Song Reassignment Surgery; Bold Covers 6

Rape Me (Nirvana), 1993: Tanya Tagaq (2016)

...voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead, they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth. 

Sam Cooke

Measure Tagaq as a truth genius. 

Listen to her TedTalk performance (below). Note the dervish intensity and human-to-animal sound spectrum ratio. If you can absorb her assault without your eyes guttering with tears, then your heart’s far sludgier than mine. Next, go to her version of Rape Me. 

Nirvana’s version – with Cobain’s lamentation on fame and as a victim of the zeitgeist – was the thesis; Tagaq writes the dissertation. 

In Tagaq’s mouth, Rape Me describes suffering

that’s less existential and far more literal: her whispers channel the agonies of ancestral generations and tortured contemporaries. And her whispers don’t just speak for the indigenous – as tragic and well-documented as their struggle has been – but for all women. Hear the heartbeat and the quiet restraint that imagines a victim’s solitude, soaked in toxic memories. Add to that whatever other tinglings you may get: patriarchy, parentage, class, duty, fear, etc. But there’s much more than rage at work here. Her registers, her guttural modulations, her sweetness and rage, the emotionality – her voice may be the chaotic psyche’s ultimate delivery system .

Tagaq says she didn’t begin throat singing herself until college. Though her indigenous culture had no history of throat singing, she’d re-engineer it to such a scale, it sounded like it was. And her record collection must be eclectic and edgy. Her approach ranges from uninhibited to feral. She’d first be introduced to a broader audience by another fellow warrior and vocal innovator, Björk. Tagaq would follow similar paths as her mentor’s but in an entirely different way. Both are aggressively elusive and hard reduce to something as simple as a category. Both sing with an intensity and commitment that is truly rare.

In the first video, see Björk and Tagaq join another aggressively elusive singer –
Mike Patton. 

In her TedTalk, Tagaq only sings. Her voice arrives from another plane entirely. Her throat astrally projects the spectrum of human emotional experience. Like a shaman from another dimension, she drops into a trance, channels voices, personalities, shadows, light, and other species. This is the kind of ecstatic performance Pentecostals dream of hacking but get nowhere near. She collects the essences of Yoko Ono, Shirley Temple, Diamanda Galas, Meredith Monk, Nina Hagen, the B-52s, throat and overtone singers, Asian traditions, Ornette Coleman's saxophone, animal and outer space noises. Her vocal palette, the colors and sounds at her disposal, are expansive enough to be seen from space.