Authors: Beth Ditto
When Kathy left the band it became less fun and more serious, which changed things for the better and for the boringer, because you can’t go back to touring in a borrowed minivan with a couple of coolers and a Hamburger full of luggage strapped to the roof. Or sleeping on people’s floors. Or going blind with undiagnosed sarcoidosis while taking a shower at a stranger’s house and having to scream,
Kathy! Kathy!
until she comes in and finds you there spread-eagled in the tub. That was the kind of shit we had gone through together. It was so sad. But Kathy is still making music in bands. Right now she’s in one called Manimal. Jeri and I want her to rename it Kathy’s Magic Moments, but she won’t pay us any mind.
After Kathy left, the drum parts for “Standing in the Way of Control” were completely changed. Up until that song, we had never taken ourselves seriously as songwriters. I remember, the minute we were done recording it, looking at Nathan and saying,
Wow. This is it. We wrote an actual song
.
The thing about Gossip is we never planned for any of this to happen, so everything that comes along is like a huge surprise, really unbelievable. And when “Standing in the Way of Control” was written we were just like,
Wow, we wrote a grown-up song. Wow. Wow!
We knew it was special. At the time we thought it was special because it was so mature of us, not because it was good. We just knew we had shifted our music in a new direction, and that alone was exciting.
When we were talking to Kill Rock Stars about
Standing in the Way of Control
, they told us our budget was going to change. Cool, we thought. But it leapt from a seven-thousand-dollar budget to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar budget. To us that was crazy incredible. No one had ever dealt with a figure like twenty-five thousand
dollars before. Not one of us, not even our parents. When we heard about a twenty-five-thousand-dollar budget just for our recording costs, we were ecstatic, but we didn’t exactly know what it would mean.
It meant we could take ten whole days to make our record. It meant we got to record in this really amazing barn that had been converted into a studio. James Brown had recorded there, as had all these grunge bands. It was in the woods outside Seattle. There was a loft and a kitchen, it was a hotel/studio, and we got so much work done because we could just play music and write songs all night. “Listen Up!” came from an all-night songwriting bender. It was very cool, and we were very lucky. I did get a little stir crazy, because I didn’t have a driver’s license and couldn’t get myself out of the woods, but it was springtime so the woods were really nice and everything was pretty much perfect. We had a giant budget and were working with Guy Picciotto from Fugazi. That was such a big deal for us. He is a great person—a truly gentle man and a part of punk history that we look up to. It was surreal and unbelievable and we felt blessed. We never knew we could have our songwriting process be so crazy and inspired. When we got to the studio we had four songs written, and by the end of ten days we had created an album.
The only example I ever had of a successful band is one that went on tour, paid its bills, and broke even. That was the only example any of us ever had, and so that was our goal. No one had ever thought this record would go to the Top 40 in the U.K., or that we’d ever rack up gold records. There is a gold record hanging on the wall of the double-wide trailer Mom lives in today. How crazy is that? Fucking crazy is how crazy. I bet it is heavier than her whole house. All we had wanted to do is all we ever want to do: make a better record than our last one. Or make a different record than our last one. That it ended up doing so well, having
mainstream crossover, was crazy and absurd and none of us saw it coming.
It’s been hard to understand our success in Europe, because we don’t live there, and so I miss a lot of it. We got to be on TV shows, but it didn’t stick out for me because I had never seen those TV shows. So we would get an amazing invitation, and I would think it was no big deal. We had played
The Jonathan Ross Show
—he’s the David Letterman of England. When we eventually played David Letterman’s show, I knew what that meant. I knew it was
The Late Show
and that it didn’t get any bigger for a band playing on TV. And that’s what was happening with
The Jonathan Ross Show
, but I couldn’t gauge it. Everything was unreal. It wasn’t until I did the second cover for the
NME
—the naked cover—that I realized that we had become famous.
The year the
NME
voted me the coolest person in rock was the first year the world’s coolest person was a woman. It was also the first time they didn’t put the world’s coolest person on the cover. I caused a big stink about it. Later they put Gossip on the cover. Eventually they were like, we want Beth on the cover, and we want her to be completely naked. I mulled it over for a long time, not because I didn’t want to be naked, but because I knew I would be opening myself up to a lot of criticism. Not only comments about my body, but I was sure people would be questioning my motives, as if I were somehow incapable of making the decision to pose naked for myself. There’s a lot of value in polarizing imagery. The hysteria and furor over something as simple and common as a fat female body tells us a lot about where our culture is at with issues of sexism and body politics. Ninety-five percent of the time, I don’t mind being made fun of. You can call me fat, just don’t say I can’t sing. I know I can sing! And so I did it. I was even on my period, and I did it. It was painless—I’m okay with being naked, it’s not a big deal. They put a lot of makeup on my body, and they put all these giant kiss marks all over me. That wasn’t my favorite thing, but the more photo shoots you do, the more you see that this is
their art, and you have to trust them. So I was like, Okay, here I go! I trusted them.
Though I’m far removed from Britain, the photo has been reprinted lots of places, so I’ve seen it a bunch. What got a lot more flack than me being fat and naked was my armpit hair! I don’t go digging around for criticism, but sometimes you can’t help but run into it. Someone said,
It’s bad enough she’s nude, can’t she shave her armpits?
I was not really surprised by this. In a culture where people look at an image on TMZ or whatever for 0.5 seconds before posting the first comment that pops into their heads, layered, contextual analysis of pop culture imagery pretty much falls by the wayside. Overall, though, the response was positive, and it was something I could be proud of. It was also nominated as magazine cover of the year! If anything, it has shock value. You can’t
not
look at it.
The interviewer for the
NME
, James Jam—who I love!—said to me,
Well, you know, you are a celebrity
. And I said,
No, I don’t feel like a celebrity
. I have a huge reality check called the United States. I come home and it’s very normal. I have a neighbor who goes to work at a nursing home at night and comes home and babysits during the day, and that’s how she makes her money. My other neighbors across the street are on disability. It’s always rainy. It’s not like my immediate life changed with all this fame, it was like my life in Britain changed, and that’s all the way across the ocean! But James Jam said,
You are. You are a celebrity
. And I said,
Maybe I should start taking this seriously. Maybe I should start being more careful
.
Let’s get totally real about it and say that it’s not just taste that keeps Gossip ignored by U.S. media. It’s sexism, the way women who are outspoken about all the real bullshit females deal with in this world either get ignored or made into jokes. I mean, even when I made the
NME
’s Cool List, Gossip’s hometown paper didn’t mention it. I didn’t know I’d won till a journalist called,
asking how I felt about it. He said,
You’re number one!
And that’s when everything really began. Whenever we got asked to do anything we were just shocked and grateful. We still are. I’m really uncomfortable with the word “celebrity,” but at a certain point I had to accept it. Suddenly I was trying to just have a cigarette on a London street, like a normal person, and I noticed all these people with cameras swarming around and realized—too late—that they were taking pictures of me. It’s so weird. I always wonder, Why don’t you go and take pictures of someone who matters! James Jam woke me up to the reality I’d been resisting, that I’ve reached for-real celebrity status. He asked me,
If you’re getting pictures taken of yourself hanging out with Kate Moss, don’t you think that makes you a celebrity?
It woke me up to the fact that, if I’m walking red carpets, it’s time to face and accept the fame that makes me so uncomfortable. And I always get to go home to Portland, Oregon, when it’s over, where the media ignores me! It’s very humbling.
I know not to look for things written about me in the press. I literally never read them. The backlash of Gossip’s success, the things that get written about me—it’s not about the music anymore, it’s about me, and how I’m “overweight” and wear tight clothes. But I never said that all I cared about was music, and truly it is just as important for me to be “overweight” and wearing tight clothes. To be myself in this world is every bit as important and radical as any song I’ve ever sung.
But it is hard sometimes to be taken seriously—hard even for me to take myself seriously. I am such a wacky person, and if you add fat to wacky you are doubly doomed. I think it is hard for some people to take you seriously, and so they treat you like a walking joke. My approach to fat politics has always been to change people’s minds from the inside out. I’ve always been into connecting with normal people in a normal way, even if what we’re talking
about is a sort of radical concept. It shouldn’t still be a surprise to read a review or critique of Gossip and find that it is actually about my body, but it is. It still surprises me, so I avoid them. Before the band blew up, I would walk into shows with Kathy and everyone would assume that Kathy was the singer, because she is so conventionally pretty. People who looked like me just weren’t the singer, even in Riot Grrrl scenes. Most all the singers in Riot Grrrl bands always had something more traditionally pretty about them.
Being fat has given me a different perspective on art and beauty, on what is meaningful and beautiful. I never looked up to Marilyn Monroe, I looked up to Miss Piggy and Divine and Mama Cass and Leigh Bowery. My role models—when I finally found them—were so much about approaching meaning, appearances, and life from a radical place, and it is just as important to me to stand among them like that as it is to make another record. I only ever wanted to be a singer. And as hard as it was to find my place and my role models and examples there was always that quote: “It’s not over till the fat lady sings.” That’s pretty cool. That means something. The fat lady sings. But it’s not nearly over. We are out there bringing punk philosophy to the people and expanding people’s definitions of acceptable images and behavior.
For instance, once we were dropped by a booking agent in the rudest way—he didn’t even tell us! He’d just stopped booking our tour. I was on the phone with him, telling him,
This is not punk, you don’t treat people this way!
Punk to me has always been a moral philosophy, more than a style of music or a fashion you wear. The underpinnings of all the songs and clothes was, for me, a core rejection of the way the world operates, the mainstream world. It was a critique of capitalism, which makes some people rich on the backs of so many powerless workers. It was about smashing beauty standards that taught fat girls and boys and anyone not adhering to inhuman expectations to hate themselves. It was about challenging racism, challenging homophobia. And when you get down to what
all these rebellions have in common, it’s basic kindness. Love, even. It is making a pledge not to hurt other people—not to profit off their labor, not to teach them to hate their bodies, not to turn hostile at the way we differ from one another, but to go forward, toward a giant community, fighting only against whoever would keep us down and apart, powerless. Under the whole “personal is political” motto of feminism, I feel that personal kindness, treating people decently, is political—is punk. So this incident with the booking agent, though it might seem like no big whoop, was one of my biggest wake-ups. Not everyone has punk ethics.
If the ten days we had to record
Standing in the Way of Control
seemed luxurious, we were about to have our minds blown by working with producer Rick Rubin on the next record. Rick gives nary a shit about a budget. His whole approach to being in the studio was totally relaxed and unstressed. He was about giving us time and space to experiment. There wasn’t the pressure of feeling like we had a handful of days to get everything done; we were able to take the time to try out things we wouldn’t have otherwise. For this record, we had signed to Sony. There’s an idea that working with a major label means you give up creative control, but our experience recording with Rick was just the opposite—he really provided an environment that made us feel loved and supported, as if the emphasis was on the process rather than cranking out the product in as little time as possible.
We recorded at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. It’s a weird little compound, a long ranch building with a studio in one half and the owner’s house in the other and a handful of outbuildings. One of them is a moldy old Airstream-ish tour bus formerly belonging
to Bob Dylan (boring), which Nathan sat in alone for hours at a time messing around with keyboard parts. Shangri-La is one of the only recording studios I’ve ever been in that had windows and actual sunlight, and with the property overlooking the Pacific Ocean it was a pretty idyllic environment. Recording means a lot of repetition, a lot of trying things out, listening, then trying again and again. A lot of takeout food and coffee and late nights. But we were lucky to have an amazing team to record with, including the brilliant recording engineer Greg Fidelman, and they kept things as fun as possible.