Feminist remixers tour as MEN
Published Feb. 19, 2008
When Johanna Fateman speaks, it’s with a soft-spoken confidence that comes hand-in-fist with the singer’s status as a post-punk prophetess — the Joan of Arc of feminist electro-punk, although she’d probably sigh at the comparison. In the 47 minutes she spent discussing her latest project, there are three sighs, four giggles, one shout and two pauses, the mix not unlike a slightly sloppy soundtrack to Fateman’s slightly sarcastic story. She isn’t one to waste her words.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not answering your questions very well.”
This is Fateman’s second lie today. Sunday morning, the Le Tigre frontwoman’s biggest problem was the back-up she caused in her Brooklyn apartment’s laundry room. Even with an upcoming tour for MEN, the “partycore” disc jockey duo she created with Tigre-teammate J.D. Samson, it’s the lie she told her neighbor that’s on her mind.
“I left my laundry in the machine a little too long,” Fateman said. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I caused the mess.”
Wednesday marks the beginning of MEN’s large-scale tour as a duo, a transition both members are still coming to terms with. If tours with Le Tigre were a little like crusades, Fateman makes MEN sound more like a two-month party.
“For us, it is a different thing — it feels different and it comes from a different place,” Fateman said. “It really comes from a DJ, club perspective rather than a live band perspective at this point. So far, we’re not a live band.”
But they are a political one. Le Tigre’s reputation for being about as apolitical as Bono precedes Fateman and Samson even as their more famous group is on a hiatus.
“In both Le Tigre and MEN, we sort of consider the political content to be, at this point, almost implicit in whatever we do,” Fateman said.
She hardly sounded worried.
“Because of who we are and because of our history, we feel like we’ve sort of created a feminist context for our work,” Fateman said. “In the big picture, certainly it works against us, if we wanted to be a big pop act or something, but I think for our scene it works for us.”
MEN’s “scene” is an interesting one for an act that owes its creation to chance — equal parts mash-up dancers and hopeful Le Tigre devotees. The only problem, as Fateman will tell you, is that both have expectations.
“We decided that we wanted to establish an identity of our own, not just being Jo and J.D. from Le Tigre, so we named ourselves and we made buttons and started doing remixes and mash-ups under the name MEN,” Fateman said. “With Le Tigre being on a break, when J.D. and I started working together, we were like, ‘We should start doing this again.’ It wasn’t a decision to start a new project from the beginning — it just sort of evolved.”
The duo’s name followed the same pattern of accidents, albeit a particularly ironic one.
“We just thought it was really funny, because we feel like we have a career based entirely on being women, either being identified as a feminist band or tokenized as female remixers in a context where everyone else is men,” Fateman said. “In a way, it kind of highlights how pathetic the music industry still is for women, because people are forced to say, ‘Hey, MEN are playing tonight,’ or ‘Did you see the new remix by MEN?’”
The last part was marked by a sigh.
“We’re poking fun at how backward that is,” she said.