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Normal History Vol. 385: The Art Of David Lester

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 32-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Mecca Normal has always viewed music journalism as an important component in the process of releasing music. When we put an album out, we compile a list of journalists and publications to send promo copies to. For most bands, this act is part of an almost unavoidable economic equation. From a band’s perspective, reviews are supposed to stimulate album sales, but, if a band is at least as interested in social discourse as sales, what exactly gets said in those reviews should be as significant as how many people end up buying their album. I think it’s pretty obvious that Mecca Normal (a group of two devoted to cultural agitation since 1984) has never gone out of our way to make music that intends to, above all else, sell. We’ve always been interested in coaxing journalists to extend conversations we instigate in songs, to give them the opportunity to further illuminate on behalf of potential listeners at large. David and I both come from newspaper backgrounds, albeit from the art and production side of things, but knowing how publishing works, including the ins and outs of how editors function, has always played a role in how we present our press material and, because rock writers are words-and-ideas people, we’ve found them very appreciative of having social justice themes to write about—and perhaps even opinions they share about violence against women, feminism, poverty, inequality, the prison industrial complex, capitalism etc.

Jessica Hopper‘s review of Mecca Normal’s The Observer (Kill Rock Stars, 2006) in the Chicago Reader was significant to us in many ways. Actually, it was more of an article than a review, subtitled “an unsparing investigation of what it means to be an independent woman”—which referred to the album, but seemed also true of the article itself. As a feminist, it was important to me to have a feminist rock critic engage and react to the work as a whole—and song by song—and to use it to make bigger points. Hopper included the piece in her 2015 anthology The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, giving our investigations and commentaries the kind of longevity that may well encourage further understanding of what independent women face when they willfully interact with men within the construct of online dating. Or at least the unique perspective of one rather feisty 45-year-old feminist online dating between 2002 and 2005 as interpreted by another rather feisty feminist rock critic some years younger, whose importance, with the publication of this book, has vastly (and rightfully) increased since that time.

“To Avoid Pain” from the album The Observer (Kill Rock Stars, 2006) (download):