How Provocative is Peaches’ New Album?

The other week I was sitting in a hotel lobby in New York, waiting for a car to arrive to take me to the airport. Ethereal techno and dance music emanated from speakers in the ceiling of the lounge; played at an intrusive volume, it transformed the space into a veritable Euro dance club. Tourists exchanged charged and prolonged glances, we ate our hor d’oeuvres with a groovy bob of the head, we raised our glasses with a coy pursing of the lips. Every time my foot tapped to the driving beat I wanted to cut off my leg.

A few days later the new Peaches album, I Feel Cream [2], arrived at my house. And as in the hotel lobby, I had to spend a few days ignoring the way it turned my car, living room, and office—wherever I listened to it, really—into a stage. Not just a stage for Peaches, but for myself. Her music is performative: a blend of electroclash (a genre of which she is a progenitor), electronica, and hip-hop, it performs for you, on you, to you. And to engage with Peaches’ music is to be part of the performance—for better or worse.

Peaches may still be best known for her 2000 debut album, The Teaches of Peaches [3], which the former Toronto elementary schoolteacher (née Merrill Nesker) recorded in her bedroom and which featured the poppy and relentless club hit “F*** the Pain Away.” The song made certain that a stereo was not just a vessel but also a dagger. Catchy and mantra-laden, the songs on Teaches buzzed with distorted, fuzzed-out beats, with sexual provocation, with dares. Lusty chainsaws. (Listen to "F*** the Pain Away," [4] which contains, obviously, mature language.) Peaches came crashing through, bold and fearless; she incited a near Bacchanalia among certain music fans, particularly those eager to marry gender, queer, and feminist studies with performance art and a driving, danceable beat.

As a listener, you were the conduit for Peaches’ message, one that couched pleasure, guilt, and debasement within a dance idiom. Peaches dared her audience to embrace the ambiguity of gender and sexual identity and to question and explore power dynamics. (Listen to "Rock Show." [5]) And there stood Peaches at the helm, and on the stage, as both liberator and captor. Hers was a masterful and jarring debut.

What followed The Teaches of Peaches were two less thrilling albums, Fatherfucker [6] (2003) and Impeach My Bush [7] (2006). But it’s difficult to tell whether Peaches’ music itself was becoming less magnetic or if the context and times in which the albums were released were less in need of—and less amenable to—shock and awe.

Peaches’ latest release, I Feel Cream, is less of an exercise in meta-music than its predecessors were. But it remains self-referential. The album continues the ongoing dialogue Peaches has had with herself, with art, and with us: a conversation about identity, power, politics, sex, and about her love/hate relationship with our culture’s seemingly irrepressible voyeuristic lens. The opening track, “Serpentine,” is a veritable list of what Peaches is and isn’t. She suggests we’ll never know for sure and—guess what—she doesn’t care. (Listen to "Serpentine." [8])

I Feel Cream marries intellectual exercises with sonic ones. While the beats are outgoing—the life of the party—the lyrics are slightly more introverted, still scooping out the insides, but this time with a blunter instrument. You might even go so far as to call some of the tracks vulnerable. Take the song, “Talk to Me,” which pleads for a moment of clarity and comprehension from a friend or lover: “This ain’t a Peaches show / it’s just me and you / there’s no wall for you to hide behind / stop pretendin’ that the problems mine / lift your head and look me dead in the eye / what made you so bitter inside?” (Listen to "Talk to Me." [9]) Along with the ballad-like title track, “Talk to Me,” possesses not a softening per se, but certainly a newfound openness. Peaches’ world has always been a pointedly suffocating, even airless one, but on I Feel Cream there is room to, if not quite relax, then at least inhale.

Not to say that you won’t get pummeled every once in a while. “Trick or Treat” and “Billionaire” leave little room for introspection. The latter has laidback beats and woozy synth sounds that recall the best of the Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre collaborations; it’s one of the album’s standout tracks despite the use of the cringe-inducing word “mangina.”

Does it suffice to say that I can’t even listen to I Feel Cream as I write this? Peaches’ music, sonically, conceptually, and lyrically, has never been subtle. I find her conceptual explicitness to be challenging but the intellectual exercises don’t translate musically; the songs themselves have the punch but not the passion. Sure, hit me over the head with your sound, but I when I get up from the KO I want more than a bruise; I want a revelation. Once you get past the balls-outside-the-pants lyrics, the taunting, the teasing, the confronting, and the confounding, all that is left is to wonder why Peaches is still relevant. She’s an artist who might be more powerful in theory than in practice; I like knowing she’s around but don’t necessarily want to listen. So, when Peaches’ songs are in the room with me, I can’t help but tune in. She’s clearly maintained her intrusive impact, but she may have lost the power of subversive transformation.

Photograph of Kathryn Bigelow by Will Ragozzino/Stringer/Getty Images.