In the year of riot grrrl, New York four-piece Luscious Jackson carved out a fascinating niche for themselves which owed less to Bikini Kill and more to gangsta rap. Daughters of the Kaos is a work of subversive brilliance which manages to both demonstrate female power within a male dominated song subject (violence/crime) and show that you can get away with morally questionable sentiments in a song if you drape them in softly sung/spoken trimmings. Throw in the mariachi cum flamenco style guitar riffs, Lalo Schifrin style drum beats and the street flavour vibe that bubbles away underneath the track, and you get a song that has me offering up everything I own without any of the band needing to pull out the six-guns mentioned by Jill Cunniff.
Daughters of the Kaos hits a sweet spot in that it doesn’t glamorise the lifestyle it’s singing about, but it also makes clear that if you’re born into crime, it needs the guiding hand of a woman to both keep you alive and allow you to thrive in that environment:
Never leave a child alone in a world like this.
He’ll play with bombs and always miss.
He’ll make a girl pick up a gun.
So she can show him how it’s done.
While not completely misandrist, the song makes clear that men are tolerated until a point that they’re no longer required:
Always give shelter to a man in need.
In the face of chaos I give up my greed.
Insane and unknown is my only creed.
Enjoy, destroy then set you free.
It’s wonderful, thrilling stuff - a product of its time and politics, yet set slightly apart from it. It shares riot grrrl’s female empowerment ethos, but acknowledges that they may need to fight dirty and with something stronger than an Andrea Dworkin paperback in their back pocket if they’re going to enjoy the spoils that men took as their right.
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