ghetto girl

In 1985, I began recording ‘songs’ on a 4-track cassette recorder I had bought, using my $39 Casio portable keyboard, a cheap-ass Radio Shack reverb box, a $5.00 microphone, and any other objects that made sound. I use the word ‘songs’ very loosely, for during that period, I was much more interested in experimenting with sounds rather than songwriting. Influenced more by Laurie Anderson and Chris & Cosey than by the Beach Boys and the Beatles, I created sonic collages into which I mixed my own acid-damaged poetry as well as found sounds and the marijuana-stimulated ad lib ramblings of my friends. One of my most frequent early collaborators, my friend Mairi Gl’amour and I came up with the name ghetto girl (no caps, please), which evolved from one of our favorite phrases from that period, “get it, girl!” (from whence came g.i.g. entertainment international). For the next few years, ghetto girl evolved as an artistic entity consisting of myself and anyone else who would let me commit his or her talents to tape. And a definite ghetto girl aesthetic emerged as well: quick and crude, but with all the magic and fleeting brilliance of first takes, twangy out-of-tune guitars laid over a poppers disco beat, and a peculiar lyrical style that paid little attention to gender pronouns or shifts in person. In her willful ignorance of traditional song structure, ghetto girl truly did create some amazingly trippy “music for stoned queers” as she then characterized her music. However, these tunes come from the “second era” in ghetto girl’s career, which began in 1989 when I met my husband Christian Matthews and a whole new world of home-recording possibilities opened up to me. Christian, too, had been recording his own songs and those of his friends since he was nine years old, and was much more technically adept at it than was I. Furthermore, he was much more of a musical traditionalist, composing perfect pop-ditties, whereas I didn’t even know what a “bridge” in a song was! Within a matter of weeks after meeting each other, we were recording together; inspired by Christian’s songcraft, and enraptured by new love, ghetto girl began to move in a more song-oriented direction. Now she was actually writing songs with verses, choruses, and harmony vocals (All Alone in Her World, Full ‘o’ Shit) and even her songs without a traditional structure at least had a melody (Again). Yet key aspects of the ghetto girl aesthetic remained intact, as evidenced by the found sounds in the dance-oriented I’ll Never Be a Fag and Lose Weight Deliciously, the gender-bending of Mary-Goes-Round and Tranzmergance, and the all-out freaky aural experimentation of Give Her a Haldol. As the years rolled by, Chris and I were able to buy more recording equipment, and his talent and skills in audio production developed from a hobby into a career. ghetto girl (and many others) reaped the benefits of his growth, resulting in recordings that were nearly professional in quality, yet recorded entirely at home on four tracks (Doppelganger, AZT-3-Day-Illness). From the very beginning, ghetto girl was conceived as a collective, and although I had less hands-on involvement in the engineering of the recordings as time passed, I remained firmly in control of ghetto girl’s artistic vision, and had to battle with Chris over, for example, whether it was appropriate to write a song about one’s AIDS medications. Ultimately, the music benefited from this collaboration, and ghetto girl produced three full-length recordings that document this remarkable period of creative output. (But I’m still not sure if I ever wrote a song with a bridge!) Because these tracks quite literally wouldn’t exist without him, I dedicate this site to my once-in-a-lifetime love, Christian Matthews. Forthcoming will be a CD compilation covering ghetto girl’s output from 1985 – 1988, entitled music for stoned queers: ghetto girl B.C. (Before Chris… get it?) And with that, I will officially be dissolving ghetto girl. It’s time to lay the old girl down to rest. The days when she could record and mix two or three songs in one night are long gone, and although she’s still making music, the output has slowed to a trickle as she’s entered middle age. By the time she gets around to releasing anything new, it probably will have to be under the name ghetto grandma! At any rate, enjoy the tunes… Jeff Mitchell -- April 2004