Mannequin Pussy Power
I played with Finom last night in Madison, WI, opening for Mannequin Pussy.
Mannequin Pussy doesn’t do encores, they do end-of-show speeches.
Missy’s two big points as I took them were: incremental change is worth believing in, and anger is a poison. You can’t avoid feeling angry, you should feel angry today, and yet if you don’t figure out something to do with it, then it will hurt your soul. Missy offered songwriting, and sewing, and making a meal for someone you love. As a precursor to political activity. To keep your soul alive.
I’ve found those things to be true in my life and it was cathartic to hear them said by someone with the sterling lefty art-world credibility she has.
Especially the first part. Incrementalism is a dirty word to a lot of young people. It’s considered worse than pointless. It’s wrong to want to improve existing systems, because that takes time and money away from revolution. Because it’s like putting lipstick (liberalism) on a pig (the white-supremacist state). Meanwhile, everyone has bills that are growing, wages that are stagnating, and relatives or neighbors who are being snatched in the street. And none of us could agree what revolution means in a 21st-century, financialized economy of derivatives and imports anyway.
I get it—I know that it’s hard to tell the difference between an incrementalist, who sees that our systems are deeply and horribly fucked up, and a status quoist, who is pretty okay with things staying the way they are, because the fucked-uppedness doesn’t really touch them. They say some of the same things, and they both vote blue.
But the ironic, upsetting thing is that the people who think every incrementalist is a secret status-quoist have, themselves, the same impact on the world as the status-quoists they hate: hardly anything positive.
So, it meant a lot to me to see Missy affirm to a Sylvee full of 1,000+ screaming college students that believing in change over time and change through existing structures doesn’t mean that you don’t see the fundamentally putrid oozing cores of those structures, and it doesn’t mean that you’re secretly okay with leaving them as they are. And she reminded us that believing that we can take positive footsteps means nothing if we don’t also take those steps. The whole point of reminding ourselves that “change” is possible is to have a reason to work. To not mistake our not working for a virtue. And to not punish each other when we could be songwriting, cooking, organizing, and building power together.