The Pretty Reckless at the Beat Kitchen
Taylor Momsen’s stuck in a little bit of a bind. Her band, The Pretty Reckless, isn’t all that terrible. At last night’s Beat Kitchen show, they had both moms and 15-year-olds singing along. Heck, if it were 1997, they would be opening for Veruca Salt and Bush on an arena tour or something. It’s not 1997, but that’s a moot point. Momsen’s even a pretty good singer.
Here’s the big problem, though: At what point does the actress cease acting and become purely a singer? Is it the audience’s fault if they can’t get past her tabloid antics and 17-year-old sexuality, instead choosing to focus on her relatively good-sized talent?
In some respects, then, yeah, it was this reporter’s fault for thinking it was totally gross when Momsen gyrated snakelike around her mic stand, harkening back to Axl Rose, or that it was even grosser when she told the audience, “Show me your tits and get on stage,” and then, when someone actually did it, proceeded to grind on them while singing “Goin’ Down,” even running her hand down the random girl’s then-shirtless cleavage. Momsen’s 17, for heaven’s sakes! She’s been on TV since she was a toddler.
Maybe grossness isn’t the issue, but rather authenticity. How real is her whole schtick? Maybe, because she’s been in the public eye for so long, Momsen’s an old soul. She smokes cigarettes non-stop and wears lingerie as outerwear. In an interview on this site earlier this week, she even seemed to gravitate toward older bands, like Led Zeppelin and Oasis. How much of that is authentic, though, and how much is just what she thinks she should do, thinks she should like, or thinks she’s into right this second? Anyone who’s been 17 knows that it’s possible to absolutely change personalities overnight depending on who’s around and what’s popular. Is that going on with Momsen, who’s changed—at least, in terms of her public image—pretty drastically in the past few years? Or is this who she really is, and she’s just stopped caring about the Hollywood machine or what anyone thinks?
The Pretty Reckless version of cock rock might not be uber-popular right this second, but it’s catchy enough. And Momsen’s goth-lite fashion gets her attention, so why the heck not? She can flip off a camera, lurch around on her spidery limbs, and swear like a sailor, and people eat it up. At the Beat Kitchen, people clamored to be around her when she came in the door, clamored to see what she was wearing (a black vinyl fräulein-ish outfit with an ill-fitting top), and paid extra to meet her before the show. The under-18 crowd sang every word to songs like “My Medicine” and “Make Me Wanna Die,” both of which are about being a little messed up but just going with it.
If Momsen’s operating on what she thinks she should be like rather than her authentic self, then she’s doing a good job of it. Her crowd banter was standard—“We love Chicago! Y’all are some crazy motherfuckers.”—but witty enough. She went for it vocally, even when her cigarette-ravaged pipes were giving out, and, yeah, her songs—which she actually wrote—are, in fact, not horrible. So, maybe this is her. This is real. Unfortunately, last night’s nine-song set wasn’t enough to knock skeptics (including this one) from their golden perches. It did, however, manage to crack the Gossip Girl façade anyone might have laid on Momsen just a little bit more, and maybe that was her plan all along.
