Lexa Gates - "Stacy's Chips"

Listen here.

By The Mother-In-Chief

The last song that I ever wrote about for a music publication owned by men was "Lately, Nothing" by my girl Lexa Gates, featuring the gorgeous voice of Alé Araya.

This was a publication I once worshipped during the salad days of the blog era, like other bitches did with Rookie Mag, until I made the mistake of finding out how the sausage was made, and I learned that the men who founded an empire of dirt pudding and mud pies had always been force-feeding me hot dogs and waterboarding me with their piss.

Now I'm all grown up, on my Tavi Gevinson with the wrist shit, and I'm determined to put those Salad Nazis out of business. But that's neither here nor there. 

All you need to know about the last eight months of my life as a corporate hack is this: don't meet your heroes. Knock down some of your idols a peg or two for a change, and maybe chomp down on the dick of a sacred cow.

There's something ever-so-ironic to me about an allegedly "underground" music publication that's actually a front for Sweetgreen publishing my thoughts on Lexa Gates, because I'm pretty sure that at one time or another, Lexa herself has probably reluctantly scarfed down at least one of those cardboard bowls filled with wilted lettuce, as I have done in a past life when I was still suckered into a soul-sucking 9-5 commute that I should have been compensated for. 

The reluctant salad you didn't actually want, which never satiates the endlessly gnawing pit, is practically a rite of passage for would-be girlbosses in the big city, a ritual on one of those gray days when you forgot your lunch and that bite of the apple they always said was so big wasn't quite enough to fill your ever-rumbling tummy, which hungers for something so much more substantial than your boss could ever give you. 

What you hear and feel is that insatiable urge to fill your belly to the brim on your own terms, with whatever you damn well please, with no scolding mother or sniveling man to make you feel like how you look to others is more important than actually feeling satiated and satisfied. 

I first found Lexa through an out-of-context clip on the timeline, spitting pure venom in the backseat with her bitches, looking for something to fill my own void. The caption described her Mac Miller for the girls, leaving me to hunt for her actual name, as I have done with so many once-nameless women whose voices impacted me.

In reality, I feel Billie Eilish's mouth sounds more than Mac's gentle jazz allyship. There's humor and horror at once in Lexa's delivery, poise and pain, steely confidence and shattered glass.

Because that's being a woman: it's fucked up, and it's fucking sick. It's slapstick comedy, and it's body horror. It's a virgin birth, and the actual fucking apocalypse.

I hate having estrogen in my bloodstream; it's awesome.

"Stacy's Chips" dropped right around the time I got fired, by one in a line of many men, who I mistakenly believe I had to beg for permission from, not only to speak about this music in a way that people would actually read, but to survive at all.

I now realize that under the previous conditions of my music writing career, I could not actually speak to why Lexa's music immediately spoke to me, so long as a man was twisting my words and deciding how much a pound of flesh was worth.

As with almost every female artist you ever convinced me I should be ashamed to enjoy, the engineers who have most often manipulated and massacred my voice, instead of mixing and mastering it, were men.

They can deny it all they want, but they have always hated the sound of our voices, even when we made their livings for them while dying on our own, which is why they always sanded away the edges they could never understand. Because it is those edges which remind them that we bleed.

And it's the edges that makes Lexa's flow immediately so compelling on a visceral level, ike the razor-sharp eyeliner that was already her signature before you even knew who she was, as if drawn on by Mother Nature herself.

It only makes sense to me that Lexa is an audio engineer too, because only women are capable of hearing the full breadth of our own voices, which men constantly mute and stifle and dull into their own unimaginative palette.

So now I'm engineering my own shit. The only way I can write about music anymore is the way I always have actually listened to it: I have to feel it, and let it become part of the fabric of my life. I put on "Stacy's Chips" as I scurry to the bodega in search of a bag of the very same pita chips, which have scratched the roof of my own mouth and caught in my throat so many times before.

I wonder how the neutrally-named Stacy identifies, if they were ever even a real person at all: like Wendy, or Aunt Jemima, or the Mamita whose frozen coconut I suck patiently like condensed milk straight from the teat: women whose friendly faces, whose feminine outlines—even if unreal—were drawn in order to make the fortunes of men who think that women cannot make fortunes ourselves, so we must be reduced to the false idol worship of branded logos.

Because women are only ever good for being seen, and never for being heard, isn't that right?

We are all haunted by the ghosts of other women: sometimes not even women we know and love, but women we hate, simply because men cannot imagine how many multitudes each one of us contains, and how unalike we all are, which ironically means we share more than we ever know, because the only thing more dissimilar from yourself than other girls, are the people who were not girls, who never have been and never will be, and who tell us that we are never good for more than being stepped on and silenced and shut up. 

I read an interview with Lexa in which she bristles at the endless comparisons to her and another rapper who just so happens to be a woman who just so happens to be from New York, who Lexa never even listened to until people kept invoking her name. It brings to mind all the times a cis person recommended me a trans writer whose flow was fucking weak, or a trans musician whose shit was too nice-and-neat to reflect the messiness of my lived experience, or a female artist who has been brainwashed into accepting the conditions of men.

Lexa snarls like she would cut you if you even blinked in her direction, let alone breathe or bat an unfriendly eye, which is how I know she's probably softer than anyone else in the game at her center.

Because the only reason you wear armor or wield a weapon in self-defense, even if it's only the blade of your own tongue, is if you have something to protect, and a heart that can be broken, and skin that will break.

I can hear her splitting in two on "Stacy's Chips," even as she keeps it together better than anyone, because most of the time being a woman means keeping it together is never enough, and there will always be another part of yourself the world convinces you that you had to shrink.

So I hope Lexa knows that she can have her steak and eat it too, and she can have all the bags of chips she can break into, and even the whole entire cake if she wants it.

Because girls need their red meat too; how else can we be expected to bleed all the time—offering up our bodies to the world anytime we dare to walk to the bodega for a midnight snack when you remembered you didn't eat, or maybe you were just trying to forget that you have to in order to keep on living—if we don't know what flesh tastes like for ourselves?

And I'm screenshotting my own shit because I don't think they can sue me if I quote it. And you wouldn't dare sue a poor helpless wittle girl lost in the woods all by hewself, now would you?

Fuck your copyright, I'm taking my masters back, even if I have to do it hostile. Because you already judged me before I even typed these words, which happened before I even opened my mouth, which happened before I was even born.

Btw Lexa you should hit my line and teach me how to do my eyeliner sometime. I can't do that shit to save my fucking life, and maybe that's why all these men think they can fuck with me. I need to scare them with my eyes, and not just my voice: to put the fear of God in them like only a furious woman sent straight from hell can. Fuck with me, you know I got it.