Diamanda Galás
You better fuckin’ watch out!
Listening to recordings of Diamanda Galás live gives an instant understanding of how much passion this woman puts into her performance. The sound she issues forth has been described as a mixture between Yoko Ono and Marilyn Manson singing opera, but comparisons will never do her justice.
Many might be familiar with Galás’ work from her version of the Screaming J Hawkins song ‘I Put a Spell on You’. When Galás speaks about Hawkins, she does so with a level of admiration rarely admitted by one performer to another. She has obviously worked hard to do justice to one of his songs, while also being able to put her own spin on it.
“Screaming J had women all over the world,” she says. “When I’m singing the song I’m singing about someone who is stalking. I’m talking about a woman who is stalking somebody, saying ‘You know something, I don’t care if you don’t want me because I’m your’s anyhow.’ That is not said with a laugh, it is said with a real, like, you know: ‘You better fuckin’ watch out!’ With him, he’s singing it with a laugh, because his history is that he could go and play anywhere and he would have women of all ages lying on the stage, waiting for him. He didn’t have to hunt anyone down. I saw him perform and I had to be careful not to look into his eyes because he was wild. And I mean wild. He had some energy, and this was at the age of 76. He is a god.”
Galás’ is emphatic in everything she does and says. She speaks with a harshness and a hurriedness. There is much to say and so little time to say it in, but the point must be put across with no bullshit in the way. This is the same attitude she brings to her performances. She really means what she’s singing about, whether it is love or disease or genocide. With these topics and the energy put into her performance it would be a considerable burden for a performer, but Galás sees it as the job description.
“Actually I find that most of life is draining, but that part of it isn’t,” she says. “The part of life that is draining for me is going to the fuckin’ bank and standing in line and all this fucking moronic shit that we have to do.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she continues, “if you’re going to go on stage in front of a bunch of strangers, you better sing something that you’re interested in, because if you don’t, everybody’s going to know about it and fall asleep. If I got up in front of the stage and just sang love songs for two hours, every time I went on stage, I would be so fuckin’ bored. There’s more to life than love songs and, clearly, there’s more to life than singing about disease, and there’s more to life than singing about genocide. So that means that if you’re performing and that’s all you do your whole life, then chances are you’re going to perform and discuss many different things.
“When I see these rock singers singing rock songs all night, I’m like ‘Wow man, wow, you must really think that you are bad. You must think that the only thing going on in the world is whether people are falling in love with you. Who the fuck cares?’ If I’m going to sing stuff like that, it’s a game. It’s about everybody. You know, everybody goes through the same shit. It’s not about me and my specific take on it. The thing that is a burden is going on stage without anything to say. That’s a burden.”
The topics and styles approached by Galás in her performance have an enormous range. She attributes this to being an amalgam of cultures as a first generation American from Greek parents.
“I’m really of three cultures,” she says. “The first one is a middle eastern culture, where my father’s people were born, from Turkey, the second is the culture in Greece, the third is being an American from California, which means that I’m American on the border of Mexico. This almost means that I’m part Mexican because I relate so much to that.”
Galás attributes the fact that she now has the ability to play sold-out shows wherever she tours to her success in outliving herself. “You outlive yourself,” she says, “and then you finally get to the point where you’re still alive and people like you and you’ve got enough people who know who the fuck you are.” She draws lines of comparison between herself and her career, and the nature of music. She has drawn on all of the cultures she has been exposed to through her upbringing and her travels, and she has adapted herself to point where she has managed to outlive herself.
“That’s the way it used to be years ago,” says Galás . “In Turkey you had the Armenians and the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the Turks singing together. They’d be singing and playing all these instruments together and the music was composed of these combinations of things. Music was always mixed together. Sometimes people try to separate them and say ‘This is this music’. But the musicians don’t want to hear that shit. All they want to do is play music. So I think, what I do when I sing blues is bring back a completely different sound. I bring back the middle eastern sound to the blues. I bring back the improvisation and the sense of being alone and that sense of experimentation that a lot of people don’t do any more. It’s in the nature of the music. When people do the blues now, that just imitate some blues guy, and they don’t add to the music. They already think it’s a dead music, and they’re wrong. It only dies if you kill it.”
By Josh Kinal
