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Porn again
Peaches and Gonzales

BY MICHAEL ENDELMAN

Peaches are juicy. Peaches are sweet. Peaches are fuzzy on the outside, soft on the inside. And Peaches, who comes to T.T. the Bear’s Place this Wednesday, is a Canadian ex-pat living in Berlin who spews raunchy sex raps over deranged techno beats that sound as if they’d been marinating in the sewer. “There’s only one Peach with a hole in the middle,” she coos. Like I said: Peaches is juicy. Peaches is sweet.

Straddling the worlds of laptop techno, raunchy hip-hop, and riot grrrl punk, Peaches brings a welcome blast of unbridled sexuality and punk attitude to the world of electronic music. Her debut American release, The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo), is shocking, and not just because Peaches is so smutty and X-rated. She is both — “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Cum Undun” are only a couple of the song titles. But The Teaches of Peaches is a chocolate-in-my-peanut butter combination that should’ve popped up years ago. The concept is so simple — cheap beats + slutty come-ons — and so great, it’s shocking that no one thought of it earlier.

“I was weaned on rock and roll,” explains Peaches over a very fuzzy cell phone from Germany. “I was doing a bunch of music, but all my friends moved away. I really wanted to keep playing music, so I started using all these little Casio machines. But then that got too complicated. So I said, ‘I have to get something really easy and I’m gonna use it and make it my rock-and-roll slave.’ So I got the [Roland] 505, and I call it my MC5.”

The resulting grooves are trashy reworkings of old-school electro — squelchy throbbing bass, tinny hand claps, trebly cymbal splashes — juiced up with the occasional ragged guitar chord. Peaches is nonchalant about her backing tracks: “Making a beat takes me about ten minutes. About the same time it takes me to take a shit, or smoke a joint. It’s like a Nintendo game.” Which only furthers the notion that techno is the new punk rock. For people with limited funds, little traditional musical talent, outspoken opinions, a healthy DIY ethic, and an aggressively uncommercial attitude, techno is the way to go — it’s a lot easier to buy a cheap sampler/drum machine/sequencer like the Roland 505 than it is to arrange the various gear and bodies one needs for a live band.

What separates Peaches from any girl with a sampler is her mouth. Like a combination of the Runaways, Kool Keith, and DJ Assault, she spits out hooky punk-pop choruses alongside lewd raps in a voice that ranges from threatening to coy. “Sucking on my titties like you wanted me/Calling me all the time, like ‘Bonnie check out my Chrissy behind’/It’s fine all of the time/What else is in the teaches of peaches?/Like sex on the beaches,” she rhymes on “Fuck the Pain Away.” Or check out “AA XXX”: “I like the innocent type/Deer in the headlight/Rocking me all night/Flexing his might/Doing it right/Keeping me tight/Taking a bite out — of — the — Peach — tonight/Only Double A, thinking Triple X.”

Calling herself the “Annie Sprinkle of music,” Peaches maintains that this isn’t pornography. “I’m not doing masturbation on stage or anything like that, it’s more suggestive than anything. I’m way more into the erotic than the pornographic. I mean, you think about all these things anyways. I think we all have disgusting dirty minds.”

Although she doesn’t get naked on stage, she is famous for a pair of hot-pink skin-tight shorts that don’t leave too much to the imagination. “The only reason I wear pink is because I don’t want people to be threatened by me. See, I’m pretty direct, so if I wear a softer color it doesn’t come off as so aggressive. Like, Peaches is hardcore but check out my little pink pretty ass.”

Peaches’ labelmate and touring partner is another Canadian ex-pat and Berlin resident named Chilly Gonzales, and he’ll join her at T.T.’s. Gonzales is a prankster MC who gets off on being offensive, a terrible rapper, and decidedly unstylish — he sports a mullet, wolfish chest hair, and thick gold chains in the booklet of his new The Entertainist (Kitty-Yo). Rapping about his massive pot intake, cumming on girl’s faces, and pissing in people’s ears, he’s a gangsta parody who’s sometimes witty and occasionally funny but usually too smart for his own good. Only when he raises the curtain of irony (“I still remember when it first occurred to me/Fuck it! — I’m gonna move to Germany/I don’t speak German, but hey! — I’m Jewish/And I need a new press angle and that should do it,” he reveals on “Higher than You”) does he become anything more than a smug self-satisfied art-school joke.

Peaches and Gonzales perform this Wednesday, May 2, at T.T. the Bear’s Place. Call (617) 492-BEAR.

Issue Date: April 26 - May 3, 2001