CRISTINA MARTINEZ APRIL 1996

Cristina Martinez can be found front and center with Boss Hog, one of the rockin’est bands on the post-punk scene today.  Her guitar player, Jon Spencer, is also her husband, who leads his own noted outfit, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.  Their partnership began almost ten years ago to the day with the notorious Pussy Galore.  Together, in Boss Hog, they’ve got everything from moody, insistent grooves to noise funk to an all-out soul review.  (One of the highlights of their latest album is a cover of a song by another famous musical couple, Ike & Tina Turner’s I Idolize You.)  Here, Cristina Martinez talks about music, marriage, family, and a few things that really matter, like using lip liner and being normal.

Amy Sillman:  I’ve always wanted to ask you what it would be like if you were really ugly?

Cristina Martinez:  It would be so much easier for me if people didn’t focus on what I look like.  I don’t mean to say, oh, I’m so beautiful, I wish I were ugly, because I don’t really think that I am that beautiful.

AS:  Nobody who feels shitty about themselves ever does.

CM:  But a lot of people focus on that and it detracts from the music, which I think should be judged solely by itself, regardless of what any of us look like.  On the other hand, I always put myself on the covers, so it’s a catch-22.  You use it for what it’s worth, but when people focus on it, it’s my own fault for putting myself there.  Still, it would be a lot easier if people didn’t focus on that.  Originally, it was something I sort of had - this new-found beauty - when I got in front of a band. I realized that I had a power that I could use, and it was really easy to use.  Then, all of a sudden, I thought this isn’t really helping me. So I shied away from it for a long time.  I remember on one tour I made a particular effort never to wear anything that I thought was at all glamorous.  I tried not to put make up on or brush my hair.  Not to care as much. And I really made this big effort to be anonymous, much more than I had before.  After a while I thought, this is ridiculous.  To deny it is just as stupid as it is to rely on it.

AS:  It’s like finding this other way of being powerful when you find out that beauty can fit into it.

CM:  A lot of it also has to do with - and this is something I sort of fought with all my life - being overly concerned with what other people thought about me.  And paying attention to that really didn’t serve any purpose, except for making me feel worse about any decision that I had made.  So once I felt more confident about myself I decided that I would do it - let myself be beautiful - because it made me feel better.  To really hide behind what some people thought was really not a good thing.

AS:  You were the only girl in your family?

CM:  Right.

AS:  From everyone I’ve ever known who’s from a Spanish or Hispanic family, the whole girl thing is really heightened.

CM:  Oh, absolutely.  My brother did all these outrageous and awful things, and he was forgiven, and sort of even admired for having done them.  And anything that was at all even remotely sexual that came out of me was bad.  I was totally bad.  And I was admonished for even thinking ...  And still, when I go home, I’ll be wearing a short skirt and my dad will glare at me and say, how can you go out like that?  You’re a married woman.

AS:  Do you go home with Jon?

CM:  Sometimes.

AS:  Do they like Jon?

CM:  They love Jon.  They think he’s great.  I spoke to my mom this morning and she said, oh, I’m listening to the Blues Explosion CD.  I know it by heart now!

AS:  So she doesn’t mind what you do?

CM:  I don’t think they had a great deal of respect for it until they saw that we were earning a living.  And they came and saw our apartment and were like, oh, I guess you make enough money to live in a nice place, and you don’t have to work, so it’s okay.  But I think they’re still worried about the longevity of it, as I am.  Recently, someone wrote about how we weren’t really any good because we weren’t junkies living on a shoestring, living in a shitty apartment, living hand-to-mouth.  And therefore, we couldn’t possibly be credible, realistic musicians because we were healthy and didn’t do drugs and were sort of normal.

AS:  Right.  You have to be mutants so you can fulfill the perverted stereotype.

CM:  Exactly.  It’s also a sort of vicarious thing, as if this is the only well that real music can come from, and you have to be completely broke and fucked up.

AS:  But if your heroes lead these flame-out lives, and die being junkies, how would you come up with something else?

CM:  Well, I don’t know.  I think that a lot of people do find that’s a kind of logical ending, because otherwise you’d meet these people and realize they were totally normal.  When people meet me and realize that I’m pretty normal, I think it’s a real big disappointment for them.  I see their disappointment, and it makes me feel like I let them down, or somehow I’m not good enough ... which is my next big thing to sort of overcome.  They want you to be something so foreign to them, and so unattainable that it’s cool.  And when they realize that it’s not, that it’s just somebody expressing themselves, it wigs them out.  It destroys the fantasy.  But every once in a while, some little girls come back stage after a show and they say, we thought you were going to be a real bitch, but you were having so much fun on stage and you were so great, and we really like you because of that.  So that’s starting to outweigh the people who are disappointed by me.

AS:  Maybe you should play little-girls-only shows.

CM:  You can only come if you don’t care that I’m nice.

AS:  I’m wondering, now that you’re on a big label, you’re on Geffen, what’s the most common question people ask?

CM:  Did we consciously make an effort to put out a record that was more viable, that could be played on the radio?  And of course, the answer to that is NO. 

 We just keep making the music that we like.  At the same time, there isn’t a conscious effort to really make music that’s unlistenable or that’s going to be unpopular.  It’s not as accessible as, say, Pearl Jam or Soundgarden, or something that popular.  For me, music has always been this thing where I’m trying to tell people ... to make people understand me.  I grew up with parents who didn’t, who weren’t so much involved in how I felt or what was important to me, as long as everything looked nice.  It was really about the shiny veneer of life and how you should always smile and be polite.  How I felt about anything, that was secondary, if it was there at all.  It was just much more important that you succeed in life, that I got married and had children and lived in a nice house.  Those things were what they felt life was all about, which was a really sort of shallow function.  So I’ve always felt completely misunderstood by them.  You’re left with this really bad feeling of being completely invalidated your whole life.  As if nothing that you think or say matters.  So for me, music was the first time that I could actually express myself honestly.  And it could be horrible.  I mean, I could just go out there and scream about whatever the fuck was bothering me.

AS:  But when I listen to your record, it’s not saying, I’m angry, fuck you ... the Courtney Love thing: I hate you.  You hate me.  Everything is fucked up.

CM:  No, not at all.  It’s cathartic, but I always thought if I wrote music that somehow exposed myself, that people would seem to understand ... even by clapping or being enthused by the music.  I would feel like I had communicated something.  And the most addictive thing about it was to inspire somebody to be able to do that themselves. It’s so emotional for me.  And really, it’s all about self-worth. 

I’ve created something, and therefore I’m not just walking through life.  And it’s done with joy because we enjoy doing it.  And there’s a real sense of humor to what we do.

AS:  When I have to talk about my work I always describe it as “humorous terror management.” So if I make jokes, it’s kind of like a way of keeping everybody at bay and realizing that you won’t be drowned in misery.

CM:  Exactly.

AS:  Do you have female heroes?

CM:  Not real heroes.  I mean, there are people who I admire and respect and whose work is amazing to me.  People like Ella Fitzgerald or Mavis Staples, who has the most incredible voice in the world.  And PJ Harvey.  She has an incredible voice and writes the most incredible music and does it all on her own.

AS:  I’ve never seen her in real life, but she does seem like somebody who has kind of gone from saying almost blatantly, “I’m an ugly girl,” to projecting an inner world that is totally incredible.

CM:  Well, that’s what I think, but I don’t know if she’s going through the same thing I went through when I first started music.  You know, all of a sudden you’re beautiful to yourself, and you can totally come out of the shell and become this exotic, beautiful diva.  She might get to the point that I got to, or she might not have that detour.  So I understand where that comes from.  A lot of people were kind of mad about that.

AS:  That she became glamorous?

CM:  Yeah.  I was even mad about it because I thought the whole time she was saying, fuck beauty, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t.  But that’s not what she was saying.  That’s just what I was reading into it.

AS:  Didn’t you recently meet Yoko Ono?

CM:  I did, and I thought, okay, I’m going to go up there and she’s going to be this totally normal person.  And she wasn’t.  I mean, she’s walking around chain-smoking - don’t write this - but she’s chain-smoking Capris and talking about the weirdest stuff.  And she’s got this crazy house with Warhols and tons and tons of cool things in there.  There’s all this ancient Egyptian art, and there’s even a mummy up there.  But then I heard her new record, and it’s so fucking leaps and bounds beyond anything.  It’s all about communication, but almost without words.  I mean, there are songs where she would spend two or three minutes just screaming and crying and laughing.  And it’s so amazing and so powerful.  I was really glad to see that she wasn’t normal.

AS:  You were glad?

CM:  Yeah.

AS:  Do you think you’re more normal than Yoko Ono?

CM:  I don’t know.  Not really.  I hope I’m like her when I’m older.  And the reason I think she’s cool is because she didn’t get pulled back into the normal, “now I have a son, I have to take care of him and I have to take care of myself, and I’ve got to straighten my life out, get back into this normal path, this normal everyday existence.”

AS:  If you had a baby, would you want it to be a girl?

CM:  Yes.

AS:  Would it be weird if it was a boy?

CM:  It would be.  I don’t really know why this is, but I feel like you can empathize so much more with a little girl, sort of understand her so much better.  I always imagine myself having a little girl ... and I always thought it would be really cool to name a girl King.  Isabella King Spencer.

AS:  How do you hold up on tour?

CM:  When you’re out on the road, a lot of the time your brain completely atrophies ...

AS:  You eat, like, Cheez Whiz.

CM:  You eat, play, sleep.  Eat, play, sleep, drive.  So there’s not much thinking going on.  And even reading a book, after a while it’s too hard to concentrate.  It’s not that easy to do when you’re in this van and you play music really loud night after night.

AS:  What do you read?

CM:  I read poetry now.  I didn’t ever before.  I didn’t used to spend a lot of time writing lyrics.  It was much more a feeling kind of thing.  I would just play guitar and sing about whatever my grievance happened to be that day.  I used to not pay that much attention to it.  And now it’s become more of an effort ... well, not an effort, it’s that I put more effort into writing.

AS:  What do you read mostly?

CM:  Cheesey poetry.  Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, stuff that’s about women, or from a woman’s point of view, sort of about craziness.  I read Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, and then Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

AS:  By Jeanette Winterson.

CM:  Right.  And of course, I also read Anais Nin.

AS:  Did you ever hear one of your own songs being played on the radio while you were driving around?

CM:  I don’t really listen to the radio, but I did hear a song of ours one time.

AS:  Was that weird?

CM:  A little bit.  It’s more weird to be in a club or in a bar when somebody plays it on the jukebox.  I’ll be like, oh, should I hide?  Should I leave?  Should I just sort of laugh it off?  That’s the only thing that it does to me.  It sort of flusters me.  It’s not really comfortable for me to listen to my music with other people around.  I don’t know why.  And I don’t listen to it by myself at home very often.  Sometimes, for reference, I’ll go back and listen to the lyrics if I don’t remember them.  But generally I don’t listen to it at home.

AS:  When you worked at Allure, what was your favorite make-up tip?

CM:  They had a little section like “Hot Tip of the Week,” and I contributed one that was given to me by a drag queen.  To keep lipstick from getting on your teeth ...

AS:  ... powder your lips.

CM:  Right.  So anything on your inside lip comes off and you’re much less likely to get lipstick on your teeth, which is highly unattractive.

AS:  Good one.

CM:  Yeah.  And then there was another one I heard about putting Visine on zits to get the red out.  But I don’t think that really worked because I tried it once.

AS:  Really?

CM:  And it didn’t really work.

AS:  Did you ever try Preparation H for the bags under your eyes?

CM:  That’s a real common one, and it just seems so gross to me that I could never do it.  That freaks me out.  I mean, I’m not really sure what the chemical reaction would be.  I can’t imagine that’s good for you.

AS:  I don’t like the idea that it makes the underneath of your eyes look like two anuses.

CM:  I know.  There’s something about that anus-eye thing.  It’s the third eye.

AS:  I know someone who always wears really dark lipstick and we always used to call her anus mouth because she would get ...

CM:  Little crack lines?

AS:  No, she would get the horrible thing where you put the lip liner on really carefully, but when you eat, the lipstick comes off, so you’ve got this sort of dark thing on the edge that’s going into pale, liver-colored lips.  I call it anus mouth.

CM:  That is definitely a fashion faux pas.

AS:  A terrible faux pas.

CM:  Really.

AS:  I saw a picture of you with the heavy lip liner look.

CM:  Did you?

AS:  Among some PR photos.

CM:  I’m totally into lip liner, and sometimes only use lip liner.  I just use the pencil itself.

AS:  And draw it in.

CM:  For a while I could never find the right dark color, so I used this plum eyeliner as lipstick.  I was watching Sally Jesse Raphael - any time they have drag queens on, I watch it - and a drag queen was talking about having total bitchin’ babe lips, and how she puts on dark eyeliner and dark lip liner, and a lighter shade of lipstick.  So she’s got this big plum lip liner look happening, which is awful.  And I thought, Naomi Campbell always does this.

AS:  Always.

CM:  And I hate it.

AS:  Hate it.

CM:  It’s awful and I totally hate it.  So I’m trying to stay away from that as much as possible.  But recently I’ve been doing this thing where I drink wine a lot, and my lips will be chapped in the winter, so I get red wine stains on the inside of my lips.

AS:  Eeeuw!

CM:  Which is gross, right?

AS:  Gross.

CM:  But then I started thinking it looked cool one day, and for one photo shoot I went in and colored the inside of my lips so it looked like they were all chapped and cracked and had wine stains on them.  And I thought that looked really cool.

AS:  How did it come out?

CM:  Those photos were in Raygun, and they ran them all blurry and fucked up.

AS:  Oh, you were little in that.  Those pictures were very indistinct.

CM:  Yeah, so you couldn’t really tell.  But that was a good look for a while.  I liked that, and the big black eyeball look.

AS:  So you’re not so much into Cindy Crawford anymore?  You had a Cindy Crawford fetish for a while.

CM:  That’s not true.  I don’t think I had a real fetish for her.  In fact, I really don’t like Cindy Crawford that much.

AS:  She said an interesting thing in an interview about going out and dealing with, being impervious to the world, you know, as her guise in public.  She said she has this whole other idea in her mind of who she is, and when she goes out as Cindy Crawford she thinks of herself as this person called “The Thing.”  And in her mind, she just goes out as “The Thing.”

CM:  That’s probably a good way of doing it.  But that’s sort of like acting.  I don’t think I could do that.  It would be a good solution, but I don’t know that I’m that good of an actor.

AS:  What’s the future of punk rock, and how does love fit into punk?

CM:  People define punk rock differently.  I think that punk rock, unfortunately, meant to a lot of people what Malcolm McClaren did, which was make it a fashion thing.  I didn’t think punk rock was about that at all.  To me, having come from DC, where it was really another kind of faction, what was considered hardcore, punk was more about an independent, do-it-yourself ethic, and about going against the norm.  You didn’t have to fit into the stereotypes to do it.  That’s why I always considered what I did to be punk rock. So I guess there will always be what the media considers punk to be, which might just be your standard three-chord aggressive misanthropic kind of thing.  But there’s what I consider to be punk rock, which is much more about doing stuff yourself and being kind of self-reliant, doing what’s important to you, no matter what the standard may be.  Not trying to be the next Smashing Pumpkins or the next Hole or the next anyone.  There will always be bands that pick up their instruments because they want to make music and communicate ideas, rather than because they want to be pop stars.  When people are severely misunderstood and they write stuff to combat that and to make a place for themselves ... that’s what punk rock is to me.  That’s always going to be happening and always has.  Punk rock existed way before.  And it’s sort of reactionary, too.  Think of the MC5 or the New York Dolls.  They did something that was so unlike what was going on at the time.  And the Stooges, too.  It was like, there’s what’s mainstream and what’s happening, and we don’t like it.  So they were saying, we’re going to do it our way, which totally makes people’s ears bleed and nobody likes that, but we can find music in there and we can make it work.  That’s what punk is, and that’s what attracts me to music.

AS:  And love?

CM:  It’s always the lowest common denominator.  I’m totally a romantic, so it’s a very important part of my life, something that I focus on, maybe over focus on ... but people do that.  Although I hope they do it with an edge, not always with sappy sentiments.  Love isn’t always great.  It’s sometimes bad and confusing and hard.  So to combine punk and love is the normal thing for me.

AS:  So you’re describing this thing that basically sums up everything you’ve said about yourself.  It’s like, punk rock, c’est moi.

CM:  That’s right.  I’m Mrs. Punk.