It's Just Not the Same, Okay?
In Defense of Tracy + the Plastics
Tools
w/Sick Bees, Display, kisskisskiss
Thurs Oct 30, Chop Suey, 9 pm, $8.
It left an unease like that of an in-joke taken way too far--the pixilated visages of Nikki and Cola emanating from the 40-foot-tall, multi-million-dollar JumboTron screens of EMP's Sky Church, silhouetting a timorous Tracy at their feet. The poetic irony seemed all but lost on the pharmaceutically posturing majority of the evening's Electroclash 2002 assembly--to whom I'm sure Tracy + the Plastics was just another beautifully androgynous girl with a drum machine and a shtick. But in the uncanny blush edging that perfectly surreal moment, something truly remarkable happened: The fragments of Wynne Greenwood's schizophrenic vision had grown to literally dwarf her.
Stranger Personals
Tracy + the Plastics' initial inception--birthed in a passionate love affair of Mylar tape and magnets--took place in Greenwood's Olympia bedroom some four years ago as a means of realizing her perfect band: Nikki Romanos, keyboardist and resident artist; Cola, drummer and political activist; and Tracy, frontwoman and figurehead. The catch? Though it's a little dishonest, the conventional qualifier is that Tracy + the Plastics doesn't really exist at all: a three-piece band of one--Greenwood--who, with only the finest equipment known to 1985, managed to clone herself into a physics-defying trippelgänger, projecting her personas (in video form) while performing at forefront. It's a multiple personality disorder masquerading as multi-media performance art.
It's that last bit that's helped to mallet the recent Brooklyn transplant's claustrophobic vision into the stifled pigeonhole of "electroclash"--an association unfortunately affirmed by her short-selling decision to join last year's maiden Electroclash package tour. And while Tracy + the Plastics' sound relies on similar convention--gender politicking and high concept over propulsive electronics--Greenwood's artistic depth and commitment to quality (evidenced in her brilliant full-length debut Muscler's Guide to Videonics) elevates the work meteorically above those contemporaries. More than that, Tracy + the Plastics is dance music that bares the mark of deeply thoughtful composition--the kind of mental immersion that you might expect from the kind of person who realizes an entire band in her head, and actually has the ingenuity to pull it off.
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Also by Zac Pennington
In the wake of punk rock's latest boom, seemingly every band with a modicum of influence is reforming, rereleasing, and rehashing the music that made them famous. On this summer's Warped Tour alone, you can catch a Darby Crash-less Germs or emo trailblazers Lifetime—all of which makes Mission of Burma's latest release so refreshing.
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