Tribe 8 Stops Short of Sex with Chairs
By Chris Meyer
A&F Associate

It's fairly safe to say that, in this day and age, almost every imaginable sub-genre of music has become a hard reality, with the possible exception of queercore gangsta rap. Given this, I should not have been surprised that a band like Tribe 8 exists, or that their presence was sponsored by about half a million departments as an event in the ongoing Women, Music and Activism series. But in truth, I was surprised, maybe because I'm a wide-eyed white boy from just off of the Bible Belt. Or maybe it was because I somehow expected Tribe 8 to be a socially conscious hip-hop collective: wrong. Turns out they're a self-described "dyke punk rock band" infamous for psychotic live shows with fake blood and giant dildos. This was a little different from my expectations, but when you're living in the fast-paced world of journalism you either swim or you get eaten by a bloodthirsty shark, and I was not about to submit to being some shark's cornbread lunch.

But back to Tribe 8. The name is a play on words - "tribidism" is the process of getting your rocks off by humping furniture. They really do have a term for this. Now that you're down with the band's lingo, you can probably picture the kind of chaos that abounded that night on the Scripps campus. Taking the stage in front of a wall covered in peace slogans such as "BUCK FUSH" and "PEACE IS PATRIOTIC," four punk ladies in their late 20s tore into their first song, and lead singer Lynn Breedlove waited about three seconds before flinging herself into the crowd in an attempt to start a mosh pit. The crowd wasn't having it, though, and I wondered how many others had come to the show expecting something else.

Tribe 8 brought the jams at a frenetic clip, pausing between each song just long enough to engage the crowd in banter ranging from hilarious to head-scratching. "We look like hags," Breedlove said at one point. "We actually have day jobs, unlike Metallica." The songs themselves, like at most live punk shows, were unfortunately almost impossible to decipher; the event's flyer maintains that the onstage debaucheries "are not shocking the audience for shock's sake, but understood on a deeper level through the band members' intense personal disclosures." Though I had a tough time trying to make out what these disclosures were, especially when Breedlove prefaced a song by telling us it was made up of words uttered by three-year-olds that she babysits.

Anyway, maybe that's being harsh on the band. They really were fun, and punk can't really be taken too seriously anyway. Stage props included toy dolls and not one, but two giant pink dildos - one used to slap around "gender-bending Brendan" in a display of female domination, and the other worn by Breedlove herself. Another song saw her "stabbing" Brendan as fake blood oozed out of his mouth; repeated attempts to get a mosh pit started finally began to work about halfway through the show. As the crowd got more into them, the band seemed to mirror this, as guitarists Leslie Mah and Mama T dueled with their axes and Breedlove's pre-song banter grew more excited. "Ladies, we gotta make our own pornos," she said at one point, "and show 'em what perverted motherfucking is!" The crowd both roared and laughed in approval. "We're all men or women or whatever we say we are. Don't try to change the way you look," she said before the band closed their set with three different versions of "Rebel Girl."

Tribe 8 has been around for over 10 years, and probably won't be going away any time soon, so if they pique your curiosity you may soon have another chance to see them; if the crowd reaction was any indication, the band will probably be welcome back at the Motley anytime. "They challenge gender roles and power dynamics," said Leigh Jones '04. "I would definitely give them blowjobs."