3. The Butchies, Sex (I’m A Lesbian)
[My freshman year of college coincided with the (brief) height of the Napster craze. Though I never once downloaded an entire album from the service, I did pillage it for lots of individual tracks, many of which were totally mislabeled. I think that's why this song is #3 on my list of the best songs of 2001, when from what I can tell it only ever appeared on a Mr. Lady sampler from 1999 that I've never heard.]
My first encounter with the Butchies was on my birthday in 2000, when they (and the Gossip) opened up for Sleater-Kinney at the Middle East in Boston. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, though the Butchies ended up being my least favorite of the three bands. (But they were cute! And I kind of had a crush on Kaia Wilson, even though I assumed she was a boy at first. I was so dumb!)
But in a live setting it’s hard to upstage Sleater-Kinney or the garage-band era Gossip. The Butchies songs were slower, more introverted, and featured a lot of wordless guitar parts that unfold better on record than they do when you’re just looking to dance around to All Hands On The Bad One.
In January of 2001, I came across Sex (I’m A Lesbian), a punchy song with a title I’m assuming was inspired by Berlin’s goofy classic. It’s a jerky song, punky and emotional, with lyrics that are spit out and awkward: “So what? It’s not what you would want/and you wouldn’t wanna want you,” it begins. It’s frustrated and confusing. And the minimal chorus is only two lines: “Only when you’re alone do you/think about what you had and lost.”
But after only a minute of the song Wilson starts coughing, like she’s said too much and wants to throw up, and then the middle third of the song is overtaken by a big crunchy instrumental, before the punky part returns at the end. That kind of interruption is something I generally only tolerate in Throwing Muses songs, but Wilson is so disarming that I’m immediately, totally floored by the confused passion in her voice. It’s a vocal style that you don’t hear very often. Kele Okereke does it sometimes, and that’s the main reason why I love Bloc Party so much, but few other people seem able to channel equal amounts of rage and bewilderment into the same phrase.
In my original 2001 year-end review, I began my rapturous praise of the song by mentioning the tenth anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, singling out Drain You as Nirvana’s greatest non-single. It’s similarly structured, with catchy bits at the beginning and end and a lengthy guitar bit in the middle. I was on a Nirvana kick at the time since I bought Nevermind (for the first time) on the tenth anniversary of its release, and the album somehow made a lot of sense in the immediate post-9/11 world. And, much like Nirvana, the Butchies were able to scrape conflicting emotions against each other while still making catchy songs.
The Butchies, Sex (I’m A Lesbian)
The Butchies, More Rock More Talk
The Butchies, Send Me You
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