Ladies and gentlemen, I am so totally having a major Leslie Hall moment right now. Leslie Hall is kind of magic. I really appreciate her wholehearted embrace of all things opulently vulgar, and at the same time, sometimes I find her mysterious and incomprehensible, but in a very delightful way. She’s doing something really interesting with a sort of middle-American, white, totally square kind of femininity (think: stretch pants, ugly sweaters, cats) and is combing it with a lot of sheer awesome (think: zombies, Back to the Future, UFOs, killer dance moves) and a lot of major awkwardness. And while she’s been embraced by the sort of hipstery feministy set (represent!) and there is a lot of irony in what she does, I think that at the same time there’s an earnestness (there’s that word again!) and a lot of love behind her music. Take this totally rad song about crafting:
Leslie Hall is making fun of crafting BECAUSE CRAFTING IS SO AWESOME and she knows it. I am also currently fairly obsessed with Blame it On the Booty, which I have been watching approximately 10.5 times a day. There’s a pretty hilarious version of fat acceptance going on here that I really delight in:
So, someone who saw this link says to me the other day, “tell me about Blame it On the Booty.” And, like, please, try to explain Leslie Hall to anybody. It’s inexplicable. But because I sit around and think about these things all the time, I did actually have something to say. Leslie Hall, I have decided, is performing a particular aesthetic that I have termed the Hipster Grotesque. That is to say, she tries to be as hideous as possible for the purpose of being somehow ironic. What’s interesting about Leslie Hall, is that when she does this I LOVE IT, whereas when I see hipsters in Silver Lake in bad 80s getup it makes me want to give them all makeovers and attitude adjustments. And I think it’s because Leslie Hall clearly knows how ridiculous she is being, and it’s that self-awareness combined with this sort of earnest joy that make what she does so appealing to me. It’s like she’s reclaimed irony for the overly self-aware fat girl set. (Look for my forthcoming Exciting Academic Paper, “Wearing Gold Spandex Pants I Made a Hip Hop Album: On Leslie Hall and the Hipster Grotesque,” coming soon to a musicology seminar near you.)
Also there’s something to be said about the fact that she calls herself a rapper. There’s some kind of critique of whiteness at work here too, but I need to think about it some more before I can come up with some sort of more cogent theory. But I think you can draw parallels to things like the Flight of the Conchords doing a Biz Markie impersonation – I’m interested in what it is that makes it so funny when white people who are impossibly hip pretend to be impossibly square and do hip hop.
ANYHOW, here is a really amazing song about Back to the Future!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If I were to, say, “do some musicology” on this song, I might talk about how Leslie has a pretty irregular usage of rhythm here, and perhaps speculate that the way timing works in this song is a reflection of how time travel technology destabilizes the idea of time as we know it, while the driving rhythms of the chorus represent the act of hurtling through time and space in a Delorean. (FUN UNRELATED FACT: For a very long time I thought the Pixies’ “My Velouria” was actually called “My Delorean.”)
And while I really wholeheartedly support Leslie’s decision to live her life in spandex, I know it’s not for everybody, and is not necessarily a life choice that I would make. But I think this glorious hot pink thing is perfect for this song, because it’s ideal attire when you go back to 1955 to hang out with mom and dad at prom, and also I’m pretty sure Leslie Hall would really dig the colour, not to mention the sequins:
