Kristeen Young defies all genres and expectations. The mystifying artist has collaborated with David Bowie and Dave Grohl, she’s opened for Morrissey. Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) played guitar on her self-released 2017 album. The artist is fiercely DIY, bashing the piano and veering her remarkable voice into wildly operatic territory, bringing to mind Lene Lovich, Kate Bush, and Nina Hagen.
Young’s philosophy is, if there is no place for your creation, then you must create a universe for it: hence, The Beauty Shop. The auteur created a whole installation piece around her music: videos, costumes, you name it, it’s her world where she stands alone as an iconoclast and pioneer of sonic exploration. “#Me Too happened. The Enlightenment happened…Is there real change, or only a change of guard?” she asks.
“Your Mouth is Going to Get You in All Kinds of Trouble” emerges from that world and that philosophy, a shrieking expulsion of memory, identity, and history. The song came to her fully formed during a grocery store run in her home of St Louis with drummer, Jefferson Wayne “Baby Jef” White. In addition to the talents of Young and White, the song features guitar by Don DeVore (Collapsing Scenery). Young produced it (with additional vocal production by Ainjel Emme) and then co-mixed it with Tony Visconti. Mike Bozzi at BG Mastering mastered it.
The remarkable video illustrates the bombastic explosion of sound in a surrealist beauty shop: a place of manufactured beauty revolving – and regurgitating – around a specific status quo.
“Lips are injected, mouths are covered, yet people still talk a lot of shit….It’s low. It’s ground floor. It’s digestive system; the bowels…Each song on The Beauty Shop is assigned a major emotion and Your Mouth Is Going To Get You In All Kinds of Trouble’s emotion is ecstasy. The fetish (beauty?) is revulsion, and it’s obvious we are living in that.”
The video was directed by Young and Brian McClelland and filmed at Renditions Salon on Route 66 in St. Louis, MO. in October 2021.
Watch below:
The Beauty Shop, written, arranged, and produced by Kristeen Young and out June 24th, is comprised of musical snapshots in the life story of a serial killer, with each song inspired by a major emotion (ie. one song being rage, one being grief, etc.) – and how life kills our emotions. It’s also inspired by the little beauty shop in the ominous foster/adopted home in St. Louis, MO. USA where Kristeen spent her childhood, a microcosm of the USA itself.
“The Beauty Shop is attached to the house. Your forefathers built it. Your foremothers toiled, broke their bodies and minds in it, raised you (in your playpen) in it. Burned you, manipulated you, cut and maimed you, in it. This is not your lineage. This is a foster lineage. But, that doesn’t matter, it’s yours now. Memorize these passages, you’ll have to perform them, disintegrate for them. ALL THAT MATTERS IS HOW YOU LOOK. ALL THAT MATTERS IS HOW PEOPLE SEE YOU. One day, on the very steps to the shop where you aped the operator herself (by cutting your doll’s, while she cut hers) she once again raises her hand against you, but this time you GRAB IT. It’s the moment. The proprietor has changed. But is it real change or only a change of guard? Is the surviving victim only a different perpetrator? The Beauty Shop is no longer brick and quartered, but the everlasting presence of it in your mind feels heavier than any concrete existence. Or do you still feel anything at all?”
Pre-Save “Your Mouth is Going to Get You in All Kinds of Trouble” Here
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