Gimme My Pink Hot Pants!

For those of you who’ve been living under a subcultural rock, Peaches wooed the indie world last year with her beatbox porn debut, The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo). Formerly an elementary school teacher in Toronto, she got bored with life there, reinvented herself, and moved to Berlin, where scenesters were quick to recognize the genius of a woman spanking herself in pink hotpants and reciting raunchy deadpan raps like, “There’s only one Peach with a hole in the middle.” Armed with a trusty Roland MC505 sequencer, her music is simple with bawdy, repetitive lyrics—think Gary Glitter as a horny chick on cocaine. Her live show is a post-Spockian spectacle, in which audience members are known to strip, hump, and chant “Fuck the pain away!” in unison. Yes, for real.

I saw you at Siren. The end of the show seemed sort of weird.

Yeah, there were all these moms complaining, “That girl’s masturbating.” I wasn’t masturbating. And they turned off my microphone, which is really fucked up. But I had another one, so I picked it up, and that’s why I was like, “I’m being censored in America.” They had a sign up saying, “Say Goodbye.”

You were singing in German at one point, weren’t you?

Yeah. It’s a cover of Jeans Team song. That was really fun.

Jeans Team is an 80’s band?

No, they’re on Kitty Rock, too. They’re four really cool nerds who like punk style, Kraftwerk and that stuff. I would love to bring them here but they have so much equipment that it would be really expensive. That’s my band, (she points to a minidisk player). I made all the beats. I have eighty loops, so I just pick whatever and put it on there.

(Noticing scabs on her knees.) What did you do to your knees?

Oh, I’ve just been sliding around on stage and stuff, trying out these new moves.

So, we were talking about German music. Have you heard of Nina Hagen?

Yeah, I like her. My friend Ninya listens to Nina Hagen, and she lives in Germany so she knows all the songs in German, but I know them in English. They sound completely different. She’s an amazing singer, Nina Hagen. So cool and out there. But if I was going to make that kind of music, I’d really find it important to be a little straighter and get a little bit of that beat all the time.

I’m not sure if I know what you mean.

Well, a lot of people just find her really weird. And a lot of those songs aren’t so listenable. There are some good parts, but I don’t know if every song is like “New York New York.”

And your songs are pretty easy to sing along to?

Yeah. I like people to sing along.

This excerpt is from an article originally published in HEEB #01, Winter 2002.

A deep dive into the obscure Connecticut law that ensures you never get a pickle that "splats" – a law that was supposedly put in place after a series of arrests in 1948 for pickles being sold that were "unfit for human consumption".