About a year ago, I saw a woman operating a leaf-blower around the perimeter of a charcoal gray office building I pass every morning on my way to work. I usually don’t pay much attention to this building, but I guess the infernal scream of the blower – a harbinger of spring! – caught my attention. This woman had a very metal look going on – big feathered hair, leather jacket, straight out of the eighties in a bad-ass way. She also had huge headphones – not the noise-cancelling ones leaf-blowers usually wear, but regular ones, I’m pretty sure. I imagined she was blaring metal into her brain and making this leaf-blowing feel meaningful or maybe even fun. She was aiming that thing like it was a machine gun and those leaves were just flying. “Yeah!” I thought as I headed for the subway’s maw.
As I do during my longish subway ride to work I chugged my coffee and listened to pop and wrote whatever came into my notebook. Lately, my ever-present, simmering rage at the daily injustices foisted upon us by patriarchy (not to mention state-sanctioned racism, ableism, transphobia, etc. etc., you know the drill) is pulsing increasingly to the front parts of my brain; rage-flames licking at the writing part, imploring me to put them out. So I’m trying to write more on-the-nose about it because otherwise I tend to yell at people like my very nice and unsuspecting dad for which I am then sorry and ashamed.
Anyway, that morning I wrote how I wanted to do to the patriarchy what that woman was doing with her blower – blast the dried-out old leaves from the corners, have a good look so we can actually see what’s up, then let them whip away forever on the wind, shove them into bags and set them on fire, let them crumble to dust beneath our stomping boots. She really stuck with me over the next few months, that powerful, metal woman. What were those lurking leaves and how best might we blast them out?
***
Which brings us to Joanna Newsom. Here’s the thing: I didn’t like her before. I lied for awhile and said I did because my partner has been a Newsom mega-fan for years. In fact, most of his favourite music is weird women singing with these high, unbridled voices (Grouper, Julianna Barwick, etc.). Most of it sounds so nice, but being a pretty straight-ahead pop fan (Tay, Brit, Madonna, Beyoncé) I enjoy but pay little heed to his stuff. Newsom, though, is hard to ignore when she’s on. For those who don’t know, she’s kind of quietly loud, harmoniously discordant, pretty goddamn in your face. To be honest, she used to consistently get on my nerves when he put her on and I sometimes had to deep breathe so I wouldn’t end up yelping, “Can you turn that shit off?”
One night a few years back, he put on a video of Newsom performing “Have One on Me” on Austin City Limits. I absently watched the beginning while folding laundry or somesuch. About a minute in I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried. This woman was so completely committed to this super-weird song, this giant outmoded instrument between her legs, this tremendously large and strange and high voice. No part of this performance was affected, every twitch of her shoulders and neck, every facial contortion – of which there were many – every dedication of reams of breath to dazzlingly long and complex strings of story seemed to emanate directly from her soul and its relationship to her instrument. It was arresting. I cried. I didn’t want my partner, who was just loving this thing, to know that I was too, which resulted in me making a horrific hiccup squeak noise. I was so moved and angry and jealous and I wanted it to stop.
So what the fuck was up? I mentioned I was jealous, and I was. But not even just of the fact that she is clearly a stellar artist at the top of her game giving it so fearlessly and flawlessly and I would like to be such an artist, too. But also because my partner loved her. Not that he ever said she was hot, he is not given to saying such things. But I was quite convinced in that moment, at a body level that he would rather have her than me. Because when I do my art, it isn’t like that. He sees me struggle and hold back and rage and cry and fuck up and drink too much and wish and wish and wish writing were different or I were different, and yes, keep trucking and keep dragging my ass to therapy to figure it out and keep taking micro-risks like starting my blog back up and trying my hand at essays and actually sending stuff out now that I’m in my late thirties, but you know. The risks still feel pretty heavy on the micro some days. Who wouldn’t prefer someone so brave?
I know this is weird. Joanna Newsom was not coming for my man. So why did I feel this way? On reflection I think my brain, lovingly shaped by institutionalized misogyny, was frantically manufacturing a scarcity mentality about both women and men. I think the buried back-beat of my inner monologue ran something along the lines of “There’s not room in this world for a whole lot of strong, brave, totally-awesome-in-a-very-offbeat-singular-way women, and I want to be one, and she’s younger than me, so I better not get too into this one lest she destroy me completely.”
Like, I thought she could do me harm just by being a woman making art and existing fully and taking up space and being rad. Remind you of anyone? (Cough-patriarchy-cough-cough.) And the rest of that back-beat was like, “You’ve found this one good man who appreciates your particular strangeness. If another woman does particular strangeness better, oh sister, you’re sunk and alone.” These thoughts may sound a little far-fetched. Perhaps. But these, I believe, are just the kind of old crusty leaves we need to point the blowers at and blast.
Though I knew on the level of logic that my partner was not running off with Joanna Newsom – or anyone! – I was, to my shame, not only delighted but relieved when I heard that Newsom was dating Andy Samberg and they were to be wed. Would it be a stretch to say that my interest in her increased when I learned that she could score such a smart, funny babe? Alas, it would not. I have always loved romance, so I won’t beat myself up for this too hard, but the worst part is that somehow that relationship humanized Newsom for me. The inverse of this, of course, is that I perceived her as something different from human before. Could it be that like the male journalists who would come to boil my blood, I had dismissed her as a bizarre mythical creature, who, for all her raw talent and dedication to completely enacting her vision was a bit of a too-serious, fringey try-hard until I saw that she had what it took to woo a worthy man?
Though fuelled by something gross, my excitement about the Newsom-Samberg union let me finally draw closer to her work. It made me stick around the next time my partner rolled a Newsom video on our living room computer. This time it was an interview and she spoke about her harp as a sort of living entity: it pushed back when she pulled. Again, I was close to tears, but this time I was ready to take what she was willing to give. Even now as these keys spring up to meet my fingers in a way that is so special to me, I realize how much I needed to hear something like that. She taught me something about art and the body and our tools that I needed to know.
So when Divers came out last Fall, I finally went for it. I spent a glorious night of a writing retreat doing nothing but drinking red wine and listening intently. I’m no music critic, so I’ll spare you that particular strain of hagiography, but I will drop the cliché that I won’t forget that night.
The same week I read this awesome piece by Leah Finnegan about how Newsom is portrayed in the mainstream press. She writes:
But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that…good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, so American and vital and wise in their manly scratchiness, like unshaved bristle and whiskey and dirt. Man voice make music good. Woman voice music bad: Too high. Too sharp. Too warbly. Sounds like birds, screams, mother. It speaks volumes that men always seem to love PJ Harvey, she of the deep timbre.
And this kind of thing, I came to realize, is just what I mean when I picture my leaf-blowing woman. The pay gap is one thing to tackle, rape culture another, but we’ve also got to drill down and get at all the tiny, stupid shit we auto-think is inferior just because it’s womanly. Because in some ways it’s the little things that gird the type of thinking that allow those bigger things to persist. We’ve got to squint hard at that shit, how it’s hiding in the crevices, in woman-identified people, too, and how it can lead us to dangerous places when we’d never believed those were places we’d go. And once we’ve had a squint, we’ve got to get out our leaf guns and blast that age-old trash to smithereens.
Of course I’m not saying if you don’t like Newsom you’re a misogynist piece of shit. Of course we’re still allowed to have our taste. I still listen way more to Mariah for example, and I probably always will. It’s just that while, indeed, I tacitly believe Waits and Dylan to be geniuses though I almost never listen to either, something about Newsom irked me and made me want to feel otherwise. Without paying much attention, I let that, “She’s okay but…” thing happen and when I looked deeper, there was something creepy inside of those thoughts.
***
On December 14th at 8:30 pm I watched Joanna Newsom stride onto a Toronto stage in a big dress and Arianna Grande ponytail, straddle her harp and just fucking annihilate the sold-out house with wall to wall virtuosity for at least two hours. This bro guy in front of me was literally head-banging during “Leaving the City,” and my hiccupy little sobs gave way to straight streaming tears by the time she was wrapping up “Cosmia” with unfettered screams.
I wish so hard I could do this more justice. I wish I could write a whole paean to that show. The entire time I watched, my writing brain was so lit up, I was describing every moment in minute detail to myself, determined to remember it all for later and write the world’s most perfect review. But afterward, I couldn’t remember anything I’d thought. Though my mind had been buzzing, it had also been fully there; so wholly absorbed in the performance that it needed all its strength to perceive and made no space for future or past.
That’s not entirely true. There is one thing I remember clearly: the way Newsom’s well-muscled arms shook when she played the hell out of that harp. Their undersides jiggled so fast they almost vibrated. Inundated as my half of the humans is with exhortations to banish arm flab, firm up those triceps, and rein it all in, it was like another pile of gross old leaves set aflame to watch those arms wobble for all they were worth. I think of those arms often, and they drive me forward. Joanna Newsom is a genius of the highest order, and it’s time that it got said and said and said. But that doesn’t mean there’s not space for more. Let us raise our arms up, wield our harps, pens, leaf-blowers, WHATEVER, let our arm flab shake, and blow it all sky high.
