Bitch And Animal
Eternally Hard (Righteous Babe)
by Jamie Kiffel
“Aww, yer not gonna listen to that angry girl rock, are you?” my very clean-cut and extremely straight male friend asked his new live-in artist girlfriend. The girl, who has very quick eyes, a thin face and a creative brain, hung her head. “No, honey,” she said. She tries to keep him happy.
Just then, I asked, “What, like Ani DiFranco?” Her head snapped up. “YES!” she shrieked.
Like Ani, yes. Except that with this girl’s kind of aversion to makeup, liking for female rockers and inadvertent smiles in my direction, my Wellesley intuition purred insidiously, No, not like Ani. Like this. Then the musical noise of Bitch and Animal, the most “out” lesbian addition to Ani’s Righteous Babe Records label yet, shot through my head.
“Oh, I’m just a little girl-boy tryin’ to make my way in a man’s world…/Got my forty and my lucky extra firm dildo”…And those crazy African drums…
Bitch and Animal blatantly is everything that beer-loving, white T-shirt-wearing boys fear Ani DiFranco to be. Ani has a growling delivery and healthy smattering of “fuck you”s, but in the end, she always admits to loving the men who drive her to insanity. She emits the smell of bisexuality, but Bitch and Animal spray Eau de Lesbos from their unshaven armpits. They are butch and blatant, miles from the closet, loud as a cranked amp. This is womyn cock rock, the new Rodan come to consume the white Amerikan male. Their liner notes are splashed with a picture of a thick, red dildo. Rrraaaah!
Run, men: The first track is all about the “best cock on the block” – a gay woman’s collection of dildos. The song is hilarious and dirty and somehow empowering as Animal raps, “the d to the i to the l to the do.” Yes, the djembe-playing is thin and sounds like cheap 1960s bongos. True, Animal‘s tough-guy styled rapping is absurd. But the idea of a lesbian waving her dick(s) around is not only exotic, it sparks a betrayed straight woman’s revenge fantasies into a gay orgiastic conflagration. Donna Summer, prance straight out of here. I can imagine no better payback than having that narrow-minded jerk who dumped me watch a woman called “Animal” announce she’s “eternally hard” and then add me to her harem of bitches.
The rest of the disc is hit and miss. The delivery is often as embarrassing as listening to a couple of lovers toy with a tape recorder. There are songs about spats, phrases like “oh my goddess,” a prayer to “the sparkly queen areola” (as in nipple), and a giggling ode to ganja, set to the tune of “Angels We Have Heard On High.” Yet what man wouldn’t be threatened by a line like, “I delve into the almost creature ovary that’s suspended on my toast on mother’s day”? Welcome to the land of women who do women. Forget the Maxim version – this is the Ms. version, the real, drippy thing. And only men with pussy are allowed.
(PO Box 95 Ellicott Station Buffalo, NY 14205)
