 You're listening to the independent 89.9 HD4 playing new music from artists in all genres from all over the world, including songs made right here in Jacksonville. Well, Jax-based artist Bebe Deluxe has been cranking out distinctive electro pop for a few years now. She's one of several artists who seem to come out of the pandemic with a sense of urgency and a renewed creative drive. Deluxe has been performing at a heavy clip recently and was even invited to play this year's South by Southwest back in March. And now she's released the gritty electro-clash-inspired number Hardfemme, a song about self-respect, affirmation, and celebrating one's individuality, which are especially pertinent topics in Florida where, between the passage of a state law widely criticized as the don't say gay bill, and legislation introduced to limit gender-affirming care, the queer and trans communities feel increasingly under attack. Deluxe released a music video for Hardfemme last week. In it, Deluxe, who is transgender, participates in the kidnapping of a public official who is then gender reassigned, married off, among other coercive acts. While the concept is sure to strike some as controversial, Deluxe argues that the satirical short only flips the mirror on those who would regulate others bodily autonomy. And in this video now to talk about the makings of the song for our latest installment of Liner Notes is Bebe Deluxe. Hi Bebe, thanks for being here. Yeah, of course. Let's talk about your songwriting process and how Hardfemme came together. Are you someone who starts with the music first, or is it lyrics or a thread of an idea? I would say it's never just one thing every single time. I do think that Hardfemme probably came from an idea, certainly, and I actually started writing this song back in 2016, which was the beginning of me coming into my transness and kind of asking myself those deconstructing questions about gender. And Hardfemme for me was a place where I felt like I was being pulled into directions. So on one, it was like I needed to be this masculine man that I was born into. And the other part was like, OK, well, if you're going to be queer, if you're going to be feminine, you have to be softer and more palatable and sweeter and don't speak your mind as much. And I just I don't believe in that. So I remember at a certain time in my life, anytime I'd perform because I would like dress a certain way, or I would, you know, be wearing women's clothing, but I'd have chest hair and leg hair or like a beard. People really felt like they could just put their hands on me. And it really started to affect my psyche. It was like, I wasn't a real person in those moments. I wasn't, you know, I was just I was so amusing or so exciting or so outside of the norm that people thought that they could completely supersede personal boundaries and like put their hands on my chest or put their hands on my butt. And and then the rest of it just kind of came naturally. It's like using that feeling of frustration. I started to write the chords and and, you know, I just wanted people to start respecting the fact that I was hardfem and if they didn't know what hardfem was, I was going to try to define it for them in less than four minutes. And in that less than four minutes, you know, it's got it's got a kind of gritty sonic signature to it. And I remember we were message messaging when you released the song about this dirty bass sound you got. And you mentioned fish or spoon or what kinds of inspiration were you drawing on for the production of the track that backs you here? Well, I have to give a major shout out to my longtime friend and collaborator, virtual baptism. He's my good friend, Joe, and he inevitably produced the entire track. I sent him stems of a rudimentary version of what he ended up coming up with. But the base was really important because I wanted to have that, like, deep in your chest. You know, when you hear like a really good song that just gives you strength, you walk a little harder, you know, in your head, you're kind of like in a movie for a minute. I wanted that. I wanted that driving moment of determination of like something that I could put in my headphones when I was, you know, dressed up and like a real genderqueer outfit having to go somewhere. I could put my headphones in and listen to that and feel powerful, even in a room where my bodily autonomy could be taken from me. It's a good segue to talking about the video that's dropping. Certainly there'll be folks who watch this video and feel uncomfortable. Can you tell us about the video for the song and what point you're trying to get across? Yeah, so I kind of knew when we started making it, especially when we started filming it, like, oh, some people are going to watch this and they're going to think of it to the 11th degree. But my opinion is we're doing it more stylistically. We're just flipping the script around because we call the hard femme video an exercise in empathy, radical empathy, because these transphobic governors, that that's the new hot thing to be as a transphobic governor. It's very in for 2022 is that they think that they're acting in the best interest of all people and trans people. Like they think they're helping us and they don't know anything about us. They they aren't trans themselves. They don't know any trans people. So they're making all of these decisions for us in what they declare to be empathy and they're just dead wrong and violent, dangerous towards us. So we created a scenario where we take somebody who would perfectly find the way they were and we crammed them into a tiny little box. We push a gender onto them that they didn't ask for. We put them in a marriage that doesn't work for them. We give surgeries to them that don't work and they don't consent to. And at the end of it, when they aren't what we need, we sacrifice them in the name of our message. And I think that if the video makes someone truly uncomfortable, if they feel threatened by the video, if they feel like our fun little romp in a back alley has anything to do with them, then they should look within and they should really think about why they feel so threatened by this video. And then get back to me, but I won't be answering my emails. Hardfemm is streaming on all streaming platforms right now, also playing on the Independent 89.9 HD 4 on a local spot 20 minutes after the hour. Thank you, BB, for being here. Thank you. Watch my video. You can find the full text of this interview on jacksmusic.org. Now back to more music and the Independent 89.9 HD 4.