Pride Week is all about subverting expectations and celebrating the alternative while partying as much as possible. To these ends, Men fits right in. Men is a new music project made up of Johanna Fateman and JD Samson of Le Tigre that’s been going for just over a year now, and the pair are starting to get serious about their future.
"JD and I were asked, well actually Le Tigre was asked to DJ an opening party for a feminist arts show called Wack in LA," says Fateman. "Kathleen [Hanna] couldn’t do it but we did it together and had so much fun that we decided to formalize the relationship and have a name and continue DJing together."’
Having started out playing mash-ups and covers of what Fateman calls "a huge wide range of stuff, everything from contemporary indie music to disco and techno, ’90s music, hip hop, rap, really everything," the duo are now developing an original catalogue for their debut album.
Rather counterintuitively for a feminist girl group, the name they chose was Men. "Being in Le Tigre for so many years it became almost a joke for us that we were always talked about in terms of our gender," explains Fateman. "In a way we felt so tired with the sort of ingrained sexism in the music industry and we thought it would be so funny to just be called Men. Men are DJing tonight! Men are playing Pride! It sort of underscores the fact that that is in fact the norm — men are playing festivals and DJing."
