TMC Interview: JD Samson and Michael of MEN
words by Anna, pictures by Holly
It’s not often I get to spend Monday mornings with a lesbian sex symbol, so, meeting JD Samson the gender-bending frontwoman of Le Tigre and new electro outfit MEN at the time that I’m usually eating a digestive biscuit and emailing someone about a press release is pretty nice all round.
JD is not just a pretty face: with MEN, she and bandmates Michael and Ginger have given some soul to the protest music of Le Tigre and come up with a complex fizzy disco sound that packs a lot of feeling.
But she certainly is a pretty face.
With big liquid brown eyes, tousled curls and that little moustache that has inspired hours of fascinated google image searches (on my part if no-one else’s) JD Samson is a poster girl for the beautiful butch. A picture of her in neon clubwear, biting a red rose against a pink wall is copied across thousands of blogs, and a little sun-kissed photo calendar she did of a road trip in 2006 – JD’s Lesbian Utopia – is a homage to hot lesbian summer loving. I won’t spoil it but there’s a lot of JD lounging out on the beach, standing in a pool with some girl’s thighs around her neck, sun glistening off the water droplets, you know..
And that mustache..? it’s one hundred percent natural – “I don’t do anything to it, I just trim it occasionally..” she says.
The morning I meet her and Michael (third bandmate Ginger is off for the day) JD is a bit less sex icon and a bit more geek next door. She has big nerdy glasses, out-of-control curls and slightly hesitant body language that is more mathaletics champion than Mick Jagger. She’s kidding around on the sofa with Michael the caramel-haired man from MEN, the guitarist and from what I can discern, a real sweetie. They’re a bit like a brother and sister – teasing and elbowing each other, finishing each others’ sentences..
When the New York Times called her an icon of “nerdy cool” they did mean nerdy. In person JD is a little bashful, she opens her eyes wide when listening and has manners to please your mum. But there’s definitely a swagger when she’s telling a joke and self-deprecating “uh”s tend to preface a cheeky line.
Sure, you could call JD’s pretty art-kid look hipster. In 30 minutes around Shoreditch you will probably see at least a dozen kids – male, female and indeterminate – who painstakingly cultivate just the beautiful dapper look she has down pat. But I can never hold it against a lesbian for being hipster. Hey I think JD was roaming round in tight jeans and andro shirts before American Apparel was invented and as she puts it in Le Tigre song Viz – “They call it coolness / We call it visibility”. She’s just being herself.
In Brooklyn where she lives, JD hangs out with the NYC indie lesbian icons: Kim Ann Foxman of Hercules and the Love Affair, Melissa from Telepathe and DJ Lauren Flax and then Sia the blonde Aussie who writes for Christina Aguilera and is dating JD. If you follow their Twitter feeds it sounds like they’re always lounging around hipster joints, having dinner with each other, collaborating on tracks and just doing some cool shit….
laurenflax: @jdsamson come to Miami I’m begging uuuuu
kimannfoxman: @jdsamson love u nomninord!!!!!
laurenflax: @jdsamson @siamusic on our way to your place right now. Thanks for being so kind to offer your place. And thanks for being in my life. <3
JD plays it down – “We try and make people think that it’s a really glamorous circle of friends, but actually we just know each other from different things. … And we only talk on our blackberrys and over iChat, we’re the jetlag crew. Lauren Flax will be like ‘where are you? come over for dinner!’ and I’ll be like ‘I’m in China!’ and the next day, I’ll be like where are you and she’ll be like oh I’m Warsaw..
“Really we’re just internet friends.”
And the icon of nerdy cool is a little worried about her flannel shirt this Monday morning….
JD: They all have way better style than I do. I feel like I’m ten years ago with my flannel.
Michael: Arguably.
JD: Everyone’s into this goth phase, and I’m not there yet. Lauren Flax, Lauren Dillard, Kim Ann, they’re going for it.
But her little anecdotes of life in Brooklyn do kind of fit the myth. They go a bit like this – “So I just bumped into Lauren Flax in Brooklyn and she was like hey “do you want to start a party?”. (They did – it’s called Hotel Motel).
JD Samson came to icon-hood early with a spot in the legendary riot grrl band Le Tigre in the summer of her third year at uni, after working as the “projectionist” for their video art in her second year. Her other student jobs at Sarah Lawrence College in New York included lecturing on Graffiti Art and assisting her Queer Studies professor – not your average weekend money-spinner. At 26 she appeared in a tuxedo on the front cover of the Le Tigre album This Island securing her place in lesbian history, and on the walls of queer teenagers for decades to come.
JD’s journey from misunderstood teen trouble-maker in small-town Ohio to Brookyln cool kid is kind of a classic gay tale – luckily – it seems she has always been charismatic enough to pull it off.
“It was really hard to come out of the closet in Ohio as a fifteen-year-old lesbian” she writes on the LeTigre website. “My parents and I fought a lot, and I was constantly getting in trouble for being different (ie: shaving my head, dying my hair). I was extremely fortunate to have some other gay and lesbian friends … we quickly found the queer friendly meeting spots for teens. Whenever there were problems with straight kids harassing us we had a whole gang of kids to back us up.”
Interestingly, her aunt is gay and her presence has always been a big deal to JD
“It was really important when I was a kid, because her coming out was this weird thing in my life. I was like 9 or 10 when I found out that she was gay and I remember feeling all these crazy feelings about it; she was like this really important figure in my life and now somehow we have all the same friends just from being in the arts. It’s really funny because people are surprised that she’s my aunt because we’re kind of similar in age.”
One of her aunt’s friends is the revered lesbian photographer Catherine Opie famed for her harsh self-portraits involving self-mutilation. Catherine Opie has just finished making a film with JD’s aunt about kids in gay families.
MEN was a project that started in an airport. For JD, a lot of things tend to happen in airports because she spends large amounts of time in them. Fortunately, she quite likes them.
JD: I would say that I spend more time in airports than I do in my own house. So I really love them.. it’s a place where I can be by myself and relax and I really just feel like it’s home.
TMC: Do you have any favourite airports?
JD: Well I love all the airports that have Chick Filou which is my favourite restaurant.
Michael: It’s like a southern fried chicken place
JD: And I love all the airports that have free internet. But I hate Heathrow, I’m really sorry.
TMC: So you just like airports where you can have some alone time with some fried chicken?
JD: Ha yeah. My job is really weird and touring is really weird, I feel like everyone is there travelling for work and then I realise that I am too – so you just mix in with it – air travel is like a reality check and I’m just this guy in a suit, travelling for work. I enjoy things which make me feel smaller in a way, that make me mix in with the rest of the world. That makes me feel like a normal person.
TMC: Talk us through why the band is called MEN…
JD: It started because Johanna Fateman from Le Tigre and I were DJing and they were like – we want you to have a name instead of just Jo and JD from Le Tigre and that day we’d been talking about this philosophy of living called “What Would A Man Do?” which is for women to maintain equal rights in their careers. The idea is just to try and channel a really asshole-dick man and just be like “actually no we deserve the best so suck my dick”.
[ JD smiles ]
That was the idea in the beginning. Some of us were also involved in another project called Hirsuite so we decided to mesh the two projects and take the name MEN. I guess the name now means more to us about gender fluidity and who gets to call themselves a man..
Michael: And who wants to call themselves a man
JD: (to Michael) It was definitely interesting for you …
Michael: It’s kind of nerve-wracking a little bit, as the man, the quote unquote man, in the band but I think part of it is just seeing us all as equal: equal people, equal bodies in the world, regardless of gender or what we want to call ourselves.
JD: It can mean so many different things, it can mean MEN as in humans. It’s been cool, also it’s hilarious because people say stuff like “parking reserved for MEN”
Michael: And people will point at the bathroom and say “this is your backstage” because it says MEN…
JD: Everyone gets a kick out of it.
TMC: Your songs often have strong political messages – is that something you set out to do?
JD: I say this a lot – I think it’s impossible for us to not be political, it’s just who we are.
TMC: So when you’re writing the songs what comes first? Do you start off with a message?
JD: It really depends, we were listening to Jarvis Cocker on the radio the other day and he was saying “try and reverse the way you write a song, it will bring different things out, and I was thinking we’re actually pretty good at mixing it up. Some things start off as chord progressions, some things have been melodies, some things have been content ideas.
Sometimes I’ve been lying in the bath tub and I came up with this melody, and then totally built a song around it. So that would be the hook of the song, but then the rest of it could come from really different places.
Some songs were beats that we were really into, some songs were ideas, sometimes it was other songs that get mish-mashed, like robot chopped up and put into a new thing. And yes some were content ideas – like, I want to write a song about this.
TMC: You’ve just released the video for Off Our Backs. Where did the idea to do a sexy tug-of-war in a desert come from?
JD: Well, we got the treatments for the video, we got a lot of them, and they were really cool. But they all were in this one area of ideas.. it was kind of like too kitschy or something. So I don’t know, I ended up finding a director that made sense, I got along with him, I felt he understood what kind of band we were. He’s really awesome, we started talking and I was like “what about a tug-of-war with some acrobats?” he was like “okay then”. Thank god we had the same idea because it’s exactly what I imagined. The main thing I wanted to show was just real close-ups of body parts and stuff. So it worked, it was really awesome
I went to film school so it was really fun for me to collaborate on a film again, it was really fun to be looking on from the monitor and being like “no! that’s bad- change it!” Also it was funny because at the start all the people who were doing the tug of war were just pulling the rope I was like “You have to get sexier!”
He was like” you know they’ve probably never met each other before”, and I was like “no! you’ve got to get really into it”. And then it like all came together – I’m really glad because otherwise it would have been really tame.
TMC: Yeah there’s lots of muscles and denim shorts and hands…
JD: People keep mentioning the bears – the hairy guys – but I don’t even notice them.
Michael: It sort of like catches my eye.
I leave them as Holly the photographer bundles them off into a curtained conference room in Sony UK headquarters that looks like a funeral parlour designed by David Lynch. And the Saturday after I watch them doing what they do best – a beautiful set at Ladyfest London where their rendition of Simultaneously really hits some heights – the lyrics are about loving, JD’s vocals are heart-rending and the rhythm has the whole room breathing at the same time.
Sure she’s a hipster. But she’s real too. A brave beautiful queer trailblazer…
Look out for JD, Michael and Ginger’s tour dates on MySpace
You can get their songs and new album Off Our Back on iTunes
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great article you two!xx
Fact: way back when Johanna Fateman was still regularly involved, and her and JD DJd at Ghetto, I got their autographs on the back of a loyalty card for Coffee Cake and Kink – which I later traded in stupidly for my free piece of cake, forgetting what was on it. SO STUPID.
Also: this is FANTASTIC thanksssss
dope interview and questions
JD is so attractive sometimes its hard to look at her.
dope interview and questions
JD is so attractive sometimes its hard to look at
her.