Marisa Dabice is the frontwoman of the Philadelphia-based punk band Mannequin Pussy. The band’s third full-length, Patience, was released in 2019 via Epitaph Records.
(Photo Credit: Marcus Maddox)
I’m just so impressed with pop music right now. I’m very jealous of the world that younger people are growing up in, where pop stars are allowed to be weird and creative, and not so robotic and… I can’t think of another adjective but “blonde,” but that’s not really fair.
I’ve been fucking obsessed with Rosalía for the past year, and very specifically the song “Fucking Money Man.” I think I’ve listened to that more than any other song since it’s come out. I’d heard Rosalía’s name around, but I’m very good at having walls up around me; I can notice something but not engage with it and have no idea what it is. But then I read an article, maybe six months ago, criticizing her in the Latinx art world as this crossover artist, since she’s from Spain. I think a lot of the criticisms were more about how the music industry has a tendency to market people, and people don’t always have control over their own perception.
I was reading this article, and I was like, I’ve seen this name so many times, I wanna just check out this artist now. Then once I did, I was like, Oh, shit, this is unreal, next era pop music. So I started with the cultural criticisms and then dove into her as an artist. I was like, Oh, this is why she’s making such a huge splash. She clearly has this really creative imprint on everything she makes. And I don’t want to be controversial, but I think artists are allowed to be influenced by many different things, and take from those inspirations. I definitely hear the marketing criticisms of the industry-wide, problem, but I feel like her as an artist is somewhat separate from that.
The very first line of “Fucking Money Man” is, “Que ja sé que he nascut per ser milionària,” which is the craziest way to start a song. In Catalan, that just means, “I always knew I was born to be a millionaire.” I don’t know if we’re still saying “Big Dick Energy” — I don’t even know if that was a 2019 thing at this point, I have no idea what the fuck year that came into our lexicon.
The whole song is very capitalist — it’s kind of ugly in that way. The whole pre-chorus is just talking about how she doesn’t just want one Bentley, she wants two in different colors. The chorus is this really cool mix of what seems like some sort of sample in English that says, “Fucking money, man,” and she’s singing in Spanish underneath it like, “I just wanna see hundred dollar bills.” So it’s very late capitalist, but I have to admit that I’m very attracted to the bravado in the song.
I love confident women. I love women who are so assured with themselves, who are so confident in their talent, who have these things to say that are kind of arrogant. I think a lot of the power we have as women, we kind of need to be a little arrogant, because very often we need to believe in ourselves before anyone else comes along who believes in us.
I was very privileged in my early 20s in that I was able to live in Spain for a while, and while I lived there I went to go see flamenco a lot. I was so moved by flamenco singers and dancing, and the whole culture behind it. I cry very easily — not, like, person-to-person if I’m sharing my emotions, but art and dance make me weep. Also movie trailers — movie trailers make me fucking weep. So I’d go to see these flamenco artists, and it was at a time in my life where I felt very emotionally closed off, and I’d just weep watching them move and sing. When I found Rosalía’s music, especially El Mal Querer, I was just so floored by the way she took these really traditional flamenco melodies and blended them into a new generation of pop music. I don’t think she’s one of those artists where she’s making the same song over and over, she’s not writing the same melody over and over. She’s doing something so new in each of her songs and I feel like it’s very rare to see an artist who’s able to almost reinvent or share a completely different side of themselves song-to-song.
You don’t have to speak Spanish to understand the emotion that goes into all these songs. I think that’s why she’s connected very widely throughout, even in English populations. The songs are light and poppy and meant to be a celebration. You don’t need to quite understand what it is she’s saying in order to feel that energy. Then the songs that are much slower, you can feel she’s transforming her pain into something beautiful. I think that’s something the flamenco style of singing makes so interesting. There’s so much in what a person can do with their voice that you understand just in the way that they sing what is being expressed, even if you can’t understand exactly what it is that they’re saying.
As told to Annie Fell.
(Photo Credit: left, Mark Maddox)
