Mannequin Pussy are one of U.S. punk’s most talked about bands. For singer Missy Dabice, having found an emotional outlet, she’s now using it to take on capitalism and find a new way to live…
It doesn’t take long for Marisa ‘Missy’ Dabice to mention it. In fact, just five minutes and 26 seconds into our chat, it comes up. ‘It’ being capitalism.
The singer of Mannequin Pussy bringing up the economic and political system that governs the majority of the world isn’t unexpected. As much as she’s always written about personal experiences, she is nevertheless acutely aware of the greater context in which they play out.
What is slightly unexpected is how the topic rears its head in the first place, coming off the back of Missy’s amazement at how quickly Mannequin Pussy’s fans learned the words to superb new album I Got Heaven, how incredible it is to have created something out of nothing, and to have crowds of people across the world shouting its lyrics back at you.
“I don’t know how deep down this well you want to go with me,” she begins in her careful and considered manner, “but I’m pretty far out about it. I’m pretty convinced that musicians are vessels of the divine. We’re just being visited by ideas, and then we do the work to bring them out into being. Where they come from can’t just be in here…” – and when she says “here” she brings her hands to her chest – “it’s the order of the cosmos, it’s just a divine presence, that all of a sudden you have an idea, or a line just comes to you. You’re visited by something.”
While that’s got nothing to do with the album name – more on that later – what is particularly interesting about it is that so many of Mannequin Pussy’s songs centre on societal, man-made issues. So how does that spiritual element intersect with those artificial constructs?
“In the world we inhabit, there is something actually kind of magical and divine going on – these things that we can’t see,” she explains, taking care to choose every one of her words. “But on the flipside of that, there are the things we are actually very aware of, that we can see – the systems and the way they act. So the intersection in what it means to be a human being on this planet is to observe these systems and governments and make your own assessments, critiques and condemnations of the way the world is, while you’re also experiencing the divine natural beauty of it.
“As someone who makes a living travelling across the world, how could you not be aware of just how beautiful it is?” she continues, rhetorically. “Every single day, I’m shocked by the natural beauty of the world around me. And then the depression hits when you realise just how little most people give a shit about that natural beauty and whether or not it should be preserved at all. Everything is seen as having some sort of capitalist value to it that’s ready to be exploited for someone’s deeper pockets.”
It’s that natural beauty of the world that Missy is referring to with the title of I Got Heaven, rather than anything spiritual. It’s a reminder to herself that, for all the systemic problems humans have to endure alongside our personal ones, the world is still a beautiful place to be born into.
At the same time, the vagaries of capitalism inherently force most of us to forget, or at least not pay close attention to, just how truly spectacular and special it is. It’s here that, for Missy, the dichotomy and intersection she was speaking about comes fully into play. Because that sense of magic and wonder we all have innately as young children – looking in awe and marvelling at things that, as we get older, just become normal – begins to fade little by little, until it’s permanently lost.
“You shouldn’t have to lose it,” she says emphatically. “But the responsibilities that are put onto you make it very difficult to enjoy any moment, when it’s getting harder and harder to just survive. At the time that I graduated from college – which was over 10 years ago now – I was convinced for a while that surely people would recognise just how evil these systems were, they would see just how detrimental they were, and that by now we would be living something closer to what I think is the way the world should be.
“Unfortunately, it’s gone the opposite way, where we’ve gotten further away from any sort of peace or sensibility, or any system that doesn’t just grossly value profits over human life. It’s astounding to me that we are so firmly on the wrong track.”
She tells an anecdote about her time in college where, in a foreign policy class, students were asked to explain the Iraq war using one of the theories of political science they’d been taught about. Except that, for Missy, nothing they’d been taught made any sense to her as an explanation for the invasion. So she went to see her professor during office hours and said as much. It’s an experience she still thinks about a lot.
“I was like, ‘Look, I can’t do this paper. These theories are bullshit. I can’t write a 20-page paper on this. I don’t think that any of these explain why we’re there.’”
Her professor replied by asking Missy why she did think the U.S. forces were there. She was unambiguous in her response.
“Money, dude. Money, and resources, and for American imperialism to have a footing in the Middle East.”
The professor then informed Missy that there was a name for this particular stripe of political science theory: radicalism. He also, with a straight face, informed her that, “We don’t teach it in university.”
Looking back, Missy remains incensed by the conversation and what it meant.
“This was, like, 2006, and it was considered a radical belief to tie anything to capitalism. It’s insane,” she spits. “It just shows how well they thought of it all. They call it ‘radical’ because if something’s radical it becomes easier for the establishment to dismiss, because it’s seen as being fringe. But the fringe thing is the most logical interpretation of the events as they are actually unfolding.”
Missy’s insistence on thinking for herself and questioning things that most accept as truth has always been a fundamental part of her identity. It’s also something that feeds directly into Mannequin Pussy’s songs, though she says that when she started the band in 2010, it was less an outlet to vent her dissatisfaction with the status quo, and more a vehicle for coping with some seriously heavy personal events.
“It was really more of a vessel for exploring emotions,” she admits. “I was really bad at expressing the way that I felt, and I was very good at pushing down and never acknowledging how deeply damaged and depressed I felt by certain events that had unfolded in my life.”
At the time, after being in remission from cancer for five years, Missy’s mother had a stroke, requiring that she and her father become her caretakers. Aged 23, Missy began to feel increasingly isolated from friends the same age.
“Not only did I think no-one could understand me, I didn’t think anyone would even want to listen to the pain I felt.”
That’s when she first discovered just how therapeutic it could be to write songs about it all, but also how societal conventions didn’t really allow for people to do that in normal life.
“Mannequin Pussy became this almost performance-art-primal-scream therapy for me,” she says. “It was wanting to write songs, but also just scream as loudly as I could because I very quickly realised that there’s really no place in society for one’s emotions or anger. There’s no place where it’s acceptable to just scream or purge. I think what artists do is access that pit where everything is living inside of them, and they find a way to transmute these emotions so they don’t spread in your body like a poison.
“I think the person that I was before I had the artistic outlet was much more unhinged and vengeful. But once I learned how to properly look my emotions in the face and transform them into something and understand them, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I can breathe again.’”
By confronting everything that was bubbling up inside her, Missy suddenly felt more free. The shackles she didn’t know she’d been wearing, though not off completely, had started to loosen.
“It’s when you ignore them that the poison starts to grow in the body,” she says. “I finally learned how to properly take care of myself and give myself the space I needed. I learned how to coexist with myself in a healthy way.”
Though still as visceral as ever, Mannequin Pussy – these days completed by drummer Kaleen Reading, bassist Colins Regisford and guitarist Maxine Steen – have turned their attention from the more personal to the more political. The two things are, of course, interlinked, but by focusing on the former and using the band as a kind of emotional coping mechanism, Missy has seen huge improvements in her mental health and personal outlook. She no longer ignores those feelings, but has instead learned to direct her anger at the right people, rather than at herself.
“I’d been socialised to believe that anger is immature, impolite and disrespectful,” she says. “But that’s a concerted effort by people in power to make the powerless feel as though we are never communicating what we feel in a proper way. In order to be heard, we have to be ‘proper’ according to their standards.
“That’s something I live in total rejection of,” she asserts. “I grew up in a time where I was continually told that you get less angry as you grow up, but I’ve not found that to be true. I’m better at living with my anger than I was as a teenager – I don’t misdirect it onto my fellow powerless people – but it grows deeper every year.”
Now finally happy in herself, Missy is able to use her platform to speak up for those without a voice, for all those suffering under the capitalist system which none of us choose to live in. She might not have all the answers, but she’s found solace in asking the questions.
“I don’t think this is the natural way of being that most individuals would choose,” she says, “but the capitalists obviously won. Especially in America. The government was for sale and they bought it. But I think people now are becoming just so hyper-aware of how little representation they have in government, and how much the corporations have.
“But we do have each other,” she continues. “I still wake up every day hating things, with all the big questions, asking, ‘Why do things have to be this way?’ But there’s also not a day that I wake up and don’t feel like this group of us are some of the luckiest people on the planet.”
How’s that?
“Because,” she says, hopefully, “despite living in these systems, we’ve found a way.”
Mannequin Pussy tour the UK through the summer from June 15, including Outbreak Fest and Reading & Leeds. This article originally appeared in the summer print issue of the magazine.
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