graphic by kayleigh woltal
For a pessimist, I’m pretty optimistic. But lately, it’s been harder than ever to find laughter. And can you really blame me?
As I write this, Israel announces their ground invasion of Rafah. Brave college students protesting the Palestinian genocide are finding more support in Macklemore than their University Presidents’. As of May 6, Mississippi’s legislature sent a signed bill to the Governor’s desk to allow cisgender people to sue to prevent transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity. And this one is a bit more personal to me, but New York City’s Adams’ administration just literally threw out the community composting program because of — you guessed it — budget cuts. Thank GOD there is now more money to pay c*ps to play Candy Crush on subway platforms everywhere!
So yeah, it’s been rough. But the spectacular thing about being at rock fucking bottom, is that usually (and with the right combination of antidepressants, in my case) a glimmer of hope appears. It may only be momentary, but fuck it, it’s something to light up the god damn pit you’ve been stuck in.
That glimmer of hope came to me in the form of a self-described trans slut rock duo named Um, Jennifer?
Um, Jennifer? is the byproduct of queer joy and pure serendipity: Fig, 25, and Eli, 24, met at a mutual friend’s birthday party. They spent the entire night talking, but didn’t exchange numbers. Months later, Eli ran into Fig at The Stonewall Inn. Eli excitedly went over to say hi, but Fig didn’t recognize him in Ashley Tisdale drag. The next time they crossed paths (with Eli dragless) was a mutual friend’s concert, and following that chance encounter, Eli’s band Moonkissed hired Fig to be an actor for their residency show. Overtime, they grew closer and closer until one day Fig posted an Instagram story about wanting to be in a band. Eli responded right away.
Their approach to collaboration was simple — to have fucking fun. Eli and Fig recorded their first single, “Girl Class,” for free at a friend’s studio.
“It was very intuitive, I wrote the drum and bass on the train over to the studio,” Eli explains.
They released the song with Final Girl Records. Fig and Eli were simply exhilarated by the knowledge that something they poured love, passion and creativity into now existed for others to enjoy.
They woke up the next day with a write up in Billboard’s “Queer Jams of the Week.” Then, “Girl Class” landed on a Spotify sponsored playlist. The stream count started ticking, and there was a buzz of excitement about this new indie-rock duo who wrote a banger song about what it means to be a girl (spoiler: there really is no one way to be a girl! So fuck your gender norms and transphobia!).
“Step one, say you’re a girl
Step two, you are a girl.”
“I had been in so many bands trying to make it, and this was the one [that finally caught attention when we were just trying to have fun],” shared Eli. “What the fuck.”
I personally discovered Um, Jennifer? through one of those Spotify playlists. As I descended the escalators in the Hudson Yards subway station, I head banged along to the crooning lyrics and infectious production of their second single, “Cut Me Open”:
“Baby, cut me open
Take my blood in your mouth
Won’t you stitch me up and
Touch me inside and out?”
To me, the song was the cry of a love-sick protagonist whose feelings were so intense, it threatened their own autonomy and metaphysical destruction.
“Darling, eat my insides
Don’t I make you insane?
Don’t you want me closer
Or are we playing a game?”
But the song has a completely different underlying subtext. “Cut Me Open,” quite figuratively and literally, captures Eli’s journey with gender affirming health care.
Over the course of writing the song, producing the final track and filming the music video, Eli undergoes top surgery, his scars proudly flashed at the camera throughout the music video. The duo decided to lean into this ironic situational subtext while promoting the project: “Fig would do promo videos [wearing a] surgical mask [and holding a] fork and knife, [as if she was conducting] DIY top surgery.”
On the one hand, it’s natural for the duo to incorporate queer and trans themes in their work: “Queerness is a big way I understand the world, and it’s what we end up talking about because it’s a big part of our experience,” shares Eli. But on the other hand, it requires a shit ton of love and joy to take heavy source material (receiving gender-affirming care in a country that is doing everything in its power to strip away that very same right) and create an anthem of celebration and confidence (a song about receiving said care and basking in the glory of being trans with a clear tongue-in-cheek promotion strategy). Whether Eli and Fig realize it or not, it’s their commitment to deconstruct complex, emotionally exhausting topics with radical joy and optimism that makes them so fucking magnetic.
Their most recent single, “Glamour Girl,” also plays with subversion and duality. On the surface, “Glamour Girl” is a sad love story. But it originated as a poem Eli wrote following a chance encounter: while traveling at two in the morning, Eli watched two gay men leave behind their transfem friend as they navigated the MTA’s underground maze. Concerned for her safety, Eli sat next to her. The intense connection and powerful femininity of the moment wasn’t the functional story of the lyrics, but definitely underscored the text:
“She’s got endless eyes
Filled with harrowing surprise
She’ll eat you up, spit you out
And when you think she’s done
She’s only just begun.”
“Glamour Girl can be whoever you want,” Eli explains. “But the queer subtext is there … Queerness and transness is a vehicle to explore any kind of human experience.”
Um, Jennifer’s? authenticity and frivolity in the face of the world’s emotional baggage is what drew a sold out crowd to their February 22 “Glamour Girl” single release show and their April 5 EP release party.
I had the pleasure of attending the single release at Purgatory, a queer bar and music venue on the outskirts of Bushwick. It was my first time at an Um, Jennifer? Set, and I had arrived way too early. I spent my time studying the crowd filtering in, and then closely observing as that very same crowd watched the opening acts by other queer bands and drag performers. My conclusion? I was completely surrounded by queer and trans joy for the sake of joy and authentic community. And it was a fucking beautiful thing.
Eli echoes a similar sentiment when he reflects on Um, Jennifer? live performances. As a life-long musician, Eli’s toured with a number of other bands and projects. And while his direct experience with other artists and project members have been welcoming, safety as trans person is not a guarantee at every tour stop along the way: “Sometimes its’ a struggle, [whether it’s] an uncomfortable venue or being kicked out of a bathroom in Middle America … even in a space where people are supposed to be cool and allies, there’s so much fuck shit.” The community created at an Um, Jennifer? concert is not only an outlier experience, but an absolutely surreal “sigh of relief.”
Eli’s face shines as he shares a special moment from the EP release show at The Sultan Room: “All my trans masc friends in the front row were singing along to a [song about testosterone], even though it was not released yet … it’s crazy seeing trans guy[s] so happy. There’s a lot of levity in the whole experience as a band, but also in the community around us [as we transition together].”
The other special moment from this show, besides the fact that they were celebrating their first EP, was that this was the first show Fig and Eli’s parents were watching them play live as a duo. While Eli is thankful that his parents are “down with trans people” — as he so funnily and casually put it — there were some bumps along the journey. That night cemented an understanding between a son and parents about what trans lives can look like: “My parents came up to me after and acknowledged that as parents, you always have your own narrative of what your kids’ life will look like, and it’s [hard to let go of that]. [While they’re] still working on being able to do that well, being in a room like that and seeing all that joy was so eye-opening for them.”
But the most important question is yet to be answered: who the fuck is Jennifer?
Eli smirks at me, a glint of playfulness in his eyes. He leans across the café table that separates us and whispers: “I’m not at liberty to say. If we start talking about her too loudly, something will explode, and this isn’t the appropriate place for that to happen.”
I laugh, and it feels good.
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Listen to Um, Jennifer’s? EP here.
Keep up with Um, Jennifer? on Instagram.