SIGNUM: Hellfire & Brimstone: Beyond Punk with The Gossip

Hellfire & Brimstone:
Beyond Punk with The Gossip

The Gossip is called a punk band, but the term seems inadequate. Punk makes you think of testosterone, of anger, and of anomie. But only one of The Gossip’s three members is a man, and in conversation the band members come across as unfailingly friendly, enthusiastic, and laid back. There’s also the music: it's as raw and straightforward as most punk, with driving guitar and clashing drums, but it also displays dimensions of musical influence that take it beyond what most people think of as punk. Although a small band – only three members – with simple lyrics and a correspondingly spare sound, The Gossip has many layers of musical style and a lot to say.

Beth Ditto’s rich throaty growl can make even "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sound dirty.

The Gossip's bluesy edge combines with radical gospel to create a truly unique brand of punk. "It’s not like we sat down and decided, 'oh let’s do gospel punk.' It just happened this way," says guitarist Brace Paine, "I think it definitely comes from Arkansas." Brace, drummer Kathy Mendonca, and vocalist Beth Ditto all hail from the same tiny town of Searcy, Arkansas. Like the disaffected children of small towns everywhere, the three got out as soon as they could. Beth moved to Olympia, Washington for school, and friends Brace and Kathy later joined her. The Gossip formed soon after, with Brace putting off his planned enrollment in the Air Force to take part in the burgeoning Olympia indie music scene.

But even with their relocation to the Pacific Northwest, they never completely left their southern influences behind. "We all went to Southern Baptist churches," Beth explains, "and I went to a Pentecostal church for a while with crazy gospel music." In fact, gospel jump-starts their new album on Kill Rock Stars, That’s Not What I Heard, with a hyped-up, punked-out version of the standard "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." It’s not what you normally expect from punk, and that difference sets the tone for the rest of the CD.

Despite their early religious backgrounds, and their upbringing in a town that Beth denounces as "reserved and conservative," That’s Not What I Heard is mostly comprised of material that would send any Southern Baptist preacher into a tizzy of hellfire and brimstone. It’s full of sly come-ons, unabashedly raw and unashamedly sexual. Beth Ditto’s rich throaty growl can make even "Swing Low" sound dirty, and when she exults, "Honey, ain’t no woman like a Southern girl," in the leering tune "Southern Comfort," you feel in your gut that she misses more about her old home than just the Waffle House and her family.

The Gossip isn’t interested in what anyone else thinks about the up-front queer content of their songs. "Girl, I’ll even tell your sister," Beth gleefully belts in "Bring It On," and when she goes on to purr, "Girl I’ll love you like no other," you can’t help but believe it. The raw, sexy twang of these and other paeons to girl-on-girl desire is refreshing, if disconcerting to some, in a punk scene that was originally dominated by angry men.

"When these things come out of my mouth, they don’t expect it," Beth acknowledges. But she doesn’t feel that the surprise is necessarily because she’s a woman, or queer. There’s a more obvious reason why she doesn’t fit in with others’ ideas of who she should be as a performer. "I don’t understand why it’s like a male thing. There are all these women, though, with perfect bodies, and 23 inch waists, and a perfect figure, and I’m nothing like these people." People focus on Beth’s appearance, and she resents the implication that a large girl can’t get it on just as much, as well, and with as much relish as the latest MTV-annointed waif diva. Her aggressive onstage persona and her saucy delivery of songs like "Hott Date" and "Got body if you want it" should dispel the notion that fat and sexy are mutually exclusive concepts, but some people still have trouble adjusting. "I always noticed that I was proud of my body but other people weren’t. Even this friend of mine would say, ‘If you just lost 10 pounds you’d be beautiful,’" Beth recalls. "It sucks that you can’t love your body, because you’re seeing in magazines, or on commercials, ‘Oh I was fat and unhappy but I lost weight and now I’m married my whole life has changed for the better.’ It’s so discouraging. Every day, I remind myself that that’s just bullshit, a bunch of companies trying to make money, and it’s not true."