Making Space for Everyone in Music: An Interview with Sadie Dupuis
“Many of the best rock records of the year have been written by women or played on by women, and people are starting to get the hint that we really can make equal space for all kinds of people,” says Sadie Dupuis as she settles in at home after being on the road her band, Speedy Ortiz.
It’s something Dupuis speaks to from personal experience. Speedy Ortiz’s latest album, Foil Deer, was released in 2015 to mass critical acclaim. But in addition to the positive record reviews, the band is also gaining attention for using their music to help others. They’ve established an anti-harassment hotline, raised money from album sales for the Baltimore Food Bank and Ferguson Public Library, and donated proceeds from their most recent tour to the Girls Rock Camp Foundation.
We caught up with Dupuis to talk about philanthropy, the new hotline, and empowering women in music.
Smart Girls: The Speedy Ortiz song “Raising the Skate” references the “I’m not bossy; I’m the boss” mantra of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Ban Bossy campaign. What inspired you to write this song?
Sadie Dupuis: At the time of writing it, I had been commiserating with several other friends who play in bands who are women and had felt discouraged in some way by not being supported or being short-changed or undervalued in general.
This was quite a few months after the Ban Bossy campaign [began]. It wasn’t necessarily supposed to endorse it 100 percent, but I wanted to make a rallying cry for myself and my friends, and young girls I met at shows who would say things to me like they hadn’t been able to form bands because the scene was so male-dominated — just something that would make people feel good about being an assertive woman in a field that’s not always so clear-cut accepting of women.
SG: What has your experience as a woman in rock and roll been like?
SD: I feel like I’m pretty able to not tolerate BS. My bandmates and I are very selective about who we work with and we generally favor people or organizations who we already see have a record of supporting women. We’ve been pretty lucky because we have been able to choose who we work with and find the people who are supportive, progressive, and working toward making [specifically rock] music a more diverse field.
In the earlier days, we would run into idiots all the time who would defer to my bandmates [when] clearly I was the person they should have been [dealing] with. We still see people use superlatives like “Who is your favorite female-fronted band at the festival?” Well, what was your favorite male-fronted band?
SG: There can be something so important about seeing yourself — whether that’s your gender or race or your sexuality — represented in whatever it is that you love.
SD: Totally. And simultaneously it’s important to be able to identify and relate to people you can’t see as yourself in. Women have been doing that in rock music for decades — identifying with the predominant male narrative in rock songs and it’s been cool to see that script flipped a bit this year. Not only where women are supporting women in rock, but at least on our tours we’ve been seeing people of all of all kinds of ages and backgrounds telling us that they identify with the songs. It’s cool to see that there’s been a widening of the narrative that people can relate to in rock music.
SG: What stands out to you in terms of organizations like Girls Rock Camp Foundation, which are aimed specifically at promoting women in music?
SD: Organizations that support women entering fields in which they’re underrepresented in general are interesting to me. I love reading about Girls Who Code. And obviously the Girls Rock Camp has a special appeal to us because we’ve all taught music to kids before and it promotes accessibility to music education. They’re not only in ritzy cities, they’re trying to make music education accessible to girls all over. Obviously a big part of changing gendered influence on professions has to do with rewiring how we raise kids, but it’s also about providing a community for adults who want to help enact those changes. I think Girls Rock does that.
SG: Speaking of nonprofits, it seems like the band is constantly using their shows or album sales to fundraise for people and nonprofits. How does this all come about?
SD: When we raised money for the Maryland food bank, it was days into the Baltimore uprising. If we feel like we have some way that we can provide whatever help a rock band can give, we try to find a way to do that. There were just so many things this year that we had such strong reactions to that we wanted to be able to help. We’re on the road and gone 10 out of 12 months a year. It’s hard to feel grounded in a community in a way that a steady once-or-twice a month volunteering commitment can make you feel. I think that part of wanting to do fundraising is [because we] feel like we’re contributing something to the world other than just playing shows.
SG: Can you tell us a little bit about Speedy Ortiz’s anti-harassment hotline? Why did you decide to create it and what has the response been like?
SD: You read several news stories a year about assaults that happen at music festivals or at concerts. There was a number of studies done about the major issue of assault at gigs in both the UK and Australia this year. Playing festivals, we would see things that were upsetting to us. I experienced stuff that was upsetting. Even at our own shows, people will sometimes behave inappropriately toward me [until] they realize that I’m in the band that they paid to see. As a performer, I always have a safe space to go backstage or I have the ear of the venue. After seeing a number of instances of harassment at big festivals, we wanted a way to extend that privilege to the people who are there seeing us. If they are being harassed and don’t know how to find security, or if they are in some kind of trouble and need a way to de-escalate it, there’s a way for them to get in touch. Our hope at the time was that it would be an emergency-only thing that will maybe remind people to be courteous to one another and look out for one another. We haven’t had any major emergencies come through it, everything has been pretty benign, but that’s the best possible outcome and we’re glad to have it in case anyone does need to use it in the future.
Photo Credit: PAHF, courtesy Speedy Ortiz
