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Best Of 2012, Guest Editors: The Corin Tucker Band On “Dance Music Sex Romance”

As 2012 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.

The first Corin Tucker Band album, 2010’s 1,000 Years, was dominated by moody, thoughtful songcraft—quite a left-turn coming after Tucker’s last album (to date) with groundbreaking trio Sleater-Kinney, 2005’s furiously distortion-heavy The Woods. But now, 1,000 Years’ follow-up, Kill My Blues (Kill Rock Stars), is another sonic shift. The guitars are louder, the textures more extreme, and Tucker’s lyrics on the album cover an amazing gamut—from clarion calls to teenage memories to more elliptical pieces. At times, the LP brings to mind S-K’s post-September 11 album, 2002’s One Beat, a collection of rock anthems for troubled times. Throughout Kill My Blues, Tucker writes—and the band plays—like something important is truly at stake on every song. The Corin Tucker Band—which also includes drummer Sara Lund, guitarist Seth Lorinczi and bassist Mike Clark (as well as touring bassist Dave Depper)—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the group.

Tucker: I’m not sure if Prince was listing off his four favorite things in this song from his 1982 album 1999, but I do know that my 10-year old brain was plenty interested in all of these subjects. What was going on in the world that Prince was describing? Were people having sex all the time? And what was up with his clothes?

In the world of 2012, these subjects still remain extremely powerful. However far we may have come in the fields of science, computers and technology, socially we are still lagging far behind where I feel that we should be.

What happened to the sexual revolution of the 1960s? The idea that both men and women could be sexually liberated and that sex did not necessarily need to be tied to marriage or procreation? That was more than 50 years ago, but today when a female law student calmly argues that birth control should be considered a normal component of women’s health care, she was attacked by conservative ideologues as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and told that a woman’s birth control should be a “dime between her knees.”

Guess what? Women have always liked sex, just as much as any man. It is just as much a part of our physical makeup as any guy.

Is it a question of morality then, of the consequences of sex, babies and what is best for the children that come from that sex? Certainly these questions are worth considering.

But I think the fundamental question is one of power. Sex and power have long been engaged in the ultimate dance, the longest human song: a struggle over dominance. These are old ideas, nothing new about them, but as long as there is a deficiency of female progressive leaders making political policy in this country, these ideas play like a broken record, over and over.

Video after the jump.

http://vimeo.com/46954078