LUDICRA THE TENANT (PROFOUND LORE)
In pop music, unisex is unusual. Hip-hop, for example, includes a ton of women—but most of them are background singers or R & B vocalists making guest appearances. Female MCs often rap about subjects rooted in femaleness: wearing lip gloss, being ultrahot, screwing or not needing to screw guys. Women in hip-hop also tend to be glammed up like Foxy Brown, so you can’t miss the important bits—if they dress like Missy Elliot, they come across as deliberately butch. Even in a genre like grunge, which has roots in metal, gender differences remain important—which is why the awesomely guttural early-90s Sub Pop band Dickless named themselves Dickless and wrote songs with names like “The C-Word” and “Saddle Tramp.”
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That’s not to say gender is completely inconsequential in the metal scene. I have no doubt that women in extreme metal have to deal with sexism. Satanists aren’t much for PC, and though most metalheads aren’t satanists, they’re still guys. And of course people notice when you’ve got women in the band; most profiles of Ludicra go out of the way to mention it. Still, I can’t think of another genre in which it matters so little. No one thinks of Astarte or Gallhammer or Ludicra as less authentically metal than bands without women in them. They’re as technically accomplished as men; they spit bile like men; their lyrics and album covers are for the most part just as bleak and sexless as those created exclusively by men. They sound the same. For all intents and purposes, they are the same. The feminist egalitarian ideal has been achieved not in gynocentric folk or riot-grrrl punk but in the almost entirely male world of extreme metal, where the war of the sexes, like identity and love and hope, disappears in a blank roar of loathing and degradation.
Sat 4/10, 8 PM, Underground Lounge, 952 W. Newport, 773-327-2739, $8, 21+.
