It’s easy to get angry about how women, especially lesbians, are often degraded by pop culture. But it takes a special sensibility to turn that fury into something as silly-yet-serious as Brooklyn-based duo Bitch and Animal make their live shows. Those of you who were privileged enough to attended their concert in Bulldog Alley last year know exactly what’s in store for show-goers. This Thursday night at the Iota Club, there will be another chance to experience the band’s tour, this time in support of its most recent album, Eternally Hard.
Like their debut disc, What’s That Smell?, the new album is difficult to categorize, yet this eclecticism has won Bitch and Animal fans. With its caustic rhythms and sassy lyrics, the lesbian duo have created records that pack almost as much energy as its adrenaline-charged live show. This gender-fluid pair goes where it wants and does what it wants, both on the stage and in the studio.
As colorful and animated as two pro-sex Muppets, the musically adept young performers are strikingly complementary. Bitch is a tall, wildly ponytailed, classically trained violinist and bassist. Animal plays djembe and ukulele, is short, mohawked and bursting with human-beat-box noises. A semi-novelty act, the band’s onstage goofiness is both charming to the like-minded and non-threatening to the skeptics. Its record label, Righteous Babe Records, seems to be preparing a small fleet of personal-is-political conscious artists. Animal constructs a musical landscape, while Bitch uses her girl-boy vocals to make strong statements against our present-day ideologies.
Most of their songs have an almost tribal, raw edge. However, a few of their songs sound like what would happen if a female folk band tried to imitate Limp Bizkit: a weird, sometimes annoying sort of white-girl rap. All and all they are each entertaining?Eternally Hard is the total manifestation of the first album, which told the story of the girls coming into their own. There’s no mistaking that the band’s emphasis is on its process rather than simply the music for its own sake.
Take “Sparkly Queen Areola,” their ode to the illegal-to-display-in-most-states part of a woman’s breast. The song debuted as a brief chant on What’s That Smell? and reappears on Eternally Hard in a more musically complete form. The language is smugly unrefined in places, but the body-part references are often broadsides at stereotypes in these tales of sexual and social politics. There is a lesbian sensibility at work, with a humor and underlying vulnerability that is almost always universal. Bitch and Animal can also wrap a lot of commentary into a single line: “I’m just a little girl boy/Trying to make my way/in a man’s world.”
Another popular song of theirs, a free-form manifesto of sorts, is aimed at freeing the popular slang word for vagina from its association with the pejorative and make it a positive term. The spoken word, rap-over-drums piece “Pussy Manifesto,” has become a millennial anthem that updates and improves upon both Valerie Solanis’ legendary S.C.U.M. Manifesto and Ann Magnuson’s Bongwater song “The Power of Pussy.” How did it improve upon those primal sources? Bitch and Animal redefines the methodology women will use to attain self-empowerment: no longer will a sister have to cut up or coddle a man, but instead she’ll just have to reclaim the joy her body brings her?while also reclaiming the imagery used to describe her body’s component parts.
“I’m sick of my genitalia being used as an insult,” raves Bitch as Animal lays down an elemental beat beneath her. “It’s time to let my labia rip and rearrange this, so here we go: ‘That was so pussy of you to help me move to my new place! Especially since I’m living on the 13th floor … you’ve really made this a pussy move.’”
This Thursday night get yourself a drink (sorry, the Iota club is 21 and over), grab a seat and listen up. These two sheroes have something to share, and it’s not just music, it’s an attitude.
You can find the Iota at 2832 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington.
