Kiss us, Kate: Kate Clinton scores with a smart new CD and a wicked ear for politics
Anne Stockwell
The Marrying Kind
* Written and performed by Kate Clinton
* Whyscrack Records
In a tough political season it always helps to hear from Kate Clinton. Easily as sharp as top topical bananas Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, Clinton is overdue for her own TV gig. (In fact, she’s shooting a pilot for the new Logo network.) In the meantime you can check out Clinton’s style on her new CD, The Marrying Kind.
“I follow polities–so I can torture you,” Clinton purrs to a delighted Los Angeles audience dining this concert recorded in December 2003. Actually, she saves the torture for her favorite targets: priestly pederasts (“There should be a law: three tykes, you’re out”), Dick Cheney (“the Bush whisperer”), and of course, George W. Bush himself (“that thing he does with his lip–like Mister Ed at the “half-door”).
Fans of Clinton’s Advocate columns will get a kick out of hearing her delivery, which is simultaneously benevolent and menacing–a trick one suspects she acquired during her early years as a schoolteacher. Surely both tones have come in handy as Clinton expands her charmed career with gigs like this year’s tour as opening act for Melissa Etheridge.
Rising-star status or no, you can depend on Clinton the activist not to go all bourgeois on you. Forget a same-sex wedding announcement in The New York Times, Clinton insists on The Marrying Kind. She and her girlfriend want one that says “Prefer to Live in Sin.”
COPYRIGHT 2004 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group