Song Of The Day 2/19/2016: Flying Lesbians – “I'm a Lesbian, How About You?”
I was planning on combining commentary on this very lovable song with another of my favorite internet pastimes: recopying bad English translations of foreign Wikipedia pages, specifically the German WP page for the band. But I found a more righteous summary of their manifesto on the Flying Lesbians' official German website, already translated into only moderately broken English:
Thus, in 1974, with a little (respectively, quite a lot of) help from male friends such as TSS, we were initiated into the mysteries of electro-technics, including amplifiers, small mixers, PA’s and boxes, and instruments.
Our mission, vision and values were mostly taken from the women’s movement to which we belonged.
What we didn’t want:
. We rejected the “Gigantomania” of the Rock business of the early 1970s. The colossal, gigantic power towers of amplifiers and boxes. For us, concerts with a volume up to 120 dB seemed like “raping” the public.
. We rejected those macho gestures of men, who used their instruments like sexual organs and who performed a concert like a violent sexual act and as a submission ritual: “Under my thumb…” sang the Rolling Stones.
. We disliked the egotrippers, sex maniacs with their groupie system, their fantasies of almightiness, and how they let the puppets dance. We disliked the enfant terrible attitude, and how they let their roadies work – real slave work!
. We were fed up by super solists like [John] McLaughlin (even while admiring the artistic perfection of Santana), who used their fans and their public for their showmanship. In this respect, we defined the Rock business as “social deficitary.”
This was basically summed up our opinion of men in the Rock business.
(Were the Rock ladies better? They usually were featured as “front-line sex objects.” Even if Tina Turner was rightly called “the first sex-subject” in Rock music, she also once said: “If my ass is gonna make them pay attention to my voice, you got it.”)
As for positive action, we wanted:
. to be amateurs instead of professionals. We wanted less distance to the public. We wanted the other women to say: “Hey, we could do that, too!” To be self-critical: Of course, none of us could ever have become John McLaughlin. But we should also keep in mind that girls seldom start with electric guitars, or with drums as early as boys – whereas boys often begin at age eight, ten or thirteen. The situation remains the same today.
. We wanted to play “our OWN music and songs.” We never played “good enough,” to cover the songs of other famous groups (other, male groups often begin by covering the music of their idols, but sometimes they do it for years, with the risk of not coming up from their cellars, because they fear that they are not yet good enough...)
Even if the ideas of “our own music” turned out to be partly an illusion, we wanted to do our own thing, and we did not want to be measured with respect to famous male groups. This was also an illusion, because we had their technical and professional standards in our own minds and ears.Basically, I'm down for every last bit of this. So yes, I'm a lesbian too!