“I have always been a disgusting woman”: Introducing Lonnie Gunn, purveyor of gruesome emotion
“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that nice” is how the poem goes. While boys are apparently “frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails”, women are supposedly clean and pretty.
That prevailing stereotype truly is the core of everything; at the very heart of sexism is that women are tender, soft, small, weak, pathetic. Women are lesser, shouldn’t get their hands dirty, and are pure, ditzy and cute, beautiful always; women are fresh, women are innocent.
In the world of music, that’s exactly the attitude that has long since kept female artists away from the stereotypical image of a rock star. For a genre built on filth, sex and chaos, surely the beacon of it can’t be a sweet-as-sugar girl. However, Lonnie Gunn is the latest in a long legacy of saying otherwise.
“I think women are, and I mean this in the best way, so gross,” Gunn says.
Her makeup couldn’t be more pristine, but she’s just finished telling me a story about how she had to wake up at silly-o’clock to get to a dry cleaners in the desperate hope that they could save the designer dress she was loaned for the night before that she swifty got dirty.
“Both secretly and publicly, we’re gross, but for some reason, we’re not viewed that way. Like, I am a disgusting woman, and I have always been a disgusting woman,” she rightfully outlines.
In the world of Gunn’s music, gruesomeness plays arguably the ultimate role. “Pick me up, I’m sick, I threw up on the carpet,” she sings on ‘EX GF’. On ‘Lucky Girl’, she paints herself Kafkaesque and disgusting, saying, “I’m a bug with a hot body”.
‘Kiss You’ sees her imagining kissing someone until their jaw breaks, while on ‘Good Girls Go To Heaven’, her latest offering, she pictures herself and a lost love as nothing but “two dead rats at the altar, tails stuck together”.
In her world, there’s blood, guts, claw marks on bed frames, disgusting purple love bites, fingers in mouths, rotting flesh, and dead animals. The hottest girl you know understands all of that perfectly.
“I think women have a higher tolerance for sort of gruesome things and a stomach for it in a lot of ways, and so the songs are celebrating that a lot of the time,” she said. It’s not that Gunn is obsessed with ugliness; it’s actually the opposite, as she puts it straight: “I’m very obsessed with beauty, and beauty is the most disgusting shit ever. Any pursuit of beauty is riddled with mutilation, basically”.
We go off course for a while, talking plastic surgery, fluid drainage bags, or the allure of playing with menstrual blood clots. Sat in a beautiful Italian deli in North London, there’s no shyness about it, no shivers, no squeamishness. And if simply reading that makes your stomach turn, maybe Gunn’s music isn’t for you.
“The songs have a lot to do with wounds,” she said, “I think that the music sounds like that too”. She said she always wants her songs to sound “squishy”.
“Playing with blood clots is an honest experience”
None of this is anything new, and Gunn is overjoyed at that idea. The night before we talk, she supported Kim Gordon at a huge show where Gunn’s tight, loud band spread out on the bigger stage with an ease that proved they deserve to own it, and soon will. American-born, now Brighton-based Gunn also talks about her admiration for the emotional gruesomeness of Mitski, “She’s got this interview where she talks about people calling her music ‘sad girl music’, and how that upsets her because it’s so much more nuanced than that,” she explained, “And I totally agree with that. I think ‘sad girl’ in general is like a really reductive term for women experiencing emotion and showing emotion. So many of her lyrics are lustful and kind of gross.”
Across every song she has released so far, each exploring a new corner of the rock to punk to grunge landscape, her interest is clearly to expose emotions to an icky extent. It’s a step beyond vulnerability where feelings of love, lust, heartbreak or jealousy become fleshy and bodily. Having already moved through a softer folk phase, born from her roots in the States, and then slowly allowing herself to admit that the classic south London Windmill sound that she discovered when landing in the UK wasn’t for her, too busy being technical or sonically off-putting to be raw, her heavier, sleazier sound was born from simply wanting to match up the content with the sonics.
She wanted to make songs that sounded as brutal as her feelings were, and as brutal as being a woman is. “Playing with blood clots is an honest experience,” she says as we land right back there in the grossness of being a girl, “I think men only really associate blood with violence, but there’s so much more nuance to it than that. It’s such an intimate thing to be able to, like, view your own insides. I think it’s something that fascinates me and a lot of other girls.”
It feels impossible to separate the visceral nature of her music from the simple experience of living as a girl. “It feels like you have this secret relationship with yourself,” she said as we kept coming back to the conversation about the repulsive side of beauty: plucking hairs, crouching in showers, bleeding, squeezing, and injecting. When confronting yourself, as in life, it seeps into art and language.
The only difference is that some may be too shy to say it, but Gunn isn’t. Love feels like vomiting, yearning feels like being a rat scratching at a wall, heartbreak feels like being a dog stuck in a hot car. Emotions feel like something crawling out of your mouth, and Gunn’s music isn’t afraid to spit and look directly at what repulsive thing was just living inside.
