Will Substack Censor the Name Mannequin Pussy?
See a show, release some anger
Brief hiatus over! Welcome back to Hi & Lo, I’ve got a few pieces in the pipeline and I’m happy to share this one.
Once again, New Yorkers: check out my zine, currently being sold at the one and only CASA MAGAZINES. Non New Yorkers: You can ALSO buy my zine by emailing me, and I will ship it to you!
New Yorkers, if you haven’t already, vote! Especially if that vote is for Zohran Mamdani. If not, and are voting for a sex pest/enabling said sex pest to win an election that will affect the lives of millions, my suggestions to you are outside the realm of what Substack would likely define as “appropriate“ or “polite.”
Anyways, where was I…
The lead singer of punk rock band Mannequin Pussy, Missy Debice, pauses the show.
A droning bass line strums while Missy almost whispers into her microphone about the hate churning behind the walls of the Warsaw ballroom. She derides society’s fear of the feminine, of its hatred of queerness and Transness, of those who can’t even say their band’s name. Mannequin Pussy. People in the Mannequin Pussy crowd yell “Free Palestine” “fuck ICE.” Debice agrees emphatically, spinning the audience calls into her pointed rage.
It is in this moment that I wonder if in all of this show’s careful theatrics, scored speeches, and timed video effects, if Missy Debice’s whispered speech is not all scripted.
My partner and I buy these tickets on a whim, desperate for live music and shouting. We arrive at a venue neither of us know, Greenpoint’s Warsaw - an old Polish dancehall and community center with bar and pierogi stand intact. Mannequin Pussy has brought together a crowd of frankly unusually good looking people, most pierced or tatted or otherwise suggestively queer, slinging pierogies and buying “Just Say Pussy” branded bumper stickers. The room is bustling with bodies, swishing watered-down tectate, and jangling silver jewelry.
I discovered Mannequin Pussy in 2019 when they held a free concert at Oberlin, a concert attended by maybe 50 people, all throwing themselves together and thrashing alongside their gatling gun punk rhythms and the flamboyance of hair metal. Mannequin Pussy sounds very good when it is fast, but many of their best songs start or resolve in Debice’s wounded crooning: raw, lithe, poised amid the storm. At 18 and a month into college this concert had the affect of pulling me apart and reconfiguring me, releasing the confusion, the sadness, the desires, rocking them around in a pit until some spilled out. As Missy said at the Brooklyn show, “give me your anger. Let us carry it for you.”
Beyond the specific politics Mannequin Pussy invokes, anger is their thesis. Debice tells the audience that she has never “outgrown” anger as people suggested she might. It has only deepened. However, she says, anger untreated is poisonous, and we must learn to harness this energy, not to let it fester into hate. She asks us all to scream. We do, and Mannequin Pussy plays loud, fusing our release with art, joining and resolving our collective maelstroms.
I think this is what happened to me six years ago. I found and released something that could’ve festered, and found art that I could use to draw out hidden rage. That night in Brooklyn however, I found beauty, unity, something beyond the quick and angry.
I have struggled for weeks to describe it. The light show on stage reflecting its flicker onto the grand chandelier, casting an angular shadow that glitched back and forth. Just as scenes in clubs and music venues in David Lynch films create gaps, stoppages, pockets within time (sometimes also with a flicker) so too does Mannequin Pussy seem to annihilate the exterior. I feel the crowd undulate and push me to the wall as mosh pits open and gnash closed until giddy punks are pushed to the surface.
My favorite details are the massive paintings of wildlife that hang next to the stage in gilded frames, revealing the stage itself to be within a giant trompe l’oeil gilded frame. All I feel in this moment is the total synchronicity of art spilling out from on high into reality, bursting from the frame until it is one with the stomping masses. Missy brings our pain and angst into the frame, freezing and unfreezing it, transmogrifying it into the contours of a song we can yell back. It is a harmonious cycle.
I have similarly struggled to articulate the way in which Mannequin Pussy’s performance takes full advantage of itself as occasion. By this I mean that it is an artistic event that refuses passivity, a performance that forcibly implicates itself into our lives - whether personal or political. There are few live performances or artistic presentations these days that don’t invoke or at least imply the tumult of the present. However, this by no means assures that art provides answers, or even confidence. After all, how to calculate the loss, the terror, the anger, and the true immediacy of each day alongside art? How to anticipate it? How to meet it?
This is where art potentially fails. Certain art at least. A24’s Civil War on Imax, Brat Summer© or Prada menswear. Liberal institutional art fails, and will continue to fail because it is designed to do so.
What is required of modern art is a jump from the frame, a seizing of an audience and an acknowledgement, no, a celebration of their fear and anger and desires. Even shaped into the contours of a scream or a mosh feels uniquely liberating.
Thank you Mannequin Pussy.
