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Queen of Noise: JOAN JETT headlines Vans Warped Tour this weekend
from: MiamiHerald.com
by Evelyn McDonnell
When the Vans Warped Festival rolls into Miami's Bicentennial Park Saturday night, a tattooed love goddess will show the thousands of skater bois and riot grrrls how to travel the world for 30 years and still love rock 'n' roll. JOAN JETT's career has taken her from jailbait proto-punk to Iron-Curtain-smashing arena-rock to lesbian-nation sex symbol. Along the way, she's starred with Michael J. Fox in a feature film, entertained numerous U.S. troops, and godmothered punk feminism.
At 47, Jett's old enough to have literally sired (which seems an appropriate term for a child-free androgyne who sings about bisexuality and S&M on her new album, SINNER) many of the teenymosher bands and fans that are Warped's bread-and-butter. Judging from SINNER's cover and recent live shots, the original Runaway looks as though time has sharpened her, like whetstone does a knife. Her famous shag hairdo is cut short, her arms are lean and etched with ink, her chest is barely covered in a leather tanktop.
She may seem to be an icon of the '70s and '80s, but in fact, Jett will fit right in among the festival's manic pop thrills. Warped may be the summer carnival of a powerful youth demographic, but it's also about surviving: at 12 years the punk rock extravaganza lays claim to being the world's oldest touring festival. This year's show will also include veteran acts the Buzzcocks and Helmet along with Against Me, Thursday, Underoath, Saves the Day, and more. Age ain't nothing but a number, as Aaliyah once sang.
''The whole thing about being a godmother, I can't really relate to,'' Jett said recently, speaking on a cellphone as she was traveling to a show in central Wisconsin where she was to perform with Loverboy and Kansas a few days before going on the road with Warped. ``I don't think too much about it and what people call me. I'm so glad people still care about hearing me after that long. That's amazing. That's partly the reason why I'm even on the Warped tour: they like to have people who harken back to how this music started.''
''She's still very relevant,'' says Warped founder Kevin Lyman. ``She's schooling younger bands on how to play live. When she gets up there and plays, it's a whole new level of talent and professionalism.''
In the story of punk's genesis, Jett is the all-too-often overlooked Eve (or perhaps Lilith). In the '70s, she founded, played guitar and wrote songs for the RUNAWAYS, a group of teenage girls whose rude, rudimentary rock was Los Angeles' answer to the New York Dolls and Ramones. After the Queens of Noise (as one of their songs proclaimed them) broke up, Jett recorded with original members of the Sex Pistols then produced seminal L.A. hardcore group the Germs. But the major labels saw no place for an ax-slinging female -- until her cover of the Arrows' I Love Rock 'n' Roll became a No. 1 lighter-waving anthem.
Jett proceeded to become a singer of crunchy, melodic Top 40 hits that were perfect beer-commercial fodder: Crimson and Clover, Do You Wanna Touch Me, and I Hate Myself for Loving You. She also starred with Fox in Light of Day and was the first American artist to play behind the Iron Curtain, in East Germany.
It's at that point, in the late '80s, that Jett's star should have faded. From then on, we should know her only through a torrid VH1 Where Are They Now? special and maybe oldies shows at casinos.
But having started so young, the woman born Joan Larkin wasn't done. In the '90s, Jett began spending time in the Pacific Northwest, where she found a new wave of admirers among the creators of grunge and Riot Grrrl. Her '94 Warner Bros. release Pure and Simple included songs co-penned by members of L7, Babes in Toyland and Bikini Kill. She also took the place of Mia Zapata in the Gits, helping raise money and awareness to solve the mystery of that Seattle singer's homicide (the murderer was arrested in the Keys in 2003).
For an artist whose work has relied heavily on bubblegum covers and a sometimes cartoonish image, Jett's follow-up should have revealed her evolving emotional depth -- and some of her most candid statements about her own life. ''Do you want me to come out, ready or not?'' Jett sang with Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna on Five, a song recorded in the mid-'90s and addressed to the many commentators who were speculating about Jett's sexual orientation.
But Warner Bros. sat on that material. And sat and sat. Those songs and others that Jett and her longtime band the BLACKHEARTS have recorded in the past decade are finally seeing the, er, light of day on SINNER, released on the artist's own Blackheart label. (Two tracks appeared on Fetish, an album that was not released widely commercially.)
''I went back and listened to a lot of this material,'' Jett says. ``It still felt valid to me musically and lyrically. I feel so relieved to have it out. I feel very good about it because I love the record, I feel very connected to it.''
Just as the RUNAWAYS' Cherry Bomb and Jett's new-generation anthem Bad Reputation (featured on numerous movies and TV shows) feel as relevant today as 20 years ago, SINNER sounds at once like classic Jett and au courant. It opens with Riddles, the obligatory-in-2006 protest song. Joan is known for playing concerts for U.S. troops, not for anti-war statements. She says she hasn't done any of those gigs recently so hasn't performed Riddles or Change the World, SINNER's other political tune, for soldiers -- but says she would.
``I go to hospitals and visit kids who've been blown up and we talk about politics. And sometimes we disagree and discuss it. And it's interesting.''
Mostly, SINNER is about sex. ''That's something that's always on my mind,'' Jett says. From covers of the Replacements' Androgynous to Jett's own Naked, the artist seems to be putting her love life on the line once and for all. Two SINNER cuts, Sweet's A.C.D.C. and Jett's Baby Blue, are odes to bisexual women. Jett has developed a core following of ''queer-punk'' fans, appeared on Ellen DeGeneres' sitcom, and played gay-pride concerts.
''As far as addressing sexuality, I'm singing to everyone. I always have been since the RUNAWAYS,'' Jett says. ``I think I'm being pretty blatant. I think anybody who wants to know who I am, all they've got to do is listen to my music.''
Still, in interviews, Jett refuses to say whether she's gay, straight, bi, or none of the above: ``Everybody likes to talk about what goes on in the bedroom and bathroom. That's not me. Maybe it's because I've been watched since I'm 15.''
But isn't the S&M cut Fetish an explicit song about bedroom practices?
``I'm not discussing personally who I'm doing anything with. I'm talking to everyone.''
The new album's title indicates a heavy sense of Catholic guilt may be guiding Jett's discretion, but the singer says that actually, SINNER's a political statement.
``It's more a lot of things: the climate of the country number one, and the judgments that seem to be flying from both sides of who's moral and who's not, what is morality. The death penalty is moral in one case, and it's OK to have collateral damage, but it's not moral to have an abortion -- some killings are OK and others aren't [to some people]. To me, some of those things aren't moral.
``It's about the judgments people will throw at me because of who they think I am because of what they see and what I wear and how I look and because I sing about sex, which is how we all got here. I consider myself just embracing being a human being. I consider myself to be caring. I try to be a good person.''
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