Q: When does a feminist blog concern itself with men? A: When we’re talking about New York City’s MEN, a band made of JD Samson (of Le Tigre and moustache fame), Ginger Brooks Takahashi (who’s also appeared in The Ballet and the wonderful Black Mountain Music Project, with Mirah), Michael O’Neill and other special guests. MEN make sounds in the proud queerio dance music tradition of Lesbians on Ecstasy, The Ssion, and Tracy & the Plastics. The video for Off Our Backs by K8 Hardy (who also produced the wicked tree-vulva video for the Lezzies on X song Sisters in the Struggle), below, is the kind of visual garage sale/image stew/eyecandy that half makes my head explode and half makes me want to go out and, like, be somebody.

MEN will be performing this Saturday in Montreal at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) with a veritable panoply of loud and proud women, including Alexis O’Hara and DJ Lynne T, who has been spinning up a storm of late.
They play Toronto June 24 at Wrong Bar and June 26 at Lee’s Palace as part of Vazaleen. For more details and tour dates, check out their Myspace.

Why should Portland have all the fun? This August Montreal is hosting its first ever Rock Camp For Girls, a five-day camp where girls learn to play an instrument, form a band, and finish up by playing a show for their hysterical, screaming, panty-tossing fans.

From the organizers:

Rock Camp is a space where girls discover and express their talents, and become leaders in creating their own kind of cultural production through music. Female musicians and community members support girls through instrument instruction, tech tutorials, band practice and skill-building workshops.

RCfG is putting on a number of fundraisers over the next while to help finance the camp, one of which is tomorrow night, and features Giselle Numba One, who I posted on long ages ago, Nightwood, Little Scream, and DJ Lynne T of Lesbians on Ecstasy. There’s a word for it: “ladysplosion”. No, wait, I mean “awesome”. And also “not to be missed”.

Key details:
Saturday June 13th
Il Motore, 179 Jean-Talon Ouest
Show starts at 9:30pm
$10

Here’s Giselle Numba One with a little taste of what you might find on Saturday.

For more details on Rock Camp For Girls and related events, check out their site.

I am big sucker for animation. And when it comes with Neko Case, well, say no more, I’m sold.

Neko is a woman after my own heart - besides being an incredibly talented musician, she is always quick to give props to her influences, especially women who have inspired her. She’s also hil-freakin-larious in interview - I highly suggest checking out some of the archives on her website to hear about how what we call PMS is actually anger that comes from not being allowed to “mate”, and how Poison Ivy‘s guitar-playing can get you pregnant. Her travelogues and biography also read better than most fiction out there. In short: a gem.

This is from her fresh-off-the-CD-burner album Middle Cyclone.

Whew! I’m still spent from last week’s rant on community radio. While I gather my energies for the next round, please enjoy this “music video” from Dutch band The Shocking Blue. I really appreciate that period in musical history (the 60s?) when someone had the idea of recording and broadcasting bands, but the whole thing was so new that you mostly just got a lot of awkward standing around in random locales (are they at a zoo? A medical laboratory?) with, like, two cuts, and “special effects” meant flashing an image of a record cover or Mariska Veres’s face really quickly to implant subliminal messages. Enjoy!

I have something a little bit unusual to share this week – instead of a music pick, I am putting forth what some may call A Rant. Nicole’s post about the situation at CKLN has got me thinking about community radio. It’s still not totally clear to me exactly what’s going on at the Ryerson station, but what is obvious not just there but everywhere is that the relevance of community radio is being questioned, mostly by students at universities, who are the ones who most often provide crucial funding to these stations.

Here’s how it works: Universities give campus/community radio stations a big chunk of the money they need to operate, and some (or all) of that money is gathered by charging students a fee – usually around $4 a semester – which in exchange gives the students membership privileges at the station, meaning they can use its resources and become volunteer hosts and programmers. Some universities have been giving students the option to opt out of these fees, and it seems like many students are keen to save a few bucks by withholding money from a service which they feel isn’t relevant, useful, or interesting. In a world where you can carry around 80,000 songs in your back pocket, get newsfeeds from the most reliable (or most obscure) sources around the world, and read highly entertaining, informative blogs, why would you bother tuning into a bunch of amateurs who are just learning when to press the On Air button, or even more so, why would you want to become one of them?

Okay, I too have been a broke student. I’ve re-used teabags, felt overjoyed at finding a nice pen on the sidewalk, gotten friends to cut my hair, and worn sweaters until they were more hole than clothing. I know saving bucks is important, and no one wants to feel like they’re throwing them down the (radio) tubes. I’ve also been a volunteer at a community radio station for close to ten years now, and I think I come from a pretty good position to talk about why community radio is worth supporting. So without further ado, here are my REASONS WHY COMMUNITY RADIO IS WORTH ONE LESS LATTE A SEMESTER.

1) Community radio creates a space for community and media engagement, not a product to be sold.
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Very pleased that the mighty Sister Suvi will be launching long-awaited full-length album Now I Am Champion at the end of the month. Basically because I think anything Merrill Garbus (aka Tune-Yards, who I profiled waaaaay back when) touches turns to diamonds. But not blood diamonds. Maybe more like crystals - perfectly formed crystals you find in a cave somewhere that seem like they ought to have been manufactured by elves wearing tiny hardhats and riding magic ponies, but they really just grew that way, because that’s their nature.

The launch happens in Montreal on Sunday March 29th at Il Motore, 179 Jean Talon Ouest, at 9 PM, with Takka Takka and Postcards. The Toronto launch is March 28th at Lee’s Palace.

Here Sister Suvi plays live in Ottawa, with surprisingly good sound quality for a video recording:

In other news, I can’t wait for another show coming up this weekend, as part of Montreal’s Radical Queer Week: it’s called Folk as Queers, and it features Sarah Mangle, Rae Spoon, and The Inappropriate Hymns and Hers, a band which started last summer at a band-off where names drawn from a hat determined the members, and the rest was up to ingenuity and badassitude; eight months later they’re still going strong, and word has it that a recording is in the near future. If the Moldy Peaches in their weirdest, most perverted incarnation (I’m thinking like Who’s Got The Crack and Steak For Chicken Moldy Peaches, not that soppy song that Michael Cera eviscerated) teamed up with the Indigo Girls, they would still be less awesome than this band.

This one happens Saturday March 14th at Le Chat des Artistes, 2205 Parthenais, at 9 PM. Check out the Radical Queer Week facebook page for more events listings - they are a-plenty.

When a bunch of Argentinian and Mexican women from various queercore and feminist punk bands decide to get together to form a supergroup sensation, you know the results will be a force to be reckoned with. What you maybe didn’t see coming were the Madonna covers.

But that’s what’s so sweet about the Kumbia Queers - they combine the fearlessness and energy of punk rock with the infectious bubbliciousness of pop music. Oh, and they’re also really gay. If the name Kumbia Queers didn’t give that away already.

Cumbia is a traditional form of Latin American music that’s somewhere between folk and popular; in the context of this band it seems to refer less to a specific kind of music than to the idea of “popular music” itself, the sort of tunes that are unavoidably cheesy, kind of lowbrow, and completely irresistible. Which might also seem like a pretty apt description of the Kumbia Queers, except there’s something sophisticated and complex about the way they flip a traditionally masculine genre of music on its head, making it both female and queer.

The video for Chica de Calendario (“Calendar Girl”) is a lezzie take on the old standard of the song written to the babely object of desire:

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Montreal-based spoken word artist Taqralik Partridge has been keeping busy. This Sunday the 15th she’s going to be featured on CBC Radio 2‘s concert series Next!: Canada’s Music Future, so tune in at 8 PM to experience her husky, rhythmic poem-performance.

Partridge is a writer and performer of Inuit and Scottish descent. But instead of choosing between differing realities - Indigenous and white, Up North and Down South, big open spaces and cramped bustling skylines - she keeps them in constant conversation, merging hip-hop and throat-singing, poetry and storytelling, the personal and the political. In her own words,

It’s very strange to me how we can live and have two realities. I come from this place that’s vast and open and beautiful, but I live and work in this place that is constricted and full of so many things going on. I love Montreal and I love the city, and [yet] in many ways I feel like an outsider.

I profiled Partridge for the Fall 2007 issue of Shameless, so you can read more about her here. And if you just can’t wait until Sunday, check out her Myspace page. Although she claims she wrote it more for a laugh than anything, the piece Eskimo Chick is a wry and touching crowd favourite, and Battery features a haunting string arrangement. Can’t wait to hear what’s next.

So, I don’t know if y’all noticed this or not, but Barack Obama is president of the USA. This, for many reasons, is cause for celebration. But while it is very exciting and thrilling and hopeful to have a person of colour holding the highest office in the United States (some would say the world, but that’s a little America-centric, don’t you think?), there is occasionally a slightly disturbing undertone to all the optimism; the joy has the possibility of sliding into smugness. It sometimes seems like we’re thinking “Alright, it’s been proven that people of colour can do anything, that means oppression and racism are things of the past!” This seems akin to if, had it been Hillary in place of Barack, we here at Shameless would pat each other on the back, shake hands, and retire the magazine, because – guess what! Feminism is over!

Well folks, it’s not over. We are not, as some would like to believe, post-feminist. And we are definitely not post-race. Although major ground has been gained in high office, struggles continue every day, on the street, in the home, in prisons, in hospitals, in the workplace. So this Black History Month seems like a good time to think about what those struggles mean, and where they’ve come from.

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