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IVH (Pride): Big Joanie / Sistahs + Back Home [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-29

Continuing with this month’s Pride theme, tonight’s selections are from London’s Big Joanie.

Fall Asleep

Chardine Taylor-Stone is the embodiment of the queer punk ethos. The Big Joanie drummer plays standing up on a non-traditional kit, and the band performs in a straight line across the stage “breaking up the hierarchy of who’s at the front and the back,” as she tells me via Zoom from her London flat. Even her musicianship has emerged unconventionally, with Taylor-Stone learning her instrument as the band evolves. “There’s something about being forced to teach yourself,” she says. “You break out of these kinds of very constructed, patriarchal and Western ideas of making music. You’re teaching yourself to go by what you love.” Now on the verge of releasing their second full-length album Back Home, Big Joanie’s sound is fuller than ever, incorporating different genres and instruments while still preserving their intricate melodies and powerful lyrics. Album opener “Cactus Tree,” is a psychedelic and expansive track with lyrics that are more folk than punk while the closing track, “Sainted,” is a goth-leaning dark wave journey. The record is bookended by these seemingly diametrically opposed songs that somehow hold the record’s uncontainable magic together. “Touring with bands like The Gossip, Sleater-Kinney, and Bikini Kill on big stages, we were forced to make our sound bigger,” Taylor-Stone elaborates. — Them.us

Sainted

There is also, of course, a sense of security we build with each other. Friendships, relationships and communities can all be homes of their own. A feminist band with radical politics, Big Joanie’s music represents the full breadth of these possibilities. The second single from this album, In My Arms, is a yearning love song, the lyrics dreaming of physical closeness with a partner who is no longer present. While the song itself resonates across many types of romantic relationships, the accompanying video and imagery deliberately foregrounds a relationship between queer people. ‘It’s really important to make sure we’re as inclusive as possible and telling different stories,’ says Stephanie. ‘You don’t want it to feel like that’s a love song that’s only for a particular person. Making sure that queer people and people of colour know that’s relevant to them, and speaking to them, is definitely important to us.’ It would be next to impossible to separate Big Joanie’s politics from their art. It’s far from the only thing that informs their work – their cultural influences are wide-ranging and multi-layered – but for Stephanie it is in many ways intrinsic to who they are as a band and as songwriters. ‘To us, the politics comes from our own actions and our own doings outside of our music. What’s most important to us, and I think what’s most radical about us, is we’re three Black women speaking for ourselves, in a world where Black women aren’t really given the agency to speak and be honest about what’s going on in their lives,’ she says. — PRS for Music

In My Arms

45: Estella, I know you’re involved in Girls Rock London outside of the band – a group which works to empower young women and trans and/or non-binary people to make music. The organisation talks about the importance of creating a more diverse music industry that then inspires the next generation. Growing up, were there any particular bands you remember relating to, who inspired you to become musicians? Or did you have to forge your own path? Chardine Taylor-Stone: I didn’t see anything and I still did it anyway. It’s important… like, we saw Megan Thee Stallion yesterday and it was really amazing to see a Black woman with a full figure just being like, fuck you, this is my body. That was really empowering. But I also think as women, our imaginations are unlimited, and I don’t think we should be waiting for anybody to be there for us to think that we can do something. Men don’t: they think they’re everybody and everything. They probably think they’re us [laughs]. It’s important to have that representation on stage and in the industry but I also think as creative beings, we can be influenced by anything. A lot of my influences musically are bands with blokes in, to be honest. Estella Adeyeri: I did have one direct influence because I got to see my sister playing in bands when she was at Uni – she was a big role model. Seeing Skunk Anansie on Top of The Pops was huge, and I remember watching Shingai [Shoniwa] in the Noisettes back in the day. That definitely helped as well, but I think you’re right [Chardine], we did end up having to carve out our own spaces. The line-up at this festival [Glastonbury] is very diverse but that doesn’t mean that the crew and backstage staff is. There have been so many strides made in lighting and sound, but they can seem very opaque in terms of how you get into it, and that’s something we’re working on as a band. We get people to shadow us so they can get the experiences that men just give to their mates. We always try to think beyond the three of us. — The Forty Five

Happier Still

Debuting their punk ethos with Sistahs, Big Joanie have since been on an ascending journey within the industry. And when you listen to Back Home, you can hear the shift they’ve made, not only in their change in sound, but just how solidified their message is. Despite not fitting into the generic, commercialised ideology of what punk is supposed to mean, Big Joanie are still very much a punk band, it’s in their ethics, it’s in their sound, it’s in their aesthetic. “I think punk has become such a cliché, but if you listen to it, it’s actually very diverse,” Taylor-Stone says. The band converse about their staple punk sound and how, whilst this album sees them explore new sounds, punk is still the face of their work. “You have Siouxsie Sioux, James Chance had a saxophone, X-Ray Spex sounded nothing like The Slits – you know, there was no fixed sound,” she continues. “There was a scope for difference, I think now it’s become ‘you play three chords, and you shout’ but I’ve always seen punk as about the approach you have. It’s very much our attitude, and how we approach it in a punk frame from who we choose to work with, to how we work with people, etc. All those choices are probably never going to change.” [...] Big Joanie may be your favourite Black feminist punk band but are by no means restricted by this. Their sound is more varied than it’s ever been, and their acclaim is rapidly growing by the second. “There’s so many amazing POC led bands now, and people can’t just dismiss us as being a blip, or a token,” Taylor-Stone says. “We are a part of the musical landscape of this country and the alternative music world. We’re Black, in a very White industry, but we’re also a band, we’re not some spectacle that people want to put on TikTok. It’s about respecting the music we choose to make first and foremost, and they’re going to have to accept that its Black women making this music.” The Quietus

Confident Man

WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?

Jimmy Kimmel: Amy Adams, Maya Rudolph, Jenna Ortega, Bush (R 11/15/22)

Jimmy Fallon: John Krasinski, Regé-Jean Page, Maggie Rogers (R 7/26/22)

Stephen Colbert: Hugh Grant, Sean Hayes (R 3/27/23)

Seth Meyers: Pierce Brosnan, Sharon Horgan, Craig Finn & the Uptown Controllers (R 10/12/22)

James Corden: Jay Ellis, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Elon Gold (R 2/7/23)

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/29/2177856/-IVH-Pride-Big-Joanie-Sistahs-Back-Home

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