Whatever. I’m so through with her now.
[QUOTE=Michelle Shocked]
That means upholding my punk rock values in the most evangelical enclaves and, in this case, speaking up for the most fearful of fundamentalists in, well, a San Francisco music hall full of Michelle Shocked fans.
[/QUOTE]
Ahh, she likes to troll is what it comes down to.
Given nearly thirty years of shows and her folking around in folk circles, and having a high proportion of her audience being gay, and nothing like this ever having been heard out of her before, her explanation makes the most sense to me.
Poor 'chelle, I think your career now will be about the same as Michael Richards, who probably doesn’t hate black people either.
See post 49 where she said:
“You are looking at the world’s greatest homophobe. Ask God what he thinks."
Just horrible. It’s like Cat Stevens calling for Salman Rushdie’s death horrible. It does seem like she suffered a psychotic break, but now her statements that her rant was misinterpreted don’t seem jibe with reality either. It’s sad.
Still, she’s made a lot of great music, and I won’t stop listening to those of her albums I already own: The Texas Campfire Tapes, Short, Sharp, Shocked, Captain Swing, and Arkansas Traveler. She’s not the same person that she was then.
Whoa.
What’s with the title? WTF is “GAYmbling” supposed to mean?
Aha! I always thought she must have been. Thanks for that.
It’s a play on this scene from Casablanca.
Casablanca reference…
Ah, maybe I would have caught the reference if the OP’s title had incorporated wordplay from an eminently quotable timeless classic.
You mean like Rio?
Ok, I listened to the uploaded audio twice and I’m still not sure what her position is. At my most charitable I think she’s trying to say, I love every soul in this room (she did say that), I don’t hate the sinner I hate the sin, don’t be so hard on the Christians, they’re just scared, except the ones that are really assholes. I think, maybe, could’a been waaaay clearer.
ETA, dammit, now I’m going to have to watch Casablanca again.
Wow. I never would have thought there’d be a “clarification” message that I would actually buy, but those statements do read as sincere and I find them entirely plausible. But damn did she do a horrible job of communicating that message effectively at the actual concert.
Yep. I accurately quoted the article that I linked, but the article itself must have been relying on recollections of her words rather than any hard verifiable source like a recording or transcript.
The official statements issued are pretty good, the whole thing is still a little murky though because of the 2011 quote “You are looking at the world’s greatest homophobe. Ask God what He thinks” as well as the fact that her very first response to the outrage on Sunday night was a tweet “Truth is leading to painful confrontation”.
About 95% of the reason I started this Thread was because when I saw the story I immediately thought of such an awesome Thread title and I was just excited to get to use it.
Kind of seemed like the obvious source to me.
I desperately want to believe that she’s not actually a homophobe, that she’s not really batshit insane. I haven’t kept up with her for ages, but I was probably the, or at least one of the first people to play her music on the radio in the midwest, if not the country. I played 2 songs from The Texas Campfire Tapes (“5am In Amsterdam” and “Down On Thomas Street”) and then later, via a pre-release promo, was probably one of the first people to play “Anchorage” from Short Sharp Shocked on a “New Releases” show. Overall, her music wasn’t enough of my thing to keep up with, but I liked a lot of the songs and I liked her storytelling. Plus she was damned cute back then.
“When I Grow Up” has always been my favorite song by her too. It’s just so cooL, lyrically and musically!
I’ve been a big Michelle Shocked fan ever since I heard The Greener Side with it’s video that lampoons Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video in the early 90’s. I even caught one of her show’s here in LA at McCabe’s (which just cancelled her upcoming appearance) like about a year ago. She’s always been a fiercely indie musician who follows her own muse. She can rock out on everything from punk to rock to blues to folk to pop to gospel to country and everything in between.
And she found God a little while ago and things began to change. I don’t think she’s a hateful person, but she has contracted a case of Bible literalist Christianity that is attacking her liberal tendencies and I suspect she’s been in a state of cognitive dissonance ever since. Add a little aging musician inarticulate rambling to the mix and we get the shitstorm that has everybody asking “Who the hell is Michelle Shocked?!”
It’s amazing how often life imitates art: She has a song from her early period called "Campus Crusade" that mocks Evangelical Christians. It starts with…
In the song, the “crusaders” get in a little hot water by offending the crowd, and the song ends with…
Check the liner notes again; that’s Taj Mahal on guest vocals (and possibly guitar) on that song.
I think her apology was sincere and her explanation truthful. This is “Elvis Costello talking smack about Ray Charles” bad, and she hasn’t had a recording career in a while. I wish her the best.
A couple years ago, I bought a CD of Mercury Poise for my (gay) niece. I’d previously given her her first Ani DiFranco and Seater-Kinney albums, which she liked enough. This one, she discreetly re-gifted to another relative, who discreetly re-gifted it to me. I love Michelle, but her stock has been dropping for a while now.
I’m not fully awake yet. What is the relevance of this? 
Krokodil believes that a black musician’s involvement is supposed to cancel out any uncomfortable feelings you may have listening to the song.