"Noisey: Your new record “Shulamith” is named after the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. How did you come about her?
Channy: I’ll probably never be able to explain to people properly why I chose her, why she fit the record so completely. I chose that name not because I wanted to make a statement about feminism– I didn’t want it to take over the record. After I finished writing the record, I read The Dialectic of Sex. I started reading it, and I couldn’t stop. I was like, “this woman has just said everything I’m trying to say in 12 songs, perfectly”. This is what I wanted to say, this is what I was looking for. This woman to me is like my pop star. I want to try and be more like her."
Tamara Roper, 'The Unlikely Front Woman', Noisey
I had previously assumed that Minneapolis-based synthpop and alt-rock five-piece Poliça (a name derived from 'Polisa', the Polish word for policy) had conceptualized their second album Shulamith (2013) after being inspired by radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (1945 – 2012) - but the exact sequence of events doesn't actually matter that much. As the first-wave feminist mantra goes, 'The personal is political' - Leaneagh need not have explicitly intended to make a political statement to have done so.
As NPR notes, Poliça's second album expands on the distinctive sound they established with 2012's critically-acclaimed Give You The Ghost: "a slinky, otherworldly style of electro-pop that mixes Channy Leaneagh's angelic voice with distorted, occasionally disturbing sound manipulations and harrowing dual drums". As many music critics have observed, the band's second album gives more prominence to Leaneagh's vocals, allowing her to explore various feminist themes without becoming too didactic or perscriptive: financial and emotional independence ("I Need $" ), marriage ("Chain My Name" and "Matty"), the need to preseve one's identity (and sanity) is a relationship ("Vegas", "Very Cruel" and "Tiff").
Pitchfork's Katherine St. Asaph observes that "the album begins with a fight and closes with the end of the fight. In Poliça’s telling, relationships are minefields, communication is elusive, and intimacy impossible. Emotions are either heightened, as in the breathless “Spilled Lines”, or, more often, numbed. Loss of identity is a recurring theme, usually in the form of losing one’s name, to marriage or otherwise."
Its sometimes easy to become numb to reiterations of messages we've already heard before: women are being oppressed, racial minorities are being oppressed, the LGBT community are being oppressed, people in the Third World are being oppressed. When the speaker is dead-set on being specific, personal and nuanced about particular modes of oppression, more attention and analysis is required on the part of the listener. Poliça's genius lies in their ability to imbue their political/aesthetic messages with emotional complexity and technical craft, making for some genuinely startling (even alarming) moments that you just can't ignore: "Chain My Name" and the music video for "Tiff" are two good examples.
This 'alarming' aesthetic (which is vaguely reminiscent of Beyonce's 'Ring the Alarm') gets pushed further with 'Raw Exit', a track that was included on the 2014 EP Raw Exit and the expanded edition of Shulamith. 'Raw Exit' gives more prominence to Leaneagh's vocals than ever, pairing it with eccentric synths and aggressive rhythmns to create a song that I imagine Marilyn Monroe singing before her supposed suicide. The track's core seems to be a female speaker's oscillation between her acceptance of a solitary, independent existence ('I was ready to die alone') and her irrepressible need for sexual and emotional intimacy:
'When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan Coming off of the x and o's Crawling out of your skin and bones'
Leaneagh ends the song with an abrupt commandment ('Slay me!'), suggesting that these two conflicting desires cannot be reconciled. Feminist objectives would be so much easier to achieve if Gloria Steinem's aphorism that 'Women need men like a fish need a bicycle' was true - but the actual interdependence, flirtations and magnetic attraction between the sexes profoundly complicate the battle between male and female interests (on a societal and individual level). Leaneagh doesn't seem to have answers to this age-old conundrum, but she does possess an acute awareness of the complexities involved.
