King Princess’s Contagious Freedom

“Freedom is contagious,” St. Vincent said at the ASCAP Expo Panel I moderated May 7. It was her lovely, evocative way of answering my question about what it was like to make an album with David Byrne, which she did in 2012, on Love This Giant. In three words, this gifted musician summarized the spirit of artistic collaboration, of two souls open to innovation and communication bouncing ideas off each other, emailing each other bits of sounds and bobs of lyrics, not being afraid to fail in front of each other or to embarrass themselves. I want this saying on a T-shirt: FREEDOM IS CONTAGIOUS. Let’s catch it.

It was an honor to share the stage with St. Vincent, and a pleasant surprise to be there with King Princess, a new artist who is already blowing up on YouTube. My first question was to point out that not only do they both have stage/pen names that denote a high sense of self-esteem, but they are also identities that are at least partially masculine: What kind of freedom does such a put-on persona give them? Both pointed out that their given names — Annie Clark and Mikaela Straus — don’t exactly shout “rock star!” Clark said her given name sounds like a “stoner babysitter from 1985.” “King Princess is like an attitude,” Mikaela explained. “I take comfort in it as kind of a shield to exist in, where I can make cohesive art.

HOLLYWOOD, CA – MAY 07:St. Vincent, Evelyn McDonnell and King Princess attend The 2018 ASCAP “I Create Music” EXPO at Loews Hollywood Hotel on May 7, 2018 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images for ASCAP)

Her Holiness and Her Majesty were both articulate, engaging, empowering. I loved the way they spoke to each other, sharing their experiences of being college dropouts (St. Vincent, from Berklee School of Music, King Princess from USC) and urging audience members, especially women, to take advantage of the cheap and easy affordances of such gear as Apogee. But their personal styles were so different. Clark sat straight in her chair, looking elegant and poised in a long dress she had gotten that morning, while Straus lounged in hers, all comfy in a long shirt, pants, and track shoes.

At just 19, King Princess is already a fledgling online celebrity. She has earned her followers not just because she has a strong, vulnerable, warbling voice (think Regina Spektor, kd lang, Amy Winehouse, Lorde) but also because she writes melody-driven songs about longing and loss, aimed unabashedly at female love interests. In interviews and at the Expo panel, she is candid and open about her sexuality. Her song “1950” is an ode to queer history, specifically the book The Price of Salt. She just released her latest song and video. Like “1950,” “Talia” is a song about a lost lover, represented by an inflatable love doll in the video. Watch it here:

 

Gray Days

Photo by Tim Maxeiner

The news of Space X building its big effing rocket in San Pedro has gone national, global even. It, along with some hot property deals, also led to the predictable headlines about an “upturn for San Pedro.” Maybe, maybe not. As “Marina del Pedro,” an info-rich exhibit currently at the Angels Gate Cultural Center, shows, the efforts to develop this community are as old as the port itself. Curator and artist Tim Maxeiner (discloser: he’s a friend) turned to both historical archives and the contemporary local community to tell the tale of the Port of Los Angeles’s push and pull relationship to nature, industry, people, and business. The German-born egalitarian pulls work from both teens he taught at the Boys and Girls Club and such local artists as Phoebe Barnum and Beth Elliott. I even wrote an essay for it, about waterfront adventures in this whale of a town. The exhibit closes Saturday, with festivities from 3 to 6 p.m. Below is my essay, which will also be in the catalog, available this weekend.

Gray Days

By Evelyn McDonnell

I live on the edge of a forest. It’s five acres large, a potential home to 700 species, and it thrives in winter, when its trunks and leaves stretch high to the sky, swaying back and forth in the ocean currents. Animals feed and hide here in the Giant Kelp: mammals as big as you, who will swim up to your kayak and look you straight in the eye or roll in the water underneath, showing off, or maybe even nursing their young. Schools of fish — sardines or Spanish mackerels — flash silver in the sun, and bright orange garibaldi dart nervously around rock outcroppings, having been pushed out of their nests by crustacean bullies: armored lobsters and their sideway cousins, the crabs.

I live next to one of the busiest ports in the world. Ships laden with containers slip in and out of Angels Gate, like multi-colored skyscrapers moving sideways across the sea. Towering cranes await them, a forest of metal redwoods silhouetted against the mountains, ready to pluck the rectangular boxes off the cargo decks like so many toothpicks hundreds of feet in the air, then stack them neatly on the dock, where they’ll continue their voyage via trains, or trucks — the atoms of the neoliberal capitalist organism continuing their global orbit. Refineries belch smoke in the background, processing the crude black oil pumped up from the bottom of the ocean by the rigs that loom like watchtowers on the southern most edge of my view — the rigs are the south poles, the refineries the north. Between them lie the kelp and the commerce, the dolphins and the dock workers, the whales and the freighters — the urban wild landscape of San Pedro, my adopted home.

Liz Phair to the Rescue!

Liz Phair is sitting in the Rose Café, a well-loved Venice, California, eatery where tech-industry entrepreneurs munch quinoa alongside music-biz hipsters sipping lattes. The critically adored singer-songwriter does not look like 25 years – sufficient time for her to conceive, deliver, raise and send a son off to college – have intervened since her debut album, Exile in Guyville, made her the Rolling Stone cover girl for third-wave feminism. She ignores her matcha until a foul odor of burning oil wafts over from the kitchen – a peril of open-air design. Phair coughs. Once, twice, repeatedly. It’s as if something heavy and toxic has seeped into this bastion of urban chic, landed in her sensitive lungs, and has to be expelled, forcibly and immediately. She perseveres, telling me about how the book she has written was compelled by the election of Donald Trump, her voice cracking under siege. Then I begin coughing.

“It’s affecting you too,” our canary in the coal mine exclaims. “Sorry, I’m going to save you.” She flags down a server and we move beverages and recorder to the bar, far from noxious fumes.

Liz Phair does not suffer irritants quietly. And lately, irritants abound. Once again, men are excluding women from power, reducing them to sexual objects, and shutting down or demeaning their modes of expression. It’s Guyville redux, only this time, it’s not just faux-alternative hipsters in the indie-rock scene of Chicago in the early 1990s. It’s the top dog in the White House.

I caught up with Phair recently for The Guardian, one of the world’s greatest newspapers. I have to admit I was heavily influenced by the great interview Allison Wolfe did with her for Women Who Rock. Read my interview with Liz here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/03/liz-phair-trump-change-her-music-exile-in-guyville-25-years