NO, SEAN YSEULT, YOU WERE NEVER THE “ONLY WOMAN IN METAL.”
Sean Yseult, bassist for the defunct White Zombie, has just released a memoir through well respected independent publisher Soft Skull Press. Yet my mild interest in this title hit a pretty severe low after reading some shoddy and downright untruthful marketing copy. I’ve bolded the offending passage below, which inflates her role in metal to comic proportions and completely discounts reality.
I’m in the Band charts White Zombie’s rise from the gritty music scene of New York’s Lower East Side in the eighties to arena headliners during the nineties alternative-explosion that followed in Nirvana’s wake, while sharing the unlikely story of a female musician who won the respect and adoration of male metal musicians and fans. From 1985 to 1996, Sean Yseult was the sole woman not only in White Zombie, but in the entire metal scene: bands, roadies, managers, you name it—with the exception of girlfriends and groupies, Yseult was in a world by herself.
Of course, the preposterous statement emphasized above is easily disproved within seconds, as any way you slice it it’s patently false. Not only were there female metal musicians before, during, and after Yseult’s tenure in White Zombie, but there were other female bassists in metal too, including Jo Bench (Bolt Thrower) and Lori Black (Melvins). I’m not even going to comment further on it; rather, I’ll let one of Yseult’s contemporaries reminder her that she wasn’t alone. Jucifer frontwoman Amber Valentine, take it away!
People should still read sean’s book if they’re interested. She’s a nice person who probably has some great stories. Just too bad about that overstatement in the promo. Discounting the many ladies like myself (who maybe flew too low to blip White Zombie’s radar… or Sean’s publicist’s… during that time), I got three words: Lita. Motherfuckin. Ford. Thanks to her duet with Ozzy, you’da hadda live in another solar system not to know she was a “female in metal.” So obviously,whoever wrote the ‘fact’ in question is an alien. I rest my case.
Thank you, Amber. Let’s hope your words serve as a quick reality check for Yseult and the lazybones at Soft Skull who wrote the marketing copy for the book in the first place. (Oh, and be sure to cop Jucifer’s latest album, Throned In Blood (CD or vinyl) out now on Nomadic Fortress/Alternative Tentacles!)
Will this post hurt my chances of Soft Skull approving my book proposal on The Decline of Western Civilization Part II for their new Deep Focus series? I sure hope not!
-GS
