The Other Girl Group: DJs

For all the times I curse social media, I have so many reason to celebrate it. Recently a friend added me to a closed Facebook group for female record collectors and DJs only. I have been working in record stores since the late '80s and there has always felt like a shortage of women who collect records because we are so greatly outnumbered by men. This FB group has connected a number of us from all over the world and in turn not only am I discovering great records but I am learning about all female DJ collectives I didn't know existed. As you can guess, the number of female DJs is much smaller than the number of men so again, it is thrilling to see so many ladies all over the planet banding together not to play instruments but to play records. 

Here is just a tiny number of them I know about:

Meet Fortyfive Degrees, a six lady collective from Germany.

And hooray for The Beat Mermaids from Copenhagen.

Frau DJs from the UK

I have written about Discwoman in NYC before.

There is another private FB group that has Mixcloud site called Sister that celebrates women in underground club music.

Chulita Vinyl Club in Austin

TGAF are from Paris, France

Honey Power in SoCal

In Japan there is the Twee Grrrls Club.

Siren in the UK

Tell me about more of them and I will add to the list!

And while we don't exist anymore, shout out to my ladies who for a few years there did Cherry Bomb with me in Richmond, VA.

New EP Alert : The She-Devils

The '60s offered quite a few campy beach movies with ginchy musical numbers featuring kids dancing along in wild appreciation. One of my favorites of this genre stars Nancy Sinatra who also performs a song in the 1966 classic The Ghost Of the Invisible Bikini. It's packs a one two punch of comedy-kiddie horror meets an excuse to parade good looking college kinds in bathing suits who writhe with pleasure to those crazy sounds of surf guitars. Yummy!

(Nancy performs at the 13:50 mark but here is the whole film for your viewing pleasure)

The She-Devils are a boy/girl Montreal duo that electronically reproduces these retro beachy tunes to perfection. They have even mastered the snap, crackle, and pop of an old record to make their brand of dreamy pop all the more vintage. I highly recommend checking out their new EP which is out now. The lead single "Come" is posted below.

A group like Noonday Underground have come before them to blend mod, soul, and bubblegum to sophisticated UK breakbeats but this is the first time I have heard someone come this close to recreating Nancy Sinatra's dead pan sex kitten voice. If you loved Mad Men for their thoughtful recreation of another time, The She-Devils will be the olive in your martini.

Yé-Yé Girls and X-Girl

Once upon a time Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head) and Daisy Von Furth started a clothing line called X-Girl that was a ying of sorts to X-Large's yang (one of the original X-Large owners was Mike D of the Beastie Boys).

Their small store opened in the early '90s on Lafayette Street in New York City's SoHo neighborhood and across the street from X-Large. One of the highlights to the X-Girl brand was that artist Mike Mills created much if not all of X-Girl's iconic graphics and shirt designs. Limited posters of his gorgeous brand work were also available for purchase and I think of anything I regret not purchasing back in the day, it is these pieces of art.

The general look of the X-Girl clothing line was androgynous and simple. The idea was to produce timeless classics that featured clean lines and were form fitting compared to that time period's grungy counterpart. To be as accurate as possible, it was practically the Mac store of '90s fashion. The business was short lived as the shop closed at the end of the '90s and then the line was sold to Japanese company that still produced it to this day.

I would be lying if I said X-Girl clothes fit anyone above a size 10 but that is a different story all together. This believe it or not brings us to the subject of French Pop musiccalled yé-yé sung by girls and young women in the 1960s.

This genre of music was said to be inspired by The Beatles and their hooky line "She loves me YEAH YEAH YEAH". The fashion sense of these yé-yé girls (tasteful Euro-mod) were also said to be an influence on the X-Girl fashion line and often playing on the small TV inside the store was a video compilation of these original yé-yé  music videos. I had several friends that worked there, including my then boyfriend. As they were closing up the shop some nights, I would sit on the bench waiting and watching these campy and totally intoxicating videos. This was my introduction to French Pop and I have collected it obsessively ever since.

It should be noted that this genre of music spread like wildfire all over the world so there a are ton of groovy girl records from the '60s to check out from many other countries too.

Here are the kind of videos that were on the X-Girl VHS collection:

Read more about X-Girl here.