Michelle Shocked: Search & Destroy.

lol

idk she always seemed a bit crazy not totally shocked at this right turn

― everything you like is white (buzza), Monday, March 18, 2013 12:19 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this this this

I read several people saying she was onstage shouting "God Hates Fags" and one or two others saying she ironically said "of course, several of you might go on Twitter saying I said "God Hates Fags"".

At the very least, confusion runs rampant:

http://www.queerty.com/alt-folk-singer-michelle-shocked-goes-on-homophobic-rant-tells-audience-god-hates-fags-20130318/

Confusion is sex(ual politics).

There are several other pseudonews articles like that on the web, none with better than 3rd-hand quotation. A full audience of UNREACHABLE GHOSTS, apparently.

I remember when Short Sharp Shocked was getting so much critical praise; I eagerly checked the LP out from the library and prepared myself for some life-changing music but what I got was some boring shit I didn't connect to or identify with at all.

xpost -- the Twitter posts from last night were all clear enough, and included a slew from the guy who was apparently formally tweeting for her from the stage. He posted from his own account about how everything turned into a mess, saying it wasn't ironic and so forth. Given that and other posts I tend to think it was as described.

Long background article on her salvation so-to-speak: http://www.leeaaron.com/john/michelle-shocked-went-for-the-singing-and-stayed-for-the-song/

I genuinely cannot tell from last night's tweets if she hollered "GOD HATES FAGS" or if she said something awkward and creepy and followed it up with "Now you'll go on Twitter and say I said..." -- and I think it makes a non-insignificant difference. I am used to Michelle Shocked being awkward and creepy (first time I heard her was in '88 in a van full of folkie punks, and "When I Grow Up" got shut off the stereo right quick by a guy who is now a professional ex-punk folkie), but subte distinctions matter.

Understanding all that, but the combination of posts, these linked articles and the extreme silence from her herself since it happened -- no posts on her site, FB or Twitter -- making me less inclined to assume it was 'just' awkwardness.

awkwardness at shows usually doesn't result in mass venue-clearing.

see, Michael Richards could have repaired his entire reputation if after his outburst if he'd looked around the venue and done a sing-songy "...awk-WAAAAAARD!"

i am shocked

I am short

http://www.headofrothchild.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/sharpie30001mrkr.jpg

woah. i wondered why the hell the michelle shocked thread was bumped.

she's doing Dylan's christian period wrong

On top of everything else!

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/michelle_shocked_makes_shocking_statement_god_hates_fags

I tried calling Shocked’s representative, Cary Baker, but got his voice mail. If you’d like to let him and Shocked know what you think, give him a call. His number is on Shocked’s website.

Update: Cary Baker has addressed the issue: “I have not worked with Michelle Shocked in four years,” he said via email. Told that he’s still listed on her website, Baker said “I am aware of that and I have asked her to change it immediately. A horrible comment and the last thing I need after a sleepless week at SXSW.”

That links to here:

http://www.mediaite.com/online/folk-singer-michelle-shocked-tells-crowd-michelle-shocked-says-god-hates-fags/

With more tweets and info and etc.

In the Michael Crichton sci-fi version of this story, Tracy Chapman will do the sane thing at a concert tonight.

same thing, followed by Edie Brickell tomorrow night, Natalie Merchant on Wednesday...

PHOBIA

on shelves Oct 2013

Tracy, Edie and Natalie were all A-listers compared to Michelle Shocked's residency on the D-list, even during her buzz years of 87-88. She may as well have been an open mic'er going off on a tangent last night.

mccabe's website shows that she's still appearing there and her 8pm set is sold out.

I only know of her because of Chaos UK

Evanston show cancelled by venue:
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#story/chi-michelle-shocked-evanston-20130318/

i guess venues have the right to cancel these shows anyway (and maybe they are because of low sales) but they should just let them happen, with her playing to her empty rooms, and that would kill off her career for good.

PHOBIA

on shelves Oct 2013

you know she actually had an album called DON'T ASK DON'T TELL

Tweet from sideman:

@MrBungo: @fiddlecub Shocked show was odd and grim. Can't begin to explain it in a tweet, but there was no "rant." I blame the audience more than her.

if this is all indeed a misunderstanding (however unlikely) she needs to respond quicksticks

I blame the audience more than her

Well duh, she's your ride home.

Hahah.

Meantime, interesting little flashback here

http://www.dallasvoice.com/michelle-shocked-said-what-1990-outlines-interview-surfaces-10434.html

it's kinda weird that in an era when even the tiniest show where something weird happens gets recorded by people with cellphones, no video of this seems to be cropping up.

that said, iirc she wanted to appear on the cover of Arkansas Traveler in blackface so what the fuck ever about Michelle Shocked

it's kinda weird that in an era when even the tiniest show where something weird happens gets recorded by people with cellphones, no video of this seems to be cropping up.

Yeah, this I keep wondering about more and more.

iirc she wanted to appear on the cover of Arkansas Traveler in blackface so what the fuck ever about Michelle Shocked

sure she isn't Michelle Shock Value?

http://i49.tinypic.com/23m0sv4.png

seattle and portland dates cancelled by the venues

yikes, this is disappointing to hear. my dad had her albums back in the day and i enjoyed them, although i've been leery of her politics ever since i read about her wanting to wear blackface on the cover of "arkansas traveler."

― a sentimental knife (reddening), Monday, March 18, 2013 1:56 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't she say some fucked-up and borderline-racist shit about hip-hop around that time? I've never found any direct quotes, just saw it referenced in a few places.

http://i49.tinypic.com/23m0sv4.png

Yes Thom Yorke is Real?

Well the new duet with KD Lang is nice anyway

Hmm

Now @MShocked is RTing angry messages she's received, as though that justifies the ignorant shit she said about gays.

As from the woman herself:

God loves everybody so much that He sacrificed His son and didn't try to triangulate the dialogue

In response to someone else, about her divorce? (I think?)

Some more concrete things

http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/folk-legend-incites-mass-walkout-anti-gay-speech-195312874.html

From all accounts, the first set had gone great, but when Shocked returned for the second set, she began talking about the evils that will result if California's Proposition 8 is overturned by the courts, to allow gay marriage in the state. Shocked cited verses from the Old Testament condemning homosexuality, first in English and then, puzzlingly, in Spanish. She even told the crowd that they "could go on Twitter and say 'Michelle Shocked says God hates f--s'," although that particular line was interpreted differently by some on hand, as either ironic or completely sincere.
The tweets that came from her account during the Yoshi's show were actually made by a patron named Matt Penfield, who'd been invited up during the uneventful first set to act as Shocked's Twitter intermediary. When things started to go very badly in the second set, Penfield not only left the stage but exited the auditorium to mill in the lobby with other confused and outraged fans who were trying to make sense of what had just happened.
"It was a very painful experience to go through," Penfield told Yahoo! Music. He not only sat on stage with Shocked for most of the show but visited with her backstage during the break. "To be that close to someone who is clearly having a breakdown of some sort is not an emotionally comfortable place to be. I'm still a little bit shaken up. And I don't like to see people vilified"—as he's well aware Shocked is being today. "I still love her music and I'm not going to delete her from my playlist or go smash CDs. But if she has made a conscious decision that she is going to use the stage to espouse beliefs that are hateful and damage groups of people, she probably should not be charging money for a concert. If she wants to sit on a panel at a conference or go to a religious festival, I think in that context she should say whatever she wants. But I do think that doing it as a bait-and-switch at a concert performance is really unfair and not showing respect to people."

And a lot more here:

At the beginning of the show, "Michelle came on stage and seemed visibly anxious and nervous, and took the mike and said that she was really scared and afraid, and that she didn’t really know how the show was going to go— which seemed a little unusual," recalled Penfield. "At one point in the first set she even said, 'You all seem very nice, but I’ve been in rooms of nice people before and sometimes they turn on you.' That was a throwaway line, but one that seemed siginifcant later. After the first set I went backstage with her to the green room and she said that she had been terrified coming up from L.A. because it was going to be a big deal for her to play this show. You can deconstruct from what happened later what she was referring to. In retrospect, it seems clear that this whole thing was premeditated—if not the exact language she used, then that this was where the show was eventually going to go."
The first set went great, from all accounts, even though Penfield thought it was odd when, at the start of the show, Shocked said she needed an on-stage tweeting volunteer and added, "Does anybody feel the invisible person in the room?" Said Penfield, "My family is fron the South and all Baptists, so for me, that’s kind of the code that people use when they’re talking about Jesus or God. I didn't know what her faith-based situation is, but clearly she was looking for someone to identify" as a fellow believer. Despite some raised hands, no one was willing to go on stage, so Pinfield finally volunteered, because after "5-10 minutes" of this, he was afraid the show wouldn't go on otherwise.
At first audience members were confused when she explained that she wanted them to vote on the order of the sets that had been posted outside the door—one labeled "truth" and one "reality." Eventually it came to a Twitter vote and the audience voted for "truth" first, which involved playing her classic Short Sharp Shocked album in its entirety. But after an intermission, Shocked hadn't even gotten to any music when she started talking first about the importance of social media to carry on a dialogue with her fans off-stage, and then about Proposition 8.
"She started reading some tweets from the stream and having a dialogue about people's impressions, talking about how she was feeling brave at this point and that she was doing the right thing. Then the tone of the conversation became extremely religious and she began talking about the two things most important to her being Jesus Christ and freedom. Then she talked about how she had just come from a prayer meeting the night before, and the people in her prayer meeting were really worried because these are the end times, and they’re the end times because Prop. 8 is going to lead to ministers marrying gay people with a rifle to the head. At which people got a little riled up; then there started to be some call and response from the crowd about what she meant. She started exhorting the crowd very specifically to go ahead and tweet or write and say that Michelle Shocked says God hates f--s, and some other references to the Bible denouncing homosexuality as sinful and abhorrent.
"At that point a lot of people started getting up and walking out. We didn’t understand if this was for the sake of art or an actual rant. Then she delivered the same Bible verses in Spanish. At that point personally I felt like I was an emotional hostage, and the night of entertainment had become a night for her to deliver this intense personal polemic that, in hindsight, it felt like she had been carrying around since she got on stage, while we were strapped in waiting for her to deliver it."
At least one fan on Twitter believed that the "God hates f--s" line was spoken ironically, as if she were predicting that that's what her message would be reduced to. But Michelle Penfield, the on-stage tweeter's wife, is one of those saying there was only one way to take what she was saying. "She said 'Please tweet that Michelle Shocked said on stage that God hates faggots.' There was no irony," says Michelle, who used the hashtag "#takingmyhusbandback" as the show fell apart. "I don't really know what's going on with Michelle Shocked, but I really hope it's a mental breakdown of sorts."
Adds her husband, Matt, "I will say from a personal perspective that I’ve been around musicians my whole life and done a lot of tour work for people, and also been around people who have pretty serious emotional problems. When people ask if she seemed high or drunk, she didn’t. She seemed like someone who had actually gone off medication—anxious and rocking back and forth and a lot of activity and about to explode with emotional anxiety. I have a lot of compassion for her, because she’s clearly processing some heavy emotional s---, but she shouldn't be doing it in front of a room full of strangers."

damn

awkwaaaard

i read all his quotes with matt pinfield's voice regardless. you know you did it too.

once a dumbass......

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/michelle-shocked/Content?oid=880716

If only she'd done it during the spoken bridge of "Graffiti Limbo" it might've worked.

word

The tape across her mouth said "Silenced By Fear."

So silenced that she's in the fucking newspaper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA3JUpQzOekShare

Supposedly she's on Piers Morgan Live, on CNN in a bit.

"We will not be bashing Michelle Shocked," he said. "Rather, we will celebrate music, diversity and send some healing Santa Cruz energy her way."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michelle-shocked-a-meltdown-jesus-432050?page=show

anybody got a bootleg of this jam from the Hollywood Reporter piece? sounds heavy.

"On stage, she was wearing a full face mask and sunglasses, and she sang this really disjointed, syncopated, non-rhyming, not-very-melodic song [about Occupy] that nobody could really follow -- and she asked everybody to sing along. She alternated between being encouraging to the crowd and telling them they were doing a horrible job. She started glaring at me as if was supposed to help them in the sing-along, and I tried to, then she leaned over and told me to ‘Shut up.’ Which I did. I handed the sound guy my microphone and watched from the crowd. There had been probably 300, 400 people at the beginning of her set, but as she started to yell at everybody, it got down to about 20. She went from manic to depressive really quickly."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27_OAk2AWMg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBxRKn666rs

I should read more local (= Santa Cruz) news! Just catching up on the whole "MS shows up to her cancelled Moes Alley gig" story. Hmm.

anybody got a bootleg of this jam from the Hollywood Reporter piece? sounds heavy.

"On stage, she was wearing a full face mask and sunglasses, and she sang this really disjointed, syncopated, non-rhyming, not-very-melodic song [about Occupy] that nobody could really follow -- and she asked everybody to sing along. She alternated between being encouraging to the crowd and telling them they were doing a horrible job. She started glaring at me as if was supposed to help them in the sing-along, and I tried to, then she leaned over and told me to ‘Shut up.’ Which I did. I handed the sound guy my microphone and watched from the crowd. There had been probably 300, 400 people at the beginning of her set, but as she started to yell at everybody, it got down to about 20. She went from manic to depressive really quickly."
--brio

Michelle doesn't condone the sharing of her shows as bootlegs

can we just change the title of the threat to Michelle Shocked: Destroy

so depressing

thread

lol silent album

http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2014/07/29/michelle-shocked-releases-silent-album/

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/tldr-20-silence/

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/michelleshocked1

i'm annoyed at how short the run-times are, like give me a good 3-and-a-half-minute silent song so i can feel like i got my money's worth.

bummed track 6 isn't "Chris Harrison (The Bachelor)"

i'm annoyed at how short the run-times are

Not as annoyed as Amanda Palmer must be for not thinking of this first. Of course, she would have had to contend with the "silence" aspect first.

not doing this as a kickstarter and having people pay a few thousand bucks each to have silent songs named after them seems like a missed opportunity.

Sinead's passing gets me thinking about Michelle Shocked. I'm guessing Short Sharp Shocked and Texas Campfire Tapes will endure, even as they're barely available online. Her cancellation came from what seemed to be a manic episode, but even before then she'd called her greatest hits Mercury Poise, as in mercury poisoning, as in getting to the end of her contract with Mercury Records.

But what an amazing bunch of songs on those two albums.

"Captain Swing" and especially "Arkansas Traveller" are nearly as good.

And if you want your heart broken, find the song "Stillborn" from the album Kind-Hearted Woman (couldn't find it on YouTube)