It is the unwelcome duty of the jobbing amateur music critic to sometimes be compelled to report upon music that rather dwells upon what we in polite society term ‘unpleasant bedroom necessities‘. So be it. Gentle readers, I give you Peaches Fatherfucker.
Flipping the script from necessities to necessititties*, Peaches delivers an LP so replete in sauce that it sounds like it was written on last night’s soggy sheets; wonderfully so.
Fatherfucker was viewed as an attempt to add some rock to Peaches’ previously sparse electroclash sound, with mixed success it has to be said; with one exception, the best bits of Fatherfucker all cleave to her previous template.
In fact Fatherfucker is a bit of a rum beast. The CD has different and better cover art, showing Peaches in a far freakier light and the running order seems different between formats^. The vinyl, ‘laxative pink’ apparently, crams all three ‘rock’ tracks on Side 1, almost as if to get them out of the way before things get slippery. Plus the gatefold interior is a rubbish live/video shot which alerts the more sensitive viewer that Peaches’ live work often strayed perilously close to that most chilling medium of all, performance art.
But, hey when in Berlin …
Fatherfucker, umm, kicks off with the track that sold me the LP, ‘Kick It’ a duet with, Miami-based bastion of propriety, Iggy Pop. It’s an absolute hoot, punky overdriven and gloriously artificial-sounding, Peaches and Iggy trade lines based around their song lyrics and titles. More importantly, it’s funny; ‘I wanna be your cat / Ah, screw that!’ and it sounds like a lot of fun was had in the making of it.
Unfortunately ‘Rock N Roll’ is a histrionic mess, which may be making a point but … it just doesn’t tickle my prostate. Neither does the act of cultural vandalism that is ‘I Don’t Give A’, which is basically Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’ playing while Peaches shouts ‘I don’t give a fuck!’, or ‘I don’t give a shit!’ a million times – the end effect is like trying to listen to your favourite record whilst a vilely undisciplined toddler revved up on Ritalin and armed with a megaphone vents their Tourette’s in your ear^^.
Fatherfucker takes a turn for the more cerebral with ‘Shake Yer Dix’ and ‘Back It Up Boys’, the former a potty-mouthed sex chant for simpletons and the latter a pulsing low-down ode to the joy of the male ass; both really good.
Peaches slips it up a gear into ‘I’m The Kinda’ though, a great tough electro track with a side accent of guitar, that’s a great witty tonic to all the years of daft male hip-hop braggadocio in the shade; not many artists reference the cities of the plain.
Sodom and Gomorrah, today and tommorra In my aura, shines like menorah My Labia Majora, (that's in the whora) Soft as angora, you can't ignore-ah it
‘I U She’ is another good slinky one, not a massively controversial or even uncommon stance for a female singer these days but 17 years ago not many did so, ‘I like girls and I like boys / I don’t have to make the choice’. The reason I like Peaches is that you never get the sense that any of this is for anyone’s titillation but her own. It’s all on her terms.
Of the rest I’m rather partial to the horror show that is ‘Operate’^* which has some great vocals, the Suicide-influenced ‘Tombstone, Baby’*^ and todger-based ditty ‘The Inch’.
Fatherfucker, at its best umm, straddles a neat line between dance/rap/electro/rock and I do hear traces of this sound through artists my kids listen to today; although none of them are remotely as obsessed with reproductive practice. I like the fact that I have to closet myself away from my family so they can’t hear the language to listen to Fatherfucker.
I also like the way Peaches wasn’t pandering to the male gaze/viewpoint in any of this at all, it was all about her and what she wanted to celebrate and rightly so. She didn’t give a …
Plus she gets bonus points for reactivating my Abraham Lincoln fetish on the LP cover.
Obviously I have listened to this LP to prevent you having to and possibly corrupting your immortal soul and/or exciting any impressionable womenfolk in the area. Now after all that unpleasant downstairs business, please turn to your hymnal, open at page 68+1 and all sing:
We're gonna kick it now and take your place C'mon and give us a taste I'm not the only one with body to kill I like to see just how you swing that thrill C'mon baby and shake that thing You make my panties go ping (Shake Yer Dix)
Fatherfucker, You certainly cannot ignore-ah it.
1052 Down(stairs).
*AA, as detailed on ‘AA XXX’ on her first LP The Teaches Of Peaches**.
**a blisteringly good LP, but one I don’t own yet, so you’re stuck with me here.
^the Spotify version is even missing a track, the appropriately named ‘I Don’t Give A’.
^^am considering doing the same trick with ‘Here Comes The Sun’, give ol’ George a co-writing credit and I’ll jut record myself screaming ‘I don’t give a shitting fuck bomb!’ every 12 seconds, occasionally interspersed with audibly breaking wind. I’ll claim it as a piece of performance art.
^*as featured in one of my favourite films ever, Mean Girls. Which is a neat link back to my last post as King Khan once stuck his naked buttocks in Lindsay Lohan’s face, or so my internet research tells me.
*^it’s almost a direct rip of ‘Ghostrider’, but is genuinely no worse for that.
Pop has to much fun.
You’re still not over him drilling that watermelon are you?
I’m just jealous he comes up with all the great ideas. Remake the Elvis movies with Iggy.
It’s a Sunday morning niiiiiittttmaaaare!
Pure filth! Performance art! What’s wrong with you man? Don’t you give a hoot about your eternal soul? If you play this backwards it contains a message from the devil (Ted Cruz) telling you to bite the head off Nancy Pelosi on stage.
I’ll pray for you.
I just started dabbling in Performance Art, thought I could handle it – nudity, blood capsules, sexual caprices. Before I knew it, my life WAS Performance Art. I mortgaged the old eternal soul for Sham 69 ‘That’s Life’, original vinyl – the greatest concept LP EVER!!
Well, damnation, tarnation! Sham 69’s That’s Life! You are redeemed.
“Here, guess what?”
“What?”
“I just won a hundred quid down the bookies!”
Aw, I want to be corrupted.
Just a typical Trinity College night out!
Truth was I never had a night out like that when I went to Trinity. I was already married with two, eventually three children. I couldn’t afford to have nights out. LOL
If I remember the story correctly, she was Feist’s roommate for a while? Anyway, she also performed on the now-(sadly)-defunct Henry Rollins Show. Great stuff.
From Wikipedia: Feist worked the back of the stage at Peaches’ shows, using a sock puppet and calling herself “Bitch Lap Lap”.
I really liked this one and her 1st LP. Later stuff, not so much, or maybe the novelty wore off a bit.
Damn, she took Bitch Lap Lap. Now I need a new stage name.
At least the font in their logo is cool as that is the Def Leppard font!! This sounds interesting to say the least, but horrid at the same time. I found the write-up to be a bastion of poetic beauty, but the album sounds like a bastard child of Ron Jeremy. I don’t know what I’m saying because it is 5:50am on a Saturday. I should be asleep.
Haha John, you appear to have melted your circuits and are shutting down like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey!
I really approve of the word ‘bastion’ though, it’s a winner.
I like this one and not just because I have a mental age of 14, I like her drive and the wittier bits of her repartee. It’s a bit much over a whole LP though.
Good logo theft too.
Sounds quite appalling, Joe. From the ghastly band name to the sub-Zappa lyrics via humour that would be excised from a first year u-grad review. Thanks heavens, then, for the clever and far more arty write up, else the laxative pink might have brought this reader undone.
Thank you Bruce, I try to shine a torch into the seamier sides of my record collection in a tasteful fashion. I would hate for my blog to become known as a repository of immoral material. Stiff upper lip and all that.
If you pardon the pun Zappa blew everything after ‘Dynah Moe Hum’, I think Overnite Sensation is the last properly listenable one of his.
Er, yeah. The lip wasn’t the bit that sprang to mind.
With you on Zappa – though some of the live material is terrific, none of the subsequent studio albums thrilled. It was almost like (and I’m not taking a poke, here, honestly) he became one of the teenage boys he’d been parodying previously. A kind of smutty sell-out, lyric-wise. Guitar playing was always formidable, of course.
We are one on Zappa. It always really saddened my folks that the smut was what he was known for. Nobody played guitar as well as him when he wanted to, ‘Why Don’t You Do Me Right’ is a monster of a track.
What’s more, there’s a very plausible case that Hot Rats (Oct 1969) was the first, the very beginning, of jazz-rock. Stick THAT in yer Harmon mute, Miles.