By Federica Lemme
Black saint, sinner lady
Playin’ knockoff soul
A punk rock romantic
Slumped on the kitchen floor
Nuns in stress position
Smokin’ Marlboros
Lolita is weeping
The bride is beautiful
(Masseduction)
Masseduction
St. Vincent
Just a few weeks ago, in Italy, they elected the new President of the Republic. In the confusion that reigned supreme, it seemed that on one thing alone the voters were all in agreement: it had to be a woman. In the end, that did not happen. In the Belpaese, already when women and music are discussed, an incoherent thought comes to light. One example is enough: Carmen Consoli is described as a good musician, a beautiful woman, a person of taste. At the same time, when people talk about cantantessa many judge her unlikeable, too concerned with fashion, with a voice that grates.
Things are no different abroad. Regardless of one’s political views, not even in the United States did they manage to elect Hillary Clinton. In the land of supposed musical democracy, the boss Bruce Springsteen continues to be more loved than many female musicians, including the acclaimed St. Vincent.
When St. Vincent is mentioned many still turn up their noses: St. Vincent is too cool, St. Vincent is not sincere, St. Vincent is cold. Some call her boring, reporting that during bus transfers from one city to another she plays Scrabble, as if it were a black mark against her. If you are musically very capable, incredibly beautiful, rarely smiling, a frequenter of the right circles and the right people, the road for you will be uphill.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 28 September 1982, and raised in Dallas, Texas, Anne Enin Clark encounters music as a child. At ten she is already hooked on Nirvana and Pearl Jam (on top of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, PJ Harvey and many others), as a teenager she plays in heavy metal and hardcore bands, so that her first concert in front of an audience comes at fifteen. Once she graduates she follows her uncle, who plays in the duo Tuck & Patti, on tour. Hers is a personal evolution made of small and big steps, like those that push her to undertake institutional musical studies at the Berklee Music College in Boston, only to leave them after a few years to join first the Polyphonic Spree and then Sufjan Stevens’s band. It is in this period that Annie Clark begins to work on her solo career and to perform under the moniker (a reference to a Nick Cave song but also an old family name) with which she will achieve fame, unfortunately as an almost alien model of perfection.
In an era in which divas try to convince you that they are just like you, in which the public wants the effect of one of us, genuine or a bluff as it may be, she embodies an ideal of the unattainable star, staging in the music and in everything around her the dialectical relationship between person (Annie Clark) and character (St. Vincent), making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The masses do not accept this from a woman: a man is allowed everything, nobody dreamed of warning Achille Lauro that turning up at Sanremo dressed like Iggy Pop and grabbing his crotch would be out of place.
A girl cannot even match David Bowie’s aesthetic shapeshifting. A female artist must be found at least one flaw, she cannot be divine. How much was said about Madonna before she grew old? The world has always preferred imperfect female musicians, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, even the Esselunga checkout girl Giusy Ferreri. So today journalists acknowledge St. Vincent’s merits, but with the benefit of the doubt.
Annie becomes a star of musical and aesthetic transformism while her father serves a long prison sentence, yet she ends up in the gossip magazines for her affairs with the model Cara Delevingne and the diva Kristen Stewart. According to some, the album Masseduction from 2017 had an undeserved success because of the positioning of its author on the media’s gossip market.
Today St. Vincent would be famous above all for other reasons, not for the music, they write in the newspapers. While she collaborates with musicians of the calibre of David Byrne or dons the guise of a heroine who seems to step out of a 1970s John Cassavetes film, the public watches her curious and amused, ready not to be taken in. It is always the girl next door who gets you, who is not at all enchanting, even a bit shabby and without the necessary talent, perhaps with a child to look after. It was Yoko Ono who broke up the Beatles, certainly not Nico of the Velvet Underground.
