We’re excited to have Edith Pop on the bill for On The Rise at LPR this Saturday 9/5 (along with Whiskey Bitches and The Naked Heroes). Listen to some of her tunes above!
PSYCHOPOP: An Interview with Edith Pop's Laura Hajek
Photos by Steve Prue
Brooklyn-based alt-pop band Edith Pop is the plastic automaton of a 1960’s socialite, the outer skin of a fashion-obsessed suburban teenager covering an infinite void, a rich housewife in the sedative haze of a handful of valium. On the flip-side, they're channeling the minimalistic genius of The Velvet Underground and Nico. They’re making dance music that as effortlessly yanks listeners onto the dancefloor as into reveries about Karl Marx’s Fetishism of the Commodity.
Front-woman Laura Hajek stands doe-eyed before the crowd in her four-inch heels before violently throwing herself on the floor, thrashing and writhing across the stage while cooing I’ve got so many shoes / All I want is you. In an instant, the crowd transforms from concert-goers to window-shoppers, peeping toms, and sugar-daddies. The exhibitionism of her body and the lyrics demands voyeurism, and Edith Pop gets what she wants. It’s unclear whether the appropriate response to the end of their brilliant set is bursting into applause or throwing bags of cash. I met up with enchantress Laura Hajek to chat about psychopaths, demons, and Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Tell me how Edith Pop began.
Well my best friend Tim and I started making music together. I used to go on tour with his band called Mathematicians. We went all over the country and one day he’s like ‘Why don’t we just make music together?’ So he used to live on this big farmhouse on 250 acres of land, and I would go out and visit him on this farmhouse and we would spend like three days. On the first day we would just get like really wasted and he would set up a drumbeat and I would go off over that, and the next day we would go through it and be like ‘Ugh that’s terrible’ or like ‘Oh this part is okay’ and edit it down. We built the project around that collaboration.
Before that, what was the beginning of your musical life?
I was in a hardcore band called Panda Piranha. It was really crazy. It was me and six dudes that are all brilliant musicians. It was upstate in Glens Falls. It got to the point where I moved out here to go to school, and that kind of fell apart, and then Edith Pop took over.
What provoked you to transition from hardcore to the style you have now?
Yeah it’s really weird pop I guess. Well, accessibility for one thing. I wanted to make something that people could dance to and maybe be more receptive to. When people are dancing to something, they tend to be more open minded to the content of the song. It’s like a trick. You get them dancing and throw this really weird thing at them and they’re like hey maybe I’m weird too.
Do you have a dance background?
I was taking ballet from when I was three years old. I took tap and jazz and modern, all that. I totally dropped out of that because I was a short girl and not really good at ballet, and I just wanted to be weird.
Tell me about what its like compared to ballet, having that insane stage presence, occupying the space in that extreme way, and losing all your inhibitions. What enabled you to feel comfortable doing that?
Well Edith Pop is a character that I play. The whole idea behind it is being possessed by the need to express something even if you don’t have anything too interesting to express. Something about, I get this feeling before I perform. I get really nervous. My stomach gets all knotted up. I can’t talk to anybody. What will happen is there’s this rush and I feel like a totally different person when I’m in front of everyone. You’re getting the energy from everybody. This person over here’s who’s kind of watching and is like ‘Oh this is bullshit,’ and the person over here is kinda digging it and then the weird energy from the band. I don’t know. It just makes me crazy. It feels really good afterwards because you’re like ‘Thank god. I’m done. I exorcized that demon.’
It seemed like some sort of ritualistic thing was taking place.
Yeah! If I don’t do it every month or so I get really weird.
Tell me about the character Edith Pop is. What does she represent to you, to the band?
The idea is sort of like if a psychopath was thrust into this idea of being a pop star and was forced to create pop music. So you take the basic idea of what you hear when you listen to a pop song. You hear a pop song and it’s like, ‘Oh baby, I wanna dance with you,” or whatever, and it’s this person hearing that and being like ‘Yeah, I can make that.’ So it’s sort of like, this person that is masquerading as a traditional pop star is almost possessed by this weird violent energy also. It’s like if an evil spirit from another time was forced into someone’s body that was forced into being a pop star.
Why Edith Piaf and Iggy Pop?
It’s them and also Edyie Gormé who’s like this really weird singer from the 40’s who’s really awful that I love. The kind of stuff that your grandparents listen to on a victrola. And Edie Sedgwick too.
When I was watching your performance, that was the first connection I made.
I read this story about her once where Patti Smith went to the Warhol Factory and she was like ‘Patti Smith is totally cool’ and she’s like ‘Yeah I dance like a cool black guy and I’m all over the place, and all these people at the factory were dancing really rigidly and robotic, and I was so into that idea of weird rigid dancing that’s unnatural. Dancing is a really weird natural function when you take this self-consciousness into account.
I actually wrote down that your music is like 1960’s pop with 21st century capitalist hedonism and debauchery. How do you think the music in your music applies to a 21st century context to people being obsessed with money and shoes? Are you making fun of everyone or are you reveling in capitalism?
Sort of but I’m also just really bored. They’re all really honest lyrics. You see a lot of musicians trying to make something more of their everyday lives and there’s this whole poetic edge to everything. And it’s like, if you take away that poetic edge and you just have the basic things that you do everyday, then I feel like that’s where the lyrics come from. I am really sick of going to the mall! I come from a suburban town where the only thing you can really do from the time you’re eleven to high school is go to the mall and walk around. It’s weird because you start to invent this other idea of what it means to go to the mall. It becomes this social space and a community zone. You run into people. You get dressed up specifically to go to the mall. I moved to New York City and when I would go home, my mom would be like, ‘Oh I want to take you to the mall and we can go shopping.” And I was like ‘This sucks. This is so boring. There’s nothing to actually do.’ So it’s kind of about that. And “Money” actually started out as a song about sex work because the lyrics are like I won’t come if you don’t come/ I won’t go if you don’t go. It’s supposed to be because this person is paying you to enact all their own fantasies but then I started writing more lyrics to it and it sort of became about my boyfriend. That was kinda weird. We’ll just let someone else unpack that.
You guys have an amazing band description that says “the deep ennui of trying to reconcile the banality of daily life with the excitement of teenage faith in rock n’ roll.” I thought that was so great. Can you elaborate on that?
Rock n’ roll saved my life. I was really bored and young, fourteen, fifteen, and when I finally heard punk rock n’ roll, specifically New York City 1970’s punk rock n’ roll, it totally challenged everything that I had ever known. I realized you can be really cool and really funny. You can take things lightly but also take them really seriously.
Who influenced you then and who influences you now?
Definitely Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Television, Blondie, all the 1970’s punk rock n’ roll bands. I love the Beastie Boys, like a lot. They’re so funny. They don’t pretend to be deep. I don’t like when people pretend. If you’re actually having an amazing moment, that’s great, but I find there’s more realness in the banal.
You’re kind of the Jeff Koons of Brooklyn pop music. Your lyrics are very much on the surface: beautiful to listen to, super engaging, and some people will be like ‘This is just about money,’ but if you look closely, it’s such a commentary about society as a whole. You can either appreciate on the surface level or a deep philosophical level.
Yeah I feel like it goes from being sarcastic to being to not sarcastic to sarcastic again. It kind of comes full circle. Currently I don’t know what kind of bands I like currently. I like Truthers. They’re awesome. The guitar player in my band, they’re his band. They’re kind of like a 60’s psych band. They’re different from any other band I’ve heard around Brooklyn.
Didn’t one of the members in your band used to be in Phantogram?
Yeah Tim was in Phantogram. Panda Piranha used to play with them too. They’re crazy people. I love them. It was awesome because when we were building the Edith Pop project, he was also learning how to perform with them on a really large scale. He was like ‘I want to help finish the track but I’m playing at Coachella.’ I was like ‘Get the fuck outta here!’
