I don’t know where my old Muffs cassette is these days, but that band carved out a little space in my music-loving heart, and I was so sad to learn that their frontwoman, Kim Shattuck, has died way too young — age 56, of ALS.
It’s not just their catchy little snarky/world-weary/get-over-it ditties. It’s the delivery, the embodying of those tunes, that expression of attitude through Kim’s huge, raw, roaring, gloriously fed-up and totally whole-hearted singing, shouting and screaming.
Gods, what a voice!
Though she wore her cutesy-L.A. punkette style with panache and flavor, Kim Shattuck’s voice was physically huge. Louder than just about any other rock’n’roll shouter that I can think of except, maybe, I dunno, Robert Plant? Paul McCartney belting it out in “Oh! Darling”? I mean, there’s no shortage of big voices in rock’n’roll, and I don’t intend here to diminish them. Specific to genre and gender, for example, Courtney Love, certainly, can bring it as viscerally as Shattuck did.
Yet they are different singers and different musicians. And Love’s songs have a depth of despair and anger that The Muffs never really plumbed.
But then again, The Muffs didn’t really need to plumb those depths; that wasn’t what they were about. Not knowing details of their personal lives, The Muffs did not come across as a band about life as a train wreck. Their songs were about moving on, about rising above, about living it and getting over it through sheer gumption, gusto and a game face. The mundane indignities of life’s stupid imbroglios, the scorn-worthy behavior of one’s self-absorbed, oblivious or just-plain-petty peers — you can deal with it all, and grab hold of some beautiful rock’n’roll catharsis along the way, by singing it all out as loud and as hard as you can.
And on any Muffs album, Shattuck’s voice is all the way on, all the time.
She was by any reckoning a top-notch guitarist and bandleader, and wrote great little tunes, but she took herself to another level by putting her whole being into every note she sang.
R.I.P. and thanks for such tremendous sound and feeling, Ms. Shattuck.
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