I can’t say I am a fan of this kind of music but this was too intriguing to stay unnoticed though rock nyc reviewed her live show last year. English-born electronic musician Janine Rostron, aka Planningtorock, has attended art school before moving to Berlin a decade ago, she has collaborated with The Knife and received a fan email from James Murphy (who signed her to his label DFA Records) and she has already released 2 albums. ‘Human Drama’ (the song below) is the second sample from her upcoming record, ‘All Love’s Legal’, that she is sharing.
Beside the synth swirls, the electronic bouncy beats, the handclaps and the strings (lots of them), the main attraction is Rostron’s voice, loud, operatic, deep and androgynous to the point you wonder about the gender or even the nature of the person producing such a sound. And that’s the point of the song, pretending that, well, gender is just a lie:
‘Gimme a human drama/And understand that gender’s just a game/Gimme a human drama/Our sexuality is not the same!/Gimme a human drama/The personal is so political/Gimme a human drama/It kinda feels like gender’s just a lie!’
I have to stop right there, because she is onto something, gender per se is not really a lie, but the thing is more complicated than most people think. There is gender expression, the way you look, gender identity, the way you feel inside (not necessarily the same thing!) and your sexual orientation… three separate entities that society would like to always correspond to each other, but which often don’t. Thus Planningtorock’s song should be the anthem for the transgender/transsexual community, or better, her whole album, as Rostron has explained that her 12-track release is a conceptual exploration of ‘transnational gender equality’, with song titles such as ‘All Love’s Legal’ or ‘Let’s Talk About Gender Baby’, and songs dancing around the powerful idea to ‘de-gendering the intellect’! Talk about some semi-dance music that carries big ideas! May be Lady Gaga should take a lesson.
I am totally for it, and after such a gender-bender song, I was curious about what she looks like… and I got all these pictures of her wearing this prosthesis making her look more like an alien or a Neanderthal woman? She said she wanted to find out how she could play around with the image of a woman without becoming a man… As I said, this is much scarier, weirder, and more artsy than anything Gaga has ever made!
