Leah takes us to another dramatic scene, where tits will roll…
Leah Isobel: Right now, my main job is at a donut shop in an upscale neighborhood. The shop is pretty, and the donuts are too. Prospective customers love to come in and eye the frostings in their bright reds and deep blues, the clouds of meringue and toasty glazed marshmallow toppings, and then walk out without buying anything. “Not for me,” they say, “I really shouldn’t. I’m watching my figure.” I hate these interactions. In these moments, I am not a person to them, but a surface to project their own hangups about their bodies, an audience for their performance of discipline and virtue. (Never clearer than when they ask, “How do you work here and stay so thin?”) They demand that I reinforce their own perception of their body, positive or negative; they’ve cast me as a supporting player in their internal theatre. But of course, I do it too. What are electrolysis or HRT or voice training or movement classes or surgery if not a series of interventions meant to force my imagined body into physical life — to make people see me as I want them to? To change the set dressing, the lighting, the sound design; to recast all of my interactions in a different light? I learn over time: my body is a stage. Maybe that’s why the union of performer and subject matter on “Off With Her Tits” feels so alchemical. Allie, one of pop’s most obvious theatre kids, navigates the body with the amount of seriousness it deserves, which is to say: not a lot. Or, perhaps, the seriousness is trapped into performative mode. The eyes of others appear only to emphasize the difference between how they see her and how she sees herself. A bank teller’s objectifying attempt at sisterhood comes across in bad faith, an acid bath of ridicule. Even the doctor’s promised relief is barred by time (“sign me up for June”), means (“10k in cash”), and the sardonic, habitual self-erasure that characterizes Allie’s whole approach. When she signs up for surgery, her own voice sneers a “yeah!” back at her; her options for inhabiting herself are either “alien” or “twit.” When Allie says “tits,” she echoes the consonant sounds into a percussive tick, a dance groove and a time bomb combined. The bass folds up and back on itself; her voice growls, screams, squeals, but there’s no release. Every spotlight burns. “My body is a prison,” she sings, “but how can I escape?” By the time her voice is swallowed into the arpeggiators on a final line so abstract it fades into nonentity — “I want to be parallel” — the exits have all been shut. The only choice is to perform.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Does similar things to U.S. Girls’ “Incidental Boogie” and “Pearly Gates“: a pop song structured like a musical-theater or vaudeville comic number about a world rigged against your gender, with several vamping verses about one’s attempts to work the system and a realization (stated in “Pearly Gates,” unstated in “Incidental Boogie” and this) that the system will find a way to win regardless, cue jazz hands. Unlike Meg Remy, Allie X is too invested in a no-longer-unique alt-synthpop sound to fully take another genre’s stage, and she’s too mannered about said alt-synthpop to really make it dark; thus, her song falters on both those axes. There aren’t enough verses — this needed a full “Saga of Jenny” suite — to fully circumnavigate its circle of hell, and there’s an ambiguity about how much of the story is trans allegory as opposed to straight-up trans narrative, which might be deliberate but might just be fuzzy songwriting. More critically, the synthpop lacks the edge and the spookiness lacks the horrorcore to fully sell the dysphoria, although it could probably sell some branded experiences.
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Al Varela: Allie X’s intense dysphoria and yearning to have her breasts removed from her body will resonate with anyone who feels an intense disgust over the way their body is perceived. The darkwave production does so much to expand on the constant nightmare of body dysphoria, from Allie X’s background screeches to the bouncing, thrumming synths and cavernous drums. But the lyrics also do plenty of work, especially the verse where even the teller she visits to get cash for the appointment objectifies her body the instant she sees her breasts. The hell spiral of synths and shrieks at the end of the song says enough about how frustrating and never-ending it all is.
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Frank Kogan: Anxiety? Resignation (like, I quit; I’m outta here)? Aggression? The bass clears a path through the undergrowth of feelings.
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Jessica Doyle: This feels like a self-pity-soaked inversion of A Chorus Line‘s “Dance 10, Looks 3.” I am still going to give it a high score, because it is well-executed and emotionally charged and the Yaz interpolation nicely done.
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Nortey Dowuona: Sigh. I unfortunately relate to the teller in this song. As somebody who’s looked at the bodies of other men and envied them, I’d never expect somebody to look at anything I once despised and wish to have it. But coveting what someone hates is easy. You don’t have to live with any of the downsides and drawbacks and frustrations that come with being envied and resented for things you don’t have much choice in. Bassline is hard tho.
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Aaron Bergstrom: It’s been 32 years since “Detachable Penis,” and sometimes it feels like the field of Modular Human Anatomy hasn’t advanced at all. It’s 2024, Allie X should be able to hotswap with the bank teller right there on the spot.
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Brad Shoup: Allie plays most of this so larkishly, like a transmasc Italo-disco swipe at Army of Lovers’ cheek. But the last minute or so is full-bodied longing: the jokes (which were pretty good, even and especially the Borscht-flavored third verse) are discarded like a cheap party mask.
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Ian Mathers: I just want to go on record that I really liked this before I got to the middle eight where the synths start sounding even more like “we have Silent Shout at home” (affectionate). I am not a woman and do not have a lot of feelings specifically about my chest, but I feel enough of some kind of way about other parts of my body and their current functioning/lack thereof/ability to be perceived/etc. that this is still deeply resonant for me in a lot of weird, powerful ways. Plus it’s a bop!
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Hannah Jocelyn: I didn’t get this song until I deeply did. I’m …fine with being a trans woman, but it feels incidental: I just know my body functions marginally better on estrogen than on testosterone and as a consequence of that I have boobs and curves and the consequences that come with those things. (My joke about my boobs is “they ain’t much, but they’re honest work.”) In a perfect world, surgery/exogenous hormones/goddamn birth control/any other modifications should be as arbitrary as taking sertraline; nothing to do with gender or your ability to perform it, just ways to feel more comfortable in your body and your brain. So I love Allie X going “off with HER tits” instead of “their,” further distancing her own body from her identity. This is a deliberately uncomfortable song, and it is very weird relating to it as a trans woman, but I’m just going to enjoy this for what it is, especially the cheesy drum machines and acid bass. Despite the track’s overdone ’80s pastiche, the campiness works for me in how over-the-top it is. If anything, it could have gone further; the “wish I had that rack” punchline is great but not exaggerated enough to get the message across. Genius tells me the verse melodies are apparently an homage to Yaz, and Alison Moyet is a little TERFy, so here’s an extra point.
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Alfred Soto: I thought about this vengeful repurposing of Yaz’s “Don’t Go” earlier this year as Justice Samuel Alito concern-trolled the solicitor general during oral argument in the case about banning gender-affirming care for minors.
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TA Inskeep: GENDER AFFIRMING HEALTHCARE IS ESSENTIAL CARE. Allie X’s use of icy synthpop as the bed for these dysphoric lyrics is more than appropriate; as a trans person, I can tell you that everything about this record feels right.
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Isabel Cole: Sometimes I think that gender is the answer to a question everyone should know better than to ask. There are ways (some beautiful, some destructive) to adjust the parameters by which your body is assessed, but no one has yet developed a way out of the cruel absurdity of living in a world where flesh is made to signify, whether we want it to or not. When I was a teenager I read an article about a trend in certain neighborhoods toward curvier mannequins that might display more accurately how the clothes available for purchase would look on the women and girls who came in to shop, and there in the New York Times was some fashion expert quoted calling the shape of my body vulgar. I wanna be a stick. Who hasn’t looked in a mirror and fantasized about whittling down every part someone somewhere has an opinion about, which, if you’re a woman, leaves no territory which feels truly yours? Taking the pain and rage of that compulsion and turning it into something that rips this hard feels like a miracle. Allie X is the Queen of Hearts as final girl, stomping around covered in blood, making us feel the barbed wire of thoughts digging into our skin but also, incredibly, making us dance, which feels both counterintuitive and correct. Sweating it out as a body surrounded by other bodies is one of the surest ways I’ve ever found to buy myself a few hours where my body is only mine.
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