#broadist

I’m not at sxsw this year, and I’m no longer a full time employee of the music industry, so I’ve been reflecting a ton about that. My everloving nostalgia brain can’t help but fomo - look at older photos from past festivals show up on my timehop, facebook memories, and instagram memories(?), plus literal hundreds of friends posting all hours about chance encounters at shows, private late night Jenny Lewis, or Toro Y Moi in a garage, or Nardwuar, aesthetically unapologetic LIZZO IN A COWBOY GETUP, and some other extremely Austin TX shit. Also, warmer weather.

So I’m back to this article. “The Transformative Power Of Fat Women Onstage” flawlessly articulates so many points and feelings I’ve had about rock music for like, ever.

“Even as I dug deeper into punk and feminist music, something was still fundamentally missing.I just assumed that only thin girls could be cool punk girls or musicians of any kind, really, because there were no fat girls in punk or rock or pop or anything else that was accessible to a 13-year-old girl.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that Missy Elliott and Jill Scott were living, breathing examples of successful fat women, but I like pretty much everyone else completely ignored their contributions, and those of other women of color, to what would later become the body positivity movement. I wanted fat rock stars.

To this day, I’ve never gotten that. But I did get Beth Ditto. She was a self-described “fat lesbian feminist,” and I’d never heard anyone use those words to describe themselves positively.

Beth Ditto was transformative not because she was fat, but because she had somehow managed to escape the circuitous pursuit of thinness.

The visibility of fat women in music is enough to make the rest of us feel like it’s okay to be visible in our own lives. To take up space.”

And for those that didn’t, we miss you like hell.