Arts & Entertainment
Kick-Ass Dyke
Kick-Ass Dyke
review by Joel Nichols
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Slam poet Alix Olson became well-known as the young member of the Nuyorican Poet’s Society whose performance at the 1998 National Poetry Slam competition sealed the victory for the New York-based team. She has now released a CD, “Built Like That” which encapsulates her work and translates it from live performance material to something you can play in the car or living room.
“Built Like That” is commendable as a independent release from Olson’s company, Feed the Fire Productions. It is woman-centered, queer-focused, anti-corporate, and progressive. Most of the tracks are not songs or poems, but fall in the gray area between the two forms; it is spoken word sometimes set to funky beats with acoustic guitar and back-up vocals from dykey musicians like Chris Pureka and Pamela Means, and always punctuated by Olson’s breath as she gets enough air to let loose words that attack the NRA, Corporate America, heterosexism, racism, rape culture, and “women’s” magazines, to name some of her targets.
Having heard for a while of Olson’s commitment to progressive politics and queer activism and her reputation as a kick-ass slam poet, I was thrilled to review this CD. I had never had the chance to see her live and was ready to be invigorated by this loud dyke and her call to revolution. Her politics did not disappoint, but her style was not what I was hoping for.
She sounds a lot like Ani DiFranco. If I had not known that it was Alix Olson, I would have assumed that it was a newer Ani CD and she had returned to her radical roots. Ani always included a poem or two set to music on her earlier albums. I dreaded having to listen to the whole CD; I did not want to have to hear an Ani-from-seven-years-ago sound-a-like.
For the good of the Out in the Mountains reader, I persevered. I made it through all 22 tracks on “Built Like That” and am glad I did. With more careful attention, Ani DiFranco looks like Britney Spears next to Olson’s fiercely independant and queer product. It is easy to criticize Ani because she married a man and has achieved high commercial success, but Ani’s sell-out is not what makes Alix Olson better or different.
Everything Olson has recorded is political. She has made her life and art politics to a degree that other artists have not. Early on the CD, the track “Cute for a Girl” is a beautiful poem about queer sex with a “straight” woman. Olson’s words are playful and undercut notions of male and female or gay and straight. To underscore the ridiculous nature of a male/female gender binary, the voice tells the woman “if it’s dick you’re after, check out my top drawer.” This quote is also a great example of how Olson uses sex and the body as a tool of activism in her work.
Track 13 is a poem built around the word “stick,” in its incarnations as both a noun and a verb. To refer to an anorexic model, the act of rape, feeding a baby, lesbian sex, or even as the way roles are predetermined, “stick” is reincarnated in various forms with different meanings expertly by Olson. Track 16, which is called “Armpit Hair (Mammally Factual)” and sounds kind of like a They Might be Giants song is a hilarious look at pit hair. The hair becomes a weapon that scares away boys, bad guys, and “gets all the girls.” The question of hair as a male privledge explored through the image of birds nesting under the arms of a camping dyke is exemplary of Olson’s originality, mixing the body and sexuality as a critque. This song is especially fun for me, a queer boy who naturally has less underarm hair than all his dyke friends.
Two of the more powerful and overtly political pieces, “Dear Mr. President” and “Cunt Cuntry” are strong calls to action. “Cunt Cuntry” proclaims a nation based on the cunt where Hothead Paisan and Alison Bechdel are more or less the cabinet. The cunt revolution would lead all dicks to fight for vaginal pride in a re-telling of American history that would end up with a woman-centered, anti-racist society. There would be a Museum of Unnatural History with a torture exhibit on high-heels. Even a man gets to be the vice president because “possessing a cunt matters less than possessing the cunt mentality.”
Almost everything on the CD seems conceived with originality and a independantly queer spirit. It is a wonderful release of queer art that serves as inspiration and even a call to battle for activist. If you are looking to fight the patriarchy or hear a “good dykey poet” as my friend recommended her to me, buy Alix Olson’s first CD, “Built Like That” at www.alixolson.com.
Joel Nichols studies German at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He grew up in Brandon, VT and is an intern at Out in the Mountains for the summer.
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