Sunday, May 17, 2009

Autumn's Guide to Cool Girl Drummers: Witch Baby

"'Witch Baby, come out and play drums for me,' Cherokee said. 'You are the most slinkster-jamming drummer girl and I want to dance.'"

Dangerous Angels Weetzie Bat BooksI first discovered Witch Baby in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books in the nineties. She was a bit like a wilder version of me. The dark haired tomboy. Always hiding and snail-curling. Covering herself in protective mud. I never played the drums, but I could have. Maybe. Witch Baby teaches herself, playing with her hands. Later she joins the Goat Guys, her step sister Cherokee's band, and finds a rhythmic partner in her childhood crush, Angel Juan, who plays bass. He calls her Niña Bruja and they forge an alliance that's never severed even when Angel Juan goes away.

"She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling into the universe."

Witch Baby has two books of her own, Witch Baby and Missing Angel Juan, but you should read all five of the original Weetzie Bat books (collected in Dangerous Angels). And the sixth one, Necklace of Kisses, where Weetzie has a crisis and Witch Baby shaves her head and goes to college in Berkeley. Witch Baby is the best girl drummer cause she lives inside her rhythms, expressing all her inner turmoil and desire. She's the mud-caked, cool-jamming, purple-eyed girl who fends off clutch pigs, photographs dreams and talks to ghosts.

This is part two in the series, Autumn's Guide to Cool Girl Drummers

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