AP Track Review
Gianna Gianna, the closest entity I personally know that embodies a living breathing work of avant garde art has just released her debut for Manimal Vinyl called "Unlocked" and within it's askew production and electro anti-pop pop destruction it poetically pushed idols off pedestals. Gianna Gianna since (2008 or thereabouts) has been pushing boundaries concerning the feminism and gender (and more). Her's and other's attempts at reshaping the bell curve is a noble one and art, after all, leads the way. It always has really and my first knowledge of her was as part of the electro-industrial-experimental hip hop outfit BLOK. That was (and is) a family affair with her brother Damien Blaise and sometimes Jesse Saint John (her other brother). Blaise co-produces with Gianna Gianna here and it works so well as you would expect from siblings who undoubtedly can finish each one's sentences.
On Unlocked, Gianna Gianna might even temper her wild vocal alliterations (a bit) but there is still that sense of possession that goes hand in hand (to me) with her wild feral performance live or otherwise. I do mean possessed by art, by the way, and if her one self is wild and wide eyed, her other self (when you talk to her one on one) is quite the opposite. She is beyond nice and incredibly focused. Of Unlocked she offers:
“The lyrics are a metaphor about generally any femme-identifying entity in any relationship,” she begins. “There are in actuality these precious deity-like beings. They are ‘worshipped’ and pursued by a mate. Then when the relationship has run its course, they are tossed away and buried by photos of their ex’s new deity on their Instagram. This song is speaking as the deity getting their revenge.”
Not to cannibalize my own writing but formerly, on this blog, I likened Gianna Gianna to a surrealist and brought up the 1929 dshort Un Chien Andalou directed by now surrealist darling Luis Bunuel. It is that film you saw in college with the "eye slicing" imagery. One excerpt from that article is:
Gianna Gianna's video's and musical artwork does, to me, have many musical eye slicing moments and while she doesn't dabble that much in the grotesque there is a feral nature to her movements offset by her red blooded beauty and raw eroticism. The sounds and prose perplex me in that "mommy, we are not in Kansas anymore" and in many of her art / vision / sound pieces I do get the sense that there are feminist and anti-feminist themes and maybe even a challenging of the feminist bourgeoisie.
You can read the article here. Gianna Gianna and other avant garde provocateurs are important. Not that you have to understand their vision (or mission) all the time but to simply step into it firmly and look at things through someone else's divergent perspective.
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Robb Donker Curtius
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