"I would certainly like to have heard that my favourite pop stars were queer when I was young. Wouldn't you?" 'Straight Not' and 'Queercore' are the latest label to be tacked onto (and here's one more) New York gay/dyke avant rockers God Is My Co-Pilot. Others have included Riot Grrrl and Naked City clones, but guitarist Craig Flanagin seems unperturbed. "Those are fine labels as long as you use at least half a dozen of them to zero in on what we're up to." Built around the nucleus of Flanagin and singer Sharon Topper, GodCo are a band in perpetual flux, playing with an ever changing line up to rework the old and inspire the new. Constantly seeking new audiences, they play constantly at home and abroad (over 200 shows in the last three years). They are generally so busy it's hardly surprising that their new LP, How To Be (Rough Trade) is their first UK release (their previous US releases include Tight Like Fist and Straight Not). Still, even this level of activity palls before the staggering breadth of their music.
Sung in English, Finnish, Yiddish or German and hammered out over two drum kits, each morsel is a speeding homage to heterogeneity, as likely to spring from folk or country roots as from the dissonance of thrashing avant jazz. Caught up in such a whirlpool, it's no wonder Flanagin has little time for purist notions of music. "Nigerian or South African music, treasured in their pure forms by world musicians, are hybrids of other things- Rock 'n' roll and reggae are hybrids and hybrids don't breed true. Wherever new instruments come into a country there's a giant collision and the musical vocabulary and forms fight it out."
Such evolutionary collisions lie at the heart of GodCo's music-, not just as a matter of principle but as a simple reflection of their way of life. "If you walk down the street in New York," says Flanagin, "you'll hear a dozen different things in a dozen different languages, either spoken or written up on shop signs." GodCo are the perfect response to such surroundings, the ultimate environmental Music.
Date created: 20 August 1997 Last modified: 20 August 1997