The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, February 2, 2016 — 5

GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

Missteps and missed 

flu shots

I 

didn’t get a flu shot this year 
for the first time in my life. 
(Really taking adulthood by 

storm, evidently.) So, of course, 
this was the first year ever I 
caught the 
flu. Over the 
course of a 
week spent 
in bed, I fin-
ished binge-
watching 
the entirety 
of “Game of 
Thrones,” 
HBO’s hall-
mark fantasy 
political/
sexual drama.

I now bring up “Thrones” 

in every conversation I can. I 
read episode recaps and dive 
dangerously deep into online 
fan theories. I’m obsessed, 
obsessed with a show that is 
notorious for its wishy-washy 
treatment of women. Laden in 
turn with complex and pow-
erful female characters and 
laughably gratuitous female 
nudity, “Thrones” isn’t win-
ning feminist awards anytime 
soon. I still love it, but like 
many things in this world, I 
feel obligated to continuously 
address its latent sexism.

At the end of my week of 

influenza, my friends and I 
went to see “Sisters,” Tina Fey 
and Amy Poehler’s newest film 
about adult sisters returning 
home for one last rager in their 
parents’ house. I felt a similar 
discomfort to when I watched 
“Thrones,” but for a different 
reason. The film is resolutely 
feminist, passing the Bechdel 
test with aplomb and inserting 
sly jokes about male privilege. 
But it also features a plot line 
about a Korean character who 
fits just about every Asian 
stereotype there is. Hae-Won 
(Greta Lee, “St. Vincent”) 
and her friends work at a nail 
salon. She is casually promis-
cuous, a plaything for white 
men and she speaks heavily 
accented English, a fact from 
which an extended joke is 
drawn. It was one of the most 
demeaning portrayals of East 
Asian women I’d seen in a long 
time. Just as I was constantly 
making both excuses for and 
criticisms of “Thrones,” I felt 
I needed to do the same for 
“Sisters,” a movie starring two 
feminists and written by one. A 
work can’t be feminist if it cre-
ates isolating and tokenizing 
images of people of color — by 
definition, that’s just not what 
feminism is.

Take another Fey creation: 

the Netflix comedy “Unbreak-
able Kimmy Schmidt.” The 

show, which was released to 
universal acclaim last March, 
follows Kimmy (Ellie Kemper, 
“The Office”), a survivor of 
abuse and terror, as she moves 
to New York and starts a new 
life. Kimmy is a uniquely femi-
nist character: naïve but buoy-
ant, hard-working and honest. 
And despite the laugh-out-loud 
humor of the show, Fey does 
not represent Kimmy’s situa-
tion lightly, earnestly express-
ing her PTSD and struggles 
acclimating to society.

But there is a catch. In the 

sixth episode, we are intro-
duced to Dong (Ki Hong Lee, 
“The Maze Runner”), a Viet-
namese delivery boy who is 
ultimately Kimmy’s love inter-
est. While an intensely lovable 
character, Dong is painted 
with many of the same limiting 
stereotypes as Hae-Won; for 
me, it’s the one sour note of the 
series.

“Tina!” I groaned to myself. 

The woman who wrote hon-
estly and poignantly about 
her youthful insecurities in 
her memoir “Bossypants,” 
the woman who gave us Liz 
Lemon, who said in “30 Rock” 
that being a woman is the 
worst “because of society!” It 
hurt me to see a woman who I 
consider a personal and profes-
sional icon missing the mark by 
so much.

These representations har-

ken back to first- and second-
wave feminism, when the 
voices of women of color were 
ignored or even squashed in 
favor of the white constituen-
cy’s goals. That shit shouldn’t 
cut it anymore. All too often 
modern feminists are forget-
ting that feminism as a system 
is inclusionary. Amy Schumer 
did it in her stand up with cal-
lous jokes about Latinos. While 
she has since apologized, 
her original biases speak to a 
greater issue — feminism is not 
feminism when it continuously 
limits divergent identities 
and experiences. And frankly, 
works of art that ignore inclu-
sivity just aren’t as good.

I don’t follow sports; recent-

ly I was looking through my 
old Facebook statuses, and one 

from the 10th grade proudly 
attested that I was boycotting 
the Super Bowl. So while I 
can’t tell you which teams are 
playing in the Super Bowl this 
year, I can tell you that Cold-
play is performing the halftime 
show, featuring the Queen her-
self, Beyoncé. Last week, the 
two released the video for their 
recent collaboration, “Hymn 
for the Weekend.”

The song fucking rocks, 

groovy yet soaring in all the 
right places. On the other 
hand, the video, which features 
Chris Martin and Yoncé don-
ning traditional Hindi garb 
and dancing in front of groups 
of Indian children celebrat-
ing Holi, the Hindu festival of 
color, is a travesty and a mis-
step. It’s cultural appropriation 
in the most basic of terms, sim-
plifying complex cultures and 
people into pretty background 
props, expressing abject pover-
ty with no context or recourse. 
It’s bad. And it comes from 
Beyoncé, a publicly proud femi-
nist who has spoken out about 
recognizing women of color in 
the feminist community.

How does this still happen? 

How can women who speak 
with such depth and resonance 
about navigating a patriarchal 
world be so tone-deaf about 
other cultures? Their femi-
nism, and their art, is so much 
better without these stereo-
types and appropriations. I 
want these women I love to be 
better, because with every lim-
iting comment or joke, they not 
only hurt the community they 
are addressing — they hurt 
feminism as a whole. Feminism 
loses credibility in the minds 
of those prone to knocking 
it down and weakening the 
system by isolating female 
voices that should be included. 
I won’t stop loving Tina and 
Amy and Bey, but criticizing 
their feminism is another step 
to making feminism better. 
Just like “Game of Thrones” 
would be so much better with 
a few less naked women and a 
few more naked men. 

Gadbois encourages you all to 

vaccinate your children with femi-

nist theory. To innoculate yourself, 

e-mail gadbnat@umich.edu.

NATALIE 

GADBOIS

Lawrence wants to 
make pop cool again

By MIMI ZAK

Daily Arts Writer

Pop music gets a pretty bad 

rep, but the genre still serves its 
original intention: it’s an amal-
gamation of various kinds of 
sounds that acts as the mono-
culture from which our national 
(and international) music com-
munity ebbs and flows. Pop 
music was once used to mark the 
best original music of the time. 
The Beatles, Michael Jackson, 
Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and The 
Beach Boys were once defined 
by the now doubtful musical dis-
tinction. Where did the change 
occur? What dragged pop music 
from something that was both 
organic and relatable to some-
thing highly manufactured and 
irrelevant to anything outside the 
allegorical club?

The descent of pop music could 

be traced back, as so many things 
can, to the rise of technologies 
and the Internet. Music stream-
ing sites created an inundation of 
artists, with most searching for 
fame at any cost. Artistic value 
and organic material fell behind 
the stronger industry algorithms 
for cookie-cutter pop music. 
Lyrical depth and sonic origi-
nality became harder to find. At 
the end of the 20th century and 
at the turn of the 21st, things of 
the musical sort were excessively 
dubious. The music of those 15 
years matched the economic and 
political stagnation of the times. 
Nothing dared to be too original. 
No one wanted to cross genres. 
The times were too hard for that.

But, in looking at the Top 40 of 

the past six years, the fight for dif-
ference appears to have returned. 
That strangeness that once pos-
sessed our former kings and 
queens of pop, like Michael Jack-
son and Madonna, have started 
to re-enter the airwaves. Most 
recently, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” 
was a Billboard hit with emo-
tional depth and sonic variety. 
Omi’s “Cheerleader” had a horn 
section playing from the speakers 
of the backyard frat party down 
the street. “i” by Kendrick Lamar 
reintroduced the Isley Brothers 
to the Top 40 listeners who were 
formerly unaware of their pop 
music importance. Genres and 
specific stylings have started to 
blur. And among these new mix-
tures of soul with jazz or pop 
or rap, the constant has started 
to edge further away from the 
unfeeling party hits of yester-
days. However slowly, and how-
ever gradually, a new era of bands 
like Lawrence, an edgy pop duo, 
are fighting for the resurgence of 
good pop music.

“We love the idea of pop 

music,” said Clyde Lawrence, one 
of the two Lawrence siblings at 
the forefront of the band. “The 
accessibility of it, the ‘hookiness’ 
of it, the catchiness of it all, the 
ability to hear something once 
and totally be into it; those are 
all a lot of things that I love. I just 
don’t happen to currently like a 
lot of the pop music. I would love 
to call our music ‘pop music.’ In 
fact, I think that our music sounds 
like what I wish pop music would 
sound like.”

Gracie Lawrence, the female 

powerhouse of the band, just 
graduated from high school. She’s 
putting off her recent acceptance 
to Brown University to go on tour 
with the rest of the band. Clyde 
Lawrence just graduated from 
Brown University with most of the 
other band members. Having used 
college as a place to collect musi-
cians and create music with them, 
Clyde never molded his time for 
the sole purpose of academics.

“For me, college was ... well, I 

looked at it as a musical oppor-
tunity in a lot of ways,” Clyde 
said. “I don’t mean to belittle the 
educational opportunities that 
I received at school. Brown’s a 
really great academic school, but 
I went to school with the pure 
intention of trying to put together 
a band.”

So Clyde and Gracie Lawrence 

and their band of college musi-
cians played gigs in and around 
the Brown University communi-
ty. At dance halls, public parties 
and small gigs up and down the 
East Coast, the band used their 
soul-based pop sound and long 
list of cover songs to attract a 

groovy college crowd.

“I had always heard that col-

lege is a great place to kind of get 
a start and get a bunch of a shows 
under your belt,” Clyde said. “If 
you talked to anyone who knew 
me at Brown, they would tell you 
that that was definitely my big-
gest priority over homework. So 
for me, it wasn’t either college or 
music; it was ‘how do we make 
this music experience count?’ ”

The band’s upcoming album 

release has been a long time 
coming for many of the band’s 
followers. After Clyde’s solo EP 
release in 2013, Homesick, the 
band has been taking its time in 
creating an album they believe 
will best match the sound they 
hope to emulate. Under the 
direction of Soulive member 
Eric Krasno, the famed producer 
has helped Lawrence with con-
necting their upcoming album 
release to artists with a similar 
mission and sound.

Krasno’s network and his con-

nection to the Brooklyn blues, 
soul and funk world, aided the 
Lawrence clan in collecting musi-
cal bedfellows of similar sound 
and transcending taste.

“We were joking that we 

should really hit up Cory Henry, 
the organist from Snarky Puppy 
and get him on our album,” Gra-
cie said. “And we made that joke 
in front of Kras and he respond-
ed with, ‘Should I call in Henry, 
do you guys want Cory Henry?’ 
Same with the drummer from 
Lettuce, Adam Deitch, Krasno set 
us up with him to collaborate on 
our album.”

What about Lawrence, though, 

is so unique? What places them 
above or among the soul/pop 
sounds of today? All these ques-
tions are answerable: Lawrence 
automatically finds originality 
in the placement and following 
of their music. The band is cat-
egorized by fans as a modern act 
whose sound and message are 
linked. Lawrence is like Leon 
Bridges, Vulfpeck, Lake Street 
Dive, Donnie Trumpet & the 
Social Experiment, White Denim 
and many others because of the 
visceral, emotional, almost tan-
gible reaction that naturally 
flows from the soulful character 
of their sound. Forget the con-
veyor belts of music production 
where people create the music 
they think will sell. Lawrence 
has placed themselves among a 
selection of modern artists whose 
music is eternal because they mix 
catchiness with genuine feeling. 
They are bound together, across 
a variety of genres, as those who 
want their audience to connect as 
much as they want them to dance 
and awkwardly sway.

“The whole concept behind the 

album is that we want it all to feel 
as though it can coexist with the 
old and the new,” Clyde said. “You 

should be able to put on one of our 
songs at a party right after play-
ing a Stevie Wonder song and it 
should be able to continue what-
ever vibe or feeling the audience 
was just feeling. Then that song 
could be followed by a Beyoncé or 
Bruno Mars track.”

With Paul Simon’s Graceland 

and Carole King’s Tapestry or 
anything by Stevie Wonder in 
mind, the band Lawrence placed 
an intense amount of focus on 
creating a cohesive album with 
an overarching emotional arch.

“We are less jammy and less 

improvisionational than other 
bands in the soul and funk world 
because we are so focused on 
creating the song,” Gracie said. 
“We’re too focused on the emo-
tion and structure of the song, 
and then the album as a whole, to 
allow for too much jam band-like 
action.”

The art of the cohesive, all-

feeling album isn’t lost with 
bands like Lawrence. Time and 
specific detail was placed on the 
ebb and flow of each song in the 
context of the larger album. Emu-
lating the vision of artists they 
adore and appreciate, Lawrence 
has created an album that tells 
a story, or includes some sort of 
journey, instead of just a collec-
tion of separate pop singles.

“The 
vibes 
of 
each 
and 

every song are distinct,” Gracie 
recounted. “And I don’t know if 
people still listen to full albums, 
but hopefully they will because 
that’s how we wrote our album. 
We placed intense detail on the 
emotional journey of the album. 
We want it to be exciting for the 
album to tell its own story, and for 
every song to share its own kind 
of sound.”

Lawrence, with the help of 

Eric Krasno, are working against 
the torrential wave of cookie-cut-
ter pop music that tends to over-
take the music industry. Because 
it’s a band like Lawrence with 
whom the masses can connect. 
It is bands like Lawrence who 
could and should be well-known, 
but they’re not. And many can’t 
understand why. I don’t neces-
sarily understand why they aren’t 
more popular. There is a magnetic 
and powerful kind of sound that 
emanates from anything mix-
ing the genres of soul and pop. 
Lawrence is one of those bands 
that deliver something magnetic, 
who feel like a well-kept secret. 
They’re holding something that 
more should know about, but 
they have to look a little harder to 
find. They’re just waiting for the 
rest of the world to catch up.

Lawrence’s new album will be 

arriving sometime in the coming 
month. This coming Monday, Feb-
ruary 8, Lawrence is performing at 
the Crofoot in Pontiac, Michigan. 
Tickets are $10, and doors open at 
7 P.M.

MUSIC INTERVIEW

rousing, 
pleading 
“Lover 

Come Back” that gave the 
audience just what they were in 
the mood for: something to sing 
along to, something to make 
them smile in spite of sadness 
and something that allowed 
them to find commonalities 
between Green’s story and their 
own.

The variety of styles presented 

at the festival were embodied 
best by two acts in particular 
that have lasted throughout 
the growth and development of 
the folk genre, growing with it 
and constantly contributing to 
it. Music veterans Yo La Tengo 
and Richard Thompson, with 
musical releases dating back 
to 1996 and 1974 respectively, 
were brilliantly distinct and 
representative of tried and true 
music. Singer Georgia Hubley 

of Yo La Tengo has an almost 
meditative quality to her voice 
that makes it simultaneously 
relaxing and attention-grabbing. 
With four other instrumentalists 
complementing 
her 
sound, 

the full effect of the band’s 
simplistic style was a joy to 
experience visually and audibly.

Thompson was like the cool 

fun uncle of the night, telling 
jokes 
between 
songs 
and 

getting everyone to participate 
by teaching them some lyrics. 
Rolling Stone has called him one 
of the best guitarists of all time, 

and if you’re inclined to compare 
his fame with that of the younger 
generation, it’s interesting to 
note that his most recent album, 
Still, reached number six on UK 
charts.

Earlier in the evening, the 

rocking Ben Daniels Band — 
who just released a new EP on 
iTunes — opened the show, 
followed by the angelic voices 
of Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke 
of Penny and Sparrow. Nora 
Jane Struthers & The Party 
Line 
contributed 
bluegrass 

vibes, and The Oh Hellos 
brought nine people on stage 
to create the biggest sounds of 
the evening. Originally a sibling 
duo, Maggie and Tyler Heath 
have certainly grown beyond 
bedroom recordings, releasing 
two full albums and an EP 
since 2011. Their appearance at 
the festival is just one stop on 
their current North American 
tour that will include sets at 
the Okeechobee Music & Arts 
Festival and Bonnaroo.

FOLK FEST
From Page 1

‘Thrones’ isn’t 
winning any 

feminist awards, 

but I love it.

A work can’t 

be feminist if it 
tokenizes POC.

WANNA GET CLOBBERED BY 
CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM?

E-mail ajtheis@umich.edu and katjacqu@umich.edu for 

information on applying to Daily Arts.

Thompson was 

like the cool 
uncle of the 

night.

