ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE WINEGARD
Peaches’s blunt-force beats, her refusal to be a corporate slave, and her ferocious stage presence have garnered her an intensely loyal following. She’s a vag-tastic provacateur, stomping onstage like a she-satyr, hair done fork-in-a-socket style and eyes a kabuki rainbow. Gorgeous in her own skin and with a sneer like Elvis, she spouts pornalicious joy to banging beats. “Whistle blow my clit”—she sang/urged/recited in 2015 on Rub’s title track, which had a video so NSFW it kept tripping the YouTube censors. The premise was vintage Peaches: unshackled by any male gaze, she and a throbbing posse of female adult-movie stars romp in the desert in Joshua Tree. Body positive, sweaty, juicy, filthy, unforgettable—it was a perfect collective feminist orgasm as a form of protest. And the song has a one-word hook that sticks like Velcro.
What makes Peaches stand apart from the herd of today’s voices-over-rhythm-track makers is her uncompromising wildness, her gender-fluid hotness, and her refusal to kowtow. In the face of music that’s increasingly sanitized, she rips off the plastic wrap and makes it real. Her voice can slide from a throaty yowl to a declaratory grunt, a supple and punchy instrument for such sex-positive, pussy-power songs. And thank the ejaculating goddess that having reached fifty, she’s not going anywhere, because we need her fearlessness more than ever.
Peaches began performing in the nineties. She was a nice Jewish girl named Merrill Beth Nisker who got bullied by her schoolmates and had the good sense to aim for better things. As part of the Toronto music scene that included her sometime roommate Feist, she made her punk rock debut, Fancypants Hoodlum, in 1995. In order to not have to rely on other musicians, she shifted from indie rock to electro—and found plenty of room inside its hammer-thump sparseness to spout, shout, incant, and sing. The Teaches of Peaches (2000) included the hypnotic anthem of sexual healing for the millennium, “Fuck the Pain Away.” Fatherfucker (2003) featured “Kick It,” a raucous collaboration with Iggy Pop that proved that Peaches has the rare balls to meet the godfather of punk’s raw power halfway, then kick it up a notch. In the video, the two toughs cajole each other flirtatiously while killing zombies. The combination of the pair’s aggressive sexiness and the retro sleazoid story line was a perfect mix of fuck off and fuck us.
With her cleverly titled Impeach My Bush (2006), Peaches took her place as supreme ruler of electroclash—a synth-pop-meets-new-wave variety of electronica that fit her punk intensity. With her backing band the Herms (a play on the seventies act Peaches and Herb and another gender-politic label), she performed at Coachella and opened for Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails. The album also gave the world the genius anthem for gender fluidity “Boys Wanna Be Her”—its lyrics miles ahead of their time: “the boys wanna be her / the girls wanna be her.” A former teacher, Peaches slyly trolled both the religious right and the ridiculous way we treat certain stars as being bigger than Jesus: “You lick so hot / Are you conceived / Kids receive / Crawling up the sleeve.”