7 Burning Q's With Writer/Musician/Photojournalist Ali Smith
The talented multi-hyphenate talks art-making, how her punk ethos still fuels her creativity, and what she's up to next
Shello!
Hope you’re all living loud and doing the most!
Before we dig into this week’s lovely 7 Burning Q’s subject (yay!), Ali Smith, I have to give a bit of thanks. Yes, of course to YOU for coming here and taking the time to read my nonsense (which is a big ask!) but also to Ryan Teague Beckwith, who asked to interview me for his journalism Substack, My First Byline. If you want to get to know me a little better, I got candid about my janky path to journalism and share a few tidbits on how to break into the biz. Give it a click, will ya?
On the topic of candid chat, let’s get to-it-do-it, shall we?
7 Burning Q's With Writer/Musician/Photojournalist Ali Smith
Last year, while seeking new authors to interview for Shondaland, I came across a memoir that spoke to me: The Ballad of Speedball Baby by Ali Smith, the first memoir by an über talented writer, photojournalist, and (obvi) former bass player of the 90s alt-punk band, Speedball Baby. It was a vivid recount of growing up on the Lower East Side, playing in bands, and riding in tour buses around the world. Smith was often the lone woman navigating a path littered with too many boys (fortunately, she liked a few), describing her journey as a hard-chop swim upstream in a profession built to favor men while trying to locate herself as a feminist and an artist.
I could relate to so much of Ali’s experience and I admired her spirit. Her sensitive prose and unflinching way of witnessing her experience resonated with me, both circumstantially and creatively. Having worked in music for much of the ‘90s myself, her stories were stories I could relate to. Ali’s world was adjacent to my world to put us in similar circles and strike us similarly as scrappy feminists from scrappy backgrounds. It was as if we spoke the same language and graduated from a similar school of life, just missing each other in the same class by a couple of grades.
When I finally got to meet Ali, I felt an immediate kinship that has since blossomed. She so generously agreed to answer 7 (yes! 7!) burning q’s for MUTHR, FCKD about her creative process, her complex path to publication, what inspires her, and her glorious (finally!) return to music. Read on!
MUTHR, FCKD: Your delicious memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, details your Lower East Side upbringing, self-realization as an artist, and what gig and road life was like as a female musician in the ‘90s. Being in music as a woman then was such a unique, specific experience. How did it (metaphorically) feed you as a now-grown artist and human being?
ALI SMITH: I love the word “delicious” as you’ve used it! I like the idea of The Ballad of Speedball Baby as something to be consumed!
For better and for worse, I have long had to be quite self-sufficient. Even though a touring band is a group, and there are road managers, labels, and bookers aware that you’re floating around somewhere in the world, you're still the one broken down at the side of the road in the middle of the night, or crossing paths with nazi skinheads, or being strip-searched at a border crossing and threatened with jail time in a country where you don’t know any of the rules. The Rolling Stones probably have those sharp edges blunted for them, but not a band of our scale. Day to day experience was very visceral. Being the only woman, I had extra concerns to navigate and a few near misses. It was helpful that the men closest to me were at least somewhat aware of that rather than macho pigs.
The experience of going out into the bigger world with all of my inevitable myopia, my sometimes-inflated confidence, and my as-yet-unworked-out-insecurities, and butting up against difference and aggression and exciting experiences—and let’s not forget beauty; the Alps, the Aegean, the Colosseum, and so much more—changed me. Unfortunately, I look at the world more fearfully now. Some of that optimistic glow has been tarnished. But I have, in my muscle memory and stuffed inside of my brain holes, this knowledge of unbelievable expansion.
I’ve met young women in Croatia who’d invented punk for themselves—without any of the usual input from media that we even had back in the 90s—and it was a testament to how much we can make out of nothing, maybe especially in rough circumstances.
Even in the heart of NYC in the ‘80s and ‘90s, being a young woman with fire-engine-red hair, wearing fishnet stockings and heavy makeup “like a whore,” I’d be chased, yelled at, threatened. So imagine committing to being strange in a worn-torn country where most people around you have no concept of punk. That takes a different kind of nerve and it was inspirational.
Creating something from nothing is something I learned from punk and it was enforced for me in places like Croatia. I learned the art of writing a memoir in real time, tolerated the critiques when it was terrible, carried on doing it during the years nobody cared, tolerated a sense of personal rejection, and continued to insist it would be seen and heard despite all evidence to the contrary. I finally convinced not only an agent but a publisher (3, actually) to believe in it, and then reached out to punk legends and my heroes to support it. An alarming, life-affirming number of those people said “YES!” The copious ‘nos’ still sting, and it took a ridiculous amount of self-belief not to give up on it, just like any creative project I’ve ever brought to fruition.
Photo: Lynda Cohen
As for being female, I think the scarcity of women in bands left me (many of us?) with a sense that we were alone and that to succeed meant to do so by the very male standards of the day. That’s why Riot Grrrl, The Lunachicks, L7, Bikini Kill etc were so important, but those scenes didn’t work for all of us. To quote Groucho Marx, “ I refuse to be a part of any club that would have me as a member.” I just wanted to be myself. We all did the best we could. I now concentrate on building more community with the women in my life and I’m richer for it.
MF: In the process of writing Speedball, what did you learn about yourself as a writer that will inevitably inform your next project?
AS: Through a ton of revisions and a lot of feedback, I learned to better intuit when I’m straying from what I’m really trying to say, or when the writing has turned to humble-bragging or revenge. I can feel that shift happening in real time now and how it cheapens the writing and changes its purpose and potential impact. A reader can feel that on some level, and it’s embarrassing to read.
MF: You're also an incredible photojournalist. What is it about a story or a moment that inspires you to grab your camera?
Thank you for saying so. Interestingly, I am less inspired to pick up my camera now than I have been in decades. Some of that is the cynicism that has crawled in over decades of working in a field that has become increasingly harder and less lucrative to work in. It can take a toll on your passion for anything when you attempt to combine it with commerce. Some creatives do appreciate experience, but so many are always looking for the newest/youngest/cheapest thing that it has spoiled some of my appreciation for the beautiful act of looking for meaning through a lens.
I used to photograph everything that happened all the time and I'm really glad I have that record—of bands, relationships, hairstyles, friends who are dead (or dead-to-me), different countries, and my son’s life. First, my music was supported by the myth-making act of photography. Then, my photography, projects about things I care deeply about like feminism, gun violence, and workers’ rights, were supported by writing. Now I think it’s becoming writing supported by images AND music. It’s a very exciting feeling, getting to simply tell a story in whichever combination of mediums seems right for the task.
Photo of Ethan Hawke: Ali Smith
But I’ll always love making portraits! Finding something unique about a person that maybe only I can see and showing it to them and others. That’s still exciting.
MF: What's the last thing you read/saw/watched/listened to that blew your mind?
AS: Well, we’re gonna go in two different directions here.
In the public sphere, the film Aftersun. Rectifying the reality of a father you adored with the reality of the man as deeply flawed is a very personal battle in my life and the storytelling was so delicate and true, the acting so natural, the visuals overwhelmingly emotive, it brought up a lot for me and has stayed with me.
Going in a very personal (humble-bragging?) direction, two things: 1. My husband (photographer Joshua Bright) showed me the trailer for his film about death and it floored me. He’s been working in it for years in the background of our lives. It’s exceptionally honest, beautiful, and the type of patient filmmaking that allows greater truths to unfold inside of you organically. I am not patient in that way and the bravery it takes moves me. 2. My son played Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor at a school recital and had several middle-aged women — myself included — in floods of tears with the melancholy piece. I was blown away to find I no longer have to hold his hand for him to succeed. That he’s in good hands; his own.
I also recently re-read the book Mole People by Jennifer Toth, which is about communities living in the subway tunnels of New York. When I was 7, our subway stopped in a tunnel and the lights went out, which was par for the course in 1970s NY. Suddenly, out of the murky yellow light of the abandoned train platform we’d stopped in front of, a man charged the car and pounded his fists against the glass right in front of me, maniacally laughing. I couldn’t comprehend the reality of what he was doing or how we had ended up there together; like discovering a very frightening Narnia. Jennifer Toth spent years with this community before reporting on it, and I revisit the book from time to time, always blown away.
MF: What's your pop culture guilty pleasure these days? What do you watch, see, or listen to when you want to mentally go tabula rasa?
AS: Oh boy, when I really want to clean that slate I watch some ridiculous stuff. Like Glow Up, or a marathon of Project Runway. I like watching people paint and create. However, if I watch too long, there comes a time when I wonder why I’m watching people create things rather than doing it myself, which leads me down an existential rabbit hole. (Plus I get pissed off about all the waste and then I’m stressed out again). Then I’ll turn to hilarious shows about how FCKD up we all are: Ladhood, Alma’s Not Normal, Mandy, I Think You Should Leave. So it’s either sparkly shiny things or absurd, funny, we’re-all-hopeless things that I can stare at, like a child, from underneath my blanket, with my cat.
MF: What are you working on now?
AS: I’m currently working on a series of short stories that take place in the 1990s in New York, returning to the world of my memoir, one that I know inside and out. The setting is a single block, the one I actually lived/bartended/ walked my child to school on over the course of several decades. There will be deep, dark humor and incredible street characters, some of whom made appearances in my memoir. The stories are fictionalized versions of real people and true events, and the common theme is trauma and how it resonates through the world, interlocking in a sort of Robert Altman/ Magnolia/ Daniel Clowes’ “Ice Haven” way.
I’m also finishing up a new album! I’m as surprised as anyone about that. An amazing musician named Marco Butcher in North Carolina has been sending me tracks and I record vocals and “yelps” and sounds to them in my room. A lot of it is improvised, and even the stuff I sit down to write has come organically and with an incredible immediacy. Speedball Baby was organic but in a very different way as I wasn’t the main songwriter. It’s been absolute heaven to get to work with amazing, completed tracks and I’m extremely proud of the album that’s emerged! We’ll see where it finds a home. It will be released under our names, Ali Smith & Marco Butcher.
MF: I call this Substack MUTHR, FCKD partly because, as a woman, I'm sick of patriarchal shit. Any thoughts or suggestions as to how we can unFCK the world?
AS: Oh wow, my friend. I hear you! What’s not to be sick of?! I wish I knew the answer. I think it's possible that all these terrible, disgusting, greedy, destructive things have always been there and we're just more aware of it on the regular now. That suggests we can survive it. I'm completely stumped as to why more people aren't acting urgently about many things, like climate change. And yet I have to believe something will present itself to turn that Titanic around. Something we can’t yet fathom.
Harvey Weinstein may be let out of jail, a rapist may be re-elected as President of the United States. These things are beyond my comprehension but also track with what we know about society as it has existed until now. It’s almost more surprising that we’re surprised. Maybe the fact that we are is a sign of progress.
I’m not trying to be Pollyanna about anything, but my 14-year-old son and his friends aren’t obsessed with the bloated dinosaurs of capitalism and competition. Sure, we live in a world where Baron Trump is placed inside the US government before his high school graduation. But for every Baron, perhaps ten other young people are keenly awake to sexism, misogyny, corruption, and greed—like my son and his friends are—and they are not on board!
There are huge swaths of people (what is this world if not people?) who increasingly reject the premise of success and capital gain at all costs. I suppose we can help UNFCK the world by joining each other in that camp. By asking, “How can I help?” By listening to those answers, and by checking in on our own levels of greed and unkindness in the process.
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Isn’t Ali, amazing? I can’t recommend her work enough!
Thanks so much for reading—if you enjoy please SHARE and SUBSCRIBE as it helps me to keep the lights on. See you SOON.
xox