Lou Ridley: "Pentecostal"

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Lou Ridley is the most Texan artist I have heard in a long time. She is as much DJ Screw and Selena and Nanci Griffith and ZZ Top and Neon Indian as Lana or Ethel or any of the mothers superior you might compare her to aesthetically: like Texas itself, her music cannot be contained by one simple box, a swamp goth born from the humidity like Aphrodite from foam. 

Texan men at prestigious Texan publications have told me a couple times now that it’s just “not the right time to write about  Lou.” Well, it’s never the right time to be excommunicated, or assaulted,  or shunned by your loved ones and branded with a scarlet letter; let alone, to have to get an abortion in a state where you can’t legally do that anymore. 

But these are things that happen to women every day, and these are the things Lou Ridley writes about every day before she picks herself back up, dusts herself off, and goes to another cleaning gig to make sure she can still pay for time in the studio, which should be her God-given right as a powerful woman whose voice needs to be heard. 

Because this crazy Texan bitch needed to hear Lou Ridley, so I know that other crazy Texan bitches need to hear her too. Because that’s who this is all for now: not just the girls, but the Texan girls in particular: because we are as unstoppable as the sweat constantly dripping from our brows.