Radical Cheek

“We like it!” says Medina, whose carpet-burned knees grace the album booklet’s back cover. “That’s why we’re sexy, because we like it. People that don’t like sex, no matter how good-looking they are, they haven’t got any sex appeal. It’s not just confidence — it’s liking sex.”

The future?

“We’re gonna get bored of making music after a while, ’cuz all our songs sound the same and you can’t go on for that long, can you?” says Too-Bad. “The word ‘band’ — it’s a horrible word, innit? It sounds like some hoary barroom band, pub band. I think ‘gang’ is better: We make clothes, and we run a club called Le Champ de Garde — it’s like walking into the ’60s Warhol Factory scene, or a club in Berlin in 1930. We play all the music we want to hear — Betty Boo, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Suicide. It’s camp and trashy. A lot of people turn up, and they go home thinking, ‘Ew, pretentious wankers.’ But we don’t want them there anyway.

“Lolita Storm is a shambles — we never know what we’re doing. You have to establish this spirit of chaos, so that things can just fall apart. It’s a bit annoying when you get too organized.”

Is Lolita Storm just another confection of the “Raspberry Reich,” as Baader-Meinhof gang member Gudrun Ensslin once derisively nicknamed the modern consumer society?

“I don’t see it that everybody [on Fatal and DHR] has to be very political in a very serious way,” says the 27-year-old (and mother of two) Elias. “If three girls sing like this about sex and drugs and everything, I think that’s very feminist. The music itself has a political message: It’s out of order, it’s not commercial, it’s special, it’s experimental.”

It’s not quite as experimental as Fatal’s other releases, like Nic Endo’s red-black-and-white-noise album White Heat (’98), or Elias’ own In Flames, a recent compilation of her solo work from the last four years that spans aggro-disco taunts, spoken-word noisecore (with once and future Elias collaborators Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman) and chilly cinema-ready ballads. Much of Elias’ work seems to parody and re-purpose the clichéd conception of the female as being something inherently threatening to the male. The title track’s video, which, with its creepy-crawly black-clad sexy female wall climbers (played by Elias and Lolita Storm), references the ’20s French anarchist silent-film serial Les Vampires, is one example of Elias’ approach. The album booklet’s inside back cover is another: It features a woman holding a large pistol in front of her bare ass.

“That’s me!” a giggling Elias admits. “When you’re very small, your mother tells you, ‘Don’t go alone on the street. Be careful of certain guys.’ You grow up in fear; you can’t really develop naturally, trusting everybody. So I try to turn it around: Holding a gun behind your naked butt says, ‘He can’t really trust you, even if you’re naked.’”

She laughs. “People ask me, ‘Hanin, why do you make this aggressive music? Can’t you sing softly for women’s rights?’ And I always answer, ‘Yeah, women are peaceful, and they are in control of their nerves for thousands of years, and they don’t fight back in an aggressive way. They think, One day maybe men will understand. But they don’t.’”

LOLITA STORM | GFSU (DHR Fatal)