This past Sunday, at a performance in San Francisco, singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked gave what many have called a homophobic speech. (You can hear it in its entirety here.) Finally, after days of cryptic retweets and an equally cryptic statement, an actual interview with Shocked has come out. Conducted the day after the events, it’s as ridiculous as you’d expect.
As the writer for Spin describes, he spoke with Shocked for 45 minutes, until she realized he had been tape-recording the conversation. She then made him delete the file and they started all over again. This second 45-minute exchange is, not surprisingly, real nuts. It’s basically the interviewer trying his darndest to get Shocked to answer his actual questions, while Shocked bounces from one incomprehensible metaphor to next.
But then things get really serious when she compares herself to Lil Wayne, Justin Bieber, Beyoncé, Hugo Chavez, and an asteroid. She explained:
“I had seen a picture of Justin Bieber, who I was pretty sure is a clean-cut young boy, in bondage gear … So I have pretty good reason to think that I’m a pretty disposable component of [the media]. If Lil Wayne can be in a coma, and good close friends are sending out tweets assuring us that the story is a little overblown, if Hugo Chavez is dead and they’ve got the photos of mourners proving it, and if asteroids have somehow made it through our missile-defense system and are magically appearing over Russia, I’m pretty sure there’s a distinction between a tweet that says, ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates faggots,’ and Michelle Shocked asked me to send a tweet saying, ‘God hates faggots.’”
Just to bring it all home, she added:
“If they can have Beyonce lip-syncing the National Anthem at the Inauguration, and have a lot of controversy about the lip-syncing, they can easily put any words in my mouth that they want.”
Say what you will about this situation — at least she’s going for it.
