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Music - Choose Your Weapon — Hiatus Kaiyote - Refusing legibility, choosing complexity
Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Fronted by Nai Palm, Hiatus Kaiyote make music that doesn’t settle down. Choose Your Weapon isn’t interested in being easily categorized, quickly consumed, or neatly summarized—and that’s precisely its power. At first listen, the album Choose Your Weapon — Hiatus Kaiyote can feel disorienting. Songs stretch and fold in on themselves. Time signatures shift. Melodies arrive sideways. Genres blur into one another—neo-soul,
Lisa Smith
Jan 312 min read


Music - Honey — Robyn
Week 3 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Honey is Robyn at her quietest—and maybe her bravest. After the maximal heartbreak of Body Talk, this album pulls the lights down. It’s still dance music, but it’s slower, softer, and more inward-facing. If Body Talk was about surviving in public, Honey is about feeling in private and choosing when (and how) to let that be seen. Sonically, it’s minimal and tactile. The beats are warm and rounded rather than sharp; synth
Lisa Smith
Jan 232 min read


Music - The Idler Wheel… — Fiona Apple Learning how to listen to yourself
Week 2 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Fiona Apple makes albums that don’t ask for your attention so much as they require it. The Idler Wheel… is a record that pulls inward. It doesn’t perform emotion—it examines it. Where Ani DiFranco invites you into a room full of people, Fiona Apple asks you to sit alone with your thoughts and stay there a while. Released in 2012, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You Mor
Lisa Smith
Jan 162 min read


Music - Living in Clip — Ani DiFranco Letting the edges stay sharp
Week 1 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Ani DiFranco has always asked listeners to meet her in motion. Living in Clip doesn’t open with a statement so much as an atmosphere. The first track is instrumental, but her voice appears as sound rather than message—woven into rhythm, texture, breath. It’s a quiet signal that this album isn’t about polish or distance. It’s about presence. Like a lot of people, my entry point to Ani was through film—the movie Better Th
Lisa Smith
Jan 93 min read
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