"IT'S VERY strange that most of the music we funnel into little girls’ ears - even music written by former little girls - is about how women are petty, pretty garbage, whose only valuable function is to hold perfectly still in men’s boudoirs and wait for intercourse."
So wrote Lindy West, the American writer, feminist, fat acceptance movement activist, and film critic. However in SAD13 - aka Speedy Ortiz frontwoman Sadie Dupuis - West, and the rest of us, has found a songwriter determined to challenge that entire (patriarchial/sexist ) songwriting ethos.
“I wanted to make songs that were the opposite of ‘Genie in A Bottle’ or ‘The Boy Is Mine,’" Dupuis said. “Songs that put affirmative consent at the heart of the subject matter and emphasize friendship among women and try to deescalate the toxic jealousy and ownership often centred in romantic pop songs.”
Such songs make up the core of SAD13's most recent album, Slugger, which the multi-instrumentalist/guitarist/singer/songwriter is touring, taking in a show at the Róisín Dubh on Tuesday June 27 at 8pm.
“I wrote and played and recorded almost all of it in the two weeks I was subletting a friend’s tiny bedroom,” she said of the album, in which she explores what it means to give and receive consent (“You don’t know how I’d like to say yes,” she sings on 'The Sting' ); sexual and romantic autonomy; finding new modes of enjoying love after destructive partnerships; and giving misogyny and other exclusionary gender politics, the kicking they deserve.
Tickets are available at www.roisindubh.net, the Ticket Desk at OMG Zhivago, Shop Street, and The Róisín Dubh.
