As fans and the music world mourn the passing of “I Kissed a Girl” singer Jill Sobule, a video of her latest song is going viral.
The tune’s unvarnished message: “JD Vance Is a C*nt.”
Related
Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” was the first queer modern rock song to chart. She just passed away.
Some radio stations banned her groundbreaking music because of its sapphic themes.
Just months before the bisexual singer-songwriter’s death in a house fire last week, “Sobule dashed off a cutting song about the VP that thrust her back into the national conversation,” Rolling Stone reports.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
The song was a “really dumb little thing with a lot of words that rhyme with ‘c*nt,’” Sobule told Westword a few days before her death. “It’s not radio-friendly. It’s not my best song, but it does get to the point.”
Sobule had arrived in Los Angeles to write with friend Michelle Lewis and her co-writer Kay Hanley when she shared the provocative number. The three women collaborated periodically over the years and called themselves Sugar Tits.
“She played it for us, and we were like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Hanley told Rolling Stone. “Michelle and I came up with background parts and we filmed it and I started a TikTok account for Sugar Tits and just threw it up.”
The two-minute video of the women singing is on track to hit one million views.
“Runt,” “bunt,” “grunt,” and “Emily Blunt” are among the rhymes describing Vance as… unqualified.
In February, Sobule reached out to frequent collaborator Bill DeMain for a melody and he came up what he called a “Harry Nilsson-type tune” that would offset the frank description. “She said, ‘That’s great,’ because it lightens it but also makes it more, in her word, ‘insidious,’” DeMain said.
The song fit right into Sugar Tits’ ambit.
“The plan was to make social media videos, because the topics of Sugar Tits songs are what’s in the news now,” says Hanley. “It’s not really stuff you’re meant to dwell on. ‘J.D. Vance Is a C*nt’ is great video to look at, take in, laugh at it, and then for it to leave your consciousness.”
Sobule had the chance to share the song a few times live when she was the opening act for the English rock band The Fixx in April.
Fans responded enthusiastically, with a few exceptions.
Sobule was shoved by one or two women as she made her way to her merch table after her set at one venue. “They told her, ‘Keep your politics to yourself,’ or something like that,” says Porter.
Sobule refrained from performing the song in Franklin, Tennessee and Richmond, Virginia.
“The fact that the song has struck a chord is maybe because we’re not hearing a lot of songwriters who are brave enough to criticize [the Trump team],” said DeMain.
“And humor is one of the things that really bothers Trump,” he said. “It’s why he gets so mad at Jimmy Kimmel or Saturday Night Live, because he doesn’t know how to laugh, so he’s furious. She acknowledged it was just kind of a silly little throwaway thing, but it’s something people will be talking about.”
“It’s not easy to write political songs without sounding like an a**hole or preachy or, holier than thou, and it’s really difficult to do that especially for women,” said Hanley.
“But she was so funny, sweet and smart that you just couldn’t be p**sed at her. When claws came out for other sorts of liberal activists, Jill seemed to avoid some of that because of the way she was. She was like pixie dust.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.