Music Style music for stoned queers

Musical Influences Lefty Frizzell, Laurie Anderson, Chris and Cosey, Sylvester, Phillip Glass, Dory Previn.

Artist History a brief history of ghetto girl: In 1985, I began recording ‘songs’ on a 4-track cassette recorder I had bought, using my $39 Casio portable keyboard, a cheap-ass Radio Shack reverb box, a $5.00 microphone, and any other objects that made sound. I use the word ‘songs’ very loosely, for during that period, I was much more interested in experimenting with sounds rather than songwriting. Influenced more by Laurie Anderson and Chris & Cosey than by the Beach Boys and the Beatles, I created sonic collages into which I mixed my own acid-damaged poetry as well as found sounds and the marijuana-stimulated ad lib ramblings of my friends. One of my most frequent early collaborators, my friend Mairi Gl’amour and I came up with the name ghetto girl (no caps, please), which evolved from one of our favorite phrases from that period, “get it, girl!” from whence came the corporate entity "g.i.g. entertainment international". For the next few years, ghetto girl evolved as an artistic entity consisting of myself and anyone else who would let me commit his or her talents to tape. And a definite ghetto girl aesthetic emerged as well: quick and crude, but with all the magic and fleeting brilliance of first takes, twangy out-of-tune guitars laid over a poppers disco beat, and a peculiar lyrical style that paid little attention to gender pronouns or shifts in person. In her willful ignorance of traditional song structure, ghetto girl truly did create some amazingly trippy “music for stoned queers” as she then characterized her music. Forthcoming is a CD collection of ghetto girl tracks from this era, entitled "ghetto girl b.c." Most of the tunes on this website, however, are from the “second era” in ghetto girl’s career, which began in 1989 when I met Christian and a whole new world of home-recording possibilities opened up to me. Christian, too, had been recording his own songs and those of his friends since he was nine years old, and was much more technically adept at it than was I. Furthermore, he was much more of a musical traditionalist, composing perfect pop-ditties, whereas I didn’t even know what a “bridge” in a song was! Within a matter of weeks after meeting each other, we were recording together; inspired by Christian’s songcraft, and enraptured by new love, ghetto girl began to move in a more song-oriented direction. Now she was actually writing songs with verses, choruses, and harmony vocals and even her songs without a traditional structure at least had a melody. Yet key aspects of the ghetto girl aesthetic remained intact, as evidenced by the found sounds in the dance-oriented "I’ll Never Be a Fag" and "Lose Weight Deliciously", the gender-bending of "Mary-Goes-Round" and "Tranzmergance", and the all-out freaky aural experimentation of "Give Her a Haldol". As the years rolled by, Chris and I were able to buy more recording equipment, and his talent and skills in audio production developed from a hobby into a career. ghetto girl (and many others) reaped the benefits of his growth, resulting in recordings that were nearly professional in quality, yet recorded entirely at home on four tracks. From the very beginning, ghetto girl was conceived as a collective, and although I had less hands-on involvement in the engineering of the recordings as time passed, I remained firmly in control of ghetto girl’s artistic vision, and had to battle with Chris over, for example, whether it was appropriate to write a song about one’s AIDS medications. Ultimately, the music benefited from this collaboration, and ghetto girl produced three full-length recordings that document this remarkable period of creative output. (But I’m still not sure if I ever wrote a song with a bridge!)Because these songs quite literally wouldn’t exist without him, I dedicate this website to my once-in-a-lifetime love, Christian Matthews.

Albums Gag (1990), Incorrect (1992), Plugged Into Vanna (1992), Out of One Body and Into Another (1994), All Alone in Her World (2000)

Location San Francisco, CA - USA

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