The FADER Interview: Speedy Ortiz’s nu-metal reanalysis
Frontwoman Sadie Dupuis describes how a Deftones homage turned into an reevaluation of the violent fantasies projected onto women in the music she grew up listening to.
Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis is this week’s guest on The FADER Interview podcast. In a wide-ranging conversation with The FADER’s Walden Green, Dupuis — who’s shepherded Speedy from its 2011 origins as a solo endeavor to its current form as a full-blown indie rock juggernaut — dug into the group’s first album in five years, Rabbit Rabbit, coming this Friday, September 1 via Wax Nine Records.
Among the many Rabbit Rabbit tracks Dupuis discusses in the new episode is “Who’s Afraid of the Bath,” an as-yet-unreleased, mid-album cut that she reveals was directly inspired by Deftones’ 2000 track “Digital Bath.”
“I love Deftones. We all do,” she says. “A lot of pop [artists] have now turned a positive eye toward nu-metal, but we never stopped believing. We always loved nu-metal. I hadn’t felt that I knew how to interpret some of those sounds before, but I do now, and that’s where ‘Who’s Afraid of the Bath’ came from.”
But the song isn’t a straight-up homage to one of Dupuis’s old favorites; it’s a retrospective critical analysis of the darker tendencies of the genre, in which misogynistic lyrics were routinely excused in service of a song’s edgy aesthetics.
“I think about all these songs that I grew up on and grew up loving, and then I think about some difficult experiences I’ve been through that other people I know have also been through,” Dupuis explains. “I’ve experienced stalking and I’ve experienced abuse in a relationship.
“It’s not to say that there’s any one-to-one correlation, and I certainly don’t believe that showing violence in art is the causality that causes violence to occur,” she continues. “But what does it mean to be identified in someone else’s mind as the subject of violence in the way that songs like this portrayed and reflected to us when we were younger? That’s what I used “Who’s Afraid of the Bath” to explore: the way that violent fantasies are projected onto women for the sake of art.”
Hear the full interview at this link, embedded below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.