Katie Alice Greer, the former lead vocalist of Washington D.C. punk band Priests, recently released her full-length solo debut Barbarism. Greer wrote, produced, and recorded the entire album herself.
She previously released music using her initials KAG, but in an NPR interview she mentioned the reasons for the change:
“It’s two reasons. The first one being I started getting an uptick in people following me, especially on Twitter, who seemed to be into “MAGA” this, Trump that. I was kind of scratching my head because I’m pretty vocally opposed to that stuff, but it’s not like I’m some famous person who might be the target of Trump trolls. I finally realized it’s because #KAG, my initials, for them means “Keep America Great.””
“That coupled with the fact that a lot of times I felt bad about taking individual credit for my creative work. There’s just something about that that’s always made me a little uncomfortable. And I’m often drawn to doing things that make me uncomfortable in my creative work, because that’s one of the best ways for me to figure out what’s going on in my head. The idea that putting it out in my own full name scared me also drew me to wanting to do it.”
With her work with Priests and other projects, she is no stranger to social commentary. That is definitely the case with her debut album. It was influenced by the current social and political climate.
An example of this is the lead single and opening track “FITS/My Love Can’t Be.” The origins of the tune can be traced back to May 2020, at the height of pandemic isolation and Black Lives Matter protests. Greer made the following statement:
“I’d spent something like 70 days mostly alone since the pandemic started. Then one weekend I biked out to Fairfax Avenue and found myself amongst thousands of people. It was jarring … To go from mostly the stillness of a barely-lived-in bedroom to projectile shopping carts, strangers chanting, phalanxes of beige gun toters, and tanks parallel parked outside luxury underwear and grocery shops on Melrose. Stuff was on fire. I think I listened to Exile On Main Street headed home, because it’s similarly contradictory and complicated mixture of emotions felt resonant. I wanted to try and capture all that I was feeling without so much as re-telling events that inspired the emotions themselves.”
A video was made for the song, with Greer playing a correspondent on the “Barbarism News Network.” “I’m not a journalist, but maybe to underscore the contrast between a reporter and a storyteller, I wanted to make a Network Howard Beale-inspired music video to visually communicate the cacophony of feeling,” Greer stated.
Despite her claim, Greer has created a potent example of musical journalism.