InfraWarrior - Monica Richards
In 2010 I got my once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a favorite band, Faith and the Muse, live in my own hometown. While I vacillated in front of the merch table, someone advised me that if I loved the band, I would also enjoy the lead singer’s solo album. Eventually I did decide to buy it, and I was not disappointed. I do enjoy the music. Most of the songs are beautiful for the same reasons that Faith and the Muse is. Still, I don’t find myself listening to it as consistently or with as much relish.
I see a lot of similarities between this album and The Burning Season, which you may (or may not) remember as my least-favorite F&tM album. And it’s true there are several songs on each that I adore. But there are also a few that just bug me, for a specific reason. They seem to indicate a philosophy of gender I’ve come to call “female exceptionalism,” a common and tempting response to patriarchy that glorifies femininity rather than emphasizing equality or rejecting strict gender divisions entirely. Female exceptionalism holds that there is something special and divine about femininity; it privileges the mother goddess over the father god and embraces positive female stereotypes.
The first InfraWarrior that especially embodies this is Gaia (Introduction), really a spoken-word piece over a musical background, where a male voice summarizes the significance and importance of goddess-worship, culminating in the argument that “If we worship and revere male gods we ignore Gaia’s ultimate power over us.” I was right with it up until then, and I think it’s a pretty shaky argument to make. The whole point of polytheism is that you can worship any god without ignoring the others.
Other such songs are I Am Warrior, Feel to Regret (which has a fun slut-shaming line hidden in its delightfully anti-patriarchal rantings), In Answer, and Death is the Ultimate Woman. In Answer is the one I find least objectionable; it explores the restrictiveness of traditional gender roles by repeating “Choose, fate, choose / mother or lover, muse or martyr.” And it does so on top of a perfect driving percussion rhythm, just like many of my absolute favorite F&tM songs.
It’s worth saying that I don’t dislike any of these tracks. I actually enjoy them quite a bit. Feel to Regret is super-catchy, and the angry feminist in me thinks it makes some excellent points, I just think it takes them a little too far at times.
And thankfully not all songs on the album do so. Most are truly pleasurable musical explorations of modern polytheistic spirituality, ranging from creative retellings of the myths (such as The Antler King) to deeply personal encounters with the spirit world (such as The Turnaway and A Good Thing). And like Faith and the Muse, they combine elements of ancient drumming and chanting, modern techno-trance music, new-age ambiance, and a unique spark that makes it difficult to describe in words. I could definitely stand to have more of this kind of music in my collection, if I can find it.
Next: When I Woke
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment