Folk singers and protests go together like hippies and not
showering. But the ’60s revivalism/revisionism of antifolk, the
nebulous tag attached to such oddball singer/songwriters as Kimya
Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis, exists largely absent a political protest
culture, despite there being plenty to rally against—war,
recession, environmental peril that makes Silent Spring seem
positively quaint. So the opportunity to see Kimya Dawson perform at
a real, old-fashioned sit-in at the Evergreen State College (staged
by the school’s chapter of the recently re-formed Students for a
Democratic Society, no less) was well worth a Greyhound freedom ride
down to Olympia.
The sit-in, started on May 21, was to protest the SDS’s suspension
as an official student group, following a concert planned in the face
of a schoolwide moratorium on concerts after the Valentine’s Day
Dead Prez concert that ended in a clash with campus police. By its 14th
day, shortly before Dawson’s scheduled performance, the sit-in numbered
around 10 to 20 people—one cluster right outside the office of
Vice President of Student Affairs Arthur Costantino and another in a
triangular lobby down the hall. In the lobby, an older man with shiny
white hair and tan skin was talking to a circle of half-interested
students about the old days.
“I think we occupied our share of buildings in our time. This is so
different from what we did 40 years ago; the people today want to break
the laws but they don’t want the consequences.”
“We didn’t vacuum the floors,” adds an older woman.
Two students, one absently strumming an acoustic guitar,
discussed the previous night’s entertainment, a double feature
screening of antifascist fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth and
perennial dorm-room stoner fave Dark Side of Oz, in which The
Wizard of Oz is played in sync with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side
of the Moon.
“You know what’s awesome? Dark Side of Oz. It was weird how
the lyrics spoke to what was going on.”
As 7:00 p.m. approached, the crowd tripled, then tripled again,
until the oddly shaped lobby was wall to wall with cross-legged
students gossiping about last night’s party or who from class they
hoped wouldn’t show up tonight. Someone said, “It’s stinky in here.”
Another person replied, “It’s just Evergreen.” The guitar strummer
stood on a chair and unscrewed the fluorescent overhead lights until
they flickered off, leaving the lobby lit only by the gray light
streaming in from a large window partially obscured by an SDS poster.
Some serious-looking (by the standards of radical leftism) students
left to go negotiate with the administration.
Kimya arrived to silence then applause, weaving through the seated
throng to a chair and a microphone in front of the window. The
guitar-strumming student read a short, nervously delivered statement
over a megaphone about the SDS’s goals—first, reinstatement
as an official student group; eventually, a campus free of police and
run in cooperation with students. A young woman, charged in the Dead
Prez “riot,” asked for pledges of support to cover her legal fees.
Kimya sang, “Doo doo doo,” checking the mic.
I’d somehow managed to never see Kimya Dawson before, or indeed
listen to more than a handful of her songs. Even if you’re a rabid
consumer of music, there’s simply too much to catch everything; entire
cultural phenomena can pass you by, easily. In preparation for the
show, I picked up Remember That I Love You and watched
Juno. It occurred to me that her songs—funny and personal
and precious, only occasionally about politics, and then only
peripherally—maybe made more sense soundtracking a determinedly
“quirky” film than a sincere, self-righteous protest.
But if her songs were on odd fit, Kimya herself was seemingly an
ideal spokesperson—a former Evergreen student, she had been
expelled for writing graffiti critical of the administration’s
policies regarding sexual assault and rape; originally, she was to be
charged with a felony, but after a sit-in staged on her behalf, she was
merely expelled. Kimya told the story between songs, cracking jokes and
rambling and apologizing for being jet-lagged (she had just flown in
from Paris). She said she was later invited back to Evergreen at
various times, under various conditions, that she was recently asked
for an interview in the alumni newsletter (she never did graduate), and
that the current president of the college had written her a letter
saying how proud Evergreen was of her. She said after she left
Evergreen, she “couldn’t stand it,” that she “was an alcoholic for four
years,” that she became “jaded” because she “couldn’t change anything.”
In the end, Kimya maybe wasn’t the most on-point spokesperson for the
SDS, as she seemed equivocal about the value of staying in school and
fighting the administration as opposed to just dropping out. “I
couldn’t keep giving them money,” she said of her own decision not to
complete her studies, noting that she’s done all right without a
diploma.
She played around 15 songs, taking requests after the first few,
playing even the ones she worried she couldn’t remember, only flubbing
a few lyrics or chord changes here or there (the crowd helped her fill
in the lyrics). The only request she denied was for a Moldy Peaches
song, which she said she doesn’t play anymore. Her last song, “Loose
Lips,” finally felt like a real protest song (even if it was as
lyrically nonsensical and childlike as anything in her oeuvre), with
the whole crowd singing along, “We won’t stop until somebody calls
the cops/and even then we’ll start again/and just pretend that
nothing ever happened.”
The SDS is set to be reinstated on a probationary basis in the fall.
