Peaches will perform at the Mezzanine in San Francisco.
Merrill Beth Nisker’s most recent music video — for a song called “Sick in the Head” — is about exactly what you’d expect from the electroclash performer better known as Peaches.
She starts off in front of a mirror, clipping blond hair extensions to her head before slipping into a sequined black leotard. For a few beats, viewers get to see her only from behind. Then, suddenly, she’s in a metal tunnel, spinning around to reveal an eyeball on each breast and a big, gnarled mouth on her crotch. Pretty soon that mouth is screaming along to the music. Oh, and there’s some (possibly satanic?) face paint, too.
All of this is to say, about 15 years after she first told listeners to “F— the Pain Away,” Nisker, who is set to perform at Mezzanine on Monday, Oct. 3, is just as wild and weird and subversive as ever.
Nisker’s been confronting and twisting social norms around gender and sex through her music and visuals since the very beginning, but these days, she says during a recent phone call, she’s on her own — she independently released her most recent album, 2015’s “Rub” — and feeling freer than ever.
“There’s no one to answer to,” she says, adding that not even TV censors can hold her back now that people can go watch her videos, which are frequently labeled “Not safe for work,” online. “Now it’s like people are going to see your s— if it’s good, even if it is subversive. That’s motivating for me.”
The new setup has meant videos featuring orgies, comedian Margaret Cho in a fuzzy onesie with a fuzzy penis and an aerial acrobat who performs with a laser butt plug. In that last video, Nisker sings: “I’m an everlasting iconoclast/ I came to destroy the past/ My stargasm makes the blast/ Shake the system, then surpass.” The message there, the one about destroying systems, is all her.
At 47, Nisker says she’s on a mission to make aging cool, and she’s still tackling big, complicated issues — like the way people relate to their bodies. Photos from her newest stage show have started making the rounds. In some of the images she has five breasts on her chest and another one between her legs. It’s not the first time she’s covered herself in boobs. (And there have also been times when she’s also draped herself in hair or dressed herself in a foam uterus or walked out into the crowd in a giant blowup phallic shaft.)
Nisker plays with these things, she says, “because it’s a body. And because we have it. And because so many things are taboo for no reason.”
When the conversation turns to the word “iconoclast,” though, she hedges a bit.
“That song was made specifically for Empress Stah, the laser-butt-plug aerialist, who actually gave me some words that she thought related to me and her together,” Nisker says. “‘Everlasting iconoclast’ was something she wanted in there. I think it fits, and I think it’s good. But it wouldn’t normally be my style to say that.”
Still, Nisker’s iconoclastic influence is everywhere — consider the sexual exploits of Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga’s sartorial choices — even if she’s never gained the mainstream attention those other artists have. Nisker has noticed, of course, and she’s watched as times have caught up with the sorts of politics she’s always been about.
These days, pop stars happily call themselves feminists, and sexual and gender fluidity aren’t nearly the taboos they once were. Nisker says she’s glad for the progress, but she’s also clearly worried about its staying power.
“I hope it doesn’t just become a trend,” she says. “I hope it’s something that continues.”