Don’t be fooled by the appearances, she totally looks like a guy (didn’t I even see some mustaches on her face?) but a guy with a girlie voice,… confusion of the sexes has always been entertaining and MEN has been playing with it to fuel their gender-politic-activism-charged lyrics over seductive disco-funk dance beats.
At Culture Collide Block Party on Sunday afternoon, ex-Le Tigre member JD Sansom (her real name is Jocelyn) appeared on stage with her two band members with matching black and pink outfits (with a design that may be a variation on the pink triangle) and a DIY black cap with white threads hanging from the visor over her face. For a few seconds, before she removed cap and jacket, she looked like a jockey who had lost her horse, but she was certainly not lost on stage, starting right away with these techno-disco beats that sounded very natural to her.
The Brooklyn-based band’s performance was all about energy, dance music and infectious beats, and the crowd knew it before they had even started, embracing the bouncy rhythms with no hesitation and transforming the block party into a dance party.
While announcing ‘Simultaneously’, JD Samson said it was about ‘co-dependency’, but before they could even start the song, a guitar broke, then the computer fell on the ground, which let the drummer play a solo of tropical rhythms for some time. These technical difficulties let Samson interact even more with the audience, feeling confident and at ease even in difficult times.
During their performance, I couldn’t help thinking about the current success of dance music, when I found out later on that JD Samson wrote an article entitled ‘I love my job, but it made me poorer’ for the huffingtonpost, just last week, expressing the fact she is struggling just to meet her basic needs! How come fake transgender Lady Gaga gets all the attention when there is MEN?
They had to cut short their performance because of these technical problems, but played a few more songs from their album ‘Talk About Body’, closing their set with ‘Who Am I To Feel So Free’, a sort of anthem, or a bold claim for freedom,… of the body.