Impeach My Bush is the best title Peaches has ever given anything. Those three words manage to take every one of her big enthusiasms-- genitals, body hair, political subversion, referring to herself in the self-aggrandizing third person-- and wrap them up into one incredibly tacky slogan that means absolutely nothing. (Which of a million things is it asking you to do: Call your senator? Go down on her? Make porn, not war?) Since 2001 or so, hip well-informed urbanites have been trying to figure out what this act means, what it signifies, what the point is-- whether it's meant to be sexy, shocking, ironic, empowering, electroclash, rock music, or just a joke. This title is one reminder of why they haven't gotten very far.
To those still searching for meaning, Impeach My Bush will just be more of the same, though maybe a tad easier to like: Now that the Peaches schtick is so 2001, there's something kind of lovably punk about how happily she's sticking with it. The real point, though, is that well-informed meaning-searchers are just not Peaches' audience. Peaches doesn't mean stuff. Peaches, like sex, acts stuff, actualizing a whole mess of conflicts and contradictions. And it's easy to imagine why that act would strike right at the raw nerves of a whole lot of people-- and I'm not even thinking of urban clubs and gay culture, where acting out sexual contradictions is par for the course. What if you were a horny average-looking teenage girl in a boring Florida town? What if you got the sense that everyone thought your horniness was a sign of your own lack of self-respect? Wouldn't it be awfully intriguing to come across Peaches-a hyper-sexualized near-naked woman, grunting and dirty-talking and showing off her pubic hair, only in a way that made typical heterosexual guys uncomfortable? That scared them and grossed them out? What if you were one of those guys, trying to figure out why Peaches unsettled you quite so much?
Ha, well: Maybe it's "Two Guys for Every Girl", the part where she says she wants to see guys fuck each other. "An ass is an ass," she says and then, on and on, "Slappin' those dicks all over the place/ Rubbin' that shit all up in your face." That little reversal is as close to a fixed "meaning" as I can find in Peaches: That female sexuality gets turned from a point of vulnerability or exploitation into a point of fear-inspiring dominance. All of which she acts out in the tackiest fashion possible-- another reason her act isn't really aimed at urbane meaning-searchers. Anyone who's spent time working through those contradictions in any serious way is likely to wind up feeling downright patronized by Peaches: That's as far as she thinks you've gotten on this one?
The music winds up running into the same problem. Impeach My Bush is without a doubt her most competent record yet, a definite return to firm ground after the flailing of Fatherfucker-- it has variety, it has dynamics, and it sounds controlled and confident. But it also seems not to trust itself, always returning to the obvious tricks, making things right rather than keeping them as disorientingly rough-edged as her debut. Worse is when Peaches feels the need to inject extra signifiers of toughness: Just when you start to immerse yourself in some spooky mechanized clatter, in comes the Joan Jett act with a bunch of cock-rock guitar riffs. It isn't just that it's too obvious, it's that it disrupts the main thing she has going for her-the thing that makes her early singles still captivating on the dance floor.
Which is why it sounds, these days, like Peaches isn't looking at the dance floor anyway. Fatherfucker seemed to be casting aimlessly around for something new and arty, some way to keep the meaning-searching audience convinced she might actually be clever. Impeach My Bush returns to basics, as if she's finally figured out who exactly those basics are for. There's a song here, after all, called "Rock the Shocker"-- after the beloved teen Shibboleth hand-sign for "two in the pink, one in the stink." This feels like a rock'n'roll agenda in the same way that Chuck Berry had a rock'n'roll agenda: You make something that'll read to most people as crass, obvious, stupid, disposable, and lamely salacious ("Won't you play with my ding-a-ling?" asks Berry), and it delights the exact population of young people who need to see exactly those issues played out in front of them. Peaches just has the dual misfortunes of (A) Not being as good at it, and (B) trying to pull of hypersexuality in a day and age where Chuck Berry's already been caught putting spy cameras in public restrooms. Good luck.
