Photo Credit: Kelly Auknst
Lauryl Sulfate admits she may have jumped the gun naming her band Lauryl Sulfate and Her Ladies of Leisure. “When I started the project it was just me, hence the really long name,” she says. “I thought it was funny since it was just me to give the band a really long name.” Since then the group has expanded to include two real Ladies of Leisure: backing vocalist Mony Bennett and keyboardist Mark Zbikowski. That one of her Ladies turned out to be a man is just one of those fun flukes that comes from naming a band before it exists.
Although the trio has played many of the same Riverwest and Bay View hot spots as most of the city’s most plugged-in acts, their sound makes them outliers on most bills they play. There aren’t a lot of acts like them in Milwaukee. They specialize in dance music at its most pop-forward, filtering the singing-into-a-hairbrush exuberance of classic Madonna through the half-rapped/all-attitude mentality of Kesha, with a little bit of Beyoncé’s no-nonsense politics thrown in. On the group’s debut album Dance Music Saves Lives, Sulfate and her ladies push back against a culture that too often casts women as supporting players in men’s stories. “I ain’t here to teach you no lessons/I ain’t your manic pixie dream girl/This is the real world,” Sulfate sings on “Hard Candy.”
For Sulfate, part of the appeal of pop music is that it can seem so out of reach. For decades, this style of pop was largely a studio creation, something that required pricy producers and even pricier equipment to realize. But advances in technology have made it possible for any musician with the interest and ambition to make records that hold their own against their bigger-budget corollaries.
“I enjoy making this style of music because it shows people that you can do whatever you want,” Sulfate says. “If you have the right tools, you can make music that sounds almost like what’s on the radio. There are big musicians these days who work using Garage Band. It’s a great equalizing tool. I love the idea that you don’t have to have a lot of money or a lot of clout to make whatever music you want.”
|
|
On the surface, the title Dance Music Saves Lives may sound grandiose and hyperbolic, but it’s quite literally true. Talk to enough people immersed in the music, and you’ll hear plenty of stories of people who found a sense of acceptance and belonging in dance music they couldn’t find anywhere else.
“One of the things we really wanted to do with this album is write a sort of love letter to the dance music and dance clubs that we grew up in,” Sulfate says. “One thing that I think gets overlooked a lot about dance music and dance culture is the way that it provides a safe haven for people who are often disenfranchised: women, queer people, people of color, poor folks.”
That’s something that can’t always be said of rock music, which Sulfate notes has historically prioritized the perspective of one overrepresented demographic: white men.
“In our culture we have this idea that one man doing it by himself is more noble than a woman who wants to collaborate with a lot of people, and I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “We have guys like Neil Young who are singing about their heartbreak, and women like Kesha who are singing about their own heartbreak. But we don’t put the same value on Kesha’s heartbreak.
“In the greater culture, ‘lone male geniuses’ are often given primacy and those are the voices we hear the loudest,” she continues. “But in the dance club, you can create a space where that social order is turned upside down. Especially in the current political climate, many people are needing these kinds of safe places more than ever. They need to be told that they are important, valued, and beautiful just the way that they are, and that is one important message of this record.”
Lauryl Sulfate and Her Ladies of Leisure play an album release show on Saturday, Feb. 9, at Company Brewing with Tigernite and LUXI at 10:30 p.m.
