Tracy Wilson of Positive No (Photo by Tina Eshleman)
Tracy Wilson could not have known, when she wrote the lyrics for Positive No’s “Reinvent the Space” early this year, that it would become the right song for the moment. With a driving guitar line and don’t-hold-back lyrics, it perfectly captures the frustration, anger and steely resolve of women confronted with the reality that while we may have come a long way, baby, we’re not where we thought we were.
“It’s sort of my battle cry,” Wilson says of the song, which will be released digitally on the band’s website Monday. “I’m not just angry. I’m not just tired. I’ve had enough. I can’t let these things go by anymore.”
For her, this awareness started to dawn in January with public complaints from female musicians about sexual assault and harassment by a male publicist. Women in the music industry formed a social media network and began sharing their stories.
“This was the beginning of kind of a trigger for me of two decades of going to shows and being in bands and having really terrible things happen to me," Wilson says. "It sort of opened up this floodgate. I was like, ‘Wow, I thought I had put all this to rest, but I’m still really angry.’ ”
Wilson, who grew up in Saddle River, New Jersey, about 30 minutes from New York City, says she can’t count the number of times she’s been groped at concerts or on the subway. She started going to rock shows as a high school student, played in bands including Dahlia Seed and Ringfinger, and worked in music distribution as a sales rep.
“Most of the time, you try to go to a show with somebody, but if you’re going to shows three to five times a week, it doesn’t always work out that way,” she says.
During a Lunachicks show at New York club CBGB in the early 1990s, she says, a member of the Doc Martens Skinheads gang shoved his elbow into her eye socket, knocking her unconscious. She also recalls the fear and humiliation she felt when a group of men at another concert picked her up “basically like a bowling ball underneath my skirt and threw me into the crowd.”
That experience was a wake-up call. “I used to be kind of proud of the fact that I could stand my ground at those kinds of shows, and that just changed it forever,” she says.
In 2000, just before Wilson moved to Richmond, she was at a metal show at Wetlands in New York City when an acquaintance, another musician, “pinned me up against the stage of a show and basically tried to rape me with clothes on.” After that encounter, she reached out to mutual friends to tell them what happened.
“I thought at least my own community could help police the situation and say something to the guy and make sure he doesn’t do this to other women. And nobody did anything for me. Nobody believed me, or they were like, ‘Oh, it probably wasn’t that bad,’ or ‘He didn’t mean it.’ ”
With these memories resurfacing, Wilson added the lyrics for “Reinvent the Space” to music that she and her bandmate and “better half,” Kenneth Close, had written previously.
I yell so I am heard.
Control what I can.
Take back what was stolen
Not borrowed.
That was about nine months ago. Since then, sexual assault has become a national topic of conversation. In September, we learned that comedian Bill Cosby, once America’s favorite TV dad, will stand trial in Pennsylvania next year on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman in 2004.
Also in September, The Huffington Post published accounts from two University of Richmond students, Cecilia Carreras and Whitney Ralston, about sexual assault by male students. Carreras also filed a Title IX complaint against the university over its handling of her case.
On Oct. 7, a 2005 video clip emerged of Donald Trump, now president-elect of the United States, talking about women in vulgar terms, something for which he later apologized. And though he emphatically denied sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women late in the campaign, his triumph on Nov. 8 seemed to many women to be a validation of sexist attitudes.
“What started as this personal song suddenly became something much bigger accidentally,” Wilson says. “There was no goal when we wrote the song except for me to vent and channel myself in some sort of positive direction. As we started to play the song live, people would come up to us and say, ‘This really resonated with me,’ and then I started to be told personal stories about similar situations, just heartbreaking stuff.”
Tracy holds buttons designed by Positive No guitarist Kenneth Close to complement the band's new song. (Photo by Tina Eshleman)
About two months ago, the band decided to record the song and release it as a single, to capture the energy around it. Wilson enlisted Shawna Potter of the Baltimore-based War on Women to add another female voice. The single will be available to download for $5; the purchase price includes six buttons designed by Close that complement the song’s message. All proceeds from the sales will go to Hollaback, an organization that supports victims of harassment and develops strategies to make public spaces safer.
On Oct. 10, Positive No posted a Facebook message inviting people who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to send photos of their palms to use as cover art for the new single. Almost immediately, 60 photos arrived in the band’s inbox. They came from men and women, from fans, neighbors and strangers. The images included two children’s hands.
Invisible is nothing new
A chorus of empty promises
First you need to make room
(and) We will reinvent the space.
By placing the images side by side, Wilson wrote, “We are also hoping it will serve as a reminder that we are out there and these victims are not strangers; they are your friends, family members, peers and neighbors. We are real people who deserve to be recognized and believed.”
The cover art for Positive No's single "Reinvent the Space" includes photos sent by nearly 60 people who have been sexually assaulted or harassed. (Cover design by Kenneth Close)
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