Y Pants were an American all-female no wave band from New York City active from 1979 to 1982. The trio, made up of photographer/musician

Barbara Ess Barbara Ess (born Barbara Eileen Schwartz; April 4, 1944 – March 4, 2021) was an American photographer. She often used a pinhole camera and was known for her No Wave musical and editorial work. Education Ess earned a B.A. at the University of ...

, visual artist Virginia Piersol (aka Virge Piersol), and filmmaker Gail Vachon, developed a unique sound via their acoustic toy instrumentation of

toy piano The toy piano, also known as the ''kinderklavier'' (child's keyboard), is a small piano-like musical instrument. Most modern toy pianos use round metal rods, as opposed to strings in a regular piano, to produce sound. The U.S. Library of Congress ...

ukulele The ukulele ( ; from haw, ukulele , approximately ), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings. The tone and volume of the instrumen ...

and a paper-headed

Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse is an animated cartoon Character (arts), character co-created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. The longtime mascot of The Walt Disney Company, Mickey is an Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic mouse who typically wears red sho ...

drum kit, augmented by electric bass guitar,

Casio keyboard The CZ series is a family of low-cost phase distortion synthesizers produced by Casio in the mid-1980s. Eight models of CZ synthesizers were released: the CZ-101, CZ-230S, CZ-1000, CZ-2000S, CZ-2600S, CZ-3000, CZ-5000, and the CZ-1. Additionally, ...

s and various low-tech effects. Y Pants' feminist poetics and toy instrumentation made them a hit in

Manhattans Manhattoe/Manhattoes is a term describing a place and, mistakenly, a people. The location was the very southern tip of the Manhattan island during the time of the Dutch colonization of the Americas at what became New Amsterdam there. The people ...

's art gallery scene, while their No Wave clout brought them to be regulars at punk rock venues like

CBGB's CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan's East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters ''CBGB'' were for '' Country'', '' BlueGrass'', and '' Blues'', Kri ...

. In 1980,

Glenn Branca Glenn may refer to: Name or surname * Glenn (name) * John Glenn, U.S. astronaut Cultivars * Glenn (mango) * a 6-row barley variety Places In the United States: * Glenn, California * Glenn County, California * Glenn, Georgia, a settleme ...

recorded their debut 4-song EP for

99 Records 99 Records was an American independent record label, active from 1980 to 1984. The label was home to musicians in the no wave, post-punk, post-disco, and avant-garde scenes in New York City. History British designer Gina Franklyn sold British fa ...

, followed by an LP two years later.Masters, Marc. ''No Wave''. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007, p. 203 Lyrically, most of the Y-Pants' material covered the off-kilter aspects of relationships, with explorations into the perils of laundry ("Favorite Sweater"), materialism ("We Have Everything"), patriarchy ("That's The Way Boys Are"), and a reworking of

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

's "Barbara's Song" from '' Threepenny Opera''. Musically they have been compared to their British

post-punk Post-punk (originally called new musick) is a broad genre of punk music that emerged in the late 1970s as musicians departed from punk's traditional elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and non-roc ...

contemporaries

The Raincoats The Raincoats are a British experimental post-punk band. Ana da Silva (vocals, guitar) and Gina Birch (vocals, bass) formed the group in 1977 while they were students at Hornsey College of Art in London. Signed to the label Rough Trade, the ...

for their overlapping vocal choruses and kitchen-sinkish approach to sound, rhythm and composition. Novelist and critic

Lynne Tillman Lynne Tillman (born January 1, 1947) is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Cri ...

wrote the lyrics for the band's song "Obvious." Y-Pants disbanded shortly after the release of their album, reportedly reuniting each year on the various band members' birthdays. Barbara Ess remained musically active throughout the 1980s, frequently contributing tracks to ''

Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the ''Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine'' utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity f ...

'' and collaborating with Peggy Ahwesh on 2001's ''Radio Guitar'' for the

Ecstatic Peace! Ecstatic Peace! is a record label based in Easthampton, Massachusetts, founded in 1981 by American musician Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. The label name is borrowed from a line in Tom Wolfe's 1968 nonfiction novel '' The Electric Kool-Aid Aci ...

label.

Discography

* "Little Music EP" (

, 1980) * ''Beat It Down'' LP (

Neutral Records Neutral Records is an independent record label. Glenn Branca ran the label during the No Wave and post-punk scene in the Lower East Side, New York City, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among their releases were early records by Swans and th ...

, 1982) * "Magnetic Attraction" (song recorded in 1980 and released in 1988 on ''

'' No. 21: "Audio By Visual Artists"') * ''Y Pants'' CD (Periodic Document, 1998, collects all of the above recordings)

References

{{Reflist

External links

Y Pants – "Magnetic Attraction", 1980, Gail Vachon: ukulele; Barbara Ess: bass; Verge Piersol. drums, Vocals: all. (3:11)
on

No wave groups All-female punk bands American art rock groups American post-punk music groups