Interviews: The Pleasure of Peaches

Listening to Rub, Peaches first new album in six years, there is a sense that perhaps we are just catching up to her. While the multimedia artist born Merrill Nisker has maintained a sizable and loyal fanbase in the 15 years since The Teaches of Peaches turned her into an international electroclashing queer icon, she’s also dipped on and off the wider cultural radar—but Rub arrives at a moment when the world needs Peaches most. Like much of the 46-year-old’s work, the album is about pleasure, power, and pain while also being explicitly feminist. Given that right now, in America, the G.O.P. is once again working overtime to deny women the right to control their bodies, the existence of a record that pulls its power from the female body, genderfucks its way to liberation, and demands respect in the sheets, the streets, and the dancefloor seems especially necessary. And while Peaches’ art may often be seen as sexual (or sexualized), there are few things as political and seditious in 2015 as a woman publicly declaring who makes her cum—and how. After all, what’s more powerful than making people dance to a radical agenda?

Pitchfork: What’s your relationship to pleasure?

Peaches: I think it’s as important as intellectual stimulation. It’s a part of treating yourself well, and being able to give off that feeling makes it so that you can also feel comfortable with other people. 

Pitchfork: That also sounds like an explanation for why you make art.

P: It’s within everything I do. I’m not a person who has a secret life; I want it to be open. I’m not afraid to express that pleasure, but it’s also really misunderstood. People are like, “Oh, Peaches is just obsessed with sex.” But why is that what you’re getting out of me expressing pleasure, need, desire, or a twisted version of what I’ve heard in a patriarchal framework?

Pitchfork: Are you interested in being understood at this point?

P: Not really. But I find all the different perceptions of what I do fascinating. I love that some people can think, “This is completely transgressive,” while others think, “This is just complete pandering to the idea that sex sells.” Or how people hear my songs and believe that I am in certain worlds that I’m not necessarily involved in, like BDSM or stuff like that. I don’t understand how people are getting that, but it’s still fascinating to me.

Pitchfork: What was it you wanted to do with this new record?

P: I always feel like I’m still reintroducing myself. There’s definitely people who have been converted, but then there’s the other people who are like, “What is that again? Is that Peaches Geldof? Didn’t she die?” Really. So with Rub I really just wanted to make a classic, back-to-the-roots, me album. That’s why I didn’t make it right away after the last record; I knew I needed to take a break and get my yayas out with other projects, so that they wouldn’t cloud a pure idea of what a Peaches album would be. 

Pitchfork: What is in a pure Peaches album?

P: I didn’t come in with any lyrics except for the line “Who’s jizz is this?”—that one was following me around for a while. It was one of those lines that sticks in your head that you don’t write down. They present themselves. So while writing “Dick in the Air”, I was like, “Oh my God, here it is!”

Pitchfork: How was it trying to work in the here-and-now like that, rather than relying on a backlog?

P: Totally exhilarating, but it was definitely work. It was frustrating. In the middle of it, a whole big breakup happened and shit just got even more real. I was like, “This is actually what’s going on in my life now, I need to put it in.”

Pitchfork: Did that change what you thought Rub was going to be?

P: On certain songs, definitely. It was bizarre because I was talking to Björk about what happened with her right before I knew it was happening to me, and also finding out about Kim [Gordon] and, you know, the same shit. Before all of that went down, there was a feeling where I was wondering whether I was getting enough out of the lyrics, like they were almost about something else, something deeper. So when the breakup happened, it was like, “Oh, I can see why I was starting to get angry during this album.”

Pitchfork: How much of a role does pain play in your work? Is there a space for it?

P: Yeah, more than ever. Teaches of Peaches was a really heavy breakup album—I’ve actually never told anybody about this, but right before that album, I found out I had thyroid cancer. It fucked with my head. I was like, “What do I want to do with my life? I want to make music. Oh my God, I’m in a relationship that I don’t think is going to give me what I need.” It was all about reevaluating my whole life. But I didn’t want to say those things when making the album or in interviews. I didn’t want to be a victim. I didn’t want that to be the focus. In the same way, I decided not to sing a lot on Teaches of Peaches because I didn’t want to be “the female singer.” I didn’t want people to just hear my voice and say, “She’s a good singer.” I wanted them to really hear what I had to say. I was thinking about it like Lydia Lunch, and Karen Finley, and riot grrrl, and how I love how they go so hardcore—but I wanted a little more humor. Not in a Primus-type way but more like hip-hop humor, through wordplay. So that was all there, but I masked it. And then I wrote “Fuck the Pain Away”—and that’s totally where that comes from. 

This time around, with Rub, there was another huge breakup, but now I could just write something like “Free Drink Ticket”, which I would have never ever written or found a place for before. To me, that song is the most poetic thing I’ve ever written. Even though there are very specific things that refer to whatever happened between me and this person in the song, there’s a relatability. It fascinates me that, when something hurtful happens, you hate the person you love the most so much that you want to kill them. You really do. And then, of course, it’s not a good look. But everybody has that feeling, and it’s very real, so I went there. 

Pitchfork: Were you a writer before you started writing lyrics?

P: I was playwriting [laughs]—existential playwriting.

Pitchfork: That is basically what you’re still doing.

P: [laughs] Yeah! In high school, I was not letting my deep side out at all. Then I went to Israel with a bunch of my friends on a Birthright trip. I was reading Siddhartha and didn’t talk to anybody for days on this trip. We went down the Jordan River in inner tubes, and I was like, “I’m not gonna paddle, I’m gonna let the river take me.” [laughs] So I would do all these things like climb up Masada and not use the stairs. It was great in terms of it being the first time I was out of my own suburban life in Canada, and I learned a lot about myself. When I came back, I was writing existential plays. On the way to school, I would stop, sit down, and write plays. Friends would drive by in their car and laugh at me, like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I even turned essays for school into plays.

Pitchfork: Did that mark your awakening as a creative person?

P: Yeah. I had really nice parents, and a very smart mother, but they weren’t into art or anything. I didn’t know what art school was—I didn’t know there was such a thing. So I didn’t really know about contemporary artists. All I knew was theater, because we would go see musicals and I would get up in the aisle and start trying to mimic things. I wanted to be a theater director but there was so much bullshit dealing with actors and other people’s politics. I just wanted to do my thing. With music, I realized I could do what I wanted without any restrictions. 

Pitchfork: How did you originally get into music?

P: I had a girlfriend who was into acoustic guitar and played her own music, and then we got a weekly gig together. We had this one song about two young, gay boys whose moms didn’t know they were gay and found them in bed together. Then one of the boys runs out of the house and gets on his motorcycle and drives away and a truck comes—but you don’t know if he got hit by the truck. It’s a very dramatic song. And there would be girls in the front row crying over this song. They’d be weeping in front of us. [laughs]

Pitchfork: What an auspicious beginning! 

P: Yeah, it was this whole folk scene and I was like, “I’m not into this.” But I definitely also saw performances that I was wowed by growing up, like Jim Carroll and Lou Reed during the Blue Mask tour.

Pitchfork: Oh, that’s heavy. A lotta death right there.

P: Hold on—[answers phone, to caller] Hey, is there any way I can call you in an hour? So good to hear from you. OK, bye. [hangs up] That was Feist. We’ve been trying to talk to each other for weeks.

But yeah, Jim Carroll opened up and told this story about a girl who wanted to have a date with him, and she said, “Meet me at this corner at this time.” So he went and there were 10 men standing there, and he was like, “Why are we all standing here? Does everyone have a date with this girl?” And they were all like, “Yeah.” And then she fucking jumped out the building so they could all watch her kill herself.

Pitchfork: Oh my God.

P: While he was telling this story he was peaking on whatever he was on and he was like, “I can’t fucking do this,” and walked off the stage. I had never seen someone be so real on stage. I was like, “What is going on?!”

I also remember seeing Cirque du Soleil and this other circus that started around the same time called Archaos; Cirque du Soleil was obviously “the pretty one.” At Archaos, they had these seven-foot-tall women who would just drink lighter fluid and blow fire way too close to your face, and I was like, “Wow! This is dangerous.” These same women would playact scenes where they were raping men in the back of cars while they were crashing them. Rape is never good in any situation, but that reversal really fucked with my brain in the same way that Liquid Sky did. And then, of course, Archaos went bankrupt, and Cirque du Soleil got huge.

Pitchfork: What allows you to be real in your own art?

P: Letting down my guard—but being vulnerable doesn’t mean crying in front of people, it means taking away that veneer and saying, “This is it.”

Pitchfork: Where does your desire to be so honest come from?

P: Growing up in the ‘80s and being so sick of how music—such a pure form of expression—was so watered down all the time when it got to certain levels. It’s happening now too. What is the point of that? What are we protecting ourselves from? 

Pitchfork: How much ego is in play when you’re creating, if any?

P: Of course there’s an ego involved: I want it to be great. I want it to mean something. I want people to enjoy it. I want them to say I made something good. But it’s not just about people liking what I did as much as it’s about them saying, “I like what you did because it made me feel this way,” or “It made me feel like I belong,” or “It made me feel like there’s another way to live in this world.” That happens a lot, and it’s a very satisfying feeling to know that people are getting something out of it and it’s making them want to be creative too.