Unbest

Gray Chapman on The Kills’ Blood Pressures (2011)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

She is everything I’m not and everything my shaky insecurity yearns to be. She has the lanky, boyish figure; I, the rounded angles of some kind of distorted Baroque painting. Her face is sallow and sunken and worn thin, possibly by a few good years of drug abuse; mine, apricots of freckled cheeks rounded out by hearty meals and a fear of setting foot anywhere near a line of blow. She is all leather and black denim and torn shirt, while I look more at home in a overly precious sun dress (belted at the waist, naturally).

Allison Mosshart is my twisted version of the feminine ideal. And while I could never achieve what she represents, despite my own black denim/leather jacket/halfhearted self-starvation efforts, she has given me something. Something intangible, something dark, a thing I grip tight and close to my chest and can’t let go of.

After recording a handful of albums, mostly with The Kills, all while sultrily dangling a half-smoked cigarette from her lips, Allison Mosshart and her grungy vocal aesthetic has become something of an amulet for me. Keep On Your Mean Side, with anthems “Fuck The People” and “Hitched,” got my blood coursing. No Wow—a bit less devil-may-care, darker and gloomily sexier—gave me feelings I hadn’t experienced since, oh, the first time I watched Cruel Intentions. Midnight Boom picked up the pace with a handful of seemingly superficial dance-y numbers, but despite the departure from broody sultriness, Mosshart’s “U.R.A. Fever” and “Sour Cherry” had me inches away from writhing around on the mattress in ecstasy. Just like all of them do.

I (the nonsmoking, five-foot-tall, rosy-faced and freckled girl that I am) can’t explain what happens in my mind when Mosshart’s force of nature overtakes me. Suddenly, my awkward nature, my biz-casual Ann Taylor Loft a-line skirts, and my fucking cheeks are all stripped away. I’m muscle wrapped tight in blues and leather, dangling that cigarette so expertly out of my lips, with some sort of uncontrollable dark mane in my face and shitkickers on my feet. I’m on my way to work but I’m elsewhere, somewhere dark and thick with smoke. I’m a different person.

The Kills came out with Blood Pressures in 2011. It was an album undoubtedly influenced by Mosshart’s bluesier stint in the Dead Weather. It was also a year of newfound hamster-like routine in all areas of my life. “Future Starts Slow” got kind of popular, further edging the band into the mainstream, much to my inner badass bitch’s chagrin. This music was my secret; my magic bullet. I listened to it when I needed to feel powerful. I listened to it when I wanted to feel in control, out of my body, away from my safe past and safer present, closer toward a cigarette-smoking, bangs-in-my-face, trashy, sinewy sort of hellish seductress.

But who am I kidding? I can’t pull off black eyeliner without looking like a child who came upon her mother’s makeup drawer. I don’t even know how to smoke a cigarette. I drink gin like an old man in elbow patches, not straight whiskey like some kind of raconteur. I can practice a menacing glare in the mirror all day long, but I can never shed a sheltered past and a couple decades’ worth of non-skinny-jeans-friendly snacking habits.

Blood Pressures, though, crumples my reality up, makes a Molotov cocktail of it all, and throws it right back in my face. And in some sort of sick, blackened Cinderella story, I’m a visceral force just like her. Stomping around in the dead of night. Never batting a downcast eye at a small-town past, a safe relationship, a nine-to-five kind of lifestyle, a kind of bored contentment in which, more often than not, a few good listens to “DNA” is what I need, what I require, to keep a pulse. Her wailing, her reverb, the earthshaking guitars and pounding percussions is a pill upon which I’ve become reliant. Years of cussing like a fuckin’ sailor and trying to cultivate a razor-sharp edge come to a head. My heart is a beating drum.

Gray Chapman lives in Atlanta.