were doing a podcast without being like “we're doing a podcast!” so I wanted to ask for help so I wasn't just like bragging.

Haley: See I thought, like, living with a person from Ireland, like hundred percent Irish would be helpful.

Alana: I love Susan Johnston. She's worked in Ireland for like years and years and years and she never adopts an Irish accent by accident except when she says the word Ireland. I don't know if you guys have noticed this.

Haley: I notice that. I love her.

Alana: She says Ireland in an Irish accent. It’s the best thing in the world. Anyway. So. She is fifteen or sixteen ish, gets married to a man named Donál O’Flaherty in 1546. They have three children; Owen, Maeve, and it's anglicized to Morrough but it's like Murchadh [Merchai] which sounds like a Hebrew name to me. Seemingly, part of her dowry was three galleys and twenty ships. And the reason that that's probably part of her dowry is based on Irish law she would get them back at a dissolution of the marriage. Which we'll get to why the marriage was dissolved. So the fact that like she was able to keep them after the marriage ended makes it seem like maybe like they came with her into this marriage and so they were part of the dowry. Poor Mr O'Flaherty was hot tempered and feuding with the neighboring clans just for S’s and G’s, shits and grins, just cuz. And in 1564 he is mortally wounded in a territorial skirmish and Gráinne takes back his castle. Another legend says that it was originally known as Cock’s Castle and became later known as Hen's Castle because she took it back, which is fun. So that is why the marriage dissolved, because he died. Three years after he dies– he died in 1564– she gets remarried to someone named Richard Bourke in 1567. He's known as Richard na-Iarrain which means iron, so his nickname is Iron Dick. Multiple of my sources called him that which is fun.

(Haley laughing)

Alana: They just called him like Iron Dick Bourke and I was like okay. I guess this is happening. Supposedly she divorced him in 1568. He came home from something and his clothes and his stuff was packed outside their room and she was like “we're not married anymore!” But Ireland– I don't know if you knew this– remember how last episode I was like “Russia is cold”? Ireland is Catholic. So a divorce was not gonna fly. So it was either like he pissed her off and she was like you're going to sleep on the couch for whatever or like they just kept pretending but they weren't friends or actually in love and they just kept pretending to be married. He died in 1583 of natural causes. Gráinne, who had taken a break from being a pirate and a rebel, which we’ll get to in a sec, goes back to that. Having, like, being a single woman again. So here are some of her pirate-y things. Her ships were not great for open ocean so her piracy or the way that she was being a pirate was short distance raids from her little strongholds in northwest Ireland and they would like levy tolls on passing ships and if they didn't pay… bad things. Bad things would happen. An English lord once referred to her as “The nurse of all rebellions in this province for forty years.” She gave birth to her youngest son and her only child with Iron Dick whose name is Theobold, or Tibbot, or Tiobóid on a ship on the way back from something, and the next day they were attacked by Algerian pirates. The legend around it says that they attacked within an hour. And so she just wrapped up this child and put it down and was like “okay we're gonna go kill these Algerian pirates now.” There's also a legend of her at Howth Castle which is in Dublin. The story goes that she was denied entrance because the family was at dinner. She thought this was super rude so she kidnapped the grandson of the Earl and returns him in exchange for the promise that the family would always have an open chair for her at their dinner table. She's like Irish Elijah. There's an empty seat for her, always. Between husbands, she took a lover Hugh de Lacy. And he– they were like pirating it up together and he was killed by some people they were raiding and so Gráinne got revenge on the castle called Doona Castle. And she gets the nickname– she's got all these nicknames, but this one I think is my favorite. It's Dark Lady of Doona, which I'm a big fan of. I really like that one. She has this like archnemesis– Professor Johnston, Dr Johnston called Elizabeth I Gráinne’s number one enemy, which, kind of, but I think this guy is her number one archenemy. Richard Bingham, who is a Lord in her county.In County Mayo, is the English Lord because England is like encroaching upon Ireland, which is a long running thing throughout history. This Lord, who was being basically like the English governor in Ireland, captured her and almost hung her but Gráinne’s son-in-law, whose name is also Richard Burke, and I'm not sure how that happened. This is a different Richard Burke though because his nickname is Devil’s Hook. But he intervened and saved her from the gallows. And at one point she got home from– she'd been like doing this not quite a cold war because it definitely got hot at some times. She's been doing this like butting heads with Richard Bingham. And her son, Murchadh or Murray or Murrough or whatever, had sided with Bingham, so Gráinne destroyed his land and burned his castle down. Motherly love, man. So we are going to now talk about Gráinne and Elizabeth I who met for the first time in 1593. So Elizabeth is concerned about Ireland. Her father Henry VIII was the first person to call himself King of Ireland, or like in a while, was the first king of England to call himself king of Ireland as well. so there's some like tension between their families. So Ireland is still Catholic, even though famously, at this point, England has not been Catholic. And it's got all these green pastures like they could very easily rise up against her. And they have this relationship with Spain, and Spain and England are not friends. But Gráinne has a problem as well. Her lands have been taken by Richard Bingham, her oldest son Owen was killed, and Tibbot, that one, her youngest son was captured by Bingham. And so Gráinne petitions for an audience to plead her case, and she's granted it. This meeting does not go great. Gráinne refuses to bow– a lot of this is legend– refuses to bow because she's also queen, and so queens shouldn't bow to other queens. supposedly she brought a dagger into their meeting but it was confiscated. The meeting was supposedly conducted in Latin because it was quote “the only language they shared.” I don't think it was the only language they shared because Gráinne petitioned in English, and probably– was like a noble Irish woman– and probably also spoke English, probably spoke some Spanish. I think she spoke both English and Irish perfectly well, but I love the idea that she goes to Elizabeth and is like “we're not going to conduct this in your language” because Elizabeth probably didn't speak that much Irish, she was like “I could do this but I'm gonna put you out. You’re gonna– I am the underdog here, I am asking for help but we're going to do this on my terms.”

Haley: When you say “Irish” are you saying Gaelic or is this like another– I'm thinking of like…

Alana: Irish Gaelic.

Haley: Okay I'm thinking of Johnston's Celts class where she had the whole… Irish…

Alana: Yeah. This is Irish specific. Irish Gaelic.

Haley: Okay cool.

Alana: So supposedly at one point Gráinne sneezed, and one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting gave her a handkerchief and so Gráinne blew her nose and then she threw the handkerchief in the fire, to a scandalized response. People were like “you should– this is a very expensive and beautiful gift and you should have kept it.” And Gráinne says “no. In Ireland that's a dirty frigging rag, and we should dispose of it.” So, like, that's another one of these things that I'm like– I don't, I really don't, like I think it's rude to like, call out other cultures on being gross but like… She just called your culture gross like what a badass. So they came to this agreement that Gráinne would stop openly rebelling against the Crown in exchange for the release of her son the return of her lands and Richard Bingham would be removed from his seat of power. Took too long. In Gráinne’s opinion, took too long. Her son was released, but the rest of it took too long so she started back up doing that rebel thing. All of that rebelling against the crown… We love it, we love to see it. And she died of natural causes in 1603 ish, again not really calendars, so she’s approximately seventy three, which is a pretty nice old age considering her lifestyle. I do wanna talk a little bit about Gráinne now. She is an icon of Irish history for standing up to England which really… Something that… So I was in Ireland, I don't know if you knew this about me, but I spent a month in Ireland. And I was there for Fourth of July. I said like the one Irish guy who was on the deck with us, Paul– shout out Paul– I said you know the main message of the Fourth of July is “England get fucked” and I feel like the Irish could get behind that. So that's why Gráinne is really like she's everywhere… to the point that there is a Grace O'Malley whiskey and gin company that will ship in– anywhere in the US. I do think they are Ireland based but they will ship in the US. Each bottle is forty dollars and you have free shipping on two bottles. This is– they're not sponsoring me. I'm telling you two this in case you wanna get me a gift, or if someone who's listening wants to DM me, and get me a gift, I would be willing to try it. I looked at my liquor store and they did not have it but I did look at my liquor store.

Haley: I think I've had it before. It's good gin if I'm thinking of the label correctly. It’s good

Alana: I can send you a picture of it.

Haley: I love gin. Gin’s like my drink of choice.

Alana: The tagline is like “Believe in Grace” and I'm like “cool!” Love that. Love to see it. Anyway. So I'm really– I was really excited about this one. I think she's a really cool person, a lot of fun.

Lexi: You know what I think is interesting? All of our ladies, if legend holds correctly, like if the popular legend holds correctly, did not die in their crazy rebellious lifestyles they just died as old ladies living their life.

Haley: Yeah.

Lexi: So you know people always talk about taking risks and stuff, why not do it? Because you’ll probably just die an old lady anyway.

Alana: You will probably die an old lady anyway. That's true. I love this episode. this was so much fun. I love this podcast.

Lexi: Alright, you ready for an outro

Alana: Yeah.

Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on lady history pod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review or tell your friends, and if you don't like the show, keep it yourself.

Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra, you can find her on Instagram and Twitter at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, GarageBand, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us. Next time on Lady History.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Haley: Next week, on Lady History we're gonna be talking about women of legend. Are they real? Are they not? What's up with their stories? We don't know, you don’t know, but we’ll all find out together.

Haley: Kara Cooney I love you.

Alana: Some quick corrections to last week’s episode: Ginger Rogers was Fred Astaire’s dance partner, not Grace Kelley. Also, my mom was the one who was almost eight when they were stopped at the airport in Israel. My uncle was five.

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judedoyle · 7 years

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It’s sort of a corny project, assembling songs by women and non-binary people at the end of every year. It’s a very dopey, dated, 1990s, Women Who Rock! version of feminism. I mean, I think there was a reason for that iteration of feminism — year-end lists are still dominated by men, and my favorite albums fall through the cracks just about every year for that very reason — but it begs the question of why you’d do it now, when it has been established fact for many decades that you do not have to be a man to make music.

The reason I do it is that it keeps me honest. This year’s list, for example, is all women; I don’t know of any albums by non-binary people that came out this year, though I’m sure there were some. But even within that narrower subset, I am blown away by how many kinds of songs by women there are — how wildly different women are in their voices and priorities and visions, how the word “woman” sums up so much but, somehow, doesn’t tell you anything at all. Making the list, I can start to feel like I’m assembling my own little pantheon, selecting a hall full of different archetypes or visions of what womanhood can be, so that listeners can wander through and pick the vision that best suits their needs or their own self-identification.

That task seemed particularly important this year. Trumpism insists so much on homogeneity — on the second-class status of all women, sure, but also, on the supremacy of whiteness, on heteronormativity, the importance of only admitting one specific Ivanka-esque type of woman to even exist as a person worthy of consideration. I wanted to select as many different versions of womanhood as I could, to show something about what “being a woman” could potentially mean.

Nor is this really a “best songs” list this year, if it ever was. I never agree with other writers’ year-end lists, and I can never put everything I love onto one cohesive mixtape; this started as twenty-four songs, and it could be thirty, or fifty, and still feel incomplete. There are songs I loved that are missing. What this is, I think, is a list of the songs that felt most like 2017; that reflected the mood and the predominant anxieties of the moment. They tend to fall into themes: Songs about fascism, about men, about grief, about God and magic. Putting them together is not just about lifting different women’s voices up, but about writing a kind of collective diary of one very strange year.

“2016,” Nadine Shah, Honeymoon Destination

Nadine Shah gets neglected, on the list of musicians I like, because she’s not showy. She just plugs away, making quietly excellent, sort-of-PJ-Harvey-ish songs for voice and guitar. This song starts out in that quiet, excellent mode, in an assortment of mundane details: She’s thirty, she’s depressed, she’s getting addicted to true crime TV, all her friends are on weird diets. Then history comes staggering into the frame — what is there left to inspire us with a fascist in the White House? — and suddenly, you’re aware that you’re hearing the voice of a biracial British Muslim woman living through Brexit and Trump, and that it is incredibly crucial. She pulls this trick a lot on Holiday Destination, angrily raking the state of the world through her songs, and though it’s sometimes incredibly on the nose, well, it deserves to be. This is that kind of year.

“Aryan Nation,” EMA, Exile In The Outer Ring

If Nadine Shah’s anger is elegant and British, EMA’s is scuzzy and loutish and American. I got to hear this album before its release, which makes me particularly fond of it, but I like to think I can still be objective. What stuns me about it is that it manages to pull off “populism,” as a stance, without ever overriding or ignoring identity. The narrator here is pulling away from the whiteness and ugliness of the United States under Trump — she’s “a refugee from the Aryan nation,” as she puts it — but she’s still located firmly among the 99%. “Tell me stories of famous men / I can’t see myself in them” is a demand that rings throughout the whole album, which mixes intimate songs about emotional abuse and misogynistic dude friends with big songs about downward mobility and class struggle, “identity” politics with politics-politics. In this song, the men standing outside the casino, the face of the elite, register as nearly demonic figures; they might be demons, I think, since “in their eyes are things that you and I will never know.” But their evil expands and takes on new facets, depending on who you are. There’s a double indictment: EMA’s Everyman can’t see herself in the nation’s “famous men” because they’re famous, but also because they’re male. Either way, she’s ready to burn it down.

“No Man Is Big Enough For My Arms,” Ibeyi, Ash

Oh, man. I love this song. I would probably love it for the title alone, to be honest. But I cannot escape the feeling that, were Leftist Asshole Twitter to get ahold of its existence, they would hate it more than seventeen Hamiltons combined. It’s an incredibly simple piece of music: Just the Diaz sisters singing the title phrase over clips of Michelle Obama’s speeches, and specifically her 2016 campaign speech about Trump’s history of assault and what our nation owes its girls. If the election had gone another way, or if the tone were valedictory, it absolutely wouldn’t work; it would probably represent the same corny, self-satisfied #centrism that I’m sure some podcast is accusing it of as we speak. But this isn’t a victory lap. As the mournfulness of the singing should make clear, it’s a funeral dirge: For a historic moment that passed into a historically racist backlash, for the vision of a better world that never came to pass, for a promise to our daughters that wasn’t kept. As much as Democrats loved the idea of “when they go low, we go high,” or Michelle Obama herself, that wasn’t the vision of women and girls that carried the day. We’ve all been brought low now.

“When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” Lana Del Rey, Lust for Life

If you told me, back in 2014, that I would be relying on Lana Del Rey for insights into the national psyche, I would have either laughed you out of the room or thrown myself out of a window to defeat your grim prophecy. Yet here we are, with a song by Lana Del Rey about American politics and the rise of fascism, and I kind of like it. Granted, her proposed solutions — they are, in order, “youth,” “truth,” and “dancing” — are all (intentionally?) vapid and Lana Del Rey-like. But the core question — is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America? — is one that’s haunted me all year. Welcome to 2017: Things are so bizarre and depressing that Lana Del Rey sounds normal.

“Let’s Generalize About Men,” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Here’s the thing, guys: I fucking loved Al Franken.

I loved him early on. I had every crappy Al Franken book of “political humor” in high school. I listened to his radio show on Air America, even as Air America collapsed into a smoldering pile of debt and garbage. I was so thrilled to share a room with him at Netroots Nation that I texted my parents, and they texted back that they were proud of me, like it had taken some feat of exceptional skill and intelligence to be in the same room as the keynote speaker at an event. I teared up watching him talk about sexual assault in the military, how we were failing those women. And I know women who worked on his first Senate campaign. They loved Al Franken. I loved Al Franken. Al Franken could have been President, on the back of all the women who loved him.

Al Franken can roast in the pits of Hell.

The creators of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” almost certainly did not intend for this song to air the same week as the Weinstein allegations and the Shitty Media Men list. They had no control over how its lyrics — right now we’re angry and sad! It’s our right to get righteously mad at every member of the opposite sex! — would land in an environment where seemingly every famous man was publicly accused of sexual atrocity. Nevertheless, in a few short weeks, this song has become my chief emotional release valve for dealing with an endless wave of sexual trauma, and the one thing that can reliably make me laugh. This is probably the one song I’ve listened to most in 2017, and it’s not even from a “real” pop album.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh as hard as it does. I think it’s the deranged cheerfulness of the music, and how triumphant they all sound. They’re just listing lazy ’90s sitcom tropes about gender, but Gabrielle Ruiz puts so much mustard on the phrase “all men only want to have sex,” my God. And, in an age, when #notallmen routinely swing by to remind you of all the stuff they’re not doing, you have to admire the magnificent troll job of lyrics like “there are no exceptions / all three billion men are like this!”

Of course, you’re not meant to agree with them; there’s a whole trip through straight ladies’ condescending homophobia, just in case you missed the point. But when they finally get to the verse about all the other stuff that all men do — all three point six billion men, and also, Al Franken — well. It is a song that is of its moment. That kicker would no doubt be less brutal, in a pre-Weinstein universe. But it’s funnier when you believe it could be true.

“Boyfriend,” Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

The concept of this song — Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” from the girl’s point of view — is so simple, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. And maybe it has! But it’s hard to believe it’s been done better, because this is, moment-for-moment, my favorite song of the year. It’s really just four jaunty minutes of Marika Hackman telling some poor schmuck about how excellently she fucked his girlfriend last night: “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl / it doesn’t count,” she sings, and it’s one of the most coolly vicious moments in any song this year. In another year, it might not even strike you as all that political. But in a year especially full of male sexual aggression and cluelessness, of Robert in “Cat Person” and the vanguard of the Left scoffing about “pats on the backside,” frogs using cuckolding metaphors and seemingly every single Hillary-hating talking head getting exposed for rubbing his penis on coworkers, “Boyfriend” feels like the snarl of rage that’s been bubbling under every conversation. I mean: Among other things, she is literally cucking this dude. It could be pretty gross. But I’ll allow it.

“Green Light,” Lorde, Melodrama

Sometimes you do need a fun, blockbuster pop song. Despite Lorde’s much-vaunted writing skills, several lyrics in this are just plain goofy: “We order different drinks at the same bars,” for example, is what everybody does at bars, including people who are on a date with each other. Later, she snarls that her ex is a “damn liar” for claiming to love the beach, a line which summons up a long history of passionate and incredibly specific anti-beach sentiments, and raises the serious possibility that she’s singing about Anakin Skywalker. But if you can get past the mental image of Lorde swinging through the club with Darth Vader, each of them taking sips from a single shared gin and tonic, there is a sense of propulsive longing to this song, a sense of being so excited you’re almost sad, like the twinge you feel on Christmas morning when you realize there’s nothing left to wait for. That sense of pre-emptive nostalgia defines many of the great moments on Melodrama; Lorde is both vibrating with joy over how new and full of potential her world seems to be, and sad that it won’t always feel like this. That feeling defines a lot of youth, too. Many songs aim for that epic sweep; Jack Antonoff has a retirement fund because of it, “Tonight, Tonight” and “1979” were the ones people played when I was young enough to actually feel it, but this year, that big, hopefully hopeless, Gatsby-invoking chorus was the closest to the real thing.

“Say You Do,” Tei Shi, Crawl Space

This is another record that got under-rated as the result of being simple, pretty and specific in its ambitions when the context demanded Big Statements. There’s nothing wrong with big statements, and this list is full of them. But this is four perfect minutes, no wasted space, no false steps, and it makes me happy every time I listen to it. Granted, it’s aiming for that same cheesy ‘90s mom-jams vibe that a lot of people aim for these days; viewed through a certain lens, this is basically a HAIM song. But HAIM actually released an album this year, and none of the songs were as good as this one. The whole album is like this; intentionally lovely, boundary-pushing without being self-indulgent, excellently crafted. It’s skated just under the radar, maybe precisely because of those qualities. But crises pass, and craft keeps standing.

“Frontline,” Kelela, Take Me Apart

Even simple, blockbuster pop songs are not always as simple as they seem. It was only when putting this list together that I realized all the songs I’d classified as “just fun” were about the same thing. They’re all about women contesting men’s narratives. You don’t know me like you say you do, Tei Shi insists; you’ll always deny that we’re going in circles, Kelela says here; even Lorde, God bless her, is incredibly clear on the fact that her ex does not like the beach, despite recent statements to the contrary. (Is systemic corruption at play? Is Lorde’s ex in the pocket of the powerful beach lobby? Only time will tell!) I don’t think I got the appeal of ‘90s R&B nostalgia before now; here, especially in the pre-chorus, it’s simultaneously sexy and meticulous, propulsive but airbrushed at the same time. But within that is Kelela herself, who has been gradually moving to the forefront of her own songs for years now, becoming a persona rather than just another instrument: Coming up with the Sun around me… now I’m up and I won’t be taken down, she sings. The fact that the defiance is intimate makes it no less political. I believe her.

“Deadly Valentine,” Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rest

It’s hard to come up with an elevator pitch for this one. It’s the Stranger Things soundtrack, but also a French disco, but also Charlotte Gainsbourg singing about her sister’s suicide. Any one of those elements could undermine the other, but somehow, they don’t. This year has been full of albums about grief — reasonable, given that it feels like most of us are grieving something — but the opulence of Gainsbourg’s, the way it calls on the musical history of the family to dramatize the loss of one of its members, stands out. I get so caught up in the catchiness of this one, so blinded by all the disco lights, that I can almost miss Gainsbourg mourning in the background (“I’m my own shadow / you are my little hurricane”). Which, I think, is the point.

“Los Ageless,” Saint Vincent, MASSEDUCTION

Annie Clark is a very cool musician. One of the last great cool musicians, maybe. Cool has been on the way out, though, in this century; what you find sexy and mysterious, I might just see as repressed and withholding. Clark does not like it when her audience gets too close. She doesn’t do “raw.” The emotion in her songs gets refracted through intellect, through reference, through character, through irony; often, and especially on her last album, she seems to be playing a parody of herself, as if she can only be a pop star by putting scare quotes around her own personality. This is often very appealing; it’s why people point to her as an heir to David Bowie or David Byrne (or, presumably, other celebrity Davids). It can also be frustrating, when you want to make a direct connection and she doesn’t let you. I don’t know why MASSEDUCTION is different; maybe the breakups Clark has been through have worn down her defenses, maybe working with living schmaltz factory Jack Antonoff has thawed the ice a bit. But this chorus is huge: Big, melodramatic, honest, painful. It’s not something I knew she could do.

“Jukai,” Jhene Aiko, Trip

I TOLD YOU PEOPLE ABOUT JHENE AIKO AND YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN.

Sorry! I was super into Jhene Aiko in 2014, the first year I made this list. I talked about her all the time and people looked at me like I was an idiot. Back then, she just sort of floated around, appearing on dudes’ songs. It took a while for her own aesthetic to take shape. She had vague, New-Agey ideas about spirituality; she talked a lot about weed; she made regrettable puns. (How regrettable? Her first album is called Souled Out, featuring a song called “Lyin’ King,” so, you tell me.) Even when her aesthetic finally did take hold, her label kept making incredibly cash-grabby statements about how there’d never been a Frank Ocean for the female demographic. So that was how people saw her, I think — just a stoner riding a trendy vibe. Someone you could write off.

If I told you, in 2014, that Jhene Aiko would be turning in a 22-song conceptual exploration of her brother’s death and her own substance abuse, and that it would begin with a song about Aiko entering the “Sea of Trees,” which is a common place for Japanese people to commit suicide, and that you would be hearing Jhene Aiko seriously sing lines like “I envy the dead,” and that critics would love it, I do not think you would have believed me. But here we are, with the harrowing, serious Jhene Aiko statement about death and grief that the world didn’t know it needed. Women shouldn’t have to bring themselves to their knees to be taken seriously. So the best thing to know, about Jhene Aiko, is that this was always there.

“Wildwood,” Tori Amos, Native Invader

The Tori Amos “return to form,” if you ask me, occurred way back in 2011, with Night of Hunters. But, at least since the 2014 critical re-evaluation that accompanied Unrepentant Geraldines, it’s widely agreed that she’s all the way back on her game. So if I tell you that Native Invader is great, that several songs are as good as anything she’s ever done, that’s not surprising. If I tell you that she’s still doing concept albums, but that it’s started working— this album is, in no particular order, about climate change, the Dakota access pipeline, her mother falling severely ill, and the Native American ancestors on her mother’s side of the family; in typical Tori Amos fashion, the endangered bodies of the planet and her mother and her ancestors get all tangled up together, until, by the final song, they seem like the same being — maybe that doesn’t surprise you, either. But this might: I finally get what she’s doing with the ‘70s soft-rock thing.

In plenty of Amos’ late-00s work, maybe all the way back to “Crazy” on Scarlet’s Walk, she’s tried to signify “sexiness” with what sounds like smooth tunes for dudes with heavy mustaches and ladies with feathered hair. Given that Amos gained her initial fan base by running on wild, primal intensity (this is either a song or a scene from The Exorcist; I’m honestly still not sure) her fixation on suddenly sounding mellow was bizarre and frustrating. “Crazy” worked fine, but “Sleeps With Butterflies” almost derailed her whole fucking career.

Yet here we are, with another sexy-’70s Tori Amos song. It’s mellow; it’s smooth. There are bongos on it. And yet, I know what it’s doing now. This is an album about aging and death; the death of wild nature, the all-too-possible death of her mother, the impending adulthood of her now-17-year-old daughter, and the fact that Amos, within the foreseeable future, will become part of her family’s oldest living generation. The point of the ’70s sounds, I think, isn’t that Amos believes they’re current; it’s that they are part of Amos’ youth, echoes of the songs she fell in love with as a teenager. These songs are to Tori Amos as Tori Amos records are to me — something precious from a world that has ended, a little bit of being young that she gets to carry around. “Wildwood” summons up a wild, healing, erotic relationship with Nature (don’t @ me) but also sounds as if it’s mourning that communion, and the woods, which may not be there for her own grandchildren; it sounds, like the Lorde song, as if it is about both happiness and the inevitable end of happiness, nostalgic for something that is happening right now.

“Om Rama,” Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

When you talk about Tori Amos, you’re always talking about God. Her worldview is deeply pagan, not in the New-Age sense, but in an earned way; when she sings to the woods as a living creature, asking it to heal her, you know she’s serious.

That was my second-favorite album of 2017. This is my favorite. I don’t know how I found it; I think it just got introduced into my Spotify feed through some algorithm. And I’m not even sure if it qualifies; sure, it was released this year, but all the actual music was recorded decades ago. It wasn’t even intended for mass release. This is Alice Coltrane’s attempt at writing devotional music for her ashram; it was meant to be heard by the ashram, and no-one else.

Yet I am hard-pressed to think of anything else like it: A female composer, from the 20th century, wrestling to communicate her own experience of God. There’s so much going on in here; traditional chanting, gospel music, ’90s synths that sound like the Twin Peaks soundtrack, what we used to call “soundscapes.” You float from one texture to another, one worldview to another, linked only by Coltrane’s own sense of the divine. It’s incredibly intimate; maybe too intimate, since you’re very aware that the state of Alice Coltrane’s soul was not intended for people outside her own religious community to pass comment on. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, a synthesis that somehow goes beyond what “God” sounds like in Western music (choirs, mostly) or Eastern appropriation, and becomes its own, new sublime.

“Tabula Rasa,” Bjork, Utopia

Here is an unexpected thing about having a baby: Bjork makes me cry now. I’d always listened to her, given that she belonged to that sacred constellation of ‘90s “alternative” ladies that makes up about 80% of my personal value system. But I tended to view her with respect, rather than love; she struck me as a cerebral artist, technically brilliant but not too intimate. Then I found myself breastfeeding at 3 AM, listening to “All is Full of Love” and crying, or singing “Hyperballad” to the baby in the bath, and I realized the emotion had always been in there. I just hadn’t felt it yet.

Utopia adds a few entries to the list of “improbable words Bjork has trilled on a record,” including “Kafkaesque” and “patriarchy.” But she’s serious about the patriarchy thing. This record is, like the title says, her utopia — her matriarchal island, where nature can still hold sway, where mothers are never defeated in their ability to protect their daughters, where, after all the dirt and awfulness of the year, we might be able to get clean. She’s less singing than she is invoking it into being.

Some of the details on this song are small, petty, specific: A bad divorce, a father who led two lives. But the whole thing centers, as stories of matriarchy always do, around a mother and her daughter. When Bjork finally starts witching out, singing her preferred solution into being — “Tabula rasa for my children / not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers” — it’s hard to imagine a better hope to take into the new year.

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