“Get Ugly”: Inside the Raw, Relentless Sound of Feminist Fury in a Regressive Age
Forget palatable politics. New York alt-rockers Trophy Wife are giving voice to the unspeakable, and it’s about to Get Ugly.
“They’ve won all of their freedoms and their rights, women. They fought for everything they’ve got and now they’re throwing it away.”
These words, uttered by song-writing machine Mike Stock, were directed at Sabrina Carpenter. But read it again, and again. Hidden in plain sight is a threat against women. A threat against expressive, free and confident sexuality for any female-identifying individual. Hidden in plain sight is evidence of the rapid regression in the global West, which pushes women back into the box of domestic servant, quiet and complacent counterpart, and docile member of society. Stock suggests women like Sabrina Carpenter would rather waste their “rights” in our judiciously and wholly equal society on hedonistic play.
Does any of this hold up? We need look no further than the Presidential election to see this in action. Kamala Harris, silent in the crowd. First Lady Ivanaka Trump stood, almost unmoving, with a cumbersome swooping hat shielding her emotions from view, as her husband is officially titled the most powerful man in the world. When he kissed her on the cheek, he didn’t make contact with her skin. When Ye accompanied his wife Bianca to the Grammy’s and ordered her to drop her coat to reveal nothing underneath, he was exercising the boundaries of her shame. He, too, posed for the photos without touching her. She was an image, not a person, a playground for shame. And women who are silent are scarce afforded the luxury of rage.
Sabrina Carpenter hit back. “Female artists have been shamed forever,” she shrugged, calling the song-writing trio responsible for demeaning comments, “regressive.” She continued on with a bedazzled and raucously fun Grammy’s performance as a clear indication of her insouciance. Fellow global pop-star Taylor Swift, booed by an arena sports fanatics at The Superbowl, seemed too to hold herself with poised equanimity. But make no mistake. Female-identifying artists around the globe are watching men in positions of increasing power dirtying their hands by handing women the shame and humiliation they have created over eons. In the cess-pit of sociopolitical relations, one emotion is bubbling to the surface in refusal of submission: rage.
If rage, and indeed in this context female rage, is zipping through popular culture at new highs, why do we mainly associate it with, “empty liberal feminist politics”? Might this have something to do with Taylor Swift, the richest musician in the world, filing a trademark application for ‘Female Rage: The Musical’?
An answer comes from, of all places, the depths of underground alternative music in New York. McKenzie Iazzetta, lead singer of alt-rock three-piece Trophy Wife, suggests that female rage is “the pushback that women who are artist get for showing themselves to be a full person.” The reminder that women still cannot exist in full and glorious complexity without judgement is tragic, and threatens the stability of our reality. The foundations shake to a dangerous degree. We label this as ‘female rage’, then, as a curious and mercurial discomfort, as a way to contain it. Language has often been used as a great deadener. As a result, female rage as it exists in the rounded zeitgeist is too surface level.
In the case of Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift, their female rage as - importantly and justifiably - directed towards the industry means their attitudes can be placed within the context of the machine they are trying to dismantle. But considering, by expansion and explosion, rage, guilt, shame and the ugly as a means through which feminist politics can be translated through female rage might offer us some alternative way to view our regressive time. Might offer new hope.
Trophy Wife, still in the throngs of relative obscurity even after a debut album that is surely one of the best of 2024, have a revolutionised approach to song-writing that explores an “unknown, unvocalised area,” perhaps best explained as the subconscious. The pressure to be angry without fault comes from a learnt reaction women experience in attempting to “censor yourself when you’re upset, or angry,” she explains, “and it’s not nice, or attractive.”
But the sound of Trophy Wife, abrasive and noise-heavy with walls of guitars and a plucky folk undertone, works to resist this seamless mental subjugation. “I write about the parts of yourself that you try to hide - when it’s not fun to be a hot mess”. We might see this as a nod to the rise of hedonism in pop, too. Charli XCX singing of the thrills of sweat and drugs in the club as a means of escapism. But Trophy Wife’s 2024 debut is called Get Ugly for a reason. Our take n female rage is “not soft and nice any more,” says McKenzie. “It’s almost gross.” It’s in the lyrics, too:
HE TALKS SO SWEET IT’S UGLY / LAST NIGHT I DREAMT WE DID IT AGAIN / THE WORDS, THE RUG, THE VOMIT / I SHUT MY EYES RUN THROUGH IT AGAIN.
“There’s a lot of pressure on women to be angry with the right people for the right things, and do it righteously and without faults, which I think is infatilizing.” Says Mckenzie. To be angry as a feminine subject is a given, and perhaps an intrinsic part of the female condition. As a form of controlling the organic, there are certain things women are permitted to exercise anger towards. Trophy Wife instead focus on “things that aren’t okay to be angry with.” I told him everything, I told him too much, get ugly! McKenzie sings in single ‘Swamp Song’. Stark moments of instrumental fuzz follow. Bassist Christian Pace used death-metal influences here in order to exemplify the clean becoming messy and unkempt. Here is de-platformed rage, organic rage, in sound. The conceit ‘blinding rage’ exists to succinctly summate the overwhelming force that anger can have; it triumphs over reason. Holding rage in a reasonable, or indeed well-reasoned, manner is paradoxical to the shape, form and nature of rage itself.
“I write about other people’s shame that’s been handed to me.” This isn’t picture-perfect, or fair on the listener. This stuff is difficult to get through, laced as it is with the fingerprints of both the immediate and the symbolic. The alternative unground scene allows a space to de-throne the natural systems of power and refuse to be in a way that necessitates a way not to be.“There are a lot of things I don’t feel ashamed of. There must be something wrong with me.”
Exploring the shadows of femininity, sexuality, relationships and the world through the lens of female rage is often not typically marketable. McKenzie tells how it often leads to self-hatred. Indeed, moments of doubt spike through in Get Ugly: I’ll quit my bitchin’ / will you keep your thumb over me / the beer and TV. Perhaps encouraging global pop-stars to look inside themselves with judgemental fervour to uproot the internalised is not conducive to sustainable, healthy art-making. The platform they have is just too vast.
But Female Rage: The Musical seems so empty as it celebrates in a pink-striped-neon-lights manner the rotten truth of being loud. The reality of becoming unlikeable by throwing restraint to the wind. It is tied less in relinquishing real control in order to expand female anger as a mode of resistance, and more in capitalism. As musicians, Trophy Wife come out of their sessions with a curious and addled self-hatred. These songs aren’t meant to be models of how to move through life, but instead “more like pieces of myself I’ve given of to this character. It’s still, like, a part of me, but I don’t even know if I like her sometimes, when the song is finished.”
SOME PARTS LEFT AT THE PULPIT / AND SOME ON THE BATHROOM FLOOR / I WANT TO BE DEFEATED / AND I WANT ALL MY DRINKS PAID FOR
One might see parallels to Kathy Acker here, punk feminist icon of the 70s and 80s operating around the Bikini Kill hey-day. Acker’s work has had a recent spike in popularity, and in her own words explores the deep-rooted rage of self: your mind is a nightmare that’s been eating you. Now, eat your mind. But her work, disgusting and self-villainizing, painted her in a terrible light. The biography written by literary frenemy Chris Kraus details widely how she was disliked in many circles. Is the solution to the patriarchy to be a bad person, then? Or is this just another reproduction of evil, one we can certainly do without? No. McKenzie seems to be suggesting that to write out the bad in art as an exercise in living through the anger might be like leading a lone wolf to a pack. Evil exists, within us, though many “don’t want to acknowledge it’s inevitable existence.” Where do we put it? In good art, which is always honest.
“We’re all a mix of good and bad. As a culture and a generation, that’s something we need to get comfortable with that.” McKenzie and Christian state. It is impossible to make choices that please everyone. We see this blown up to carnival proportions in pop music. The perceived bad of a person comes through their choices - choice of opinion, choice of circumstance, choice of partner, choice of reaction (indeed, complicated by access to freedom). “When I make a choice for myself, am I a bad person?” McKenzie ponders. Here we are, returned perpetually to the misogyny of Mike Stock, in which women who choose to indulge or celebrate their sexuality are humiliating themselves and the female condition at large.
By this logic, women are throwing away freedom, by exercising freedom. Female rage might be an exercise in freedom, an exercise in the grey areas of the self. Indeed, Trophy Wife exist within tumultuous American politics, where freedoms and rights are ripped with no explanation from their roots, and polarised politics are expunging complexity of human life. Trumpism forces boxes around us all. Darkness engulfs. “There is an absence of grey area,” says McKenzie, now more than ever. Enraged or otherwise, it appears we must pick a side. “Either you’re good or you’re bad. And I don’t know that I’m good.”
Do you?