Zia McCabe: Why is being a woman in a band still so fucking demeaning?!
When thinking about The Dandy Warhols’ iconic keyboard player Zia McCabe, there’s (rather strangely) a live review of ABBA performing in Sydney, Australia that keeps popping into my head.
One that ostensibly illustrates just how uncool and lame ABBA were before their reinvention as gods of pop in the 1990s… I think it goes one further, though, and shows just how impossibly difficult it is to be a woman in a band without being reduced to your body.
It’s a negative review, and the line that has always stayed with me is (to paraphrase) “you’re nearly better off staying at home and listening to the records, but at least you get to see Anni-Frid’s bottom in tight trousers,” like… Sir, this is ABBA we’re talking about, and even putting aside the fact that they’re fronted by two stunning women, this is a band with all the sexuality of a butter croissant – delicious and life-affirming, sure, but if you want to fuck it, that’s not the intended reaction.
To me, it’s easy to draw a line from that reaction to the current pop scene that’s full of immensely talented, immensely savvy female pop artists who put as much effort into looking incredible as they do making great music. Because they know that when men look at women, they are going to be sexualised. Or at the very least viewed as a body first and an artist, like, third. You might as well take control of it. Few people were made as brutally aware of this as The Dandy Warhols’ keyboard player, Zia McCabe.
McCabe is actually a very interesting case in general because, by her own admission in an interview with Polyester, she joined the Dandies because of her gender – to be “the token chick” in the band, as she says, and while she wouldn’t play an instrument, her personality (not to mention her looks) got her a spot in the group, and again, just re-telling what she says in the interview, please don’t shoot the messenger, yet she was never there to be a sex symbol.
Even when she started playing full shows topless.
Why did Zia McCabe start playing shows topless?
It was one of the first things that turned the Dandies from a jobbing psych-rock group to a full-on underground sensation. The fact that their keyboardist would often take her shirt off during their shows. This was the late 1990s and early 2000s, when something like this would be as marketed an aspect of the band as any of their music, despite the fact that McCabe genuinely didn’t think of it as a sexual act. One can be suspicious of this all they want, I actually buy it.
In the Polyester interview, she says, “I had my boobs out all the time because I didn’t identify them as sexual objects. I carried that mentality into concerts and mosh pits. The guys didn’t have their shirts on, so I didn’t have my shirt on. I was like, ‘This is awesome.’” Which is fair enough, really. The lads in Biffy Clyro have been playing live topless for 30 years, and nobody ever thought that was a ploy for the attention of thirsty rock fans. Even with a fox like Simon Neil up front. Gracious.
Typically, it was the UK press that was the problem. They got photos of McCabe performing topless, ran with them and for a while, that was what meat-headed dickheads were coming to Dandy Warhols shows for. Proof, as if it was ever needed, that there is a double standard at play when it comes to the bodies of men and women in rock. When men in rock are topless, it’s a sign that they’re giving so much to the music that they need to strip down to cool off. They’re just so intense, maaaan. When women do it, it’s tacit permission to be ogled and dehumanised. Almost like they’re asking for it.
They aren’t. They never are. Whether they’re Anni-Frid Lynstad or Zia McCabe, they’re just asking to be treated like you would any other musician. Something that seems to be as tough to ask for today as it was in the 1970s and the 2000s, which is a damning indictment.