Rockbitch: The female band with their own sex commune
In the annuls of rock ‘n’ roll history, Rockbitch are one of the most mythical. In this case, the mythology is always NSFW so proceed with extreme caution. For instance, one online account of one their live shows finds a fan recount the moment a band member urinated on stage… directly into a fans mouth… while another fan used a cucumber on the widdling star in a way that you can warp your mind towards imagining.
However, the band’s official website attempts to clarify the cause of this debauchery. In an opening statement, they cite: “If you search engine Rockbitch you get a lot of untruths and erroneous interpretations about who we were, what we did and why. This site is to put the record straight.” Nevertheless, they do not go on to denounce the on-stage sex acts, the famed golden condom, or any backstage orgies. It is merely the political intent behind their message that they feared might often be missed.
You see, as they saw it, female flesh will also be seen as radical in the mainstream. In fact, Mick Jagger has gyrated away like a lemur behind a jackhammer for most of his career and yet he is hardly regarded as a lewd atavist in the same breath as someone like Madonna.
This sexual disparity is something that they set out to address in a very extreme fashion, breaking the notion of conformist norms via a medium that once thrived on this liberated outlook. However, it must be noted that I missed the page in Jagger’s history where he handed a helmet with a dildo attached to someone in the front row and dished out some crude instructions.
“When we first began our show,” they explain on their site, “we were trying to make a visual and musical statement about the way in which women and their sexuality are portrayed in every medium within Western culture. We wanted to express our responses to these perceptions, and we wanted to have fun – none of these contradict each other.”
A paradigm for this radical view of sexual liberation is the famed ‘golden condom’. The band were clear that extreme sexual liberation and safe sex were far from mutually exclusive, so they set about showing this in an incredibly bizarre way. Towards the end of their rock sets, they hurled a golden condom into the crowd. Whoever caught this was then invited backstage to have sex with the band.
This is undoubtedly an extreme way of making a point. And what was their point, exactly? Well, as they put it themselves: “Rockbitch are expressing their lifestyle – a pagan, pro-sex, feminine utopia – a rhetoric missile composed of the music we love and an inyaface sex-ritual stage show.” That certainly has its own odd place in cultural history because there is no doubt that they hit upon one hell of an eye-opening mark.
So, what became of the band? Well, the authorities clamped down on them and it became increasingly difficult for venues to book them, so they ceased performing in 2002 and ventured back to their French commune. As the band state regarding the commune (location unknown) in Babe This is Rockbitch: “We play rock. We live together in a commune. We love each other. We have sex together. We’re mainly women. We are exactly what we claim to be. We’re what you get when strong intelligent women decide to free themselves from the expectations of other people and live closer to the heart to truth to sex.”
Concluding: “We believe in liberation through sexual freedom and through the evolution of mind and spirit through exactly that. The Rock Bitch side of things was an accident. It’s what you get when the sex witches happen to form a band.”
