Authors: Beth Ditto
Once I became serious with Freddie, I wanted him to come to Arkansas with me, to see where I’m from and to be able to match all my stories up with faces and places. I trusted him enough to show him my world, and I trusted my family enough to know they would treat him right, and they did not let me down. My whole family respected that Freddie was male and called him “he,” no big deal. I don’t know if they understand the finer points of transgender identity, but they know how to give a person the respect he requires, they understand dignity and manners.
What they did not understand or respect—what really scandalized my family—was reading in a local Arkansas paper that I didn’t believe in God anymore. There is only one sin that is unforgivable in my family, and that is to denounce God. They were worried for my soul, which isn’t a bad thing, actually. It’s sweet to have a big group of people who love you so much that they are concerned about your afterlife. I don’t care if my family thinks I’m sinning, as long as they don’t treat me like shit about it.
After
Movement
came out Gossip got to go to Scotland. We went with the singer-songwriter Sarah Dougher and this band called the Lollies. Sarah was part of the band Cadallaca with Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney, and on her own she wrote beautiful, strong, and folksy songs for her guitar. She was touring her new CD,
The Bluff
.
The Lollies were a U.K. girl group that had blown up after the
NME
named them the best new band in Britain. They were punk and into ’60s garage music and generally fell into being a band in the same jokey way Gossip had, so we got along great. The tour was hilarious. In the USA I was still underage, but not in Europe! I drank and smoked myself into oblivion. That was back when I could just bounce back from a night spent getting hammered, without a shame spiral in the morning or giving a shit about anything. That was before touring became hard work. Those days can’t last forever, and I was glad I took advantage of my resiliency on that tour.
It was my first time in Britain. We went to Glasgow to play
Ladyfest Scotland and did some shows in little towns throughout the U.K. We went to a working-class place called Hull, and our show there was my favorite U.K. performance to this very day. There weren’t any kids at the show, just local blue-collar workers and older lesbians. By the end of the night we had drunk machinist guys screaming Bikini Kill lyrics with us:
“TAKE BACK, TAKE BACK THE REVOLUTION!”
What was happening then, and what continues to happen, is the longer I sing, the more records we make, the more I am using my real voice. I never knew what pitch was, or what key was, and so many albums later I’m starting to get an idea. As a little kid I wasn’t encouraged much in school. My mother did her best, as usual, but her tutoring skills were spread too thin. Lucky for me, she saw my potential. Overhearing my Munchkinland versions of “Like a Virgin” or “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Mom would pop into the room, grab hold of my nose, and say,
Not through the nose, from the gut!
snapping her fingers, counting,
One, two, three, four!
Teaching me the bare basics of rhythm, projection, and confidence. I still can’t totally tell if something sounds “pitchy,” but I keep learning, and when I’m performing and recording I find myself applying the things I’ve picked up, skills I’ve learned from other singers I’ve met along the way, tricks I’ve learned from people helping us with our albums, and stuff I figured out on my own, almost intuitively, from singing all day every day for so many years. When we recorded
Movement
I didn’t know anything about singing; by the time we recorded
Standing in the Way of Control
I understood a lot more.
In 2008 we recorded
Music for Men
, and we had the luxury of taking as much time as we needed to record. It gave me the space to understand how to use my voice even more fully than on our other records, which was amazing. But I could feel, even during those sessions, that I had gotten to the heart of my true voice yet, and I also hadn’t figured out how to take all the different ways I’d learned to sing and use them together. I’m able to do a lot of different
styles of singing and I don’t think that’s true for all vocalists. I’ve become so comfortable with my voice, and I can accept that it’s
good
, and I use it to do what comes naturally instead of forcing it into some girl-singer box. I don’t restrict myself anymore out of being scared about what I should or shouldn’t sound like. And I’ve been able to teach young singers what it’s taken me so many years to figure out at Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. I’m helping to teach them to take the less painful road of accepting their differences and embracing their one-of-a-kind sound from an early age.
I have been lucky enough to volunteer at Rock Camp for one week each summer, teaching vocals, and it’s always an incredible experience. The girls at the camp are ages eight to eighteen, and the instructors are mostly self-taught, do-it-yourself female or transgendered folks. We teach them every aspect of making music we can think of. Rock Camp started in Portland, Oregon, back in 2002. Some of those original kids are now young adults, and many of them have come back to the camp as volunteers. It’s a radical environment that teaches kids to know and accept and love themselves, to give themselves permission to be exactly who they are. If anyone thinks that music and feminism are not important, that Riot Grrrl didn’t do anything, well, the legacy of the movement is so massive that now there are multiple rock camps for girls all around the United States. At our rock camp, we employ a gentle radical feminism that teaches the girls basic self-confidence and the simple but radical idea that they have the right as young women to access the world of music, or any world they want. We teach them how to read music or, if they choose, to not read music and learn instead through hands-on and intuitive means. We help them learn how to respect one another. We have workshops about gender identity and racism, and in the process we adult teachers are learning as well. Kids don’t realize the offhand racist comments they can make, and as a grown-up you have to learn how to address that and know when it’s appropriate to intervene and when to just let things play out.
In one way, Rock Camp is even helping me to be a better musician. I have to admit that I didn’t know what monitors were for until I was about twenty-four years old. I knew there were these big black speakers facing me up on the stage, but I didn’t know I was supposed to hear myself in them. I would blow my voice out on the first three nights of a tour, just screaming, trying to get a sense of what I sounded like. Even now I am just learning to use a PA, and the reason I’m learning is because I’ve got to teach eight-year-olds how to use a PA! So they are really teaching me, which is hilarious.
At Rock Camp it always comes back to basic self-love and acceptance. When a girl is feeling bummed out about her singing, I want to know if she feels sad because she’s been told she’s a bad singer her whole life, or because she doesn’t sound like her favorite singer, or because she just doesn’t like herself. Is she so self-conscious she doesn’t really want to be heard, so her natural voice gets strangled and comes out like a dry little squeak? These are questions all singers need to ask themselves. I think the older you get the more comfortable you become in your body, and the more relaxed you are with yourself, the more your natural voice can take shape and stun you.
There is a music library at the camp that allows the girls to learn about music they might not find on their own—not just PJ Harvey and Joan Jett but Ma Rainey and Cibo Matto and Yoko Ono. There are a lot more women of color and fat women involved in music than you would ever know from watching MTV. I like to bring in vocalists who totally challenge the way the girls understand voice. It empowers the kids to see that everyone is capable. That fame isn’t the most important goal and that there are many different levels of success. Your definition of success is more important than anyone else’s. You’re not often taught that what matters in this life is your happiness, and we work to impart this simple philosophy to the girls at Rock Camp.
Teaching at Rock Camp, I made friends with one girl who was
just a natural weirdo, a little kid with a crazy high voice. And not high like a little girl’s voice tends to be—it was a powerful, supernatural high voice coming out of this child. When she spoke she spoke normally, but when she sang it was like her voice was wanting to erupt into some lunatic yodel. The people around her were unsure of how to work with her, and the other little girls were especially annoyed by it. I brought in some Nina Hagen and had them all gather around and listen, asking them,
Would you call this singing?
The wild cries of “New York New York” filled the space, and I watched the little yodeler’s eyes go huge, and I could tell that for the first time she was hearing something that made sense to her. Not every artist gets to have this moment, where you connect with someone who came before you, who is channeling the same creative energy as you and helps you make sense to yourself. It took me twenty-seven years to get to that moment, and right then, at Rock Camp, I got to have a sneak peek at what it would be like to get that sort of understanding when you’re eight or nine years old. And this is why feminism is so important. When you’re involved in feminist-oriented projects like Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls—or whatever arts festival or political group or zine project you’re involved in—it’s easy to get lost in the big picture or sidetracked by how much hard work there is. But you’ve got to remember you’re doing it for the Nina Simones and Yoko Onos of the coming generations, so they don’t stay ignorant of their own voices and their own creative power in this world. I have a friend whose music teacher wanted to test her for a hearing problem because her sound was so unusual! If she’d been in Rock Camp we’d have just found some raw lady singer who matched up with her natural style, providing her with a role model and a map to her creative self.
Another thing I teach girls at Rock Camp is how to have stage presence and the confidence to use your body. Every other instrument gives you something to hide behind, but singing comes straight out of your physicality, and there is no place to hide. The
female body comes under such constant criticism and scrutiny, and this affects a girl when she is up there, being so vulnerable, letting her strong gorgeous weird surprising voice out. Girls are raised being told you have to sing this one way, talk this one way, sit with your legs crossed, stop taking your top off at the swimming pool, start following all these rules, and these social restrictions bleed into art and make it hard for grown women to access the freedom they need to grow as creative people. This is Feminism 101, and it’s crucial to get it to girls when they’re young so they don’t spend half their life unlearning all the bullshit, wasting time they could be spending perfecting their singing or writing or painting. No one takes us when we’re nine years old and makes us listen to Yoko Ono, and I say that it is a radical, healing, and simple thing to do.
In the absence of idealistic feminists turning me on to Nina Hagen and Nina Simone in my youth, I stumbled upon other role models in pop culture. I idolized Miss Piggy, the glamorous, bossy femme from
The Muppet Show
. I really, really idolized Mama Cass, who was fat and could sing and be beautiful and famous. I loved Cyndi Lauper so much that I literally believed we were sisters when I was growing up. I was obsessed with Boy George and his glamorous gender and seductive voice. I couldn’t figure it out, but I was so drawn to Boy George! I stopped having cable TV in 1986, when our region capitulated to the demands of the local Christian college and banned MTV. My mother, who liked Talking Heads and Black Sabbath, was a young mom, and she figured what was the point in scraping and scrimping to get us cable when there was no MTV? The last thing I saw on MTV before the Man took it away was Michael Jackson and Madonna, and I remained frozen in that musical moment for a long time, having no way to know about what came next. For years I would do Mom’s makeup and draw a little Madonna mole on her cheek.
The lessons I come up with at Rock Camp are really outside the box. I’m trying to give those girls access to everything I missed
when I was younger. I like to take Antony and the Johnsons and Nina Simone and play them both for the kids and ask them to tell me what gender each singer is. They always get it wrong. Girls are taught to sing high and pretty, like Antony, not low and from the guts like Nina Simone. But we’re slowly trying to change that. There are so many things we’re not told growing up, and it’s our true feminist responsibility to take the truth to the people who need to hear it.
So, eventually Gossip had packed it up and left the teeny-weeny town of Olympia for the thriving metropolis of PDX, OR, which was just hours away, but the scene was bigger—more places to play, to live, to eat, to shop. Instead of nine months of solid rain there are only eight!
Portland was stuffed with queers and punks and artists who had fled Olympia once the scene got too stifling. As magical as Olympia was to land in, once you’ve been there for a few years, as my band and I had, it becomes claustrophobic. The same little one-block downtown, once so quaint, seems tired. You crave newness, a bit of space, the freedom to walk down the street without seeing fifteen people you know in fifteen minutes. There is a fine line between community and feeling socially oversaturated. It was time to move on. We all could feel it—Nathan, Kathy, even, thankfully, Freddie. Nathan and I got a house together, and everyone else found rooms with friends who’d already completed their migration from Olympia to Portland. I was excited for my next chapter and to see what would happen to Gossip out of the cozy confines
of our supportive womb. I packed my belongings—mostly clothes and records—into Nathan’s car, and we sang songs the whole way down into Oregon.
But soon enough life in my new town started to feel overwhelming. A month or so earlier I had been on tour with Gossip and some scary things had happened with my vision. Everything would just go white, like the cable disconnecting on your television set. Electric snow. I couldn’t see anything for a brief moment, and then my vision would return and it would be okay and I’d think, That was weird, and get on with it. That was the tour when I started hearing how skinny I was.
Beth, you look skinny, are you okay?
I’d shrug.
Yeah, I’m fine
.