The Sugar-Coated Fashion and Pop Performances of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj: Skin, Candy, and Consumability

     

 

         If girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” then Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj take this statement to the extreme, deploying an excess of sweetness in their visual and aural performances. From cotton candy hair to bras shooting out whipped cream, these two pop stars deploy more than enough sugary signifiers and surfaces to send their audiences to the dentist. I will compare Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj’s use of sweets, paying particular attention to how candy complicates gender and racial politics. The use of sugary surfaces and signifiers in both their visual and aural performances blur the boundaries between edible / non-edible surfaces and bodies, real / artificial, and playful / aggressive, ultimately complicating feminine corporeality and sexuality. By aligning candy with the female body, Perry and Minaj makes manifest, borrowing from Carol J. Adams, the sexual politics of candy. While Adam’s outlines the sexual politics of meat, I propose that candy as a signifier works in a similar way.  Candy is an incredibly complex signifier that lends itself to numerous contradictions that I will explore throughout this essay. For one, it lures hungry subjects, often children (see this interesting take on the candy shop and sexual exploitation) with its enticing smell and promise of sweetness, yet too much candy takes a rotten turn. Furthermore, it connotes both a sort of innocent girlhood, yet is an incredibly erotic and sexually potent metaphor (think 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”). By comparing these two female pop stars, I hope to unpack some of these contradictions and reveal how candy can be at once a problematic and subversive signifier for the sexed, racialized and gendered female body. Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” music video as well as the marketing of her Teenage Dreams album and tour reveals tensions between candy and the female body, specifically the youthful female body. What does Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” reveal about American cultures of girlhood? Nicki Minaj uses sugary surfaces in a potentially more subversive way. Using her videos “The Boys” and “Stupid Hoe”, I will explore how her use of saccharine makeup, hair, skin, and voice displace any notion of an essential “skin” that signifies race and gender. Nicki Minaj, in her abrupt movements between sweet and sour, between cute and aggressive, reveals the power of candy to lure the gaze of the audience in with its sweet smell only to turn into a disruptive substance. Ultimately, these two pop and fashion performances reveal the volatility of candy as a substance, surface, and signifier.

 

Cotton Candy and Ice Cream and Gummi Bears, Oh My!: Katy Perry’s “Candyfornia Gurls”

            Katy Perry, in her “California Gurls” music video, brings the children’s boardgame “Candy Land” to life. I will focus on the complex politics of consumption in the video as well as the female body that leaks candy. Perry uses candy to such an excess that one can almost smell the sickly sweetness leaking out of the video. In fact, for her 2011 California Dreams tour, Perry’s performance was literally so sweet the audience could smell it (Vena). Furthermore, the limited edition of her album Teenage Dreams filled music stores with its sweet smell. It is easy to see how Perry’s use of sugary signifiers, surfaces, smells verges on a consumption of candy, of the candied body, that causes indigestion rather than satisfaction.

 

The video begins with Snoop Dog reveling in his Candy Kingdom, playing a game of “Candyland”. Snoop Dog’s presence in this music video is quite unsettling: he is seemingly omnipresent throughout the video, controlling the candied women in Candyland. Snoop Dog is a Sugar Daddy, in every sense of the word: he is the “King of Candyland” who lures Katy Perry and the other “gurls” along the graham cracker path with the promise of all the candy they can eat. Furthermore, Snoop Dog’s presence as a spectator invites not only Katy Perry and the gurls to consume, but invites the viewing audience to glut themselves. However, it is not just candy that Snoop Dog invites the audience to consume, but the female bodies who resemble candy as well. So, to sum up this incredibly complex chain of consumption: the audience consumes the music video in which Snoop Dog consumes/ objectifies Katy Perry as candy, who consumes actual candy. The frame in which Katy Perry lies naked on a cotton candy cloud reveals this tension between the audience’s gaze on the female body and the consumption of candy. Katy Perry attracts the audience’s gaze, or hunger, drawing them in with her “sun-kissed skin” that looks a lot like the cotton candy cloud. However, Perry disrupts the audience’s comfortable consumption by taking a bite of her cotton candy cloud, exposing the audience’s own consumption of both candy and the female body. There is a way that Perry’s excessive use and consumption of candy in this video is at once enticing and repulsive; there is so much candy that it begins to leak, to melt like the icecream cone at 0:15, to become grotesque.

            Towards the end of the video, Katy Perry and her California gurl gang face off against Snoop Dog and his army of Gummi Bears. Perry pulls out two cans of whipped cream, attaches them to her bra, and fires away: her body is not only leaking, but projecting, sugar. This image aligns sugary substances with the abject: the substance that transgresses the boundaries of the body, “attest[ing] the permeability of the [female] body” (Grosz 193). Candy, as an edible object, invites licking, sucking, yet is also a potentially transgressive substance: it is sticky, gooey, oozy, messy. The whipped cream that shoots out of Perry’s breasts is messy and sticky, and in this way it is a viscous substance. Mary Douglas states that "[t]he viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid [. . .] It is unstable, but it does not flow [. . .] Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it" (Grosz 194). Katy Perry’s candy-leaking body presents a threat to the spectator’s coherent subjectivity: threatening to disrupt the spectator's stability with stickiness. However, the viscosity of candy works both ways: to ensnare the spectator as well as the surface/ subject who deploys it. Throughout the video, Perry must save one of the gurls who is continuously trapped in various gooey substances: bubblegum, jelly, and the most disturbing of all, a candy wrapper. While these images highlight the intersection between consuming candy, or any food, and objectifying the female body, they also reveal the precarity of candy as a signifier. Katy Perry's use of candy both disrupts and reinforces the objectified female body. She uses it to defeat Snoop Dog, yet finds herself trapped by the sugary surfaces of her own making. Nicki Minaj, like Katy Perry, uses candy as surface, as skin, in an incredibly complex, yet potentially subversive way.

 

Pink Invasion: Nicki Minaj’s Deadly Sweetness

 

 

       Nicki Minaj deploys sugary signifiers to the point that her cute- candy sweetness threatens to consume the audience – the consumers. Using Minaj’s music videos “The Boys” and “Stupid Hoe” I will outline, what I propose be called Nicki Minaj’s Pink feminism that asserts feminine subjectivity and corporeality as volatile and dangerous.  I will begin by looking at Nicki Minaj as a feminist camp figure, who manipulates surfaces of the body using candy, both on the level of clothing and skin, in an attempt to displace any natural notions of gender and race: she trades in depth for sugary surfaces and artificial flavorings. Furthermore, I will explore how Minaj’s use of candy is inextricable to her manipulation of cuteness that rapidly morphs into aggressiveness. What happens when Nicki Minaj’s candied surfaces turn sour?

 

 

 

 

       “The Boys” begins with an onslaught of pink substances and surfaces: pink is literally flooding the video, taking over. Minaj uses the colour pink to accentuate the sugary surfaces of both her skin and hair, drawing attention to the artificiality of her skin. Pink feminism embraces artifice and excess, much like the Camp sensibility. Susan Sontag states that Camp is “the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (275). Camp reveals the performativity of race and gender in its exaggerated mannerisms, gestures, and for Nicki Minaj, facial expressions. Minaj’s use of sugary surfaces play into her manipulation of camp: her facial expressions are both exaggerated and, with the combination of her bubblegum pink lips and Barbie- looking skin, sugary. I propose that Minaj uses Camp much like the modernist artist, Josephine Baker (see below). Both female performers juxtapose female sexuality with a wacky humour, resisting objectification by offsetting the viewer’s gaze with an unexpected facial expression, such as Minaj’s face at 1:58 in “The Boys”. Anne Cheng, in her analysis of Baker’s use of skin and surface in her performance of gender and race, proposes that Baker’s black skin entices viewers with its shimmer and smoothness. The audience, in their ability to place her, to get under her skin and see the “true” Josephine Baker, are given surface upon surface. Much like Baker, Minaj uses her skin as “a costume, a prop” (Cheng 60), to resist gender and racial categories.

 

 

Minaj gives the audience no ‘real’ Nicki, but rather moves between playful and aggressive, sweet and sour. In “The Boys”, Minaj’s pink playfulness becomes excessive resulting in a mass murder, not only by fire, but by sweetness. This scene is reminiscent of Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s mass murder by honey in “Telephone”. Minaj’s voice, leading up to this mass murder, rapidly moves between her two alter-egos: Barbie whose voice is sugary and sweet, and Roman Zolanski, her gay male twin sister whose voice is aggressive. Minaj, in the abrupt aural movements between playful and aggressive reveals the sheer power of her pink feminism; to entice the listeners with her bubblegum sound only to repulse them with aggression. Her voice, in a similar way to Katy Perry’s candy leaking body, is out of control. Similarly, her body and skin cannot be placed and thus disrupt racial and gender binaries. She is literally candy-coated, however her skin does not hide an essential chocolate centre, but she is “skin all the way in” (Jack Miles in Cavanagh 70). Furthermore, her skin does not reveal invite the audience to place her into a racial category; she is not black or white, she is simply sugar. Minaj’s “The Boys” outlines the power of pink feminism that uses candy, Camp, and skin as surface to overstimulate the audience with pink. As Nicki Minaj states, in “Monster”, “pink wig thick ass give em whiplash”; Minaj shows how pink, candy, and cuteness can be toxic. In “Stupid Hoe”, Minaj assaults the viewers with an onslaught of visual and aural sweetness juxtaposed with aggression.

 

 

      As Robin James points out, this video is incredibly complex in both its visual, gender, and racial politics and as a result, purposely resists classification. I will not so much focus on Minaj’s potentially problematic gender politics here, for as James states, this video is at once misogynist and feminist and to label it as one or the other reduces the song to a coherent meaning. Instead, I am interested in how Minaj uses candy as part of her subversive cuteness. Minaj introduces the doll-like persona around 2:35 of “Stupid Hoe”. Her big eyes, small stature, and her child-like voice are all signifiers of cuteness. Sianne N’gai, in her exploration of cuteness as an aesthetic category, notes that a cute object is malleable, consumable and states that “the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility” (820).

Candy, then, becomes a powerful signifier for cuteness as it highlights the consumability of the cute object. In fact, Minaj holds a lollipop as part of her cute act. However, Minaj’s cute appearance fails to conform to one of N’gai’s markers of cuteness; instead of a small mouth or lack of mouth, like Hello Kitty for example, Minaj’s mouth becomes bigger and bigger as her voice escalates from cuteness to aggression. She turns the objectified cute object that is consumed to the cute object that threatens to consume the viewer; it literally looks like Minaj is eating the viewer. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of Minaj’s cute and sugary appearance with her aggressive chant of “you a stupid hoe” is unsettling. Like in “The Boys”, Minaj uses cuteness to displace the viewer and their attempts to place her into a stable gender and racial category. Minaj’s visual and aural performance in “Stupid Hoe” is overwhelming in more ways than one. She responds to the audience’s gluttonous appetite for the objectified female body with an excess of sweetness and cuteness resulting in a reversal of the subject and object relations of the gaze. Ultimately, Minaj uses cuteness, Camp, and candy to overwhelm the viewer’s attempt to pin her down: any attempt to get past her sugary surface results in either more sweetness or an unexpected turn to aggression.

            Therefore, both Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj complicate female subjectivity and corporeality through their use of candied surfaces in their visual and aural performances. Candy embodies many transgressions; it blurs the boundaries between cuteness and aggression and breaches the limits of solid and liquid, resulting in a threatening viscous substance. All three of these videos explore sweetness in different ways, however all use candy in a potentially disruptive way. Whether it be through breasts that shoot out whipped cream, a mass murder by pink sweetness, or an overwhelming cuteness that morphs into a hostile threat, these female pop performers reveal the power of sweetness. They work from inside the pop culture industry, using the very signifier that is used to objectify the young female body, and reveal the subversiveness of this signifier. They demand to be consumed, luring the gaze with their candied skin and surfaces, only to turn their excessive sweetness into a substance that rots the consumer from the inside out. Minaj, in particular, draws the viewer in with the promise of her sugary skin, only to overwhelm them with layers upon layers of skin, surfaces, signifiers, threatening the coherence of the consumer, of the subject. These two pop stars refuse to be anything but surface and artifice; they are layer upon layer of sugar-coated skins and surfaces.

Kate Nash's Girl Talk: "Kitsch"en Sink Quirk Meets Riot Grrrl

            Kate Nash’s recently released album, Girl Talk is a departure from her previous “cheeky Britpop” (Ghomeshi) sound, however it is not as distinct or drastic of a departure as many critics believe. Lauren Vadnjal, for example, claims that Kate Nash “has gone from sweet and quirky to 90’s feminist punk”, in other words, she has traded in her cute and quirky aesthetic for an aggressive, full-blown Riot Grrrl sound. While her new album marks the development of this more aggressive sound, I argue that these elements have been present, just not as central, to Nash’s previous work. Songs like "Caroline's a Victim" (2007), “Mansion Song”(2010) and “Don’t You Want to Share the Guilt”(2010), among others, stand out as particularly Riot Grrrl-esque songs, in both their sound and content. I will think about Kate Nash’s Girl Talk as an intersection between the quirky and the aggressive Riot Grrrl aesthetic. On a larger scale, I will begin to develop how Kate Nash’s album is representative of a new feminism that seems to be emerging, or perhaps becoming the dominant, that draws on residual elements of both the Riot Grrrl aesthetic of the 90’s and elements of nostalgic quirky kitschiness. If Riot Grrrl is re-emerging, what is it about the quirky aesthetic that is attractive to its feminist politics? What meaning might emerge from a Riot Grrrl feminism rooted in a quirky rather than punk aesthetic?

I propose that, by thinking about how these two aesthetics inform, rather than oppose each other, the significance of their being mixed together by Nash, and other contemporary artists, will emerge. Drawing on two of Nash’s music videos, “Foundations”, from her first Made of Bricks album, and “Fri-end?” from Girl Talk, as well as a few of her songs, I will begin to outline quirkiness as an aesthetic, sensibility, and tone, focusing on how it blurs the boundaries between the personal / political and draws on elements of the everyday and domestic, such as the kitsch object. The everyday object, and the manipulation of this object, is central to the quirky, but also to the Riot Grrrl movement, in creating an archive of objects as well as manipulating everyday objects into crafted and original signifiers. From here, I will explore Nash’s use of DIY and collage in both her album art and the aural elements of her songs and think about the rise of DIY / craft culture in contemporary feminism. Finally, by analysing the movement between songs on her albums as well as sonic movement in terms of the voice, going from cute to aggressive, I will explore what happens in the space between the quirky and Riot Grrrl. What is the effect of Nash moving between these clashing, yet overlapping, aesthetics?  

James MacDowell proposes that the quirky is not an inherent quality or genre, but a sensibility or tone. The quirky as a tone Nash perfects the quirky tone in Made of Bricks, complete with the random lyrics and the simple piano chord progressions. The use of simple piano riffs, like in Nash’s “Pickpocket” becomes a signifier of the quirky female singer: Lenka, Coeur de Pirate, Regina Spektor. Furthermore, the presence of random, unexpected lyrics defines the quirky musical. The quirky, in its embrace of everyday, random experiences and objects, is deeply rooted in the kitsch object. Susan Stewart describes the kitsch object as “a saturation of materiality, a saturation that takes place to such a degree that materiality is ironic” (167). The quirky, in its embrace of kitsch, is an ironic knowingness, a deliberate, intellectual embrace of the odd, of the awkward. Randomness, as Michael Hirschorn, points out is central to the quirky: the “embrace of small moments, narrative randomness”. The presence of the kitschy, everyday objects ties together Kate Nash’s earlier more cutesy sound with her more aggressive aesthetic in Girl Talk. These kitsch objects cut through both her music videos as well as lyrics, popping up at seemingly random moments.

 

The quirky, therefore, is rooted in the domestic space of the everyday and uses the odd, random, kitsch objects of that space as part of its aesthetic. Kate Nash, in “Foundations” scatters these kitsch objects throughout the narrative: the watches, the toothbrushes, the socks, the dinosaurs, and the wind-up baby. These last two are perhaps particularly quirky in their childishness (MacDowell 10). Nash’s use of the kitsch object contributes to the quirky tone as they convey randomness, nostalgia as well as playfulness. The quirky, therefore, breaks down the boundaries between the personal and the political by bringing the kitsch object, the simplicities of the everyday, to the forefront. This is where, perhaps, a quirky sensibility lends itself well to Nash’s Riot Grrrl feminist aesthetic. Nash reasserts the power of the domestic space to be aggressive, to be political. In her video “Fri-end?” from Girl Talk, Nash mixes her Riot Grrrl sound with a quirky aesthetic.

 

While this video has a more aggressive sound the quirky sensibility is still central. For one, both “Foundations” and “Fri-end?” take place in a domestic setting, and more specifically, a significant portion takes part in the kitchen, or the kitschen. This term alludes to the centrality of the kitsch object to Nash’s domestic space as well as, what I like to call, her “everything in the kitschen sink style”: the presence of random objects and lyrics. “Fri-end?”’s aesthetic is incredibly quirky: the costumes, the dance moves, and the rabbit at 0:45, who also appears in Nash’s video for “Girl Gang” at 1:30. The transition from Nash in her vampire costume to a cute bunny rabbit is startling, yet effective. Nash moves from aggressive to cute, from Riot Grrrl to quirky, accentuating that it is the constant movement between these two sensibilities that is significant to her feminist politics. They are not distinct, but mutual. For example, in “Mansion Song” (2010), Nash sings “I’m an independent woman of the 21^st century /  No time for knits, I want sex and debauchery / I read glamour and the guardian / I like flowers”. The personal, the everyday :”I read glamour and the guardian” is inextricably tied to the political. Furthermore, just as the quirky blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political, so does one of the major aspects of Riot Grrrl culture: the rise of DIY and craft culture. In the two videos I discussed, Nash incorporates elements of DIY. In “Fri-ends?” her use of tinted videography creates the nostalgic, yet kitschy, tone of the instagram filter and in “Foundations” her use of stop motion animation in the scenes with the socks, toothbrushes, and watches gives her videos a quirky edge, much like the style of Andrea Dorfman. The DIY elements represent both the personal becoming political, as well the balance between innocent childishness and intellectual knowingness that is central to quirkiness. Thus, Nash’s quirky sensibility is not distinct from her more developed Riot Grrrl sound, but is central to her feminist politics.

Lisa Butterworth, an editor of BUST magazine, traces the popularization of craft culture to the mid-nineties Riot Grrrl movement. Sara Marcus, in her fantastic personal/ collective history of the Riot Grrls, attributes the coming-together of the movement to DIY objects; the girl-zines, collaged posters, “necklace[s]. . .cute out of Shrinky Dink plastic, inscribed with the words RIOT GRRRL and a few hand-drawn stars” were what brought the individual girls searching for a place to be heard, together (7). Furthermore, DIY offered an opportunity, as the Riot Grrrl manifesto of 1991 states, “to take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings” ("Riot Girl Manifesto"): to communicate the anger, “moanings”, screams, frustration through DIY projects and low-key music technology. Although the movement lost “the core of its cause” by 1994, after the media seized hold of the signifiers and commodified the movement, Butterworth proposes that the legacy it left behind was the resurgence of DIY culture. She states, [d]espite the movement’s dissolution, girls all over the country were starting to listen to Riot Grrrl music, pour their hearts out onto stapled, black-and-white pages, and get their hands dirty with all kinds of DIY projects”. Since the late 1990s, craft movements such as Stitch ‘n Bitch have emerged, reclaiming craft as a feminist project. Kate Nash, in both My Best Friend is You and Girl Talk uses elements of collage in her album art.

 

                                                                                                    

            Collage encapsulates a quirky sensibility: it brings together random, kitschy objects in an intellectual way. Nash uses collage, not only in her album art, but also in her lyrics. “Don’t’ You Want to Share the Guilt” and “I Hate Seagulls”, using a sort of stream of consciousness narrative to create a jumble of unattached statements that come together form a collage. Nash uses found objects and phrases as part of her collaged album art and lyrics. In this way, both Nash and the Riot Grrrl movement, in their collages, prompt the audience to reconsider, to realize forgotten objects. These kitschy objects are imbued with affect, however, as Stewart notes, the kitsch object, unlike the souvenir, is apprehended not” on the level of individual biography; rather they are apprehended on the level of collective identity” (167). Nash’s collages hark back to the Riot Grrrl archive that is not made of official histories or monuments, but of objects saturated with a collective affect. Likewise, Ann Cvetkovich proposes that marginally displaced groups create “archives of feeling” in which “cultural texts are repositories” for affect” (7). Nash, in balancing quirkiness, and its embrace of the kitsch object, highlights the importance of simple, kitschy objects to the creation of counterpublics like Riot Grrrl. Nash, using these abandonded, but affect-filled objects, in her album artwork and aural and visual performances, attempts to recreate the collective feeling of the Riot Grrrl movement. For example, in her video for “3 am” (link), she features a group of roller-skating girls who come together in solidarity, harking back to the Roller Derbies that were part of the Riot Grrrl movement. Nash uses the kitsch object as both part of her quirky and DIY Riot Grrrl aesthetic to recreate the feeling of a collective. Furthermore, Kim Socha states, in her discussion of feminism, the avant-garde, and animal liberation, the collage “forces the attentive viewer to consider each element differently, both on its own and as a whole as it works with other parts” (28). Collages juxtapose clashing objects of the everyday, such Nash’s above skeleton with a rabbit. In the collage, these objects take on new significance, their previous meaning collapsing in order to make way for new significance. Kate Nash, in her use of collage, calls for a feminist revolution in seeing, in being. Furthermore, the collage is a coming together of unique parts: it is the individual becoming collective, the everyday objects becoming political.  

Nash, in the abrupt movements between the quirky and aggressive Riot Grrrl aesthetic, opens up a space to define the emerging feminist politics. In Girl Talk, Nash moves from soft-sounding lullabies like “Labyrinth” to the in-your-face sound of “Sister”. The juxtaposition of the soft/ cute with the aggressive sound only makes the guttural yells, the broken cries stick out more. The quirky sound and lyrics of something like “You’re So Cool, I’m So Freaky” intensifies the anger, the frustration, the rawness of a song like “Rap of Rejection”. “Rap for Rejection” is perhaps the most Riot Grrrl-esque song on her album as Nash overtly asserts her feminist political project: “You’re tryna tell me sexism doesn’t exist / If it doesn’t exist, then what the fuck is this?”. However, Nash pairs this strong political message with a lack of Riot Grrrl passion. Nash keeps a monotone voice throughout the song until the very end when, after stating “No they can’t shut us up”, she releases three aggressive yells. The song lulls you into a comfortable space and then breaks through the monotony, waking the listener up, calling her/him to action. Therefore, Nash strategically moves between a soft and aggressive sound, a quirky and Riot Grrrl sensibility, to further her feminist message; to make the anger and frustration truly transform the listener, Nash pairs it with a quirky sensibility, enticing the listener with comfort and nostalgia only to call them to a revolution, a riot,  with her  aggressive and raw screams and yells.      

Nash’s album, I think, is representative of a larger cultural, or feminist, movement that draws on DIY elements of Riot Grrrl but infuses them with a quirky sensibility. Butterworth attributes part of the resurgence of Riot Grrrl to the rise of blogging technology that function similarly to zines. One significant online zine is  Rookie magazine, created by thirteen year old Tavi Gevinson who was inspired by the Riot Grrrl zines of the nineties. This magazine, like Nash’s Girl Talk, balances quirkiness, with its random topics, and serious political issues. Rookie’s feminism focuses on the “grrrl”, the young feminist, and provides inspiration on the level of personal DIY projects and political projects. Rookie, like Kate Nash, embraces everyday simplicity, the awkward, the cute, the sentimental, and the angry, all of which are part of this emerging, if not already dominant, feminism. Nash’s retrieval of the Riot Grrrl sound fits well into this trending feminism that embraces the DIY craft culture of something like Stich n’ Bitch, the quirky, but raw humour of someone like Lena Dunham, the awkwardness and dead-pan humour of someone like Aubrey Plaza, and the nostalgic kitsch of the layout of Rookie magazine. These artists and magazines attempt to collapse the personal and the political, asserting the power of everyday objects, gestures, or sounds, in subverting the normal. Sara Marcus states, “the can backfiring, the bookstore crowd murmuring, the baby breathing slowly, the bell ringing for fifth period – this is the sound of a revolution” (330). The Riot Grrrl Revolution happens not on the stage, but at the level of the everyday.

            Kate Nash reclaims the power of the ordinary, the kitsch in Girl Talk by juxtaposing these objects with her aggressive aesthetic. Kate Nash’s quirkiness is not distinct, but as I have argued, is inextricable from her Riot Grrrl feminism. The kitsch object is central to both aesthetics and both draw on DIY and craft culture. While her first two albums contain elements of this more aggressive sound and overt political content, Girl Talk represents the crystallization of her kitschen sink meets Riots Grrrl aesthetic. Nash, in “Don’t You Want to Share the Guilt” (2010), asks “Listen, can you hear it? / if you speak, will I feel it?”, marking the emergence of a new affective structure that she cannot yet articulate into words. In Girl Talk, Kate Nash is finally able to“ articulate what [she] want[s] to say” (“Don’t You…) by balancing her quirky sensibility with a Riot Grrrl aesthetic and feminism. Nash distinguishes herself from other female singers who draw on elements of the quirky but are not as overtly political, like She & Him, by lending her quirkiness to the re-volution of Riot Grrrl. Ultimately, Nash, in Girl Talk, proves that the quirky elements of the everyday can the grounds for a radical riot against the conventional.    

Works Cited

Butterworth, Lisa. “Girl Power, DIY Culture and the Age of the Riot Grrrl.” The Etsy Blog. 9   April 2012. Web. 9 April 2013.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures.Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

Gevinson, Tavi. Rookie Magazine. Rookie, 2013. Web. 9 April 2013.

Ghomeshi, Jian. “Kate Nash on ‘Girl Talk’ and girl power in Studio Q.” CBC Radio. 11 March            2013. Web. 9 April 2013.

Hirschorn, Michael. “Quirked Around.” The Atlantic. 1 Sept. 2007. Web. 9 April 2013.

MacDowell, James. “Wes Anderson, Tone, and the Quirky Sensibility.” New Review of Film and             Television Studies 10.1 (2012): 6-27. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 April 2013.  

Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper      Perennial, 2010. Print.

Nash, Kate. Girl Talk. Ingrooves, 2013. CD.

---. Made of Bricks. Universal, 2007. CD.

---. My Best Friend is You. Geffen, 2013. CD.

 “Riot Grrrl Manifesto”. n.p., n.d. Web. 2 April 2013.

Socha, Kim. Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation. New            York: Rodopi, 2012. Print.

Stewart, Susan. “On Longing.” Objects of Desire. Durham: Duke U P, 1993. 150-167. Print.

Vadnjal, Lauren. “Kate Nash Goes Riot Grrrl.” Portable. n.d. Web. 9 April 2013.