ABSTRACT
During her solo set at the 2002 San Francisco Queer Arts festival, Kaia Wilson, the lead singer of the dyke punk trio The Butchies, broke into an unplugged rendition of a few bars of Celine Dion’s megaballad, “My Heart Will Go On.” This incursion of pop schmaltz into the subcultural setting was, predictably enough, met with more than a few chuckles and the appropriate ironic posturing by the audience. Yet something in Wilson’s earnest delivery of the tune (and the sense that she kept wanting to play it despite the audience’s studied hipster aversion to the piece) suggested that the interlude was more of an homage than an urban crowd at a dyke punk show was comfortable with. Her performance was also part of an “intergenerational” night of music: she shared the bill with the iconic butch folkie Ferron as part of the festival’s attempt to bring both young and “mature” artists and fans together. In this setting, Wilson’s earnest acoustic tribute to sappy love songs did more than evoke VH1 images of an artificially windblown Dion spasmodically belting a weeper. Wilson echoed a musical affect from another era and a “prelapserian” musical market-a more sentimental and, for some, a retrospectively embarrassing era of lesbian and “womyn’s music” from the 1970s and 80s.
