Amanda Palmer on Performance Art, “Wesleyan Fight Song,” Being Covered in Fake Blood

“I wanted to write a mock Wesleyan fight song. And then I heard the actual Wesleyan fight song, and it wasn’t very interesting, so I just wrote a song about torching the school.”

Shortly before Amanda Palmer ’98 took to the stage (err, floor) for last Friday’s intimate “ninja gig” at Eclectic, Aural Wes’ Waka Flocka Feinstein ’13 caught wind via Wesleying of the performer’s surprise presence on campus. A longtime fan of Palmer’s work, the film major and Static Stamina frontman acted fast: he grabbed his camera, temporarily unprivatized his Twitter, and set up an interview within the half hour in one simple tweet:

The result, which surfaced on Aural Wes earlier today, is a fascinating and darkly hilarious conversation focused largely on a topic previously shrouded in mystery and taboo: Palmer’s experiences at Wesleyan in the ’90s—and just why they were traumatic enough to warrant a scathing (if hilarious) bastardization of the Wesleyan Fight Song.

Palmer finally gives the story behind that particularly infamous tirade (which the singer declined to perform on Friday but promises to bring to campus in the spring; it hasn’t seen the light of day since one performance in 2004) and goes into great detail regarding her lacking involvement with the Wesleyan music scene in the ’90s (“I was mostly too busy hiding”). Additionally, don’t miss her account of the bizarre performance art piece she put together as a student (“it was like a 90-minute performance art piece about my own inability to finish songs”). (For additional reading, Dresden  fanatics may also find fascinating this diary-style blogspot post, in which Palmer describes in depth some of her memories of living in Eclectic and discovering Beat poetry in the ’90s.)

You can watch the full conversation above: interview by Feinstein, filming by Adrian DeFontaine ’13, and whole thing courtesy of Aural Wes. You should also head over to AW for Feinstein’s video footage of the entire show in mostly accurate order. If you missed it, you owe it to yourself to catch up. If you were there, it’s still well worth reliving.

For now, here’s Dresden Dolls original “Coin-Operated Boy” and a deeply disturbing reinterpretation of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”:

[Aural Wes]