Review Summary: Queercore - I
The inlay of the only 7” by Portland’s early queercore greats CeBe Barns Band states the following: Tragedy and Antonia Euginie Gogin play all instruments, Miranda does Song and Dance. Parsing out names and pseudonyms from there quickly reveals the short-lived collective’s stately pedigree of some of queercore’s best and most enduring members in the Pacific Northwest.
Tragedy, as in Radio Tragedy, as in Radio Sloan, future founding member of pioneering Olympia group The Need, and a visionary who has played with just about every underground and mainstream queer icon through the 90’s and into the aughts – her touch sits everywhere from the indie-infused noise pop of Scarling. to the frenzied electroglam of Peaches.
Toni Gogin, an omni-presence in Portland’s hardcore scene, who has one time or another led, produced and played in Harum-Scarum, Atrocious Madness and Full Boney.
And Miranda July, who by now has taken her riot grrl roots into the multimedia stratosphere, publishing fiction, staging performance art works, and creating digital content and film, with her latest movie Kajillionaire being released a few years ago to rave reviews.
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She’s a Winner is the first blast of these future idols of queercore, then flourishing in its second coming, and under the tutelage of riot grrl taking over college radio, perhaps planting its punked-up feet firmly into the ground for the first time.
The EP is three short keyed-up cuts of indie punk, whose rowdy circular energy is chopped up with those unforgettable twee melodies that overtook Olympia and Portland’s indie in the early 90’s. A strange and compelling brew of Sleater Kinney-esque guitar melancholy and The Slits’ raucous push and shove becomes these tunes.
At the heart of it is unrest over the gendered chasm permeating everything from sexual politics to consumer culture. On the title track, Miranda July sneers "Put on a fucking dress. You should have been a boy" as the band harmonizes the lilty ear-worming refrain “She’s a winner. She’s a dyke.” “Height of Fashion” skewers pseudo-leftist tendencies, and how lesbian and bisexual individuals are exploited socially and culturally by NIMBY’s and rendered as little more than accessories of an ‘open-minded’ lifestyle. It’s heavy stuff dealing with a heavy toll, a toll that predictably and grimly persists and has in some ways only grown. And in the case of Cebe Barns, it’s set to some fucking rad music.
