TS: TATU vs. Le Tigre

"300 km/h..." vs. "Feminist Sweepstakes": Tatu

Ha, that one actually does read like it's straight from an alternate-world version of the New Yorker show listings!

http://www.kuci.org/~brianm/ile/tatushadow.jpg

that was pretty funny. and jonsi does sing like someone stuck the Keebler elves' tree up his ass.

oh yeah -- TATU. in every possible way.

Le Tigre is much more confrontational, and to me at least, makes me think about gender issues a bit more. I think perhaps Le Tiger might be more effective because they have the ability to make people start asking questions that they might have been willing to ask if the ideas were more available to them. While they might not be able to break out of the queer ghetto nearly as easily as TATU, they might be better because anything subversive about TATU will have already been filtered out by the assumptions of the straight community at large.

I am not sure which in necessarily better, but I know that Le Tigre has influenced my musical thinking far more than TATU has. Also, I have a huge crush on Kathleen Hanna. Thank goodness unrequited love is the best kind of love there is.

i like TaTu's music, and i dislike Le Tigre's music. it's as simple as that and it ends there.

I missed that sanding stuff--is there a video? Sounds hot.

also tatu is hot.

also tatu is hot.

*another thing though - in the UK at least TaTu have started real actual debates on sexuality and pop and censorship because some people thought their single should be banned.

i love you TATU

hanna is just so dull and academic and white and straight,

This is fucking bullshit. I'm not denying that you are unfortunately right, and the Male Gaze is inflicted upon female performers whether they like it or not. But there's a difference between setting up an interesting performance which happens to attract the male gaze, and setting up a performance DESIGNED TO provoke the male gaze. As far as I'm concerned, Tatu err on the wrong side.

Personally, I like girl bands who are designed to appeal *to* (straight) girls, that men just like coincidentally, as opposed to girl bands who are designed just for men to look at. I don't particularly like either Le Tigre *or* Tatu, but I find Le Tigre slightly less objectinable.

I'll say, you can't even bring yrself to spell her name correctly. I hate 'Feminist Sweepstakes' so much I've never even heard it.

(haha that was more directed at le tigre, not nabisco, but watch it buddy)

anyway, my main problem with le tigre - other than their often turgid music (it all went downhill after sadie benning left) - is that relations between men and women, women and other women, men and other men, are fare more complex than anything you will find distributed by kill rock stars, and if you're going to tackle them you should do it with a bit more wit - if not subtlty - than evidenced in jody's quote above

(i was a big bikini kill fan and "hot topic" was one of my fav 90s singles, but let's not be coy: on the evidence k hanna and troop are not exactly pynchon-level master-narrative chroniclers, therefore maybe should stick to what would be most effective [shouting slogans over barely competent instrumentals])

andrew yr a lesbian and you know it

well every year there are debates on these sorts of issues but what is going to come out of it anyway. its just stuff to fill trabloid pages. we all know singles won't be banned.

this whole thing abt tatu reaching a wider audience is not something to beat le tigre with bcz there's more money behind them no?

(Yeah yeah, I know Le Tigre and Bikini Kill have only Kathleen in common.. and I'm not sure to what capacity Kathleen contributes musically as well as lyrically, which may make my expectation unreasonable.)

http://empty.org/empty/full/m/body.jpg

post some cindy sherman now, sterl

It does to me. If I find something "engaging", that means there's something about it that makes me want to hear it more. That's my personal criterium for deciding the relative worth of music.

Also, tATu stomps all over Le Tigre vocally.

anyway, k-rowr:

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/full/sherman/sherman_15.jpg

*DOODLY DOODLY DOODLY DOODLY DOODLY*

[pitchfork/aoltimewarner/westinghouse music enterprises inc. review update]

3/31/2009

Artist : Le Tigre
Album : Revel In Your Art Ghetto
Label : KRS/Maverick
Rating : 10.0

In a radical movement away from their more haphazard and amateurly produced and written earlier material, Le Tigre -- in a quasi-ironic response to what they called a "fan"'s suggestion to "try harder and stay in [their] art ghetto" -- have achieved a cornerstore in independent rock music -- melding a well-crafted, loud and edgy professional sheen over unrelenting and unique guitar sounds and progressions that bridge the worlds of feministic politics, underground rock, and mainstream pop sensibilities...

This may be is a lie.

There is at least one line spoken by a member of t.A.T.u. that would probably blow up here on like "your pal Ma$e" levels, but I don't think I'd want that to happen so I'm not going to share it.

Julia and Lena looked tired and unhappy, even in the opulence of an expensive midtown restaurant. Julia was skeptical of the image strategy that their new handlers at Interscope had in mind for them. "The Americans want us to sound smart. We're two little girls and we have to remain little girls, not be grown women," she told me.

"My p--

Hey!! Let go, Nabisco!

I think this is rather unfair, Anthony: you don't know K. Hanna personally and have no right to say what she is or isn't. And it really isn't any of our business (which is one of the very good points tAtu make, I think: the idea isn't - or shouldn't be - "look at the crazy lesbians" but "our sexuality is more mysterious and unreachable than you, the viewer, can possibly hope to grasp.").

replace "hanna" with taTu, and you've got a pretty accurate description of this thread.

this makes no sense

I want to be absorbed by the mainstream because I think that the common denominator can only improve if it adopts my views, at least as far as it pertains to me anyway. I often forget that other people aren't this self-centered (possibly it would be more accurate to say other are self-centered in orthoganol ways).

i didn't bring this issue into the discussion at all. i was talking completely about audience response.

di, i don't expect anyone to be any particular way all the time, but i also think a worldview which basically shrinks down to "everything is futile" is utter bullshit. i may be fiddling over rome's ruins when i play records like taTu (nb: i dont even like them that much), but i'll be damned if i'm going to cower in the corner when it's all going down playing nothing but records which reinforce my own depression and smallness

but i didn't say that only queer women could discuss it, i said only queer women could ultimately DECIDE. would you like me making grand pronouncements about black issues?

I wouldn't like you making grand pronouncements about black issues, but I also don't like it when black people make grand pronouncements about black issues (unless, of course, said pronouncement agrees with something I believe, in which case it doesn't matter what the color of the person is, they're validating my worldview and taking a step closer to that idyllic world where everyone is a variation of me and I get to rampage around doing whatever I want without repercussions because everyone gets what I'm doing and where I'm coming from).

You've caught me at the height of a "Dan vs the world" paranoia cycle/utter narcissistic fit, I think. Not that this doesn't raise some interesting issues; how does the mainstreaming of a culture affect that culture, and what are the positives and negatives? What does the mainstreaming of a culture mean for the people who lived through the culture's marginalia? How about appropriating the trappings of a culture as a fashion trend while rejecting the culture's core values?

dan has just highlighted the failure of every social justice movement of the last 100 years.

Di: I see your three islands and raise it to thirteen inhabited islands. But as my I guess its obvious my geography isn't too hot maybe someone else could do better.

I think my appreciation of tATu is a lot like Dan's in that this issue isn't hugely relevant: the songs sound good, and the lesbian thing/schtick/ploy/whatever only constitutes a particular tweak on that. (The amount of attention they've been getting over the lesbian thing is novelty-attention and cultural-crit attention: they're in the New Yorker, yeah, but Schteyngart is just using them as a partial springboard to talk about Russian culture, and he even gets the name of the album wrong. This is true of nearly every one of the 3,000 articles that have been written about them.)

And I think my appreciation of Le Tigre works sort of the same way: I like some of their songs. I like the way they introduce their personal enthusiasms into their music. The fact that their personal enthusiasms sometimes have to do with gender politics is interesting but not in the least essential to my liking or disliking them. In fact, it's arguable that those enthusiasms are even very politicized a lot of the time: my recollection of the first Le Tigre album includes more songs about supposedly-vacant pop stars than gender politics, and songs like "Hot Topic" or "What's Your Take on Cassavetes" can be taken less as sloganeering and more as the everyday chatter of people who happen to concern themselves with these things as much as guys in rock bands concern themselves with dating girls.

And -- most importantly -- I think this is going to be true of just about everyone. Apart from your culture-criticism attraction or repulsion to the way they set themselves up, surely whether you like or dislike them is going to have more to do with whether you can bear to listen to the music or not. The middle ground is just going to consist of various types -- guys who say "I don't care about their songs but tATu are hot"; people who say "I like Le Tigre's politics but the music doesn't do much for me"; people who say "I like Le Tigre but their politics get a little annoying." I honestly think one's opinion of the groups follows the music a thousand times more than it follows the cultural slant.

When I saw Le Tigre in fall I actually thought the worst thing about them was that Hanna was sort of polite about her more "political" commentary -- dropping these safe consensus notes between songs apologetically, like she didn't want to bother you or distract you or put you off.

I wish I still thought this abt them, but after seeing them live, hoo boy. I was in love with that song in particular; "oh man, they have that 'coastal college girl' voice down cold, it's pitch perfect, 'we talked about it on the fewn' amazing!" K Hanna introduced it, however, as much more serious that I thought it could possibly be: "this is a song about, you know, like, dialogue, about having conversations about art and stuff that's important." Either I misread her presentation (ie stage-patter continuing song's 'character') or the 'reconstruction-of-chatter' element turned out to be a fiction I laid over the song.

But this quote kinda killed it for me anyway (from mem): "so I was, like, watching tv in our hotel? And one of the NETWORKS was playing Mrs. Doubtfire. You know, Robin Williams dresses up as a woman so he can see his kids? Like they wouldn't know, duh, it was SO stupid. But this was like their Mother's Day movie! They were, like, saying 'fuck you mom,' y'know? Well, I say fuck you Robin Williams! Y'know, like really. Are you with me? [cheers] FUCK YOU ROBIN WILLIAMS! Like, fuck that, seriously."

anyway long story short, I think K Hanna's kinda dumb.

My fave bit about tatu is how crap they are as a pop machine. They can't sing for shit, but more than that, their "show" looks like next to no planning went into it at all. They have NO routine, no dance, nothing. They just kinda walk around and touch each other on the arms and then one of them will sit down and then the other one will and they'll play with each other's hair maybe. No way would they get through the Mickey Mouse Club boot camp. Either it didn't occur to the psychologist that that's de rigeur over here, or he just thought "I'm sitting on a lesbian goldmine here, why bother shelling out for some knockoff paula abdul shit? 'sure they made out, but those steps, jesus' yeah right, fuckers."

okay, cards on the table time, and why this whole argument bothers me (at least from the moment - as nitsuh implied - that it went from discussing the music to discussing the implicit "politics" of each band...except i'd argue that it went their the moment the question was posted): i don't believe there's anything inherently revolutionary or radical about music which excludes itself from popular culture. i don't disdain it, necessarily, and there are certainly other advantages to that sort of purposeful exclusion. but when you are trying to be any sort of "issue" band, at this point the idea of such exclusion strikes me as counterproductive when we're sliding at such a rapid pace into the face of mutually assured destruction on all sides (political, social, sexual). the idea of "building an alternative community" strikes me less as utopian idealist than a sort of terrified hermitage, an evasion from the realities of life. ESPECIALLY, the realities you want to change. i think there's a very positive and powerful human pull towards surrounding yourself with people who bolster your needs and wants and ideals and dreams, a community of likeminded individuals who can provide support. but there is an ultimate danger - especially when those communities are based around music for some reason - of cocooning yourself into a world where you don't ever have to leave their comfy confines, where the support becomes a crutch. there’s a point where an anti-commodification stance becomes pointless when you’re so far removed from any sort of mainstream that it becomes the equivalent of a bunch of old men in a bar arguing over which actresses they wouldn’t fuck. I especially find something distasteful about a band (and a fanbase) who go on at such lengths about commodification when their sound is so based on, uh, commodification of what can be termed, in short, “black folks music” (techno, electro, hip-hop.) just because you’re on “the side of good” doesn’t mean you can’t be guilty of same.

...especially when membership in any of these communities is defined by purchase as much by thought, if not more. It's a matter of consumer choice, and I'm not being derogatory with that term, merely descriptive. (And that's not to say that making good choices isn't possible or necessary, but it's the same dollar. I didn't buy feminist sweepstakes with girlysounds scrip [and when I got rid of it a week later I'm glad I didn't recieve same.])

And I hate to get all marcusy but giving the finger to babylon and retreating into your own hills (hills which you may have paid the pigs for anyway) to "live as I please" rather than taking on the bigger project is very American.

The rumors, etc.

take a stand or DIE, ned!!

Oh good lord. Tatu in Russian because it sounds good. There.

(And they also knock yr chakras out of balance hahaha)

It was me! Sterling was all like "No, yr crazy, it's dance."

Jess, while I semi-agree with your exclusion point re: Le Tigre, there are two things that should be pointed out about the thing in general:

(a) Exclusion can be imposed from outside as well as from inside; in fact, that's the way most people who like this sort of thing conceptualize it. It's feasible to think of a band like Le Tigre who do what they do not to deliberately insulate themselves but because that's what they like -- it's possible to do this sort of thing in an "if you build it they will come" way. While I hate the "sell-out" accusation (because you can never really know) there is without doubt a difference between making something intentionally accessible to a great number of people -- trying to engage them and pull them over into your real agenda -- and just laying out the agenda and allowing people to come on their own. And there's a very complex difference between being "exclusive" and just plain refusing to compromise.

(b) There are also many different voices and groups to be included or excluded. There's nothing inherently evil about targeting one whose beliefs and tastes you think are underrepresented and giving them what they want. It seems a bit churlish to say "oh this is terrible it isn't for me" -- I think a lot of the girls at Le Tigre shows would turn around and point out that plenty of the hip-hop you like "excludes" them in much greater ways than Le Tigre "excludes" the mainstream. (I.e. not by actually excluding anyone, but by presenting a worldview certain people are just not going to be able to engage with or sometimes even tolerate.)

I don't think I see Le Tigre as quite as "exclusive" as you do, although I do think it's an issue with them and more particularly with a subgroup of their fans: when I was standing in line for their show here some girl told me "the Nelly show is down the street."

classic! (see also: bez, richey manic, sid - ok, not sid)

If you want to talk *only* about the music, my opinions are thus:

That taTu single is boring bland retro-bubblegum which Sugababes would have been ashamed to put their voices to, and all the soft porn lesbo-posturing in the world can't save it.

Le Tigre have the *very* occasional moment of giddy joy (I will admit that Decepticon is a great pop choon) but for the most part they are tired whiteboy (sorry, girl) fake hip-hop with feminist cheerleading over the top.

End of story. Boring with a capital Blah.

oh no! where does that leave derek bailey and morton feldman! oh no!!! ;-)

damn straight

http://www.geocities.com/hellaneotwee/bands.html

(g--ff c-nn-n has quickly become one of my fave posters -- i love everything you've said in this thread...)

My experience with taTu is kinda weird, cuz I heard them in a completely different context. A good friend of mine when to Moscow for a few weeks about a year or two ago, and came back with shitloads of records -- he just bought everything on the Russian pop charts. He and I spent a night listening through all of this stuff, and the best by far were the taTu records. They sounded hard and fresh and bouncy and the best kind of Europop. A few months later I hear the story behind them (in Blender, I guess it was), and it's caused this complete disconnect for me between who taTu the musical act and taTu the media act are. I think that I like them both equally, though if it were two American girls from Toledo pretending to dyke it out in a bid to dominate the charts I would probably hate it. But somehow taTu being Ruskies makes it seem okay... Otherness upon otherness makes a gimmick work? I dunno.

And I choke at the notion that being married and having kids is a privilege for women. You can have the little bastards.

funny bcz improv is the one thing that blows through any 'popular is the only thing capable of being radical' type theories.

Well invoked. "Ride a Dove" would be a nice album title for TaTu as well. (Hi Yanc3y, what's up buddy?)

this is why i am never talking to him again

The hell?

Gimme Deathpunk Baby!
And I like it.
Like It! Love it!
Like It! Love it!
Like It! Love it!
Right! On!

Also I don't really like TATU or Le Tigre that much, from what little I've heard of each.