Kimya Dawson is a folk singer-songwriter best known for being one-half of The Moldy Peaches, a genre-breaking and genre-establishing anti-folk punk band from New York City. She’s often recognized as one of the soundtrack contributors for the 2007 film Juno, starring Eliot Page and Michael Cera, where alongside Adam Green, she performed “Anyone Else But You” and quickly climbed the billboard hot 100 after the film’s release. Some other of her most recognizable songs from Juno are “Tire Swing”, “So Nice So Smart”, and “Tree Hugger”.
You’ll likely ask, as much of the music scene in NYC did at the time, why songs with titles and sounds like these would be considered punk at all. She was met with heavy criticism from punk scenes at the time (and still today) as Kimya Dawson’s songwriting certainly doesn’t feel “punk” in the way 80’s thrash-core bands like Crass, Black Flag, Discharge, and Wasted Youth did, and this is completely true. You’re unlikely to find mosh pits or have the cops called on you at an anti-folk show. That being said, it’s undeniable that artists like Dawson nearly single-handedly kept driving the founding punk spirit of “do it yourself” attitude and politically charged messages, saving the dying movement.
With the revival of singer-songwriters in the early ’90s like Daniel Johnston and Elliot Smith, Dawson and Green took elements from all their predecessors to establish a punk band without the clichés of angry men screaming into microphones, expanding the boundaries of the genre and paving the way for other genres like Bedroom-Pop, Lo-fi Punk, Nature-Punk, and Folk-Punk to realize their full potential and see validation from punk scenes across the world. At a time where scenes were still obsessed with cold-war era thrash or chain and quickly being made obsolete by Bubblegum-Pop and massively produced sellout bands like The Ramones, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols, Dawson and her contemporaries breathed new life into a dying, overlooked movement.
In the era of sellouts, gigs and venues were quickly becoming harder and harder to find for independent artists. In response to this lack of showcase, much like the way the Beats brought poetry readings and open-mics back to bars and bookstores, the Anti-Folk artists brought punk shows to cafés, record stores, and underpasses to ensure the movement’s perseverance and allow entirely new avenues and venues for independent artists to have their voices heard. What’s insane is that we still see these effects today, the vast majority of punk shows still take place in mom-and-pop local businesses. Chances are if you walk by a locally-owned book, record, or thrift store, you’ll see dozens of flyers for local artists and shows. Even if you don’t actively go to shows, if you’ve ever walked into a coffee shop and seen someone performing, you have the Anti-Folks to thank for keeping that independent spirit alive. At a crucial point in time when the industry was rapidly planting artists into the punk genre and even more rapidly removing its history and messages, artists like Kimya Dawson kept the movement alive by expanding its boundaries to include all independent art.
After finding success with The Moldy Peaches and solidifying her voice as an artist, Kimya branched out and started solo work as well as collaborations with other Anti-Folk artists like Jeffrey Lewis and Paul Baribeau. In and around this time of branching out, Kimya asked Jeffrey Lewis to create the cover art for her most well-known album: Remember that I Love You. This album includes every one of her Juno hits outside of The Moldy Peaches, and with this album, people outside of the New York City punk scenes started paying attention to Dawson. This all led to her eventually redefining the concept of “punk” that had been around for generations. Just by the album’s title alone, Kimya changed the entire punk attitude from pessimistic realism to hopeful optimism. The entire album’s theme can best be summed up by the third track, “Loose Lips” before you read the lyrics, I’d like to include a trigger warning for topics of self-harm and suicide:
“We won’t stop until somebody calls the cops
And even then we’ll start again and just pretend that
Nothing ever happened
We won’t stop until somebody calls the cops
And even then we’ll start again and just pretend that
Nothing ever happened”
“So if you wanna burn yourself
Remember that I love you
And if you wanna cut yourself
Remember that I love you
And if you wanna kill yourself
Remember that I love you
Call me up before you’re dead, we can make some plans instead
Send me an IM, I’ll be your friend”
With just these lines, Dawson solidified Anti-Folk as a hopeful, mutual, and punk-as-f*ck movement. While yes, most punk bands and scenes heavily focused on community up to this point, the main and clear messages of the movement were collective actions against opposing statist forces. Dawson re-iterates these ideas as a collective building up of each other, putting a huge emphasis on mental health and a call to everyone who listens to her music to check up on their friends and be there for one another. Because let’s face it, the world has changed a lot since the Cold War, and our generations of spiking anxiety and mental illnesses needed- and still needs- reassurance like this.
Many more than I have called Kimya Dawson the mother of all punks because she leads by example and her words have been there for us time and time again. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to “Loose Lips” during some of my more difficult teenage years. It seems especially in hard times like the repeated ones we’ve all faced these past few years, it’s increasingly more important to pay attention to messages like Dawson’s. Love yourself to the best of your ability, and make sure you spread some of that to those around you. You’re worth it, and so is everybody else!
-Samuel McFerron, Blog Editor.
Sam McFerron – Blog Editor, Asst. Prose & Asst. Poetry Editor: Sam is a Sophomore at Lewis University. They are an English Major with a concentration in literature and hopes to procure a minor in Philosophy. They aspire to become a professor of literature and spend most of their free time reading and writing music. They hope to improve upon their writing skills as well as their literary analysis skills during their time here at Lewis and are seeking publication within this time frame. Some authors they recommend are David Foster Wallace, MIlan Kundera, William S. Burroughs, and Kate Chopin.