A forty-five-year-old Icelandic artist introduced himself to an ensemble of singer-songwriters at the Guggenheim the other day. “Hello, my name is Ragnar Kjartansson, and I’m a patriarch in recovery,” he said. “But just call me Raggi!” A few women laughed, and he went on, “And I’m just, like, shaking, I’m so emotional. I think this piece will save the world.”
Twenty-four female and nonbinary musicians—plus Kjartansson, a bespectacled man who wore linen pants and suspenders, and a museum curator, who also identified as a man—had assembled for the first rehearsal of Kjartansson’s “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy,” a four-day marathon orchestrated to reveal the misogyny in popular culture. In a few days, the singer-songwriters would collectively perform arrangements of well-loved tunes (among them “Wild World,” by Cat Stevens, “Every Breath You Take,” by the Police, “Love the Way You Lie,” by Eminem, featuring Rihanna) on repeat for seven hours daily in the museum’s rotunda. “Some songs are ambiguous, some songs are violent, and some are just beautiful love songs,” Kjartansson said. “These are gorgeous songs, fantastic music made by great songwriters”—he paused—“and the songwriters are not misogynistic. It’s just there in the culture. The songs are just an affirmation of our culture.” He added, “Every frickin’ song has patriarchal overtones in it. The more you think about it, it’s in, like, everything you hear.”
A middle-aged woman dressed in shorts and a long plaid shirt tuned her guitar before the rehearsal began. Nearby, several performers chatted about the project. “I’ve never played a song over and over and over again,” Miriam Elhajli, a young musician with short hair, said. “I’m wary to see what happens to my subconscious.”
“I didn’t realize what it was,” Felice Rosser, who played an electroacoustic guitar, said. She wore spandex shorts and had an Apple earbud (song: Lil Wayne’s “Love Me,” on repeat) in her left ear. “I thought we were going to be performing in front of somebody’s paintings.” (Kjartansson said that he liked the idea of the museum walls being bare, “so your focus doesn’t mess up.”) Rosser’s voice grew dreamy: “I’m singing the songs of someone who sold, like, one hundred and fifty-eight million records worldwide. What does that say about my life?”
“I’m happy to bring out some trauma in people!” another musician yelped.
After rehearsal commenced, Kjartansson, and the work’s musical director, Kendra McKinley—a singer-songwriter from Santa Cruz—walked up the museum’s spiral, listening:
“He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.”
“I know you want it, you’re a good girl.”
“Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world!”
McKinley cut in: “That sounds really great, but just know you can finger-pick it a little more slowly, because that’s a tricky tempo to maintain for a long time.” McKinley had also co-arranged the music and would be performing in the show. Kjartansson gave notes to another musician, who had dreadlocks. “Just play the song sculpturally!” he said.
“Cool, I’ll do that,” the musician answered, laughing. They tried it again: “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl / than to be with another man.”
At about noon, Kjartansson called for a break and reflected on his own relationship to the patriarchy. “I was in denial,” he said. “I’m still working on getting it out of my veins.” He continued, “Is it really so great to be a man, and to be abusive and violent? Is that really what we want?” He looked down. “In the old days, you would just slap and rape and whatnot—”
“It still happens!” a musician said.
“It still happens, yeah, but now there’s more, like, whining, ‘I’m very complicated emotionally,’ all that bullshit. We use new weapons to oppress women.” (Elhajli later dropped out before the show started up. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of emotional labor helping a man understand his place within the patriarchy,” she said.)
The rehearsal resumed. “The intensity is spiralling up. It’s like a David Lynch lullaby, where it’s, like, God, I’m being seduced, but I also think I’m gonna puke!” McKinley said, near the top of the rotunda. “The sirens are beckoning!”
The sirens beckoned: “All she eat is dick / she’s on a strict diet, that’s my baby.”
“Every step you take / I’ll be watching you.”
“This is a fucking great song,” Kjartansson said, as a musician with wavy hair and a flamenco guitar played “Closer,” by Nine Inch Nails. “But it’s really, like, ‘Parental Advisory!’ ” The musician, who sipped from a thermos full of herbal tea, contemplated the song’s lyrics. “When I was six years old, my guitar teacher kissed me,” she said, cradling her guitar. “That was the first, like, experience I had. It was pretty heavy. I was traumatized.” She went on, “As terrible as it sounds, I learned everything I know about guitar from that man.” Then she started playing. “You let me violate you / You let me desecrate you / You let me penetrate you,” she sang. “You let me complicate you.” ♦
