Home » The black fairy tales of the Belly – Daniele Cassandro

The black fairy tales of the Belly – Daniele Cassandro

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In May 1994, the British musical monthly Q (which stopped publishing exactly one year ago) came out with a historical cover. There were Pj Harvey, Björk and Tori Amos together who, dressed in white, were presented as a holy trinity of female rock. The title, which today sounds at least clumsy, was “Hips, lips, tits, power” (the strength of hips, lips and breasts) and referred to the debate that existed in those years on the new role that women were playing taking in pop and rock music, in the wake of the punk and feminist claims of a number of bands collectively known as riot grrrls. Despite having little to do with the all in all marginal and fiercely self-produced scene of riot grrrls, the three very famous artists on the cover represented, in fact, a new way of being songwriters. Above all, each in its own way, embodied a new way of putting the woman’s body at the center of the musical discourse, no longer just as an object of desire but as an active subject and as a powerful narrating agent.

But that trio on the cover of Q was supposed to be a quartet. Because alongside Björk, Tori Amos and Pj Harvey, the American singer-songwriter Tanya Donelly would have been very good, in those years she was making a notable contribution to the debate on the role of women in alternative rock. Donelly, born in 1966 in New England, is an American indie rock aristocrat. At the age of 14 he founded, together with his half-sister Kristin Hersh, the cult band Throwing Muses and then together with Kim Deal, the bassist of the Pixies, founded another cornerstone of female rock of the early nineties: the Breeders. After an album with the Breeders (the unmissable Under 1990, produced by Steve Albini), Donelly went on his own and formed his own band, Belly.

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Belly’s music has a much more varied color palette than that of the Breeders or Throwing Muses: it moves gracefully in a gray area between dream pop, American folk rock and electric and crooked pop. The songs of Star, their debut album released in 1994, all written by Tanya Donelly, have a melodic ease that much grunge of those years lacked. Donelly knows how to write a memorable pop song and then he knows how to dress it with feedback, reverberations and roughness in order to make it mysterious and alienating. His texts are opaque and convoluted; despite the sweetness of his slightly childish voice, behind each of his songs there seems to be a mystery, a black tale, perhaps a crime.

The album opens with Someone to die for, a kind of lullaby as sweet as it is disturbing: “Poor thing, poor thing… do you have a sister? Someone you would lay down on the train tracks for? Do you have someone you would die for? ”. Precisely this mysterious sister, this elusive female presence that requires us, with her witchcraft nursery rhyme, devotion and sacrifice is the guiding spirit that pervades all the songs of Star. In Gepetto a childhood trauma is relived: between bad children and decapitated dolls and in Slow dog it evokes the disturbing figure of a woman walking around with a rifle and a dead dog on her shoulders. And then wild landscapes illuminated by a strange red moon (Low red moon), talking frogs with a thousand pretensions (Untogether) and witches with whom we find ourselves sharing a bed (Witch). The world of Tanya Donelly is made of a magical realism always poised between fairytale and nightmare, between wakefulness and hallucination. It is no coincidence that there was a great affinity between her and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. In 1993, a year before the release of Star, Radiohead opened Belly gigs, and Thom and Tanya sang a memorable version of Untogether which ended with a long hug.

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Belly
Star
4AD, 1993

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