Tonight’s selections from Olympia, WA’s trans-feminist hardcore band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit). These tracks are from their 2015 self-titled demo.
Why G.L.O.S.S.? A band that existed for 1 ½ years. A band that recorded a total of 10 songs (less than 18 minutes of music). A band that was offered a not-insignificant amount of money to sign with well respected punk label Epitaph Records but chose to break up instead. Read on.
“I consistently feel bowled over by the [positive reaction to the demo],” says Sadie [Smith, vocals]. “I have been brought to tears many times from letters, emails and conversations at our shows with other queer and trans folks who have been impacted by our songs… I think for trans women to be honest about their lives there [will] be a lot of pain and a lot of shit to dig up. Singing in G.L.O.S.S. is kind of like getting to be a superhero, like weaponizing a lifetime of anguish and alienation.” BitchMedia.org
THEY TOLD US WE WERE GIRLS / HOW WE TALK, DRESS, LOOK, AND CRY
THEY TOLD US WE WERE GIRLS / SO WE CLAIMED OUR FEMALE LIVES
NOW THEY TELL US WE AREN'T GIRLS / OUR FEMININITY DOESN'T FIT
WE'RE FUCKING FUTURE GIRLS / LIVING OUTSIDE SOCIETY'S SHIT!
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Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit
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The foundation of G.L.O.S.S. was poured in Boston—well-known in punk circles for its hardcore scene—where frontwoman Sadie and guitarist Jake [Bison] attended shows together, the former a closeted transgender teenager in a scene, like pretty much every area of American rock music, dominated by cis-gendered, heterosexual white men. "I spent most of those years in the back of the room," Sadie told Bitch Media in 2015, "but I was always watching, always feeling."
Eventually Jake and Sadie would make their way to Olympia, Washington State's capital city of warring ideologies. In the town of artists, activists, hippies, punks, and weirdos vs. its heavy conservative contingent, Sadie was looking to build a healthier existence emotionally but was eventually inspired to start a hardcore band with Jake and a murderer's row of local punks—Tannrr on guitar, Julaya [Antolin] on bass, and Corey [Rose Evans] on drums.
G.L.O.S.S. would in turn record and release a demo in early 2015. Packed tightly into five songs, the eight-minute EP was like throwing an M-80 into a glass house with its powerful songs of rejecting validation from the straight boy canon and trendy mutant skinheads; decrying the performance of masculinity; crafting incendiary anthems for transfemmes, genderfluid folks, and outcasts tired of standing in the back of the venue. Spiked baseball bats beating down the structures of repression and the closets the straight white establishment force trans and nonbinary people into. Trans people being the targets of straight male bigotry and oppression. Supported by pummelling instrumentation and Sadie's barbed wire-shredded screams, the G.L.O.S.S. demo was a homicidal rebuke of transphobia and all its disgusting subideals. — KEXP
THIS IS FOR THE OUTCASTS / REJECTS / GIRLS AND THE QUEERS
FOR THE DOWNTRODDEN WOMEN WHO HAVE SHED THEIR LAST TEARS
FOR THE FIGHTERS / PSYCHOS / FREAKS AND THE FEMMES
FOR ALL THE TRANSGENDER LADIES IN CONSTANT TRANSITION
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Outcast Stomp
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At its best, hardcore is personal; it tends to erase the spatial distinctions between performer and audience, until there is a primordial flow of bodies, ideas, and energy. Growing up, the experience of my own queerness was often unreal and abstract, which combined into a kind of confusion and anger in myself. Trans Day of Revenge [the bands' second release] takes the anger and confusion one feels in the depths of the margins, and translates them, literalizes them, from a burning abstraction into something almost tangible. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. “We’re fucking future girls/living outside society’s shit!” Sadie screamed on the first song on their demo. G.L.O.S.S. advance the possibilities inherent in queerness, even as they depict and reject the present horrors that queerness endures. It is music that is, above all, about survival and survivors. They project a future, both in the genre of hardcore and in the genre of reality. — Pitchfork
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Lined Lips and Spiked Bats
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As a cis-gendered man, I think a lot about taking up space in a place that isn't meant for me. I think about being an admirer of G.L.O.S.S. and what they stood for, even though Sadie has mentioned in multiple interviews about being sort of confused by the acclaim the band has gotten from cis people. Is this a matter of barging into someone else's safe space? Conversations like this probably played into the decision G.L.O.S.S. made to discontinue recording music. From the group's breakup statement: "Being in the mainstream media, where total strangers have a say in something we've created for other queer people, is exhausting." I immediately think of the commentary brought forth in the piece "G.L.O.S.S., Hardcore, and the Righteous White Voice." I think of the intersecting discourse of when it is and when it isn't appropriate to speak to an experience you haven't lived.
Ultimately, I feel music is the great uniter in an increasingly fractured world. I am implicitly aware of the fact that Trans Day of Revenge isn't for me, and there might be some sort of line I'm crossing by singing its praises anyway. But that doesn't overshadow the importance of this work of art; it doesn't delude its relevance or detract from the notion of how important it is to be armed when the fascists kick down your door. — KEXP
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Masculine Artifice
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Goodbye from G.L.O.S.S. (published in Maximum RockNRoll)
Hey y’all,
G.L.O.S.S. has decided to break up and move on with our lives. We all remain close friends, but are at a point where we need to be honest about the toll this band is taking on the mental and physical health of some of us. We are not all high-functioning people, and operating at this level of visibility often feels like too much.
We want to measure success in terms of how we’ve been able to move people and be moved by people, how we’ve been able to grow as individuals. This band has become too large and unwieldy to feel sustainable or good anymore—the only thing growing at this point is the cult of personality surrounding us, which feels unhealthy. There is constant stress, and traveling all the time is damaging our home lives, keeping us from personal growth and active involvement in our communities. Being in the mainstream media, where total strangers have a say in something we’ve created for other queer people, is exhausting.
The punk we care about isn’t supposed to be about getting big or becoming famous, it’s supposed to be about challenging ourselves and each other to be better people. It feels hard to be honest and inward when we are constantly either put on a pedestal or torn down, worshiped or demonized. We want to be whole people, not one-dimensional cartoons.
We are so thankful for everyone who has supported us and taken the time to tell us what we mean to you. If this band was for you, you know who you are, and no one can take that away. [… final tour dates]
We are eternally grateful for the people we have met and the places we have been due to G.L.O.S.S. Making these connections has been deeply rewarding and meaningful. Thank you so much for everything over the past year and a half.
Sharing this experience with you all has truly meant the world to us.
With love,
Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit
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Full set, Live San Jose 8/12/2016
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“We're only the people that we are today because we're finished being the people that we were yesterday.” — Sadie “Switchblade” Smith
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Magic Johnson, Fortune Feimster, Wet Leg (R 10/10/22)
Jimmy Fallon: Pedro Pascal, Kathryn Newton, Armani White (R 2/2/23)
Stephen Colbert: Kieran Culkin, Run the Jewels (R 8/10/22)
Seth Meyers: Keri Russell, Graham Norton (R 4/26/23)
James Corden: Josh Gad, Fred Armisen, the Big Pink (R 10/26/22)
SPOILER WARNING
None. All repeats.
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