Earworm of the Day: Against Me! - White Crosses

"I wrote the majority of the record in St Augustine, in Florida where I recently moved to and just around the corner from my house there's this church and the front lawn is covered in these little white crosses, and behind them there's a piece of text saying each of the crosses is there to represent how many abortions occur in America every day. So the song is in essence a pro-choice song, and seeing those crosses everyday, I fantasised about smashing them down, or driving my car through them. I think there's something to be said for acts like that - it'd be very gratifying, but instead I play music and write about this stuff. That's why I say in the lyric, 'I wanna smash them all'" -- Laura Jane Grace

Joan Jett and Against Me!'s Laura Jane Grace Cover The Replacements' "Androgynous"

Joan Jett and Against Me! covered The Replacements' "Androgynous"earlier this month. Just weeks ago, lead singer Laura Jane Grace (born Tom Gabel) announced that she was trans and begining hormone therapy. (To any of those wondering, as I see this question quite frequently on blogs and forums, taking female hormones doesn't alter the sound of one's voice.) Laura also did a an interview for MTV that's worth checking out. She looks gorgeous, by the way.

"You don't understand what's happening to you ... though, as you grow older, you realize this isn't something that goes away," she says. "When you're younger, you have these moments where you're like, 'OK, I'm going to choose to be male. I will be male. This is it. I'm going to take all my women's clothes that I have secretly hidden away under my bed, and I'm going to put 'em in a garbage bag and I'm going to throw them in a dumpster, and that's it. I swear off this behavior for the rest of my life.'

Laura Jane Grace's First Show

Rolling Stone has a nice feature -- and review -- of Against Me!'s first show since singer Laura Jane Grace's interview last month coming out as a trans woman:

"I was worried that some people expected me to come out looking like Little Bo Peep or something," Grace said after the show while hanging out at the merch table with her wife, Heather. (They're doing the tour as a family; their toddler daughter, Evelyn, was sleeping with a nanny in the tour bus.  [...] Grace is two weeks into hormone replacement therapy. The process involves redistribution of her body's muscle mass, and she was worried about how it would affect her stamina. The band talked before the show about taking some time between songs, but they ended up just powering through the set. The only problem Grace encountered was her guitar cutting out during one song.

(The video's pretty shaky, but the sound's good.)

Kudos to RS for getting the pronouns right, but I have one question -- and as a cis woman, I may be overstepping my boundaries but I want to be a good ally -- the title still refers to Laura as Tom. I understand that to a lot of rock fans it's probably confusing, and generally mainstream magazines suck at this sort of thing, but shouldn't the headline just read "Laura" now?

A popular musician comes out as trans

Tom Gabel, who is now going by the name Laura Jane Grace, leader of the band Against Me!  came out as trans in a Rolling Stone interview that will hit the racks today:

Gabel only told a handful of family and friends about her plan to transition before talking to Rolling Stone. Because this is the first time a major rock star has come out as transgender, the singer made a point of speaking openly about it. "I'm going to have embarrassing moments," says Gabel, "and that won't be fun. But that's part of what talking to you is about – is hoping people will understand, and hoping they'll be fairly kind."

Aside from a few obviously bigoted trolls (some of the comments on Rolling Stone's blog are awful), the response has been overwhelmingly positive, and it's forcing fans to look more closely at her lyrics. The song, "The Ocean" with its lines, "If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman. My mother once told me she would have named me Laura. I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her. One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband." has been cited numerous times, but until now, Laura has given no indication of her transgender status.  Matthew Perpetua from Fluxblog wrote about the temptation to read the songwriter into the lyrics:

This thing with Gabel and “The Ocean” is intriguing to me because it’s so much the opposite of this White situation. Gabel was, in the plainest language possible, confiding in the listener, and virtually everyone who heard it assumed it was fiction. When asked about the song at the time it was originally written and recorded, Gabel dodged it because she wasn’t ready to come out as transgender, which is perfectly understandable. But still, this makes me wonder how often we’re listening to singers tell the truth in unexpected songs, and where we assume they’re singing the truth in pure fiction. We think we can tell, that we can suss out the difference between contrived narrative and confessional, but “The Ocean” shows us that sometimes we have no idea what we’re actually hearing.

Although Laura is not the first rock star to come out as trans -- last year Keith Caputo from the band Life of Agony began transitioning and now goes by the name Mina, and not to mention the legendary Jayne County -- but she is one of the most high-profile. Lora from Autostraddle added:

A major rock star coming out as trans would be huge news anywhere, but Gabel's coming out in the often testosterone-infused punk scene is especially significant. The scene can sometimes be an unwelcoming place for women musicians and fans, not to mention those who are gender nonconforming. At the end of the day, though, punk rock is about being true to yourself and not being weighed down by anyone else's expectations. Hopefully having someone as prominent and well-liked as Gabel come out will be a huge step in accepting an increasingly diverse punk community.

Full disclosure: I knew little about Against Me! before this story broke, but I've been in that sort of fan world for a good portion of my music listening life.  I know what it's like to want to identify with the person behind the lyrics -- and the danger in that, too. I've been reading some of the fan postings lamenting what this will do to the band, their sound, or their fanbase. Let me just say one thing: this isn't about you. It's a natural reaction to something that's been a huge part of your life -- when you've given up parts of your life for it -- but in the end, our favorite artists don't exist simply to please us. Publicly coming out as trans has to be one of the most difficult things to do, particularly for someone who's image is fully ensconced in a punk scene not immune to transphobia.