Pussy Riot are back with a song to celebrate the vagina
- Text by Ella Guthrie
If your vagina puts you in prison, then the whole world is going to listen.” So say Russian Punk band Pussy Riot, who since their release from jail after their notorious anti-Putin ‘Punk-Prayer’ protest have not stayed quiet.
Following on from their ‘Refugees in’ video, shot at Banksy’s Dismaland and ‘I can’t breathe’ – a comment on the death of Eric Garner, ‘Straight Out of Vagina’ produced by Dave Sitek, is four and a half glorious minutes of Nadya Tolokonnikova and her team of trailblazers explicitly and unashamedly celebrating the holy grail of female genitalia.
“Don’t play stupid, don’t play dumb, vagina’s where you’re really from”, chants Nadya, clad in what looks like church robes and her signature blue balaclava. In true Pussy Riot style, the video features everything that could cause the fainthearted to collapse, from men donning stilettos in cubicles, women pissing into urinals from their bright blue vaginas, and a girl who, after taking some sort of magical vagina pill, becomes something of a feminist rap god.
The song, recorded in February, was not explicitly created as a retort to the egotistical maniac taking stage in the US election who thinks it’s acceptable to “grab [women] by the pussy”, but acts like one nonetheless. The ‘vagina gonna win the race’ lyric taking on a whole new weighty meaning as the U.S. moves closer to election day.
Whether this overt, crude and vividly brilliant work of art manages to persuade people not to give their political power away to a bright orange buffoon or not, at least it might manage to remind people of the magical power of the vagina that at one point we all spawned from.
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