Convo with Sizzy Rocket
Hot off last year’s album Grrrl and the subsequent Punk Sessions, the singer-songwriter sinks her teeth into rock ‘n’ roll seduction and we can taste it through the screen.
The time has come for Marcy Playground to step back because there’s a new scent in the air. Singer-songwriter and all-around badass Sizzy Rocket released the single Smells Like Sex in April and punctuated it last week with a steamy and poignant accompanying art video. The short song comes with a heavy bass and some hip hop influences. talking-rap verses act as added rhythm to the brooding, sensual beat. While her style says pop punk, sonically, she mixes the most raw aspects of rock, pop and hip hop for her signature sound. She’s a Patti Smith for the 21st century, representing a side of womxn in music making it independently and ferociously. The new art video for the song sees Sizzy having a bedroom dance party that I can only imagine is done while stepping on some man’s throat with Doc Martens. Or at least that’s the vibe from the heat-lens shake down. In the accompanying statement, she explains her choice to layer the footage with clips from celeb sex tapes aka “our cultural “fantasy girls” who have capitalized in the most extreme ways on the pornification of their identities and re-claimed ownership over them.” It creates a commentative juxtaposition; Sizzy knowingly filming herself owning her body verse tapes that the ‘fantasy girls’ never expected to come out. The pairing highlights that this can and does happen to all womxn regardless of the route we take. She digs back to the root and core of her sexuality, from the innocence of first exploration that leads to the control of ones empowerment concocting a dark pop song. The energy of “I know you wanna fuck me, but too bad, fuck you” with the kind of beat you imagine lights flashing too while your body gets drenched in dancing sweat and spilled cocktails.
“I feel like I'm a hyper-creative person in general,” Sizzy begins, after I ask how the video came to be. “I guess this is how all my creative endeavors kind of start. I don't really know like what I'm making. I just feel, I just feel, and I'm kind of like blindly like something around trying to like make it happen however that is going to be. So I was just kind of thinking like, ‘Oh, like I wanna I want to make a visual for my single and I love this, this macbook, photo booth.’ I had been playing with it. So I saw this LED light in my house and I kind of like attached it to my laptop, um, in a way and put a red gel over it and just put the song on and kind of like let myself vibe. And I feel like in that specific tape, cause it's just one tape, like under the whole song. I really felt like myself.” And it clearly shows. Whether she was imagining people naked or that the camera was a packed stadium, she was fully in her element. “it's funny cause my, my boyfriend, like when I showed him the video, he was like, um, he hasn't seen any live yet. Cause we've only been dating for a short period of time and obviously quarantine. And he was like, ‘whoa, I feel like this is what your show would feel like.”
We reminisce about when Photo Booth was our Instagram and DIY photoshoots with your friends . “I think I was like a senior in high school or like a freshman in college; I’d just gotten my first MacBook laptop. It was the plastic white one and playing with Photo Booth with my friends was definitely like a self-realizing process. You're watching yourself move with like the little hearts where you can distort your face. I feel like it definitely like defined the identity of our generation or at least helped us like define us.”
Photographer: Jenna Houchin
Photographer: Jenna Houchin
Sizzy loves finding new facets of herself but she will not be defined by other people. Unfortunately, music is an industry known for being limiting to womxn. There’s the battle between being restricted and exploited. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most self-love person in the world, there’s an empowerment taken away from you when it’s someone else calling the shots; whether it’s a group of executives or schoolground bullies. Unfortunately, it’s a battle every womxn faces. Sizzy said fuck that. “Like every cliché story has probably happened to me in my career, but now I’m independent. I have my own label. I’ve kind of gone through those things in my life so I feel like it helps them navigate their own situations by watching me go through mine.” For the haters who say it’s narcissistic, she has some self-awareness for ya. “And, they’re not wrong. I do enjoy watching myself dance naked. I think for women especially, feeling yourself, like that specific feeling is so important.”
We discuss how it is to be presented as one-dimensional, so often out of survival. Whether with queerness or intellect or even an affinity for geeky things, hyper-femme presenting people aren’t taken seriously. Their brand is immediately “-girly” and any additional attributes are either undermined or fetishized. “And that was kind of my whole thing: why can't I be hyper-feminine-pop-star but then like middle finger or deep throat in the mic, like raw at the same time?” she asks, not expecting an answer from me but seeming to still want one from the world. “And now I'm at a place where I'm like ‘Oh, like I can embody like both of those things.’”
I mention how Alduous Huxley once cursed A Brave New World’s popularity, hating how his authorship was defined by the one book. “I'm not gonna lie, there was a second where I was, maybe I would even say, scared that my legacy is going to be Bestie. That was a moment and I didn’t want to be defined by this. I was like, ‘I have so much more to say, it's a lot deeper than that.’ But I got over that and now I'm grateful for it. The first wave of my very first core fan base was because of that song and that [thinking] was like writing them off. They're smart enough to know that's just like one little part of like what I do. And they fucking love that song. Like at my live shows it goes off now, so I can't really like, that's the thing about being an artist. Like you can't really like be mad about the reception of the work.” And to her credit, when she talks about Bestie, even how it made her anxious, there’s still a sense of love. Sizzy isn’t making art to show the world who she is. Her songs are an offering to her fans, a seed for them to nurture however the need. She’s an artist for the people, as she explains “once it leaves my house, my part is sort of done, that's how I look at it now.”
For Sizzy, there was never hesitation about her close fan dynamic. Before there was any idea of marketing or strategy, there was an immediate instinct to protect. After Besties popped off, Sizzy unknowingly became the big sister to thousands of young girls who needed one.
Photographer: Jenna Houchin
“It was weird, I had no fans and then I woke up one day with like a thousand new fans. So it was kind of like very mysterious, like all at once, like somehow a bunch of girls found the bestie video all at once. And when that happened, I immediately felt this like responsibility to them. Like I was like, okay, like I'm not just shouting in the void and like making music at home anymore. Like there are girls who look like how I looked when I was 16, like they already had the glitter and like the streaks in their hair, so I recognize them and I was like, I am now responsible for being authentic. Cause I just think about the artists that I idolize and why I love them so much is because they taught me about myself. Like when I discovered punk, when I discovered Iggy Pop; I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’ Like it just spoke to me to see these girls have that reaction towards my art. I was immediately like, ‘Oh yeah, like I need to protect this.’ Like this isn't something that, you know, I take to my record label now and go like, ‘Oh like how do we like promo that the single to them’ it was more like, ‘Oh this is something that I need to protect with my life. Cause it's rare and it's special.’”
Maybe that’s what makes her empowerment so infectious; it’s just as much an offering to her fans self-love journey as it is to her own. I was bloated, hangry and menstruating when I first watched the art video. I wasn’t physically or mentally feeling myself but by the second loop of the video, I was grinding my ass into the chair. My arms pushing my hair around my face (while also spotting my laptop in case it fell from my lap), I was turned on by myself. It was as if Sizzy and I were in my high school bedroom blasting music from a stereo while the self-timer clicked off. The art video isn’t just commentary, it’s a call to action.