A
November Saturday night in Berlin and Wolfgang Tillmans is preparing to call
Susanne Oberbeck – No Bra – in New York to discuss her new album, Love &
Power, for which he’s photographed the musician. It’s not the first time: the
two have known each other since 2001, when they were both based in London.
(Somehow, like ambassadors, they still encapsulate the figurative attitude of
the city.) But we’re lucky to be here at all: a typo over email misgendered the
name of the street Tillmans’ studio is on, sending this writer somewhere else.
Though unrelated, it’s perhaps the perfect precursor: described by Dazed as a
“gender revolutionary,” No Bra’s new record weaves between themes of
sadomasochism, cruising, the inextricable link between sex and money (and their
portrayal in pop music), populist politics and fantasies of a utopian future
world. It does this while simultaneously being a banger. The first video,
Bangin, directed and edited by Oberbeck features cinematography by Slava
Mogutin. The second, for Who Is The God? featuring Abdu Ali and premiered here,
was shot in Baltimore a few days previously. Deal with Oberbeck and you’re
dealing with an artist, in all senses. Her expression is turbocharged, and
writ-through.
Dean
Mayo Davies: You’ve enjoyed a long friendship with each other – Wolfgang,
you’ve photographed Susanne repeatedly over the years. Can we start by talking
about the process of photographing?
Susanne
Oberbeck: There are things that I know Wolfgang’s very interested in, exposing
some kind of a truth in a situation.
Wolfgang
Tillmans: I think it’s the power of vulnerability which makes a portrait work
for me, you know when on both sides there is a sense of opening up to the
situation. We’ve known each other for a long time but we also don’t know each
other in depth, you just have a sense of time and different places and scenes
lived in, and—
SO:
Maybe what you picked up on about the person is more relevant than biographical
details.
WT: Only
this summer when we took the pictures did we ever talk about our German
backgrounds.
DMD: Did
you discuss the Love & Power imagery beforehand?
SO: We
talked on the phone – you asked me whether I wanted something that was quite
natural or more like my stage persona. And we both decided that it would be
good for this release to have something that was more like my stage persona –
‘Because that’s also you,’ I remember you saying. That’s your philosophy, you
say things like, ‘If somebody says that song reminds me of Pet Shop Boys then
that’s also real.’ Obviously the stage persona comes from somewhere and in
normal situations it’s maybe inappropriate to be that person, but it’s still
you.
WT: I
wanted to be as open as possible to what you felt this record needed, I didn’t
want to bring an idea before I heard you. And then for me it was fun because I
dressed some corners in the studio a little bit; I got some materials, some
metal foils. I hardly ever photograph in my studio, it’s the thing we do the
least here, so for everyone involved it was exciting to prepare for you. We’ve
got this underground car park under the building and I got my assistant to find
the fuse box to turn off the automatic lights so we could make the scene.
SO: What
did you think when you saw that picture, Dean? Without knowing anything about
it, where did you think it was?
DMD: I
felt that it’s very much its own time and place – as if you’ve just arrived
through a portal or a mysterious door that leads to I don’t know where. To the
left of you there’s this striking shadow.
WT: How
are we doing with the nipple, do you think we’re running into trouble?
SO: I
have to censor both of them, [but] I did it in a way that’s not particularly
noticeable. I mean, I noticed just now with the video I made for Bangin: I had
to keep it unlisted. I put it on Instagram and it was taken down within ten
minutes. It’s a real problem. Princess Nokia made a video where she’s fully
nude at one point but because it’s later on in the video, they don’t notice it
that easily, you know. So, you have to be really strategic about it. It’s
stupid because at one point they could just suddenly turn around and go, ‘Oh,
it’s fine now.’ One person’s censorship is the next person’s clickbait. It’s
totally arbitrary, and it inhibits your ability to promote yourself.
WT: It’s
so maddening, and it’s really only because of US American rules. In Europe it
wouldn’t be a problem. So, the first picture, a portrait I took of you, was in
2005 for GLU Magazine – and you moved to New York in 2010?
DMD:
What catalysed your move to New York, what interested you?
SO: I’d
been playing so many shows in London, for several years. Everybody knew me
already. I felt like in Britain it was always, ‘We love this’, but there’s a
kind of a comedy element; a bit Page 3, a bit saucy. In America it was more in
the history of avant-garde. Peoples’ understanding was a little bit different
because they don’t have that Page 3 reference. And I was getting a lot of
shows. Obviously, New York itself is appealing. One or two years later this whole
queer rap scene popped off and I started doing my club night Gay Vinyl in 2011.
So that was what kept me here. There was suddenly a new surge of energy with
lots of things happening, like Venus X’s GHE20G0TH1K which single-handedly
changed the whole club scene in NYC and worldwide, Shayne [Oliver]’s Hood By
Air doing the same for fashion, Telfar, Luar, the Vogue scene around Qween
Beat, Mykki Blanco and Arca and others really shifting music culture; Ian
Isiah, Princess Nokia, Dev Hynes just never stops.
DMD:
There’s a lyric on the album: ‘Boring people think they’re really powerful.’ I
think that’s such an important lyric.
SO:
[Laughs] Well, I think because now we live in a time where it’s kind of almost
understood that big companies are quite blatantly going around stealing ideas
from unknown artists and making them big, and the fact they have money means
they can do that. So it’s almost like this understanding that to be somebody
who has ideas or is willing to push them forward makes you a weak person,
because you’re genuine, you’re not corrupt, you have a genuine motivation. I
always felt when I was younger, trying to apply for jobs, the fact that you
were a person who they thought had ideas bordered on making you unsuitable for
the job. That it was important to be a bit boring, a bit subdued. That to be a
creative person is seen as a bit crazy and weak, as a way of justifying exploiting
people; people try to put it in with Bohemianism and this kind of thing. It has
nothing to do with that.
WT: That
really resonates with me in the way I developed my portraiture in the very
early 90s. I felt that my contemporaries and myself weren’t really represented
as serious beings in the media, and that young people, creative people, always
had to almost apologise by giving funny poses or crazy smiles or weird colours
in the photographic style. Apologising for being different and as if all of
this is just a fun and passing phase. I wanted to photograph people in their
early twenties as serious people, because I felt I’m a serious person with all
my contradictions and the lot.
SO:
Exactly. I get up at five in the morning and I work hard. And I know people who
don’t even have the kind of visibility that I have, and they make amazing
things constantly, but they’re not being given any kind of exposure let alone
financial support.
WT: That
financial disparity I find is becoming ever more crazy.
SO: Yes.
WT: That
if you don’t have an object to sell then you’re basically fucked.
SO: Yes,
Nicki Minaj just said, ‘People think rappers have money, we don’t have money,
because Spotify is giving it away for free and the guy who runs it it is getting
rich.’ Neoliberalism has been exposed now but it’s an ideology, so it’s hard to
change that perception, that if you’re not making money, it must be your fault
somehow, it’s seen as a personality flaw, you know, it’s structural. People
don’t want to say that actually nobody’s really making money, apart from these
few people at the top, and everybody is looking to the next person that seems
to have it slightly better than you. So it’s that ideology at work and that
really needs to be turned around. Artists’ ideas are really important in
shaping society and their work is made out to have very little value.
WT: Is
that also what you referred to in Bangin, in the song, in the lyrics, ‘Cos
nothing costs a thing in this economy?’
SO:
Well, no that was more a personal thing where I was having an affair with
somebody where I felt like this person couldn’t work out what my interest in
them was, and it was almost like being some type of a prostitute that doesn’t
charge or something. For some people that’s just a safer way of interacting
with people, it’s transactional but at this point we’re not paying anybody.
DMD: The
new record feels very strong, after-dark in the beats and the production.
SO:
What, like club, kind of?
DMD:
Yes.
WT:
[Dean] You know your question, ‘Is night-time a safe space?’ I guess Susanne
and I don’t need reminding that, you know, the safe spaces for radical ideas of
free expression in urban settings like New York or London have been so
radically diminished over the last 20 years that when we talk, ‘Oh nightlife is
exciting right now’ we’re actually talking about two or three or four venues in
a city of ten million, no.
SO: Yes,
in New York in particular because of the housing prices the venues are pushed
more and more into the outskirts and then everybody arrives in an Uber, and
there’s no other way of getting there, and from an economic and environmental
point of view it doesn’t really make sense. I feel like nightlife should be
somewhere where people can walk, not be this suburban thing. So when you say it
has a night-time feel, it’s also an imaginary space, it’s an imaginary
futuristic world.
WT: What
is the time span the songs on Love & Power come from?
SO: The
music I made between 2016 and 18 and the lyrics I wrote a year ago, mostly.
WT: So,
you write the tracks without a lyrical idea first?
SO: Yes,
not always. Actually there’s a variety of processes on this record.
WT: Do
you ever collaborate in the production side of things?
SO: Not
really, no. I did a thing with Arca where I recorded some vocals and sent it to
her and she wrote a really beautiful piano piece over it and produced it. But
not with my own project.
WT: Because
you have such a strong live persona and the words are so strong that—
SO:
Could do with a producer? [Laughs].
WT: No,
no, no: I’m very curious about what your set-up is. How do you work, is it all
software or do you have instruments?
SO: It’s
all actual hardware instruments and then I record audio files into Logic and
edit them. On this record there’s a few things that came from computer-based
drum machines, like MPC for computer and different types of drum machines and
synths because I figured that I wasn’t going to buy all these instruments.
WT: Yes.
SO: But
not like software plug-ins, I’ve never worked with that.
DMD: How
do you know when there’s an end – an album – in sight?
SO:
Sometimes it’s just like, ‘This has to go out now, this has to be finished.’ I
don’t plan a release around a certain theme, but I made the songs so there will
be a coherence and I have to understand what it is.
DMD:
It’s always a product of your mind and your preoccupations at the time even if
you’re not consciously aware of it.
SO:
That’s exactly how it is, yes, and sometimes you just have to force yourself to
admit what it is, even if it’s going to make some people uncomfortable.
DMD: Is
that something you fight against?
SO: You
have to get it past people somehow.
DMD: The
lead track, Bangin, has a great video, what was the idea behind it?
SO: My
idea was to basically recreate the lyrics, initially I was thinking to actually
have some hint of activity, an interaction between people, rubbing our tits
together and so on, I thought it could be done in a way that is a little bit
funny, a little bit awkward, but not pornographic. But then I changed my mind
about that, so in the end it’s implied, everybody is staring at the camera,
there’s a threat of something, a group of people that look very powerful.
WT: And
it’s more what isn’t happening.
SO: Yes,
exactly.
WT:
Dysphoricize is the last song on the album. What’s it about?
SO:
Dysphoria is when you perceive a disparity between your allocated gender and
your perceived gender I guess: you’re being dysphoric. I was just trying to add
an angle to this discussion which is that, yes, it’s about your perception of
yourself, but this is also always relating to society. So I turned it into a
verb, somebody can ‘dysphoricize’ you, they’re actively doing something to make
you feel this way, but it’s systemic so it’s not so obvious. It’s such a basic
thing that’s everywhere, how people respond to you based on your body shape and
your perceived gender, it’s a subconscious bias that’s very hard to get rid of.
Wolfgang
Tillmans in Conversation with Genderfuck Icon No Bra. By Dean Mayo Davies. Another Mag , November
27, 2019.
In 2003,
Susanne Oberbeck saw a headline in the Sunday Sport referring to a member of S
Club 7. “Rachel Stevens,” it said, “with no bra.” Oberbeck, who is German, was
sufficiently intrigued by this sleazy tabloid prurience to name her own band No
Bra.
Originally
a duo, No Bra soon became known for Oberbeck’s habit of intoning sexually
charged lyrics in a Nico-esque accent over industrial sounds while standing
topless and wearing a moustache. No Bra’s single Munchausen – in which two
hipsters try to outdo each other with extravagant boasts (“I used to share a
squat in Camden with Nina Hagen and she used to make pizza out of dead cats”) –
even got championed by the unlikely figure of BBC Radio 1’s Pete Tong when it
was released in 2005.
Oberbeck
is about to release the third No Bra album, Love and Power. In the video for
the single Bangin, she’s still topless but the moustache has gone. She is lying
surrounded by a posse of similarly disrobed, heavily tattooed people from New
York’s queer underground performance scene, singing lyrics inspired by French
philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari over stark electronic beats:
“Rubbing our dicks together in the house of love / Rubbing our tits together in
the house of love.”
While
Oberbeck’s MO has barely changed, No Bra has found a new relevance in a time of
gender fluidity. Oberbeck moved to New York in 2010 and found her tribe: people
such as Shayne Oliver, former fashion designer for Hood by Air, now making
records; rapper Mykki Blanco; and Björk and Kanye West collaborator Arca, on
whose forthcoming album she appears.
“I’d
played so many shows in London,” says Oberbeck, speaking by phone from New
York. “I came here and the responses were so positive and it was seen as more
avant garde. In Britain it was, ‘It’s really cool but it’s a bit funny, a bit
page three humour.’ In America, they don’t have that.” What New Yorkers do
have, though, is a downtown performance art tradition stretching back decades,
and a habit of embracing eccentric misfits. No Bra fit right in.
“It
definitely feels like a new moment of relevance for her,” says the artist
Wolfgang Tillmans, who photographed Oberbeck standing topless in a multistorey
car park for the sleeve of Love and Power, and who has known her for 20 years.
“That is always fantastic for artists who just do their thing, don’t search to
be in the zeitgeist, then end up just naturally in the midst of it or ahead of
it.”
Long
before gender-nonconformity became widely talked about, Oberbeck was living it.
Growing up queer in the countryside north of Hamburg, she felt alienated from
the family life expected of her, but found an answer in her father’s collection
of existentialist and gay literature. “I was reading Simone de Beauvoir when I
was about 15 and thought it was the only thing I could see that was remotely
relatable, that you dedicate your life to your work and don’t sit with some guy
in the same house every day.” Her other big inspiration was British style
magazines such as i-D and the Face. “They opened up a world – ‘Wow, there are
places where the women look cool, not everybody’s white and there’s a music
culture.’”
She
studied film at Camberwell School of Art in London and was drawn to the city’s
alternative gay scene, which was “a lot more encouraging of unusual females”.
It also influenced her focus on sexuality. As Tillmans says, Oberbeck “has a
very particular way of including all sorts of sexual subjects in her work
without it being either stereotypically German or titillating saucy English”.
Sex Slaves in the White House is an unsettling diagnosis of Donald Trump’s
unsatisfied urges and their consequences for the rest of us: “Tied up on a
leash, the whole world is in peace, because now there’s sex slaves in the White
House.” In 2016, she posted a video of herself and the Russian artist Slava
Mogutin cruising for sex on London’s Hampstead Heath while singing a wobbly
version of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man.
Sex, she
says, is the main thing her friends talk about: “There’s so much hypocrisy
around female sexuality, you encounter it every day.” She’s determined to break
down taboos while providing an alternative to a popular culture that she says
just promotes consumerism. “It’s nice to have things that will make life easier
but, at the end of the day, it’s directing your energy and desires in a way
that’s soul-destroying.”
Oberbeck
believes that identity politics are important, but too easily co-opted by
capitalism. She prefers to explore how people relate to one another than who
they are, imagining a non-binary, science-fiction world “where you’re not being
assessed by your identity”. It all takes us back to her Bangin video, and its
slightly sinister, multiracial, sexually indeterminate cast, with this deadpan
presence at its centre – an outsider with whom the rest of the world is
catching up.
No Bra:
'In Britain, I was seen as page-three humour'. By Alex Needham. The Guardian,
November 19, 2019.
Susanne
Oberbeck, otherwise known as No Bra, is an electronic musician, producer and
performer now living in New York, who has achieved cult status on account of
her offbeat brand of industrial music and her tendency to subvert gender norms.
Originally from the German countryside, just north of Hamburg, Oberbeck
rejected convention from an early age–in a recent interview with The Guardian,
she describes reading Simone de Beauvoir at 15 as “the only thing I could see
that was remotely relatable.” Released this month, LOVE & POWER is
Oberbeck‘s third album, and her first long form project since 2013’s Candy.
Bold, defiant and endlessly experimental, LOVE & POWER imagines new
possibilities for empathy, intimacy, gender identities and expression. Musing
on sadomasochism, cruising, and the link between sex and money, the record
expresses the craftiness and wit it takes to live in these strange times,
whilst living, as Oberbeck does, against them.
To
celebrate the launch of her new album—with sleeve photography by Wolfgang
Tillmans, a friend of hers for over twenty years—Oberbeck has selected five
songs from LOVE & POWER to expand upon for SLEEK.
“Hypnotizing
Powerful People”
“This
song is really about how I see society following the wrong values. Money and
quantity is valued more than ideas or authenticity (“maybe in the future you
will be romantic”). Artists are framed as weird, crazy people even though other
people are making money off their work and ideas. Larger companies are
blatantly stealing things and because they have the money to do it, we can’t do
much about it. Spotify and other platforms get someone rich while musicians
make next to nothing. I think the power of money has to be taken away by people
valuing other things. Also, maybe some kind of basic income [needs to be
introduced] to make people less dependent on the companies. This all ties in
with a worship of stereotypical masculine values which seem to be linked, so I
talk about my personal disillusionment with that.”
“Divine
Swipe”
“The
idea for this song came when I was talking to a friend about how in the future
gay or any dating apps won’t be on your phone, but actually integrated in your
body somehow, and how you will pay for things by swiping your asscrack. It’s a
bit silly. Then it also goes into this idea about bodies morphing, people
changing shapes and becoming one as a futuristic form of having sex.”
“Dysphoricize”
“Dysphoria
is not just a passive thing that happens to a person, or their own problem. It
is actively inflicted on people by how others respond to body shape, gender
presentation and unconscious assumptions. So I‘m making up a verb, ‘to
dysphoricize’, and protesting against it.”
“Hard
City”
“Hard
City is about the idea that “cruising” should be available to women too. I‘m
trying to expose the subject/object duality, so it’s about a character that
switches genders whilst cruising downtown NYC.”
“No
Money”
“No
Money was intended as a satire of a style of pop music that worships money,
affluence and the ‘American Dream’. I wanted it to have this auto tune effect
that mimics particular pop songs, but it turned out different –– more eerie. It
became its own thing.”
Gender-subverting
Icon No Bra takes us through her New Album on Love, Money and Power. By Sanja Grozdanic. Sleek Mag, November 28, 2019.
Art
college, a haven for freaks and marginal people, has always produced
interesting bands. The Who; Roxy Music; Talking Heads; the No Wave scene: each
was au fait with contemporary art; each was unafraid to be pretentious; each
used pop’s template to move pop out of pop, to make pop overflow its bounds, to
fuck with pop, making pop pop (in every sense). No Bra is the latest in the
venerable line of art school pop-fucking music weirdos.
Formed
by German-born Susanne Oberbeck (original in collaboration, now solo), No Bra
came about after Oberbeck had graduated from Camberwell College of Arts and
returned to London following studies in film directing in New York. The 2005
single ‘Munchausen’, a well-aimed satire of London’s pretentious Nathan
Barley-ites, was a breakthrough. “I like listening to Karlheinz Munchausen . .
. We used to live together . . . I used to piss on him,” goes its absurd
mock-dialogue between Oberbeck and Dale Cornish. ‘Munchausen’ was followed by
No Bra’s debut album Dance and Walk (2006) and an embrace by the art and fashion
worlds. Since then, No Bra has become Oberbeck’s solo project and she has
relocated from London to New York.
On this
third album Love & Power, No Bra is more Suicide than Shoreditch. Lead
single ‘Bangin’ gives Vega’s scuzzy nervous electro-crooning an update,
Oberbeck’s lyrics (“Rubbing our dicks together in the house of love / Rubbing
our clits together in the house of love”) sung with a close echo recalling Alan
Vega, and indeed Elvis’s ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. Comparisons are odious, of
course, and No Bra’s aesthetic is singular. But just as Suicide provoked
disgust and jeers in the Belgian gig immortalised on ‘23 Minutes Over
Brussels’, I can well imagine No Bra’s po-faced unmusicality provoking some men
to anger.
‘No
Money’ is a précis of Na Bra’s style. Drum machine rhythms are sequenced
seemingly at random. When her voice comes in, Oberbeck ignores the 6/8 meter by
singing over it in an ill-fitting 4/4. Melodic and harmonic layers are there
but never synchronise; instead they run oblivious to each other as if wandering
drunk, bumping into walls. The sung couplets sometimes hit the target and
sometimes are like Kim Gordon at her first-thing-that-comes-into-my-head worst
(‘No asses / No assets’). It’s jarring, and even for someone like me who likes
noise and weirdness, Love & Power can be hard to get into. It takes a few
listens. But as with a lot of the most interesting music, it’s a grower and it
repays the effort.
Love
& Power’s deliberately disjointed music relates to its lyrical themes:
gender fluidity, performance of social roles, urban anomie, misogyny and the
male gaze, the sexual perversions wrought by social inequality. On
‘Dysphoricize’ Oberbeck intones in her flat sing-song: “You cannot cure this /
How would you cure this? / […] How would you control this?” The kick drum
pattern is sequenced but all over the place. Two layers of synth chords are layered
without synchronisation. Then halfway through, without any cadence or
preparation, the song abruptly cuts to a protracted blast of noise, as if
mistakenly inserted on Audacity. Similarly on ‘30 Pounds’ Oberbeck sings, “30
pounds is what it took to get you on your knees”, while a I-V chord progression
played awkwardly on electric guitar emerges in the background. It all sounds
‘wrong’. But it’s ‘wrong’ by design. At first it sounds frustrating; then,
after a few listens, it appears as powerfully resistant, music creating its own
terms and narrative.
I could
go on and describe the album song by song, but I’m more interested in No Bra’s
queer blurring of intentionally artless delivery and (quote-unquote) ‘arty’
style. No Bra’s music appears artless; and it appears so precisely inasmuch as
it’s arty. No Bra sounds roundly, soundly, flagrantly artless, and roundly,
soundly, flagrantly arty. This paradox – it’s arty inasmuch as it’s artless –
defines No Bra’s style. The listener’s desire to correct the rhythms, to
quantise the voice – a desire to manipulate and control and violate her style –
is ceaselessly frustrated. In that, the style is a mode of resistance and
inherently political. As in Mars’s later stuff like ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Outside
Africa’, pop here becomes a grandly gritty question mark over itself.
There
are some overtly poppy moments. ‘Who is the God’ (featuring Abdu Ali) is a
standout, a parodic nonsensical hip hop track – all bling, auto-apotheosis and
pussy-eating (with Oberbeck throwing in the odd “I get my dick in a twist”). On
‘Bangin’ the voice is autotuned, and the video’s parade of reclining nudes
recalls the Vincent Desiderio-inspired video for Kanye West’s ‘Famous’. In
recent years, mainstream pop has shown tendencies to undercut itself, towards
psychedelia and the avant-garde. And given that the mainstream is all about
star-making and the sovereignty of the image, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see
No Bra ending up there, with her distinctive look of bare chest,
shoulder-length hair and fake moustache.
The
Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue editor Diane Vreeland used to say that, instead of
trying to hide a bodily imperfection, one should instead make it the
centrepiece of one’s look. “If you have a long nose, hold it up and make it
your trademark,” she said, famously using this to establish Barbara Streisand’s
brand. A similar strategy at times suggests itself in No Bra’s studied musical
artlessness. ‘Hypnotizing Powerful People’, as with other songs, is out of tune
with itself, harmonically banal, and has a vocal line to give a vocal coach
nightmares. But all that is up front and centre and as a style it simply works.
The persona is an effete man being sung by a gender-fluid woman. Gender
identity is in a swirl. It’s an affront to musicianship. And that is what’s
ballsy about it.
Those
without the patience to listen might dismiss No Bra as embodying the excesses
of contemporary art transferred into pop. Love & Power’s cover shot was
taken by Wolfgang Tillmans and No Bra often performs at galleries. The lo-fi
artlessness can occasionally cross the line into dross, but as with anything
experimental, that goes with the territory. But there is an anarchic quality to
what No Bra does – a perversely infuriating style – that unquestionably
validates the whole thing and situates her in a longer outsider pop tradition.
Love & Power. themfire
Also of
interest :
i-D throwback:
We Meet Gender Subverting Icon Susanne Oberbeck. By Tessa Christian. i-D, September
12, 2016.
No Bra, website
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