EXCLAIM! 17TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
Featuring Thunderheist, Winter Gloves. The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Tue, Apr 21 (8pm). Tickets available through Ticketmaster, unionevents.com, Blackbyrd.
“There goes my ADD again!” laughs Isis, frontwoman for the Canadian dance-rap duo Thunderheist. At first, I think she’s just indulging in a little self-deprecating humour, but as our interview continues, I realize that she meant that comment literally. She’s funny, she’s friendly, and as anyone who’s listened to Thunderheist’s self-titled debut CD can tell you, she’s a tremendously sly, sexy, fun presence behind the mic — but she couldn’t stick to a subject for five minutes if you held a gun to her head. When I spoke to her, she and Thunderheist DJ Grahm Zilla had just returned from South by Southwest, the massive film and music festival in Austin, Texas, and it’s a wonder all the stimulation didn’t frazzle her permanently.
“South by Southwest can destroy you!” she says. “You have to be very smart to not let it destroy you. You need at least a week of recovery time. Hey, have you seen Wanted?”
Er ... you mean the Angelina Jolie movie?
“Yeah. You know those recovery baths?” (She’s talking about the scenes in Wanted where the main characters, who belong to a team of hired assassins with vaguely supernatural powers, sit in tubs full of milky liquid that magically heals any wounds or broken bones or gunshots they may have acquired during their latest assignment.) “That’s what I needed after South by Southwest. I was bruised on my thighs from crowdsurfing and falling. It’s ground zero. It’s a whole lot of rock-and-rollers and a whole lot of alcohol and a whole lot of barbecue. I mean, this is a bad idea! Who came up with this idea anyway? I want to get that guy. Give him my medical bill! Ha! But it was great. I met Perez Hilton, I met Kanye West — he’s an asshole in real life too. And you get to see how the other half lives. Oh! I was on Fashion Television too. I was really excited about that — I almost cried. I was like, ‘I’ve finally made it! Fashion Television is interested in the fact that I’m actually breathing!’”
Are you keeping up? If not, Isis understands — she happily admits that without Grahm Zilla around, she has a tendency to ramble. “I’m winging it!” she says cheerfully. “I try not to overthink things. Grahm’s the perfectionist. We’re a package deal — nothing’s sold separately. He brings structure into my life. I’d be wandering naked in the desert, given half a chance. He keeps me grounded and stable and productive and keeps me away from all those things that can destroy you in this fucking industry. I’m a free spirit — I’m going to be one of those hippie moms their kids are going to hate. ‘If they want to go streaking, let them run free!’ Maybe I’ll get a puppy first and see how that goes.”
It’s hard to know which half of Thunderheist is responsible for the genius way they’ve marketed themselves. It would seem to take a whole lot of savvy Grahm-style calculation to generate the level of press coverage that Thunderheist received a full year before their album was even released, or to place their song “Jerk It” on the soundtrack of The Wrestler. But Isis chalks it all up to dumb luck. (“We were fumbling around in the dark!” she says.) They were lucky, she says, to have a MySpace page back when MySpace hadn’t gotten oversaturated and could still break a band, and they got lucky again when they decided to hold a fan contest to create a video for “Jerk It” — and one of the submissions turned out to be one of the most attention-getting clips of recent years.
How to describe the awesomeness of the “Jerk It” video? The concept is simple but elusive on the page: we see tantalizing slow-motion close-ups of various parts of a young woman’s body — the sinews of her arm slowly flexing, her legs and shoulders jiggling ever so slightly, sweat pooling on her collarbone — as she performs some offscreen function with her right hand. It’s hard not to leap to the conclusion that she’s ... well ... jerking some guy off, but midway through the video we see that she’s actually holding a gigantic rooster upside-down by its feet. The slyness of the visual double entendre, the eroticized photography, the girl’s off-the-charts cuteness, plus the irresistible catchiness of the song itself ... as music videos go, it’s kind of perfect.
“It’s pure innuendo,” Isis says. “A hot chick, a song called ‘Jerk It,’ and then you put a cock in the video — okay, a rooster — it sucks you in. It’s so simple but so genius. It’s like the guy who invented bread. Or the sandwich guy. Genius! It definitely upped our sex appeal by, like, 65 per cent.
“But it’s not a song just for 20-year-old kids who club a lot. All my friends’ parents work out to ‘Jerk It.’ I have a friend who works at a pool and does a seniors’ class and all these elderly women synchronize swim to ‘Jerk It.’ And they love it! It’s a freedom song — it says, ‘Don’t care about what people think about you, because right now, you are so awesome!’ I’m talking, like, Oprah awesome. It’s a song for any kid who thinks he’s too fat or too nerdy — it says, ‘Fuck ’em.’ I think people subconsciously get that.”
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