http://thechrisproject.com/music/peaches-fuck_the_pain_away.mp3

It was in the titty bar scene of Lost in Translation. I heard the drum beat in that movie and knew that that song was the one. My hopes and dreams have been fulfilled by the experience of this song. Listen.

Exerpt from mp3 player playlist

buddy holly - Rave on
peaches - fuck the pain away





Fuck, we all loved that song when we first heard it.

bill murray is the man

I love that movie.

I'm The Original Heavily Littered Pedalboard Man.

Merrill Nisker is the kind of woman you want to get with. Better known as Peaches, she burns tracks and blazes stages, ripping riffs and breaking beats like the love child of Hermes and Aphrodite. She’s a rock goddess who drops the mask, allowing the listener to revel in all that’s unshaven. Her roots are rocknroll, she likes it raw, and after a taste you’ll be branded by her XXX. Just be sure to mind the seed that’ll bust your teeth.

Peaches sets off her second album, Fatherfucker, in the same fashion as her first, The Teaches of Peaches, by not giving a damn, fuck, or shit about her reputation. Groovebox in hand she pushes forward an up-close and barely-legal look at a bearded lady with brass balls.

Inspired by the electricity of AC/DC, the stripped-down brilliance of Old Dirty Bastard, and the rockabilly energy of the Cramps, she’s been launched to the Top of the Pops even if the MTV world isn’t ready to shake their dicks and tits to a different tune that's programmed, produced, and punched out by the one and only Peach. On Fatherfucker she flips switches and tweaks knobs on her MC5, backed by a band with enough raw power to stop the blood in Iggy Pop. She’s a sweet thing with a manner that’s tough, caught between two worlds, bending gender, pushing buttons, and turning the whip on the industry by writing lines like, “Mine’s fake/ Inanimate /But feels great/ To stimulate/ Your prostate.” Peaches evens the score with choruses that asks boys to “Take a sabbatical/ From your radical/ Fanatical battle/ Sit on my saddle/ And rattle rattle rattle/ Back it up baby/ Back it up, back it up . . . sweet buns/ Let me be your gun.” So keep an open mind, put on your trannie training-panties, and ride the line with Peaches.


Pardon my French, but what the fuck is a fatherfucker?
What’s a motherfucker?

What is a motherfucker?
Why do we use it every day? Why do we call our mothers motherfuckers? Why do we stub our toe and say “Aww motherfucker!”? What is motherfucker? And also it's over because we use it in our everyday language and it’s such an insanely intense word. I’m not one to shy away from these obscene terms that we actually have in our mainstream. Motherfucker is a very mainstream word. But if we’re going to use motherfucker, why don’t we use fatherfucker? I’m just trying to be even. Some of these songs are like “shake your tits, shake your ass,” so I’m trying to say “shake your tits, shake your dicks.” You know, guys get left out all the time. So motherfucker, it’s time for the fatherfuckers. In the same way it's always “back it up, girl.” It’s, like, no, back it up, boys. Technically it’s supposed to feel better for them. We don’t have a prostate. So, I’m just trying to include men and boys. I’m not trying to take it away; there’s just so much focus on the girls.

It’s quite a switch from being a school teacher.
Well, I wasn’t really ever a schoolteacher; I don’t have a teaching degree. I started teaching because when I grew up, learning creativity was “Sing this, read this part, dress up in a sailor costume, say your lines, your parents will clap.” But there was no actual creativity or development involved, so I wanted to give kids a chance to use their creativity, which they have so much of. They could actually develop and feel free to use their creativity and not get boxed in by the general learning that happens unless you go to an arts school or something. I developed a program, started in daycares, and then moved to private schools because I couldn’t work in public school since I didn’t have a degree. Then I did it in people’s homes, things like that. It was quite a radical, but also very successful, program that I did for 10 years. At the same time, at night, I would do music for myself, and I think doing that in the day really made me want to unleash the kid in myself at night. It wasn’t like I was boxed in as a teacher; no, I was trying to give the teaches but I wasn’t a perverted school teacher or anything like that at all. Kids are totally creative and fun, I’m all for creativity and energy. My shows are live 200% pure energy.

Even now, I feel like you leave audiences wide-eyed and in awe, like schoolchildren.
You learn a lot from kids; if they don’t like you they just jump on you.
They let you know, you know? They prepared me for how you have to keep an audience interested.

Do you consider what you do now to be educational?
It could be, but I think the most important thing for me is that it’s good music. It’s all about the music first. I hope that people are just getting into the music and when they sing along with it — or they realize that I produced all the music and made all the beats and wrote all the lyrics, and then they think about the lyrics — maybe then there is something to learn, if they want. The point for me is that it’s rocking for them.

I’ve heard you use the term “herm” before — your him-her rock philosophy. Lay your sex out like Plato and tell us about the essential teaches of Peaches.
I just think that there is so much male and female in us all. When you do a rock performance people just see that it’s male. That’s totally ridiculous. Didn’t we learn something with Patti Smith or Joan Jett, down the line with all those? It’s still an issue, which is totally ridiculous. When I do my 200% live-energy show people think, “Oh, she’s trying to be male.” No, I’m just trying to give 100%.

So it’s not a “big gigantic **** show”?
(Laughs) People ask me if I have ***** envy. Well, I have hermaphrodite envy.

And about rock shows, when was the proverbial peach popped?
Well, I was making music. I started with the acoustic guitar and a friend who sang. We had a band called Mermaid Cafe, after a Joni Mitchell song, and we would sing songs about whatever, the fake honesty that folk music has when it’s at its worst. People were actually there every week, listening to us and crying, and I was like, oh man, I can really relate to being a performer, 'cause it was my first time performing, but I can’t relate to this music anymore. So I just tried to experiment with all these things and then finally I was working with jazz people and weird time signatures and singing like wooawwoh, like Nina Hagen and Diamanda Galás, who I totally love, but it wasn’t really connecting to an audience and that to me was really important. You know, having the connection, not living in a vacuum or something like that. Some people are happy to just make the music, and if they’re satisfied, that’s fine, but I also like to connect with people. So when I had this band called “The Shit” — with my friends who were all dissatisfied with the music, like this girl Sticky and a guy named Mocky and Chilly Gonzalez — we all just stripped away what we didn’t like in our music and just tried to dumb it down for our own fun and get really high and sing about whatever. We all gave each other our own names.

I’ve read that you took on the name “Peaches” after listening to the Nina Simone song “Four Women,” and I was wondering how you related to what she sings.
I don’t think that I’m a black slave or something like that, but it was just because at the end of the song she sings, “What do they call her, they call her Peaches!” and the way she said it was just so raw and so pure and energetic; I was like, sing it to me. So I changed my name so she’d be singing it to me.

I read that you were tormented as a child by your neighbors who threw stones and insults at you like “dirty Jew.”
Well, it wasn’t really my neighbors. I went to a Jewish private school and there was also a Catholic private school down the street. It was more like the private-school kids going, “Dirty Jews” when we would get out of school, throwing stones at us. It’s like Canada in the suburbs, that’s what’s so amazing about it.

Now you face a similar brand of bigotry in the jeers from the crowds that aren’t with Peaches. How do you react to what author Inga Muscio calls “**** hatred”?
It’s cool. I mean, I really feel like Lenny Bruce in those situations. You really find out where people are at when you’re putting your way out there. I actually feel really good heckling my audiences. It usually doesn’t happen in my audiences; it happens when I open for other people. Like when I opened for Queens of the Stone Age, someone shouted, “Get off the stage, gay man” or “You Suck!” and I’m like, “Yeah and I swallow,” and they’re like, “Oh, she just got you at your own game, buddy.” I turn them around right there. So it’s important for me to do that. But I must say that I didn’t get blazingly high or drunk before I opened for them because I really wanted to be able to come back, because I knew it wasn’t my audience. I had to be doubly on top of things. I opened for Bjork in Europe last month, Paris for two shows, and it was because she wanted me to, not because some agency said, “Oh it’s good for Peaches’ career” or whatever. So I did and then her audiences were really tough, too — they wanted their little angel, and rightly so. She’s amazing, you know? I was upsetting them; they were screaming at me, “Shut up!” Some of them. Of course there is always the half that is totally into it, giving signs like “I Love You.” So it’s not all negative, and that’s the point, that it’s positive and negative. People are actually having a reaction, that’s important.

It’s funny. I use fake blood in my shows; I like to spit fake blood like
Gene Simmons, but now I’m going to start having my period onstage. I just thought, what are people going to think of that? They can understand spitting fake blood but blood that actually happens every month, down there, that’s going to be way more shocking and that’s totally funny because it’s just part of our bodies. You know what’s also funny? The places where we have sex are also the dirty words we use for people like, “You dick,” “You ****,” “You shit,” you know? “Piss off,” “Asshole” — and they’re all the parts where you also have pleasure and bodily functions that happen every day. We’re just totally dissing ourselves. It’s so weird.

What’s your favorite foreign phrase that you picked up on tour during all of that?
Pizda [pronounced peezdzielets].

What is it?
Pizda, it’s Russian. It means “****.” But someone told me that it can be understood as both great and ****. But people didn’t get it that way so I’d come onstage and be like, “Yea, pizda!” They’d be like, “Oh my God! What is she saying? Who is she? She’s so in our face that the first thing she says is pizda?!”

On your new album, you collaborate with Iggy Pop on the song “Kick It," in which you admit that “some people don’t like [your] crotch.” What was it like to work with Iggy?
Iggy and I had just met at one of his surprise performances at the Short List Awards in L.A. I played the night before and I just happened to be there and I was like, "Oh, can I come tomorrow night?" So I did, and then I told him to come and see me play in Miami after his performance was, again, blowing me away like always. He actually did show up at my show and had my album and said it was great and was waiting for the live show and loved the live show. I really, really enjoyed meeting him. Later he called me and told me he took the song, from The Teaches of Peaches, called “Rock Show” and sang over it and said, “I want to put it on my album,” so I said, "OK, then you have to be on mine," and he said, “OK, write us something.” So I actually wrote the whole thing. I got to basically direct his parts and say, "Hey Iggy, sing it like this." I wanted to debunk the myths that I’m only about sex, which I’m sure most people get already, because it’s really about the big blanket of sex in terms of gender and all kinds of things, not just sucking and fucking. In the Iggy track I wasn’t like, “Hey Iggy you got a big one, wanna fuck me?” It was more like going back and forth and really just rocknroll. I also got to be the guitar player, which was really exciting.

I’m also on his album. I have a band with Chilly Gonzalez and Taylor Savvy, a backing band. We only do rock riffs. That rock band is older than Peaches, but it still goes on. When we play it’s really quite intense and fun. Iggy Pop asked me, “Do you have any more songs for my album?” I sent him a few tracks and he used one of those too.

Being in league with all of these superstars, do you find yourself at all star-struck?
With Iggy Pop and definitely with John Waters — oh my god, meeting him I was like so nervous. He was so nice. He was just like, “Oh, get out of your dressing room and come meet my friends.” He was cool. With Matthew Barney, I was pretty star-struck too; he was on the Bjork tour. I was like rraaooawoa, but he’s totally cool. You meet people in the right context and then it’s fine.

Are there any other collaborations that we have to look forward to?
Yesterday I did a song with Pink. She was a fan of me and said, “Hey, you’ve got to sing on this song on my album.” She stepped up. So I wrote some raps and we did a little thing together and I’m really happy about it. She’s not afraid to be sexy and raw; she’s not a puppet like some people think. Her album is coming out in November.

You yourself have been launched to the top of the cool list, appearing in films, fashion shows, and inspiring Peaches look-alike contests. Does all the fame and attention seem sudden to you or have you just been taking it all in stride?
It’s so funny, right? Peaches look-alikes and drag queens doing my whole album for their shows? Sometimes I think, “This doesn’t happen.” People don’t come out and say that they work out to “Fuck the Pain Away.” Iggy Pop calling me on the phone. Madonna and Pink playing my album. It’s all organic. These are people — like Bjork asked for me personally. It’s not record-company ploys or big hype; there is no big hype. All it is is trying, then it happens. It sounds so like, “Believe in your dreams and the rainbows will come” but you have to think about what you believe in, not like, “Oh that sounds like corny crap.” Everyone believes in something. It’s only corny crap if you don’t really believe in it and you try and figure someone else's crap into your own, right?

What do you believe in?
I just believe in standing up for who you are. Don’t be afraid, don’t buy that crap that you’ve got to be like this or beauty is only like this. Take charge in your own way. I don’t think everyone has to be in-your-face taking charge cause it’s not everybody's style. You have to find your way. Just use it to your advantage. Get satisfaction out of your life. Not everyone is the hunter.

Do you feel at all pressured to steer your sound in a certain direction, make it more accessible commercially?
Obviously not. I don’t mean to be like, oh obviously not, but it’s funny. I did have the chance with the second album if I really felt like that. I just really needed to do my thing again, actually even in a stronger way. I felt like, bring it on more, now that people know who I am, now that I can really go for it.

I heard about a video you shot in which your pubic hair grows all over the place.
It was like a werewolf video but with my own body hair. The natural image of beauty is when your hair is long, and your eyelashes are long, so I had that grow first. It was like “Oh, she’s getting prettier.” Then the hair started growing under my arm spits, from my crotch, just growing everywhere. I thought it was totally hilarious and a great comment, even on Thriller, you know? Also, those videos where they’re showing these crotches close up, but of course they’re always shaven. Of course they wouldn’t show my video in America.

Sony eventually dropped you after that.
It was only a deal in Germany, just for a single. I was really happy that they dropped it. They had a really weird idea, like why they signed me for a single and then wanted me to be on daytime TV. That’s why they wanted to make a really expensive video and I’m like, well, I want it to be a hair-growing video. They said, “We want it to be beautiful.” I said, Well, let's collaborate. It was a really good experience for me. I didn’t want to be on a major label, right? I had all the problems without having to release my album with a major, just a single. A single catastrophe. It’s a big danger in the industry. If you fail with a major, that’s it. But I got over that and so did everybody else. It was a good experiment. Some people were really upset, like “Peaches, you went commercial.” But look at the video — it was set in a bathroom, and people kept coming in having those stupid bathroom sex videos but I was growing hair, it was totally ridiculous, you know? For me it was really funny to have all this money to do this video and then what I did with it.

But they showed it in Germany?
Oh yeah. That’s why they wanted me to make it in Germany; they had directors and deals. Sony pays off the video stations so their videos always get on. So of course it was going to be shown; it's business. It had nothing to do with the artistic quality or anything.

Do you have other videos in the works?
Yeah, I make my own Super 8 movies. For the first album I made like seven of them. One was a guitar instructional video for “Rock Show.” Just me and my friend doing different rock moves together, like how you move the guitar up and down and jumping with it. The one that got the most attention, my first one, I made with my friend Malcolm Frasier. It was about two girls on low-rider bicycles who circle each other and start to fall in love with their own bikes. They get off their bikes and start fetishizing and licking the bikes. I think you can see them on the Net.

I’m very curious about the experimental film you did with John Malkovich and Bella Freud.
Yeah, Bella Freud is a designer but she didn’t want to do catwalk stuff.
They’re friends and John wanted to do more directing and writing so they got together and did a short film. The next year they did another one and Bella Freud had seen me play live and told John, “Hey, you gotta get Peaches in your film.” I was a beat poet and I wore Bella Freud shoes that had laces and they came undone. Before we started the scene, John Malkovich bent down and tied my shoe.

You were also in a traditional runway show too, right?
You mean Imitation of Christ? It wasn’t a runway show. What they did was have an old furniture store and they would have different levels and scenes going on all over the place. The scene I was in had these really young topless models vacuuming and I was their dominatrix and had to tell them to keep vacuuming. And some of the models really didn’t get it; I mean, some of them were only 14. Some of them were like, I don’t really want to be topless but I don’t want to lose my job. So it was kind of sad. Before I went out there I gave them a little talk like, "Listen, I’m not a dominatrix, I’ve been asked to do this, so when I yell at you, please don’t take it personal," you know? Some, you can tell, were trying not to cry cause they were topless and it was their first modeling job and I’m yelling at them. But what was really fun for me was that I got to yell at all those fashion photographers and writers like, “Don’t look at my crotch, what are you fucking doing?" And they were like, “Who the fuck is that? That’s definitely not a model. What the hell is she doing here?” They just didn’t get me at all, which was great because I got to yell at them and they were like, “Well! I never!” So that was really fun.

Speaking toward the warped view of fashionable beauty, I came upon a fan forum devoted to you online where a character by the name of AlfredH says, “Too bad she DOES NOT look like Brittany Spears, Avril Lavigne, or Mandy Moore. THAT would be something! An ugly girl talking about sex is just not sexy.” What do you say to punks like that?
Well, if he thinks I’m ugly, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say; maybe they have this image of what a pretty girl should look like. I don’t personally think I’m ugly. I just don’t think that I have the perfect features that those girls are bred to have. If I did look like that and was singing what I’m singing it would even be worse. People would say, “She’s too pretty to sing like that. She’s so pretty, why doesn’t she just sing nice songs?” It’s cool that they said that, I didn’t realize it was said that way. Actually, that’s a kind of controversial-cool way that they wrote it. I haven’t seen it yet but people keep telling me about it.

Another fan directed them to the crotch gallery on your site at www.peachesrocks.com.
That started because my album cover for The Teaches of Peaches was a crotch and people came to my live shows and started taking pictures of my crotch and I thought that was pretty amazing because people do take pictures of people’s body parts without their heads. I embraced that and made a Web site so that I could actually see those photos and people sent the pictures in.

In closing, do you really like sex or is it just an act?
Of course I like sex. Sex is one of the five basic needs in life and one of the only two that involve another person. You need to eat, you need to sleep, you need shelter, you need to belong, and you need to have sex. Those are actually the five basic needs.

[This message was edited by thechrisproject on February 12, 2004 at 01:19 PM.]

[This message was edited by thechrisproject on February 12, 2004 at 01:20 PM.]