The Dead Betties have been in the queercore trenches since they formed back in 2000. Their persistence against queerphobic scrutiny is the stuff of legend, including the incident about a decade ago when Bill O’Reilly tried to say that it was inappropriate for frontman Joshua Ackley, as a gay man and member of this band, to be a spokesperson for the Girl Scouts of America. And yet, O’Reilly’s bigoted bellyaching ultimately didn’t change anything about Ackley’s life, and the band persists to this day, laughing in the face of hatred and ignorance all the way. Last year the band returned after a long hiatus to release their album Impossible Future, and now they’ve found their inspiration to turn around and put out a new EP called Whitey, which comes out on Friday from Rotten Princess Records.
Today, the band are debuting the video for the title track off of Whitey. With pop elements and a fierce, powerful rhythm section, this song moves into harder territory than what you think of from famous queercore bands like Pansy Division, yet still with a healthy dose of slickness to the production. The tripped-out music video with flashes of bizarre imagery and intense light and colors flying across the screen perfectly mirrors the intensity of the song itself.
“Whitey is about the contract of whiteness that sanitizes thought, emotion, and identity,” says Ackley, reflecting on the song. “It’s a mirror held up to the systems that train us to numb ourselves, to trade imagination for comfort and individuality for belonging. The video is a nightmare made literal: a ghost haunted by his own compliance, a person suffocating in plastic, wading through pills and money in an endless cycle of consumption and denial.
“I wanted to show how the pursuit of purity, of being the right kind of person in a broken culture, becomes its own form of violence. The characters in white are both villains and victims of a mythology that rewards silence and self-erasure. Whitey is not just about race, it is about the spiritual cost of conformity and the price we pay for pretending everything is fine.”
Check out the video below.
Whitey is out Friday from Rotten Princess Records and you can preorder it from Bandcamp.
Photo Credit: Jonathon Marin
