Then came Le Butcherettes, like
Stars at Night a fundamentally Mexican-American punk band, but with a
guitar-strapped and red-keyboard-dancing indigenous warrior as its
frontwoman. Teri Gender Bender (Teresa Suarez Cosio) is, despite the name, a
righteously feminine presence on stage. Her femininity manages to unlock the power of a rock star while, at the same time, embodying the fan
who’s making the most of her time on stage. Cosio’s duality took me back to my punk self. For kids like me, who lived and breathed music but didn't understand
the world of the Hollywood-Rock-Star culture, the punks were a human-size
revolution, as their brothers and sisters in hip hop would parallel and inform.
I think of this video for "This is Radio
Clash"—https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=this+is+radio+clash+official+video
With all that was happening with funk, hip hop and soul in the 80s, I soon felt outside the punk world, and I've not kept a close watch there for ages. That said, over three decades down the line, the gap between fan and star that created 70s punk is wider than ever. It's exacerbated by the irony that there is a new immediacy to the media, but YouTube sensations and TV talent show
contestants arrive without a sense of a movement or fan base behind them.
Le Butcherettes have paid their dues, and, over the course of its four
albums, Le Butcherettes has taken several forms. What hit Kansas City
mid-February was a band's band--drummer Alejandra Robles Luna holding down the
beat and kicking up a furor to make Keith Moon smile, while bassist Marfred
Rodriguez-Lopez and guitarist/second keyboardist Rico Rodriguez-Lopez played
near-stoic foils to Cosio's expressive, explosive, dynamic and achingly
vulnerable antics. Watching this multi-dimensional, intimate and hard-fought
show reminded me that nearly the whole world of what is most raw
and real in this rock and roll history is once again underground. The radio has
never felt more like the tip of an iceberg. And the revolution is being fought
on levels I never dreamed of before, night after night after night.
I didn’t know Jerry Harrison
produced their new album until well after I fell for it, but it makes sense.
His first band, the Modern Lovers, were important to me for all the reasons
suggested above, but that other band of his, The Talking Heads….They redefined
what was possible. A slinky, poppin’ rhythm section holding together knife-play
lyricism and Harrison filling the whole thing with the appropriate, impossible
colors.
It’s enough to say this record
has those colors, but what matters is the way the sound serves Cosio’s vision. This is
a record that pushes and pulls at the contradictions and complexities of
relationships like a saw taken to the bone. Cosio is playful and deadly serious
at the same time. It’s vivid in “spider/WAVES” when she telegraphs
the opening chant, “Injuries are slashed deep open/Messiahs hold them still.”
It’s terrifying….and inviting.
There’s so much to this
hard-focused tightrope between grief and liberation. The folky “in/THE
END” complements an irresistible, tender melody with a gut-tugging lyric. “give/UP”
begins with a battle cry and a charging verse before reaching a bridge built by
compassion. That’s in the lyric, but it’s also in the sound, a meandering stream
of colored keyboard. Caught up by those sparkling waters, Cosio sings, “Sudden sympathy invades the very fiber of my vicious being.” Such precious connections have everything to do with why I came to punk in the first place. What's more, they lie at the heart of rock and soul itself.
