Peaches: “Why do men have such problems with their asses?”

Pop provocateur, feminist, educator: PEACHES has a mission – to improve the world with sex

When we meet Peaches for an interview, the rock world is celebrating Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl because, after breaking his leg, he is playing concerts in a cast on a throne made especially for him. Peaches rolls her eyes. She is sitting on a wooden bench in a Berlin café and looks thinner than ever, but of course no one says that to her - it would probably not be a compliment for someone who has been rebelling against beauty ideals for years.

Whatever Grohl can do, she has been able to do for a long time, and in a much more spectacular way. After Peaches broke her ankle at a festival in Portugal in 2010 (“jumping from the drum podium, David Lee Roth style”), she designed an entire tour concept around her disability. She had to hurl a naked transsexual nurse with a painted penis and red crosses on her breasts across the stage in her wheelchair, while the Canadian singer clutched the microphone with one hand and a bottle of vodka with the other. Rock'n'roll to the power of ten, but no one celebrated her as a hero because of that.

“Bitches everywhere”

The unequal treatment of men and women in the music business was the driving force behind the fictional character Peaches from the beginning. That is why she named her albums “Fatherfuckers” and “Impeach My Bush” and encouraged men to shake their dicks to the beat in songs like "Shake Yer Dix." "Look at the rappers: bitches everywhere, 'twerk your asses, shake your tits, girls', all the time. Or the Rolling Stones waving a giant inflatable dick around on stage in 1975 during 'Star Star.' Why can't a woman do that?"

Of course, there are parodic elements when she sings lines like "You came to see a rock show, a big, gigantic cock show" on stage with a strobe light in her crotch or asks her audience to take off their shirts with a huge gold "Peaches" emblem in front of her chest. The call for a higher level of female self-determination contained therein is, however, serious, and compared to the raw energy of her live shows, every pop femme fatale dancing in underwear to a choreography seems uptight. Or should we say castrated?

Facing your own distress

The twist goes like this: Anyone who admits that they find Peaches' demanding female sexuality disturbing should, logically, ask themselves why that is. On YouTube, in addition to the usual declarations of love and hate, you can also find comments like "This is WRONG" or "Scared of her, scared of being raped!" under her videos. Many people find it easier to dismiss Peaches as a cartoonish sex maniac or a feminist lesbian riot (for those who should know: she is bisexual) than to face up to her disturbance.

Even her first major record company, Sony, initially tried helplessly to sell the pop artist, born Merrill Nisker in Toronto, as a wicked techno siren. "My version of 'Set It Off' didn't seem radio-friendly enough to them, so they had a remix made and invited a German mainstream director to shoot the video," she says of her second single. In the finished clip, she can be seen dancing to the pounding Eurodance of Tobi Neumann's "Radio Mix" between smooching and groping models in a club toilet. She had to fight hard for the short CG effect in the middle section, in which her armpit and pubic hair suddenly sprout from her pink bikini. She won and lost: Sony released her from her contract shortly after completion and allegedly even demanded back the money she had already invested.

All signs point to retrospective

Thanks in no small part to the word of mouth of famous fans such as Björk, Marilyn Manson, Michael Stipe and Yoko Ono, Peaches can still live without a major label. When you attend one of her concerts, you can tell that the queer community would still celebrate Peaches even if she had been “Teaches Of Peaches” no longer recorded new music. The debut was released 15 years ago, with “Rub” At the end of September, six years after the last album, their fifth work will be released. "

I'll just keep going, I want to still be on stage when I'm 90." She turns 47 this year, and all signs are already pointing to a retrospective.
A few months ago, her autobiographical musical “Peaches Does Herself” was released on DVD, a colorful dance revue in which she recounts the highlights of her career in elaborate costumes (including a golden bodysuit with a protruding penis that explodes in the show finale).

Drunk in the backstage toilet

Her behind-the-scenes photo book was also recently published, showing Peaches in a more private way than ever before. The photographer Holger Talinski accompanied her for six years and was allowed to take pictures of Peaches sitting naked in the backstage toilet and drunkenly peeing behind a tree. Other pictures give a good impression of what the artist was like when she was still called Merrill Nisker and played folk music in Toronto. Without any wild make-up or vagina overalls, alone in her apartment, hanging out with friends or with her cat Catanza on the terrace of her house in Los Angeles.

The most remarkable photo shows her with her family on the living room couch. "It was the end of a tour, she was totally exhausted," says the photographer. "Everyone was sitting relaxed watching TV, I think they were watching baseball." As in many other pictures in the book, Peaches is seen sleeping, her feet on her father's lap, while her mother tenderly strokes her hair.

She was concerned that the myth of the electropunk provocateur could suffer from such photos, but it was also important to her to show this side for once. "Holger and I spent over a year selecting the photos. I had to remind him again and again not to ignore the wild side." She had a dedication printed on the first page of the illustrated book: "For my sister Suri - now you have pictures of all the stories I always tell you."

Suri is three years older than Merrill, alias Peaches, the role model of her youth. At 23, Suri was diagnosed with a serious nervous disease and has been in a wheelchair for years. She cannot travel abroad with her famous little sister. "Every time I perform in New York, where she lives, she sits up in the box and I sing for her," says Peaches. She can still remember the first time Suri attended one of her concerts. "She lifted herself out of the wheelchair and crawled towards me. She called out excitedly, 'Oh yeah! Oh yeah!' - and I thought: Oh my God, I love you so much!"

'Free Drink Ticket' is perhaps the most personal song I have ever released

On her new album, Peaches dares to process private experiences in songs for the first time. The dark "Free Drink Ticket" is about the breakup of her long-term partner - "it's perhaps the most personal song I've ever released." It is also one of the angriest pieces Peaches has ever made, with the aggressive drive coming mainly from the fact that you can't hear her screaming. "Fuck you, chickenshit, you spineless coward, you liar," she hisses over threateningly buzzing bass lines that she produced together with Vice Cooler from XBXRX. "I want to be there when you hit the ground, when your life implodes." It is the reckoning of a deeply wounded person in the style of Kelis' "Caught Out There," "created in the moment when you hate the other person from the bottom of your heart."

Reckoning with Berlin’s party addiction

At the same time, the song is also a reckoning with the hedonistic partying in a city like Berlin, where Peaches lived for years and where she still has an apartment today. The musician, often misunderstood as a shrill party queen, has repeatedly had to experience how loved ones became estranged from her in search of the next kick. "There is this dark side of nightlife that swallows you up, draws you into a world of drugs and paranoia. And at some point you're just a zombie, thirsting for the next free drink."

Except for “Free Drink Ticket” and the pop excursion “Dumb Fuck”, Peaches has “Rub” not far from her trademark sound – only that today she has better equipment at her disposal to produce the eruptive, bass-heavy electro-clash. "At 'Teaches Of Peaches' I have wanted such sounds, now
I have it," she says enthusiastically. Her content has also remained the same. "Dick In The Air" is even an update of "Shake Yer Dix", released in 2004. "I'm still trying to imagine it. What's the best way to hold your dick in the air?" she asks, getting on all fours on the wooden bench and moving her pelvis up and down in jerking movements. "How do you get a guy to do that?" In the last ten years, women have made enormous progress in terms of emancipation, she explains. "It's just that men are still waiting for their sexual revolution."

Men are still waiting for their sexual revolution

You can find her constant circling around sex boring or compulsive. You can criticize her feminist stance as being too brutal or ask yourself whether pop culture really needs another figure like Peaches, who uses performance art to ride on stereotypes. But when it comes to the narrowly defined rules of male role behavior in pop, you have to agree with her: hardly anything has changed. Justin Bieber and Drake kissing at the VMAs? Unthinkable. Bushido having himself photographed sleeping on his mother's lap? Death threat. To this day, even the most loyal fans of Metallica have not forgiven the band members for speaking openly about their feelings in the documentary "Some Kind Of Monster." Men just don't do that.

"When I talk about sex, it doesn't mean I want to fuck everyone," says Peaches. "It's about the general attitude, the politics of private life. I want to change history for the better, you know? We paralyze ourselves with fear, fear is a big part of our history, especially in sex. Why do men have such a big problem with their asses, for example? It's really... stupid. The anus is a place of discovery shared by both sexes! Lots of men push their girlfriends into anal sex and don't realize that they themselves have asses. I sang in 'Back It Up Boys' in 2003 about how it feels even better for a guy because of the excitable pros-tata. Relax, guys!" Then she slows down again. "It's like this: every man has to become a feminist first. Only when the balance between the sexes is achieved can we meet as human beings on equal terms."

Only when the balance between the sexes is established can we meet on equal terms

Before her pop career, Peaches ran a daycare center for ten years. When she talks about her message, you can see that she also sees her work as sex education for adults, as dance music with a therapeutic purpose. "I like to talk to men about these things. With ROLLING STONE, a
"It's a magazine aimed at heterosexual men," she says. - Well, we just had Conchita Wurst on the cover! Her answer has the encouraging tone of a kindergarten teacher, and she repeats it twice so that people can understand her correctly: "Good for you! Good for you."

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