The rest of album’s songs shimmer and rage. There’s heft to the sugar (“She’s Amazing”), soul to the desperation (“Screwing Yer Courage”). The songs are scraps and scenes, densely packed. Jody’s songs are stories ripped from a notebook (“There’s a tree fort on this island on the river by Oak’s Park/ We found it on our bikes and had fake fights until dark”) and infused with smoky-voiced desire. Though lesbian representation is at the center of the album’s political ethos, several songs make gestures to allied struggles. “#1 Chance Pirate TV,” for example, checks Sinead O’Connor’s famous tearing of the Pope’s photo on Saturday Night Live.
Captain My Captain, released in 1996, takes on notably different directions. Melissa York of New York’s Vitapup had taken over drumming duties; the album was, according to rumors on the AOL Queer Punk message board, “written in the studio”; and Team Dresch were now full-on “dykons,” writing songs not only to save their own lives but for fans like me who looked to them for salvation. The album has the kind of sonic and lyrical focus of a band with a message desperate to be heard. The lyrics are more direct, as in “Musical Fanzine”: “Queer sex is great, it’s fun as shit, don’t worry, Jesus is dead and God don’t exist.” Cleaner production makes these lyrics the album’s centerpiece, rather than one part of a noisier conversation. Its songs (most of them, anyway) are anthems, and the band does anthems well: guitar riffs hover and slice, and Melissa is a powerhouse on drums. Kaia sings two infectious-with-edge love songs, “107” and “Take On Me,” that plead and growl at just the right moments. “Remember Who You Are” is a moving call to the importance of both trusting yourself and investing in fantasy: “Remember who you are and make up who you are.”
I tried to approach listening to these albums in 2019 with an open mind, but what can I say: Personal Best was everything to me, the record I copied onto a cassette (Maxwell UR-90, caseless) so that I could listen to it endlessly up and down Bergen County’s Route 4, dreaming of escape. I know that, based on timing or circumstance, Captain My Captain was that lifeline for others. Could either of these albums be as vital to a lonely young queer kid today? The word “dyke,” which is all over both albums, is basically ancient now, a total 90s tell. While it doesn’t exclude a broad spectrum of gender identification, “dyke” centers one’s sexuality in a way that might read as retrograde to many. And I wonder what a teen born in 2002 would make of Captain My Captain’s “I’m Illegal,” when Kaia sings, “I have this vivid memory of being in a boat with a friend (I was 11)/ I said girls can’t get married to each other, I remember thinking how fucked up that was.” Is it a quaint tale of struggles vanquished? Or, in the Trump era, a chillingly relevant sentiment? Or does the righteous impatience of the chorus, its pissed-off yowl, evoke the sensation of feeling illegal no matter what the law says, and is it possible that for a kid handling inarticulable desire in a still-cruel world, that feeling never really goes away?
It’s no longer an anomaly to be an out queer musician today. The popularity of everyone from Courtney Barnett to Janelle Monae might cause one to say that it’s “no big deal.” But, I don’t know, are those musicians writing lyrics about kissing their girlfriend “in the van at some show” and titling that song “Hate the Christian Right!” — who, as it turns out, are still eminently hateable? Are they seizing the means of production and making records that bring a specificity to queer experience, one that refuses the bland “we’re just like you!” that infuses so much of modern LGBTQ+ representation? It’s a different experience to be young and queer today, and it’s also different to be a musician and a music fan. If younger listeners discover these reissued albums on Spotify, will it mean anything that they were originally released on dyke-owned indie labels? Anyone who’s ever been saved by any kind of underground knows that its limits bring a death-defying freedom.
