Indie girls don’t like each other anymore.
Indie girls are killing themselves.
We have seen it with Hindscon Dearwith the Shego. Colleagues who never speak to each other again. People slamming the door.
One releases a statement, another denies it. Who says what, what really happened, what they told me in a bar. We can’t even share a van anymore. I see you from afar at a party and we ignore each other: before we came on your motorcycle, before we were the same, once we had something to say together.
This is like seeing members of the same body separately in an enclosed space. This is a small butcher shop. Tweets, tweets, more fucking tweets. Verbiage. I’m going wild. Knife blows. Conspiracies. Giving concerts without notifying the public that a main member has been replaced. I have a separate project. I’m already in another one. I’m fine.
Ugly things, sad things.
These days I was wondering why it is making me so uncomfortable to attend these independent women’s circuit events as a spectator.
First I thought: damn, with everything we fought for years from the press and from feminist critics to have women’s bands and to demand their place on the festival posters, now that we have them, now that there is unanimity in recognizing their talent and their relevance, now that the impostor syndrome is losing strength, right now, are they going and skinning each other?
I remember when ten years ago I called female musicians to give their opinion in a cultural report and they continually refused to participate because they were paralyzed with fear and complexes… and then the reports came out only with macho voices, who always feel like masters of everything even if they are not, and the cycle of infamy was perpetuated!
The girl artists have been judged vilely, with a buzzed harshness, to silence them or to discredit them. I know that the logical reaction to avoid being attacked was often to keep a low profile. For me, who wrote and expressed myself in a different way (of course, nothing comparable to the vertigo of a stage), I often felt like doing the same thing from my place, from my tile.
But in the end we didn’t do it, and screw them. In the end we shot from wherever we could in this one, our limping, cowardly, accommodating and still sexist cultural industry.
We have come this far. Hello, assholes!
That’s why it’s sickened me to see these gangs of girls clashing with so much virulence. That’s a disgusting heterosexual male fantasy. Girls who fight in the mud like beasts and rub each other a little. Girls being nasty to each other. Men are turned on by women with character when that character fucks with another woman, not with them. This is always like this.
It also disgusted me that all this gave foment to the cart-wheeling abnormals who have never abandoned the noise of “aunts are your worst enemies”, or “how you whore each other”.
Were they right?
No. Of course not.
The old formation of the Hinds.
From the outset, it is flatly false that only bands of aunts break up or change members. I think of Mujeres, of Biznaga, of Alcalá Norte, of Vera Fauna, of Parque Svr, of Medalla or of Carrera.
They have also experienced rotations, departures or permanent closures. Nothing bloody. Sometimes it has taken us even to find out or realize some of those movements. Nobody talks about the dead. Everything is more or less placid, everything is more or less silent. They have a diplomatic continuity that is impressive.
The question then is why women break up their groups with more fury than men. Why do they make so much noise?
I want to understand it. I think about myself and the friends I lost and suddenly my stomach hurts.
One knows that one is a little mutilated by life. The friends we lost took parts of us and keep them in their music boxes or jewelry boxes. We also guard their eyes and their hands. The occasional knee. It was the treatment of loving us like that, so bestially.
The position occupied by a friend cannot be filled by another.neither in a group nor in life. There is something unrepeatable in each of them. It is its uniqueness. A friend is not like anyone else. And we love no one like her, under this style, under this tailored suit, under this language of ours, incomprehensible to the rest.
This is revolutionary and this is anti-capitalist, because it is the friend who does the job, and not the other way around.
I suspect that in men’s bands they exchange with each other more lightly because They are clear about the goal, which is to have a group, and the members are means. They are more businesslike! If this one goes, this other one will come. Nothing is so traumatic.
But when a woman leaves our house, our head, our artistic language, an empty chair remains in our dining room forever.
We are a little in love. We have really talked (this is a radical experience that I recommend), we have immersed ourselves in the conversation. One night we turned upside down like a bag full of crushed tickets and pitis and our contents scattered on the floor. I gave you everything: even my garbage.
Women memorize every detail of their friends’ lives. I know that men can spend years seeing each other every week to play soccer, and although they would break their faces to defend each other, although their affection is rough and tribal, They can’t explain what exactly the others are working on. not even if they get along with their mothers or if their last partners hurt them a lot or the breakup left them cold.
They love with a broad brush. Us in brushstrokes.
Former Shego formation.
It is also true that while the kids are not even sure how many there are in a group, we merge more than two by two because we take each other seriously. This means that in a gang, when there is a scuffle, small alliances are generated. It is not outrage: it is loyalty to the Great Friend, the Best Friend.
It is our urgent need to get wet, to not stand in profile. We have never tiptoed through life and of course that comes at a high price.
Of course, all this explains many things sociologically. When we girls fall, we fall from higher. If we have killed each other it is because we climbed together to the eighth floor and they barely made it to the second. Everything is traumatic for us because everything was immense for us.. We will be gone and it will be forever.
It bothers me to admit that we demand less from uncles than from aunts. We are harsher with our friends than with our friends: I am the first. We expect more from them. We expect it all, in fact. More moral height, more honesty, more intelligence, more tenderness, more purity, more attention.
From our boy friends we assume a charming clumsiness, a deficit in verbal expression when it comes to feelings and some selfishness. We have assumed it. We love them like this. We do not ask more of them than they want to give.
But we girls… we girls hoped to love each other forever, to marry our friends, to put them in our bed and in our library, to place them on the desk like a coffee or a notebook, always close to our hand, and we imagined ourselves having breakfast in Mallorca at one hundred and two years old, laughing under our sunglasses, petting each other’s dog and saving ourselves from existential horror out of habit.
I defend indie girls from all the misogynistic theses that have been poured out on them these weeks.
I think that when we break up with a friend we really ask ourselves, what’s the point of life if we can’t knock on her red door again to tell her a thought, or what things sound like when Mozart isn’t playing on her jukebox, or Why did everyone think we were better when we were together?.
This is the big difference: they do not lie about the dead.
And we spend our entire lives living with our dead.
Long live indie and talented girls.