Tegan and Sara by Melody Lau

Author:Melody Lau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2022-07-25T18:31:46+00:00

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Instead of letting publications get away with their problematic writing, as Tegan and Sara had for almost a decade, Sara decided to fight back. Frustrated by the categorization of their band as “tampon rock” in The Con’s Pitchfork review (the full line read: “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock, a comparison only fair because of the company they kept”),51 among other superfluous jabs, Sara reached out to Pitchfork via their publicist to call them out. Ultimately, only one change was made to the piece: Pitchfork removed a line in the original review that referred to Walla’s main occupation as being in “fellow lesbian band Death Cab for Cutie,” even though the writer later noted it as a joke. “That’s basically saying that being in a lesbian band is a bad thing and now you’re making fun of Death Cab for Cutie using my sexuality and my lower status in your mind to put this band in a lower slot,” Sara explains.

Sara laughs at it now, but remembers thinking, “Oh great, so I went to bat for the straight white guys? Don’t worry, our shitty review is still there.” But she wasn’t alone in calling out these types of reviews. Music critic Jessica Hopper notably blogged her response to Pitchfork’s “tampon rock” line: “The company they kept? Vaginas? Cos their (sic) lesbians? Is it a joke and ps. who is tampon rocking? Is that post-Lilith fair? Or just music by people who get their periods? ?!?!?!?”52 There were similar reactions to other reviews, too, like NME’s two-star review that ends with the unnecessarily harsh line, “A saddening case of brick production, paper soul—here the Quins are little more than twin airbags.”53

Over at Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau—whom other writers have defended to me as a champion of women in music—falters with the opening line of his album review: “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality, Tegan and Sara don’t have men to lash out at, put up with, or gripe about.” Christgau argues that the “objects of their romantic ambivalence remain distant”54 and that The Con as an album is difficult to connect with. This comes off as a form of othering by inferring that queer artists must draw from their struggles, but also that their sexuality renders them unrelatable to people like him, a straight man. “It’s not written for the benefit of a male gaze, and it’s not written from the perspective of a male gaze,” Liss asserts, in the album’s defense. “When you’re a queer woman, there can be a certain kind of bro-ing down that happens with dudes, and I think the fact that The Con evades this is I’m sure frustrating for someone who is embedded in a certain way of thinking, let’s say.” It’s an argument that dates back to Tegan and Sara’s earliest music, that their writing sets off an alarm to readers: if you’re not a lesbian, you might not get much from listening to the album.

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