Colliding bodies

Let’s go back to that muggy, dark night club in Montreal during that heatwave in 2018 that I mentioned last week. I had only planned on seeing my friend’s band perform before hurrying back to my cousins who were roaming Old Montreal’s waterfront for a fireworks show. Having no interest in the spectacle or crowds at fireworks, I supposed it would be fine to stay a little longer to see a headlining act of the festival, Backxwash.

I was awoken to her hard rhymes. I do not pretend to know anything about music, especially metal and rap. So it seems futile to explain Backxwash as some specific kind of musician, but I can describe what I saw and felt that night. When she got on stage, in the middle of the club, a group of young queer Black and Brown people gathered to mosh. To feel their bodies collide with one another, or perhaps momentarily be held by one another. Conventionally an act of white men’s defiance to norms that actually serve them, this actually looked revolutionary. This felt healing. And Backxwash fed them the energy to move through the crowd like their goth mother. I had never felt so much warmth by the seemingly violent act of moshing.

At one point, Backxwash slowed it down and sung “You like my body the way it is.” The chant-like expression of these words emotionally overwhelmed me as she sang about loving bodies. She spoke of the challenges in perceiving one’s own desirability as people with non-conforming bodies; gendered, raced, sexualized. I felt the crowd of Black and Brown queer bodies feel this as many embraced each other. It was magic. At the end of the night I thanked her for performance before I raced back through fireworks crowds to the nose jobs and waxed arms of my cousins.

I learned that last October Backxwash won the Polaris Music Prize. I felt blessed to have seen the Underground Princess perform that sweaty night. I am so hopeful for the future of the Canadian music industry now that marginalized people’s voices are being put in the centre and celebrated. I feel we are moving toward people representing themselves and their experiences instead of through the lens of a white dominant, cis-hetero gaze that Canadians have referred to for so long. It is time for honesty in Canada.