I think open adoption is a great idea, because it allows a relationship between the birth mother and her child so that the kid isn’t like, “Where did I come from?” And to have it be like, “Look, you have a bunch of people who love you.”
Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it’s just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.
I made the decision that my contribution needed to be more musical than political. My music was enough, politically. Art matters. Art was enough. My music was enough to say what I had to say.
I am such a bossy producer and such a control freak that there’s a part of me that really longs to be bossed around.
When you’re the person who’s kind of in charge of everything a lot of the time, it’s sometimes nice to get bossed around. It’s sometimes nice to have somebody say, “This is what I want you to do” and to stretch your abilities.
I don’t appreciate it when women – or men – bandy about these stupid stereotypes about feminism that are age-old, and that are meant to keep people turned off from it. It’s like, “All you have to do is Wikipedia feminism to know that it’s not about man-hating – so shut up.” That makes me annoyed.
Most of my records are never going to be commercial successes, and I don’t expect that. It’s just all a learning process to me. If something appears as a failure, fine. If there’s success, fine. I like the record, and my friends like the record, and that’s kind of all I can really care about.
It takes your mind off things when there’s a cat in your lip and he’s purring while you’re petting him.
I am not Lyme disease, that’s not who I am, I’m still a feminist artist, but this is a part of my story too, and I’m not going to keep it out to look cooler.
I need to see my friends or I’m gonna go crazy. I’m not gonna stay home and work.
I’m sure if you see things you wrote when you were 19, you cringe. I saw stuff like angry poetry that I wrote when I was mad at my father, or photos I took where I smeared period blood on myself. It’s embarrassing.
There are people who view their feminism in different ways. I used to beat myself up if I didn’t react to things like I was supposed to.
I’m more interested in a feminism that ends discrimination for all people. It’s not just about a woman becoming the CEO of a company or something. It’s connected to racism and classism and gender issues that go beyond the binary.
I think that the Internet is really cool because a lot of young feminists don’t feel like they have to reinvent the wheel.
The cool thing about the Internet is that it’s allowing women more access to their own history.
What I’ve heard from younger women and women my age is that the albums changed their lives or it was the first time they had heard feminism that they could relate to. So that’s great.
The exciting thing about getting a label together and doing press for it is that hopefully some 15-year-old girl who is the only feminist in her junior-high class will hear about it and be like, “Oh, cool, I hadn’t heard of that, I’m going to check it out.”
I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.
My original goal in the ’90s, after I found feminism and I was the first generation in my family to go to college, was to spread this information that feminism was still very much alive, and that you can’t believe the media telling you that it doesn’t need to exist and that it doesn’t exist.
Don’t get down on yourself that you can’t run a 4K or dance all night long at a fun club. Give yourself a break.