Michelle Shocked: Search & Destroy.

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.

yeah, in the same vein as buzza's link:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-05-28/features/9202170604_1_blackface-bart-bull-minstrelsy

choice quotes:

At the recent South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, for example, she gave a rambling keynote address in which she compared the black funk-rock group Fishbone to the blackface minstrels of 100 years ago. Shocked now concedes, "My performance could be called into question."

...

"I felt that this image (a blackface cover) was so powerful, so potent, that the controversy would swallow up the music. I would have been just like a tar baby - controversy would just stick to me."

aaaand the mccabe's show is cancelled.

wtf

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/3/19/1363691341607/Michelle-Shocked-in-2005-010.jpg

http://blog.chron.com/askacat/files/legacy/hatcat.JPG

Maybe it's actually Howard Devoto.

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

*nods shamefully*

The pure products of America
go crazy

sounds like pretty much the entire tour has been called off:

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/garchik/article/Shocked-shows-canceled-in-wake-of-anti-gay-tirade-4367370.php

also note: "Cheryl Renee, who was said to have been Shocked's PR person, responded to an e-mail from The Chronicle saying that as of Feb. 25, "I am no longer working with Michelle Shocked. I cannot comment on her behalf and was not present at Yoshi's. ... I personally do not support the sentiment of what Michelle is being accused of saying."

what's it like to work for someone like this who starts to go off the rails?

she's claiming on twitter that she isn't against gay marriage or abortion as well. I think she's having a mental breakdown.

Yes.

Holy mackerel. This all comes as quite a shock.

seen shared:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/32624_10200305192405425_1720273674_n.jpg

my take: she's mentally ill AND a bigot, and the bigotry is no doubt fueled by the illness, although it must be said that not all mentally ill people are bigots, and mental illness does not excuse bigotry or assholish behavior. also: yes, she's a closeted queer (at least bisexual), and it seems like the is-she-or-isn't-she thing has always been a thorn in her side, based on interviews going way back, and judging from her problems with act up as "outers." to me, her ambiguity is more than bowie-ish mystique-building, it veers close to "don't ask don't tell" territory.

http://www.cosmik.com/aa-septemberoctober05/reviews/pics/review_michelle_shocked.jpg

yup, i posted that upthread.

The cover for 'On The Greener Side' used to freak me out when I was about 8
http://ring.cdandlp.com/disclo/photo_grande/114094436.jpg
Actually got a bit of a fright seeing so many of it in Google images

Well...

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2013/03/michelle_shocke_1.html

The audio of the set, tweeted by Erin McEwan. "Michelle Shocked 2nd Yoshi's Set" will be a noise album title at some point soon I predict

https://soundcloud.com/therealtofuandwhiskey/michelle-shocked-2nd-yoshis

dibs

McKeown I should say.

"Folks wonder about my sexuality, but denying being gay is like saying I never beat my husband."

I honestly believe that people with so poor a grasp of rhetoric that they can't mention the "when did you stop beating your spouse" rhetorical gambit without making people wonder if they actually beat their spouse are better off not writing lyrics

When did you stop beating your lyricist?

as discussed earlier here's what she put in the liner notes of Arkansas Traveler:

My early intention was to present this record with a cover
photo of myself wearing blackface. Aside from providing
controversy for hatemongers or offending the delicate sensibilities
of the politically correct, my sincere intention was that it would
provide a genuine focus on the real 'roots' of many of the tunes
included; blackface minstrelsy. It's my contention that a blackface
tradition is alive and well hidden behind a modern mask. I believe that
'blacking up' should be done correctly; as an exploration for the source
of that hollow ring we mistakenly believe was immaculately conceived in
Las Vegas, and in a context of true respect for the cultures we ape.

iirc the label had to tell her "we're not putting out a record with a white woman in blackface on the cover, Michelle"

I believe that 'blacking up' should be done correctly; as an exploration for the source of that hollow ring we mistakenly believe was immaculately conceived in Las Vegas

I think this is where the weed kicked in?

the soundcloud makes pretty clear that she's saying what _she_ thinks. "from their vantage point. well i shouldn't say their because i also mean mine. from our vantage point." etc. the "god hates" thing was said ironically/jokingly though.