Michelle Shocked is Ready to Rumba

08 Nov 2019

When contacted about interviewing Michelle Shocked, I was instantly curious and also wary. I had seen Shocked in concert twice and been impressed. And her 1989 album Captain Swing was one that I listened to frequently until what Shocked calls "the Yoshi incident." At that point I essentially wrote Shocked off and hadn't followed any of her subsequent endeavours. As she drily puts it, "I'm sure you're not alone."

Listening to some of her new music made the prospect intriguing. Her upcoming song cycle, Musical Chairs, is extraordinary, as is the video released to promote the tour. And reading the few interviews that I could find just deepened the mystery of why "the Yoshi incident" happened. Shocked is a complicated artist and person. Musical Chairs is lyrically concerned with artist's rights and the issue of copyright. One hooky chorus demands, "Don't you dare to compare my song to a chair." That it is framed in lush and infectious latin rhythms - the tour is called "Ready to Rhumba" - makes it irresistible.

I was curious how she chose rumba as the musical form for her message. "I love the synergy of music and message, form and function," she says. "The truth is: I fell in love with clave and once you go clave, it's hard to go back. It's a delightful facet of history that after the Cuban revolution, copyright was abolished. I don't have the exact details but I can speculate that it was considered counter-revolutionary or petite bourgeoisie. At which point a lot of Puerto Rican musicians in New York said, 'Hey if you're not going to use those copyrights, we know what to do with them,' and they invented salsa. At which point the Cuban government responded with, 'On second thought . . .'"

The lyrical inspiration for Musical Chairs was already percolating in Shocked's mind. "It was a fairly organic chain of events that took place. I had a prescience and a precociousness about my legacy from the outset. It was instinctual more than theoretical. I had often compared my catalogue, I looked at my albums like children with personalities. So I gave myself permission to be as protective and as fierce in doing what I could to make sure that they found their way in the world. And that instinct grew stronger and stronger over time and by the time the internet fell down on all of our heads, I was able to see with a little bit of foresight, not a great amount of wisdom, the challenges in protecting my legacy, my catalogue, my children. I had been researching and developing my thinking but I didn't have a vehicle." Don't you dare call her song a chair.

"I discovered that I don't write songs, I write song cycles," she says. "I won't sit down and take the time to write a song until I have a comprehensive coherent concept to embed it in. Artist's rights was definitely the concept but only after my first trip to Cuba in January of 2016, did the glimmer of instinct begin to grow. My second trip was to the birthplace of rumba and at that point in my education I started to realize that there were as many idioms in rumba and the folkloric traditions of Cuba as I was going to need to carry the freight of my concept."

The song cycle completed, "I went into the studio with an incredible producer Nelson Gonzalez and he exceeded beyond my wildest dreams in creating the rhythm that was necessary for me to then bring in my lyrical and melodic concepts. He honoured his own legacy, he has been Paul Simon's muse for many, many years, so he knows both worlds, the world of rumba and the world of the lyric singer songwriter. I couldn't have been in better hands. We have the final mixes not yet mastered. It's the first time I've produced a studio project with no plan of when or how to release. But I'm keeping the faith and having fun in the meantime presenting the material live."

The live format is not the big band of the recording, it is a trio. "Max Pollock is my body percussionist," says Shocked of the musician who provides the beats. "He has practiced and developed over many years what he calls Rumba Tap. The keyboardist I am bringing, Nicki Denner is a badass. She hangs with the heaviest of New York rumba cats. It's a very macho tradition so I take my hat off to Nicki. The fact that she's willing to collaborate with me and Max just makes it such a joy. Her passions went even deeper than mine. I could be accused of dilettantism, she's dedicated her practice to this exclusively. I eschew any criticism of being a tourist in another culture because of my own practice, I have earned the right to delve into any idiom and follow my passion as vehicles for my gift as a lyric poet."

At this point I have to ask about "the Yoshi incident." In 2013, during a performance in San Francisco, Shocked announced that "God hates fags" and proceeded to elaborate. The audience walked out, the rest of the tour was cancelled, and Shocked's career, her mainstream fanbase composed mainly of left-leaners and LGBT folk, collapsed. Shocked is, inspired initially by gospel music, a born-again Christian, and that audience she retained. But the reasons for her statements turn out to be considerably more complicated than dictates of faith.

Shocked literally sighs when I press her on her comments. "We can refer to it in shorthand as 'the Yoshi incident' if that helps. I can give you right off the top three of what I call 'money shots' which are pull quotes that are unequivocal. Let's start with 'You would have to be a moron to be a homophobe.' Here's another one, 'I went from being a self-loathing closeted lesbian to a notorious blacklisted homophobe in less than 24 hours.' And the third one, 'I'm not a homophobe, I'm the world's greatest homophobe.' Make sure that word is capitalized, greatest is capitalized and homophobe is capitalized so that it takes on this Barnum and Bailey sense of the greatest show on earth. That's the click bait but if we want to get to the heart of the matter, there were ample explanations."

What follows is a long and convoluted conversation with Shocked being audibly frustrated at having to explain something that she feels she has already dealt with. And my becoming frustrated at not being able to gain clarity. Yet throughout it all, she is engaging, humorous and possesses that rare quality of speaking in full thoughtful sentences. Occasionally we agree to disagree and frequently we have to backtrack as there are several strands of ideas happening all at once. We start with Shocked invoking Robert Johnson, "You can call him a bluesman but he was an entertainer first and foremost and he was going to do whatever he had to to get the party started. Rock critics bent themselves into pretzels to turn Robert Johnston into an archetypal bluesman and in doing so had to excise all the inconvenient truths of his vast repertoire."

Shocked then talks of a previous controversy. "When Short, Sharp, Shocked was released in 1988, I was nominated for an award at the CMJs. Every single nominee for best new artist was a woman. I flippantly got up and accepted the award, I won, and said 'They might as well have called this category: they might be lesbians.' At that point, you're a hipster and you happen to know there's a band called They Might Be Giants, or you're a tin-eared knee-jerk saying 'Aha, Michelle Shocked just came out of the closet.'" 

Shocked's rise to fame occurred at the same time as Melissa Etheridge, KD Lang, Tracy Chapman, and several other women whose semi-closeted sexuality was part of their allure. Shocked, who projected a certain androgyny, was considered one of the congregation. I express to her that at that point in time, queers were so hungry to have our existence acknowledged that we searched out and supported artists who were giving us the representation that we had been missing. Shocked was experiencing it from a different perspective. "To make a case for a bunch of women in a post-Suzanne Vega 'Luka' '87-'88 as the first wave of queer representation in music just doesn't hold water. Glam rock was around long before 'The Year of the Women' ever showed up."

We then have a lively discussion that encompasses female folkies, closet lesbians, the liberating aspect of rumba's strict rhythms, gospel music, Rob Halford,  Keith Richards, blackface, Shocked's status as a born-again Christian, the irony that Shocked first came to fame thanks to the bootlegged cassette The Campfire Tapes, Little Richard, and "the queering of mainstream culture." When I say that I don't believe that mainstream culture has been queered enough after centuries of oppression, Shocked responds,"I don't agree but not to the point of wanting to thumb wrestle you for it. It is my opinion that mainstream culture has been totally queered. Being on the inside of it, it was a headscratcher. I obviously had no control over the company I was keeping, it wasn't like I had chosen to hang out with these gals. And I'll take some responsibility for my complicity in it, but not much. Most of it was foisted on me and I was powerless to prevail against the narrative."

She then makes a very shrewd observation. "It's great that we come from different perspectives but what I was hoping to accomplish is rather than using a fairly lightweight frame of what happened in 1988 as the year of the woman, I would like to propose that privileged white males who were experiencing a measure of the quality of oppression, or discrimination or limitations, that people of colour and women, work women of colour in there somehow, had effectively rallied their forces with the imperative of the AIDS crisis with the rallying cry of 'Silence = Death.' In 1988 we had a president, we had a culture that insisted that unseemly topics, like AIDS-related deaths, was not fit for conversation. The queering of mainstream culture was a direct response to that outrage."

While admiring her theory if not totally agreeing with her conclusion, I still do not understand why "the Yoshi incident" occurred. Shocked continues to be evasive until finally, after much badgering, she says, "Here's the reason I said what I said. Because someone was in the audience bootlegging my music. Stealing my copyright. And there is only one person who would care about that abuse of my rights and that is me. I had to figure out a way to make everyone on earth care about the consequences of stealing an artist's words. And I did. And that's the answer." 

Musical Chairs had already been gestating. Shocked wanted to ruin the bootleg by making it unreleasable, but wound up making it, shorn of her music, probably the most played clip of her career. She is unrepentant. "The idea that I could have quote unquote saved my career by apologizing for words that were quite obviously facetious, satire, never occurred to me because I refuse to apologize for coming up with something so creative that here we are seven years later almost, scratching our heads trying to figure out what it all meant. It was a sacrifice but it's not like I wasted my time in between. I've been very productive and busy."

She then circles back yet again. "We now know that Robert Johnson was a popular entertainer. I am guilty of being ahead of my time just enough that if I'm not a closeted lesbian I am an obnoxious homophobe. If it takes as long as it took Robert Johnson for my true identity to be revealed, I'll just hang in there."

In the meantime Shocked has artist right's to advocate for - we discuss Taylor Swift's recent battle over the ownership of her masters, something Shocked very shrewdly retained, and she quips "If I've gone from being associated with KD Lang and Melissa Etheridge to Taylor Swift, let's hear it for versatility" - and a tour to perform. "I've done this show a handful of times," she says. "What people are going to be seeing in Toronto is an incredibly rare and precious preview of an artist at the peak of her powers about to unleash a juggernaut of vindication and righteous anger. If they're smart, they'll come down to this show. It'll be like going to see Prince at First Avenue. I was there man. And if someone's really stupid, they're going to bootleg the show."

I reassure Shocked that when I've finished fact checking the quotes, that I will erase the interview. And she can't resist one last little bit of provocation. "When I'm watching RuPaul's Drag Race, I'll be thinking to myself, I wonder what Drew means when he says that mainstream culture hasn't been queered enough. Ask me what I mean when I say that it's been thoroughly queered. What's the difference between blackface and drag? Get back to me on that one."