Medusa and Childe

 Thighs are apt to play a great role in the new postwar art, which will be so eager for life. —Leon Trotsky, Madrid, 1916

The new Sophie B. Hawkins LP, Timbre, has been in the can for a couple years, and a lot of the delay was because her record company Sony wanted "Lose Your Way" to be a single, but the song has a banjo, and mainstream radio won't play banjos, so Sony told her to redo it without banjo. Sophie refused. She'd written the song on banjo, she wanted the banjo. Eventually, she encouraged her fans to call, write, and e-mail Sony on behalf of the banjo. This worked. Sony gave in.

I'm sure there's more to the story than that, but I like it, and I like her for it. Her resistance is completely admirable. A radio prohibition against banjos? I wouldn't put up with that either. Even if it's real—even if the banjo sinks the song commercially—one can't tolerate such stupidity, a world that won't let a banjo in. Anyway, I don't think that written into the rules of mainstream rock/pop is the commandment that everything has to be balanced and bland. Streams, even main streams, have eddies, pools, rocks, character. All sorts of flora and fauna come in by way of tributaries, and the odd ones don't necessarily have to get fished out.


Sophie B. Hawkins
Timbre Columbia

Yet I wonder about the psychology behind her refusal. Sophie is part of a songwriting tradition of poetic overspill; it starts with Dylan but then mainly gets taken over by women, who make it misty and sexually feminine—a sea of feeling. But basically I think that Sophie's not a natural, not the free spirit or the force of nature that she'd like to be. She doesn't have the Teena Marie ability to swoop her voice and personality all over everywhere, or the Stevie Nicks ability to have her femininity soak through the music. Sophie's fundamental voice is a husky burr—it's effective but not all that rich. When her voice goes into the higher register it can be quite beautiful, but only sometimes carries her personality with it. So she has to work for her voluptuousness, for female fecundity, for animal richness. She makes her music full-bodied. And so when a record company wants to take away a sound that she'd put into her song, it's not just an aesthetic or commercial disagreement, it's that they want to take away part of the blood and bone of her music. And so of course she's got to fight back, because the music is her body.

The promo packet quotes her saying, "The whole goal of this album was to make it resonate something really, really true that came from my body. There was no compromise. To me it was like playing the cello. When it's tuned so that it's ringing—singing against your sternum—you go for a tone that evokes the truth of your whole self. That's the timbre I'm talking about."

I have two contradictory responses. One, this is horseshit; the truth about yourself isn't in a feeling or a tone, it's what you do and why you do it. Understanding yourself involves probing and testing, comparing your memories and ideas to someone else's and asking yourself if why you think you did something was the real reason, and so on.

Response number two is that she's not so much uncovering truth as she is trying to be true to some things: to a sound, to a songwriting tradition, to a feeling in her sternum, to a bodily sense of life, to what she can do, to what music can be. In this sense true doesn't mean "accurate" so much as it means "being worthy."

I think she intends to do both: to dig inside, to reveal herself; and to create a full sound that's worthy of the musical impulse within her. She does much better at fullness than she does at self-revelation. This is because—simply—she has not thought through her ideas, thought through her lyrics. She has a talent for words: they're part of her abundance, an overload of images, a verbal too-muchness. Startling metaphors, mawkish clichés, feints at narrative, shock effects. But she's evasive: she retreats too often into vagueness and sentimentality and high-school girl twaddle, fake self-discovery.

She started in music as a drummer, and she has a good sense of how words sound, how they have beats and rhythm and tones. The first verse of "32 Lines":

I want your hand across my belly

I want your breasts upon my back

I want your pain to rip right through me

I am your death, you are my wrath

The words sound compelling: death wrath back, belly right through me, hand pain rip, I want I want I want. You think that there's an interesting drama being introduced, let's say a woman lover acting out Sophie's mute anger, Sophie in turn representing the woman's unacknowledged mortality. But if you're the listener you're going to have to provide such a drama for yourself, because Sophie doesn't. Instead, the song goes on, with more verses, more conclusions, a string of abstractions ("You are my fate, I'm your design," etc.), without answering the questions: Why wrath? Why death? What ripping pain? The words are hardly meaningless—there's a potential vision here, sex as not just something whole and wholesome, but as a dangerous sharing, shattering as well as unifying. But she doesn't know how to put the vision down into words, doesn't, as it were, give it a body. This is a great song nonetheless, sexy, a slow intense rocker not unlike "Justify My Love" but that manages to vary from whispers to wails without losing its intensity.

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