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| The gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks |
Making things twee is exactly right. That's the most recent version of emasculation (and I would say defemination). It was even worse in the 90's when indie was dominated by shoe gazing, voice cracking twee men. I don't have any problem with these kinds of twee or elfen men, in fact, I loved a lot of these bands. I also lump the comics of Daniel Clowes in with this whole wonderful era of the subterranean 90's.
Long story short, there is such a thing as an elfen man. I love me a twee elfen man.
So, I shouldn't say it was worse. But there wasn't any place for a more virile expression. And as my voice got progressively lower and my outsized immigrant features began to assert themselves, I realized that I would never be a part of this era of elfen hairlessness.
On to the topic at hand. Will, I think there's no way the sisters would put Woody "in quotes" (I just put that in quotes, fighting fire with fire so to speak). And they would never "let capitalism do the rest." They would never be allied with capitalism in that way.
I see Woody as a robust force of nature just like the Savage Sisters and similarly endangered by the likes of Don Gilber. I think James Vernor locked him in his basement when he went off to fight in the Civil War. Woody probably blundered in there from the subterranean tunnels and fell asleep. As a pharmacist, Vernor spent the entire war dreaming up a concoction that would progressively cause the wild man in his basement to diminish. Upon return, he subjected him to a regimen that resulted in the gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks.
I say true muliebrity doesn't feel need to ridicule or diminish virility. Of course, being a pagan force of nature means you do all sorts of things—cast spells, dismember, flay, cannibalize, castrate, etc.—but all in good fun. It would have absolutely nothing in common with modern movements that seem to think suppression and belittlement and detribalizing can somehow replace the riotous harmonies of pagan life (see modern concerns about Grimm's Fairy tales). How about acknowledging the awesomeness of forces beyond our comprehension? We can't do that intellectually, only ritually, only symbolically, only poetically, only artistically, only through music. The Protestant/Enlightenment approach doesn't have the necessary scaffolding to wade into those realities. Just like when Adrienne Rich becomes too topical, her poetry starts to suck. No value judgment on her politics, it just sucks poetically. That's problem with the Protestant/Enlightenment approach in a nutshell.
Having mowed down all its hedges, this approach doesn't have any means for channeling the archetypal herds, keeping wolves and monsters at bay, etc.
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On a totally different subject, after all these years, that is literally the first ICP song I have ever knowingly heard. I had a roommate in college who had a whole group of friends that were active members of this group, one who was a wrestler in their WWF-style wrestling matches. With hardly any knowledge about the group whatsoever, I have to confess a kind of admiration for them. It fit my expectation that the video you sent has been viewed tens of millions of times and has more thumbs down than thumbs up. But, truly in this case, haters gonna hate. More people love Eminem than hate him. More people love Taylor Swift than hate her. These guys can literally say that more people hate them than love them, but, since that comes from a pool of millions of people, they actually have an extremely large fan base, one that has a cult-like devotion to them and their many spin-off enterprises.
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