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Thievery: Fuck You Too, Pixie Meat
23rd Feb 2012 in Thievery, Writing
Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.
The Story:
‘Fuck You Too, Pixie Meat’ is published in Gutter #5.
An extract:
Some girl was up on stage doing her thing, standing on her tiptoes to sing because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to lower the mic after the boys had played. Her band was Bitches on Acid, or Cuntfight, or Slit, and they had red glitter drumskins and Hello Kitty stickers on the bass. You know exactly how they looked: pink hair, smeared lipstick, and muffin-tops anchored over the waists of their jeans. There was even a plastic unicorn standing guard at the front of the stage. You know exactly how they sounded too, but who needs more than three chords anyway?
The Inspiration:
Like many misunderstood teen girls in the 90s, I adored Courtney Love. I was all about kinderwhore style: big black boots, torn slip dresses, red lipstick. I had long multicoloured hair and I’d adorn it with cheap diamante tiaras or tie it up with rosary beads (see photographic evidence of me at 16). Oh, I thought I was the shit.
I’m now 27 and although I do still wear black boots and red lipstick, I save the tiaras for fancy dress. And I still love Courtney Love and Hole and especially their 1994 album Live Through This.
I wanted to try a new thing (well, new to me) where I’d write a story based around the structure, sound and lyrics of a song. I chose the Hole song ‘Rock Star’ because I thought that the word repetition and stuttering start and end would lend themselves well to prose. Also, I was in a bit of a rut with pretty, floaty, fairytale-style stories and thought something with lots of screaming and swear-words might snap me out of it.
I named the characters Jennifer (after the song ‘Jennifer’s Body’) and Tabitha (after something Courtney Love said in a live show that I’ve never understood: “This song is about the girl in your class who always smelled of pee – that was me, not Tabitha.”)
The song starts in with a stuttering repeat so I started the story the same way:
It went like this: the sky was glittering, the dancefloor was throbbing, and every single goddess there was looking at the way –
Once upon a time there was a girl, and one star-strewn night she met a boy who was a bite of perfection, all lipstick and bones, and they lived happily –
Fuck it. This is how it really was: Wednesday night at the Olympia and everyone looked the same.
It goes on, loosely following the structure of the song, using words and imagery from the lyrics. And I enjoyed it so much that now I want to write a short story collection, Kinderwhoring, inspired by the Live Through This album. Of course, that’s after I finish my other story collection, and my first novel, and the other two novels I’ve been researching, and the dozens of unconnected short stories I want to write, and…
Anyway, here’s the song:
And you can read the story in Gutter #5.