Ever heard a peeled baby scream? That’s the sound of Countess Alex Zapak, the dazzling doyenne of Cunt Rock! All raw, raging, Freudian passion, unhinged and unrestrained, furiously pissing on boundaries never even imagined, she’s a primal scream princess personified!
Never heard of her? Even when she rode a horse down Portobello Road? Don’t worry, you will – in spades! Native British, she’s back from a ten-year performance art marathon in Manhattan, and, more recently, Berlin. Always singularly striking, tonight – holding furious, artistic court in Soho’s Groucho Club – she’s all clinging leather cat-suit and brunette bee-hive, a post-modern Emma Peel.
So, what exactly is Cunt Rock? Ah, get real – haven’t you ever – just once – been tempted to razor off your ball-bag and dangler to expose the glorious treasures within? I have, but sadly, lacked the guts to keep on cutting. But who knows what sexual and emotional wonderlands waited if I’d just chopped deeper? But – quite obviously – Alex practices unparalleled penetration, and never stops until she fingers the seething vulva of female outrage!
And the concrete result? Totally jaw-dropping. Over banked, live and video-feed projection screens, Alex howls her completely uncensored, shockingly confessional lyrics with the manic joy of a napalm victim screaming for instant Nirvana. Blithely unconcerned at the remote possibility of intrusive, objectifying male stares – a pathetic, occasional flaw in even uber-sensitive critics – she’s a self-combusting, riveting firestorm.
Is she disturbing? Oh fuck, yeah – imagine your mother, sister or possible, transsexual self furiously wanking filthy linen in public, and you’ll get why pompous, male critiques shrivel at appraising Alex’s art.
Why? Are (straight men, mostly) that threatened by strong, pussy-soaked, Amazonian art? You bet, and blame peerless Aussie academic Germaine Greer if you must, certainly one of Alex’s subliminal poster saints. Way back in 1971, Greer wrote her astonishing Lady, Love your Cunt piece in Suck magazine, simultaneously applauding creative, vaginal glory and demolishing lame adorations of cock-rock. Dripping in forensic, no-holds-barred genital detail, Greer’s prose instantly invalidated male, jerk-off guitar solos, and paved a savage punk-rock pathway for snarling poet Patti Smith.
But Patti – bless her flaming, bisexual, sound and fury – barely sucks the nuclear butt of Alex’s deviant outrage, her bullshit-shredding weapons of crass destruction. ‘I feel like I’m trippin’, and I’m not even high’, Alex wrenchingly sings, soaring incomparably beyond easy comparisons, euphorically enwrapped in her own fierce, multi-disciplinarian myth. Sure, initially, Alex channelled divine, diva inspiration from fellow performance-art singularity Penny Arcade, but tonight, who cares? With just one, utterly out-there performance, Alex, irresistibly, has seduced every potent presence of her past, and fucked them, forcibly, into a new, inconceivable future. And guess what? That performing future – so bright it’s breathtakingly blinding – has a name, and right now, this vanishing, sacred second, it’s the Countess Alex Zapak. Long may she reign!
Which brings us, tragically, to the poxy ghosts of the ill-conceived past, and one unbelievably dreary show in particular – Bowie’s narcoleptic swan-song, Lazarus. Look, truly, I’m the last one to knock a multisexual, bewilderingly brilliant musical chameleon – the stellar Mozart of glam-rock – but even geniuses have off days!
What was our Davey thinking? Back in ’76, in the tsunami collision of punk bile and icy, arthouse rock, Bowie’s Man Who Fell To Earth created a puzzlingly unique cinematic icon. An autistic empath, a living paradox and contradiction, Bowie’s character – Thomas Jerome Newton – radiated shocking otherness from his morgue-glazed eyes. Where’s that magic gone? Lazarus is a bog-standard exercise in sub-Kafka alienation, so conceptually thin it’s embarrassing, with no incandescent muse distinguishing the story, acting or delivery! Featuring a West End Wendy excruciatingly murdering ‘Life on Mars’, you have to ask, pleadingly, is this the real fruit of 40 years of Bowie creativity? OMG, no – somewhere, the real Lazarus must be hiding!
• Countess Zapak@Matthew Glamorre’s GenderAgenda February 11th
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