ROCKRGRL, Fall 2003
Nomy Lamm: Punk Rock Accordion-Playing Disco Diva
By Jojoboy

“One of the greatest challenges to myself from the universe is to live within fractured identities. There’s not any specific identity that I can stand one hundred percent firmly inside of, and that gives me a deeper perspective to understand things from.”

So says Nomy Lamm, the self-described “Fat-ass, bad-ass, Jew dyke amputee,” who’s unclogging our heads of all the filthy ideas we’ve swallowed about ourselves. She’s offering up some gorgeous alternatives, too.Lamm’s zines and theatrical lectures on fat oppression (the latter of which finds her dressed in fairy wings and waving a magic wand) got her mad props from Ms. Magazine in 1997, when she was cited as one of their Women of the Year. She’s also rocked it on the Sister Spit spoken word tour, and popped up in everything from indie movies to medicine shows.

But it’s her music that this child of musical-theater-gone-punk calls home. Her solo debut Anthem was released in 2000 and, with its mix of revolution-minded themes and haunting, soaring, soulful vocals, instantly became a classic within the Olympia punk scene. She followed it up later that year with The Transfused, a soundtrack to the acclaimed anti-corporate rock musical she co-wrote with the Need.

Now, three years later, Lamm is back with a new album, Effigy. Though she remains ever bit the self-created bad-ass diva, things are very different now. “The effigy is the representation of the self,” she explains of the title track. “The album documents a really intense process I was going through in facing my fears, who I was in the world, letting go of the ideas that dictate my behaviors, and just letting myself be how I am. As a Virgo with a super analytical, tightly controlled brain, ‘free your mind’ was really literal for me. I couldn’t function anymore within the rules and assumptions I’d set for myself and been conditioned with. So, ‘you free your mind/ you free your effigy” is about opening things up inside for new experiences and ways of perceiving the world. It’s about letting go of expectations, so we can learn how to be in the moment and live in a way that feels authentic.”

The album also marks a sharp shift in focus from an external concept of revolution to an internal one. “I pretty much had a nervous breakdown when I finished The Transfused. I had worked myself so hard and completely ignored my body,” Lamm says. “I was totally dissociated. There was a point where I started having visions of myself falling down the stairs. I went through a couple of really introspective, really magical, painful years of delving into it. It helped me understand the effects of industrialization, colonization, brainwashing, patriarchy – things I’d been politically analyzing from a dissociated perspective.”

As ever, Lamm’s hurricane vocals take center stage on the new album. Still, there’s a huge sonic difference between Anthem’s charred punk operatics and Effigy’s sleek electronica thump. “What I’m doing now is total disco-pop,” she says. “It’s still punk because it was created through punk channels using punk ethics.” This
is made clear on tracks like, “Not a Girl,” which moves wild booty and rebels against societal brainwashing all at once.“I figure my music will just keep changing depending on who I’m working with and what equipment I have access to,” she says of the new sound. “Programming on a drum machine makes it a lot easier to be a one-person band.”

Then there’s her accordion, a most unlikely candidate to propel a fierce disco record, but an instrument which Lamm pumps through Effigy and rocks the dance floor with live. “Playing the accordion changes what I do a lot,” she explains. “I just got a new one, and it’s so beautiful.” While drum machines and accordion accompany her during smaller shows, they are only part of her Effigy Extravaganza, a full-on production with elaborate costumes, dancers and set changes. Think Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour gone totally DIY.

Lamm initially had reservations about how a show with huge production values would be received. She was quick to tell potential collaborators that it was not a pop parody. “When I was first conceptualizing this show and trying to explain it to people, I was afraid people would get hung up on the ‘freak show’ aspect of it. ‘Oh, it’s ironic because a fat amputee could never be a superstar,’” she says. But as the team came together she felt less defensive about it, and the fact is, Lamm already is a superstar.

She’s made it this far because she’s been singing that “freak show” aspect loudly and proudly since the beginning. “My art, activism and writing came out of a community that focused on identity politics,” Lamm says. “I found that it was powerful and got people’s attention to list identities like that. The different ways people
respond is funny sometimes. They’re like ‘Oh, don’t say that bad stuff about yourself.’ I try to explain that it’s just a description, that none of those terms imply a value judgment to me. If they have a negative reaction to those words, that’s their issue to deal with. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just be known as a ‘musician’ or a ‘writer,’ but I also think the title helps me reach a lot of people who I wouldn’t otherwise.”

Though she’s inspired by a wide range of spiritual practices, from Buddhism to “the mystical arts,” Judaism is one that she finds herself coming back to. “My Jewishness is an ethnicity, culture, spiritual heritage, community and political framework,” Lamm says. “In many ways it has been a source of strength and belonging for me in the world. It’s also been a source of pain and alienation. I was the only Jew in my entire elementary school, I’ve been the victim of anti-Jewish hate crimes, and I grew up with the pain of the Holocaust hanging over my head. At the same time, I was raised in a very white community with access to a lot of privilege, where Jewishness was spoken of as a religion and wasn’t particularly racialized. I was taught a lot of middle class, white liberal values about being ‘accepting’ and
‘celebrating diversity.’ This kind of conditioning is cool in some ways, but can be false when you’re operating in the context of a predominantly white community and living on colonized land.”

This is why Lamm currently identifies as a “white-girl Jew,” claiming both white and minority identity in a punk scene that, like her birth community, constantly checks itself around issues of race and racism, but is challenged when it comes to actually integrating people of color. (“You may be the first person of color I’ve ever heard really commend white punks for the work they’ve done around race,” she tells me at one point. “It’s a nice thing to hear.”) The hope is that as she learns to balance seeming contradictions within herself, the integration process will spill over into her work and inspire us to do the same. Effigy brilliantly lays the groundwork.

On the road, she integrates her personal life with her life in the spotlight, interruptin a show to whip out a cell phone and call her sweetheart from the stage. “I’ve got a birthday song for you,” she says, and then to the audience, “Can y’all make some noise?” One song and some wild applause later, she’s saying into the receiver, “Aw thanks, I love you too! But I have to go now because, you know, I’m in the middle of a concert.”

Even the drunk frat boy who’s been yelling “Hey, baby!” from the front row seems touched. By the show’s end, he’s watching with awe-struck respect. “I have ideas about the impact I want to have on the world and what I want to do before I leave it,” Lamm says. “It is kind of crazy and maybe delusional, but a lot of it has already come true. Yeah, I know I want a lot. I always want a lot. But I usually find what I need, so I have faith that I will get it when I’m ready.”