Kiss me gently while I’m all on fours
I’m your dog and nothing more
Yeah I’m just a good time for whenever you’re bored
So call me pretty but never yours
Words by Jason Lee
Over the weekend Susannah Joffe released the music video to her most recent single “Call Me Pretty,” a song Joffe revealed on TikTok was inspired by the characters of Jackie & Shauna on the Showtime/Paramount Plus series Yellowjackets in which the airplane of a tournament-bound New Jersey high school girl’s soccer team goes down in the remote Canadian woods with Lord of the Flies-type chaos ensuing (YJ is one of the few streaming series of late that The Deli fuxx wit cuz goddam those ‘90s needle drops) which if you thought Orange Is The New Black had complex female relationships at its core you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…
…with Jackie and Shauna a/k/a the Princess and the Gawky Best Friend Who May In Fact Be A Psychopath being the most complex of ‘em all (warning: spoilers in the video below) with their relationship remaining highly co-dependent and wracked with suppressed Sapphic desire, guilt, resentment, and suppressed longing to possess and ultimately consume the other even after one of ‘em expires at the conclusion of a gut punch of a season finalé as in Cannibalism Is The New You Complete Me just replace “meet cute” with “eat cute” ammirite…
…which thankfully neither the song’s lyrics nor the vid’s visual attempt to represent too literally instead capturing the emotional tenor with an exacting precision and suffice to say the song and its newly minted visuals are a one-two gut-punch mindf*ck mashup of ravishing beauty and alarming abjection opening with a couple seconds of backwards audio that foreshadows the reality-field distortion to come (the series constantly jumps back and forth between the ‘90s soccer team stranded in the woods and the lives of its surviving members in the present day) bur first leading directly into a highly vibey slow-motion-high-lonesome waltz-time-slow-dance of a first verse swaddled in dreamy reverb-soaked slide guitar that feels as if Dummy-era Portishead decided to make a dream-pop-trip-hop country song…
…as S.J. intones the opening lines over strains of Dark Americana, “give me a black eye and cover it with stars in red, white & blue” to which Lana Del Rey might say too far, girl to which Susannah might reply hold my beer and while yr at it give me a shiner with that Shiner but either way s’all good cuz if there’s one thing we could use right now it’s lyrics no less extreme than the times we’re currently living thru with its sense of dread and incipient violence and social control to maybe shake some sense back into the body politic and if yr at all inclined to say hey it’s all just a bit of country & western camp so don’t read too much into it as the cover image’s pastiche of Dolly/Kitty/Loretta circa 1974 seems to indicate…
…which reminds of us of an old Southern saying “the higher the hair, the closer to God” with the cover image’s wig having been designed by a “drag queen in Lubbock, Texas” in keeping with Susannah’s staunchly queer aesthetics then clearly you haven’t listened yet to the rest of the Ben Coleman-produced song (Joffe’s regular recording partner) which after an entreaty to “lay me naked by your Gibson guitar and play me too” makes a turn to the more unsetting as witnessed in the S&M-suggestive lyrics quoted at the top of this piece…
…as those lovely pedal steel tones from the first verse grow gradually more distorted, enveloped in swampy reverb that threatens to engulf the rest of the track as if the song itself is fraying at the edges (classic shoegaze move!) and as its narrator likewise goes full primitive like a once-pampered suburban athlete turned starving-to-death survivalist with no remaining social constraints demanding that you “fuck me in your pickup truck / pray to god and drive me drunk”…
…as the dreamy tone of the song turns increasingly more agitated with the vocals moving up into falsetto range as the music starts breaking up, phasing in and out like a glitching radio signal or a My Bloody Valentine song played with 20 guitar pedals which sounds cool af and makes it feel like you’re breaking thru to another plane of existence and perception like breaking the thin membrane formed atop a glass of milk left out on the kitchen table for too long to borrow an image from Julia Kristeva or as she puts it…
“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.”
…and whether “Call Me Pretty” is meant to be taken as devilish yet harmless fun in the form of libertine cuntry kink or as exposing the unseemly underbelly of Standard White Jesus-based gender roles in patriarchal “bros ’n’ hos” country culture or heck something else entirely (what’s the safe word for Yellowjackets slash fanfic type roleplaying? “Pit girl” or “Antler queen”?) is left up to the listener-viewer but don’t get it twisted re: the willfully submissive victim type being S.J.’s whole “thang” cuz nothing could be further from the truth…
…with her previous single “Shit Out of Luck” for instance seeing Susannah taking on the role of a murderous “scorned woman” who vows “I’ll touch myself to your last breath” so clearly she’s adapt at the whole role-playing thing which may have something to do with being interested in a career as a film editor before taking up singing and songwriting full-time…
…and no wonder then she’s also written a musical mash-note to “Sofia Coppola” (“I’ll braid your hair then fuck you on your dad’s old sofa / idolize you, my Sofia Coppola”) and what’s more if yr gonna make proper outlaw country these days you gotta amp up the sex & violence to 2020s levels and ideally be into the music of other outlaw artists too like Ethel Cain and Nicole Dollanganger both of whom are hashtagged in Susannah’s TikTok posts about “Call Me Pretty” alongside Lana Del Rey duh…
…and that’s all just the half of it now that we got visuals to go with the music with the video opening on S.J. resplendent in a denim bikini draped with rhinestone fringe seemingly modeled on the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders’ iconic sideline look ‘cept perhaps closer to the Debbie Does Dallas version as Susannah rides a mechanical bull shot in sumptuous slow-rolling motion complete with RuPaul’s Drag Race–ready makeup (shoutout also to Divine) and that towering Lubbock drag queen-made wig on too as Susannah rides bareback at first before flipping over and grabbing the horn of the saddle…
…writhing above the bucking torso in a fashion not seen since Debra Winger went all reverse cowgirl on an electro-bovine at the now mythic Gilley’s which is the very Houston-area honky tonk that first popularized and patented the mechanical bull as captured in the 1980 “honky tonk-sploitation” classic Urban Cowboy which isn’t actually so culturally exploitative in S.J.’s take seeing as Susannah was born and raised in Austin, TX at the triangulated point between Dallas and Houston no less…
…with these parts of the music video clearly filmed at Brooklyn’s most recent C&W/Americana hot spot, the Desert Five Spot and you don’t get much more authentically “urban cowboy” than that as the vid flips between mechanical bull riding shots and shots of S.J. showing off her lassoing skills in what looks like a cheap motel room…
…and in stark contrast to the dreamy Desert 5 Spot bits are other bits filmed in a pig-pin or some another mud-based locale with Susannah appearing to relish getting down ‘n’ dirty as a mudflap girl in the pig-pen’s wallow with a tiara replacing the giant wig as someone off-screen pelts her with more globs of mud across her body as she mimes a quick choking motion and here’s where we get back to abjection again with the contrast between ethereal sweetness and light and debasement being just as visceral and compelling on the visual side as on the musical side of things…
…and just in case any family members happen to be reading we wish to close by highlighting yet another facet of Susannah’s artistic personality and that’s her current musical project with her father whose own musical adventures when she was growing up got her immersed in music and live music culture no less than anything else seeing she “grew up watching [her] dad do open mics at venues in Austin, half of which don’t even exist anymore,” a side of her musical past she pulled away from after moving to NYC until gaining renewed appreciation for the Southern arts and music scene that she was immersed in from an early age with her father Scott’s assisstance while introducing her to the joys of songwriting at just 14 years old…
…which today the younger Joffe is paying back and paying forward by lending her voice to new recordings of some of her father’s old songs in their joint project Your Daughter’s Father which is remarkable thing for a member of attention-deficited, amoral Gen Z to be doing with most Zoomers spending their time addicted to TikTok, AI, designer drugs and “rizz” debauchery when not too busy wearing Mom jeans to the mall or walking around in their PJs everywhere which like put on some real clothes damnit (we keed! we keed!) with Susannah’s paternal musical connection extending also to her biggest viral hit to date, namely “Die Your Daughter,” which pays tribute to dear ol’ dead with 16 million streams and counting…
no time to kill
I’ll stick around If you will
Getting old that looks good on you
But god, someone make it stop
Nature will run its course, I’m left to pawn you off
I will die your daughter
Susannah Joffe plays Bowery Ballroom tonight (5/14/25) with Alix Page, with dates in Boston and D.C. the next few days…