Cristo and I are collaborating on artwork for a September exhibition. As research, we spend part of last weekend watching music documentaries—Kill Your Idols and LoudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies.
There was a scene in LoudQUIETloud that had me weeping pretty uselessly, to my own great surprise, during the European leg of the tour: Kim Deal surrounded by a dozen or so little girls, maybe 9 to 14 years old, utterly adored and swarmed by them, signing autographs and chatting. Chris realized I was crying, tears rolling off the tip of my chin crying, and teased me a little. I bucked up, shook it off.
Maybe twenty minutes later, we see a chubby teenaged girl with frizzy dark hair and dorky eyeglasses camped out on a sidewalk, first in line for tickets for a show. The film crew is surprised someone her age knows about the band, asks how she got into them. She showed the camera a YA novel, text heavily marked up with highlighter, that had introduced her to the Pixies. She was—like the book’s narrator—completely obsessed, particularly with Kim. The book had changed her life, made it survivable, and so had the band. We were supposed to think her mildly ridiculous.
Cristo takes the bait, made a comment. Not a mean comment, just genuinely confused by the level of hero-worship. Moved by this dorky little girl, fresh tears shining in my eyes, I turn to him: “If you’re a teenage girl, and you can’t sing well, and you want to be a rock star musician, who are your role models?” The look in his eyes, he’s flummoxed. My boyfriend is a feminist. He’s the most feminist man I know. He was raised by strong women to respect strong women. It’s why he loves me. But my punk-rock-and-metal-obsessed boyfriend has never asked himself this question before. I see from his face he’s starting to get why those little British girls made me cry. “You don’t want to be Britney Spears or Beyonce,” I continue, “You want to be a rock god. Who’s there to look up to? Who can you respect?”
He mentions and dismisses Courtney Love, that Gwen Stefani squandered her Hollywood nerd-girl cred. Kim’s pretty much it. (I mean, there are the hypertalented punk-goddess sexpots like Siouxsie and Nina Hagan and Exene and PJ; Kim Gordon and Joan Jett and Ani are brutal guitarists, but too pretty for an awkward teen girl to aspire to; and then the “ugly” girls like Janis and Patti. All of them are singers first, and what if you don’t have a decent voice? For straight-up musicianship, there’s pretty much Kim Deal.)
The camera picks her out in the concert, the awkward young aspiring bassist in the front row, holding aloft a handmade sign: KIM DEAL IS GOD. After the show, she corners Kim for autographs and praise. She presses her disposable camera against the chain-link fence to photograph her idol, and thrusts the book through the gaps. Kim is later shown reading it on the tour bus, confounded by the level of love out there, for her.
She makes one final appearance: over the closing credits, we see the little bassist girl jamming with her band—all boys—in a makeshift rehearsal space. They’re covering a Pixies song, and they’re surpisingly good. “Wow,” murmured Cristo, blown away by this little knowing flourish on the part of the filmmakers, “I’m really glad they followed her to get this. She’s really, really good.”
I agreed.
