The Map Is the Territory
The song opens like a dare. Amanda Palmer—never one to approach a subject sideways when she can walk straight through the wall—made her 2011 single a celebration of pubic hair: specifically, of women who have it and decline to apologize. Map of Tasmania takes its title from Australian slang, the island’s triangular silhouette being a serviceable stand-in for an unmaintained situation. It’s the kind of euphemism that makes the song funnier and sharper simultaneously.
Palmer came out of The Dresden Dolls, the Boston art-punk duo she built with Brian Viglione, where she developed her gift for giving transgressive subjects the treatment of a vaudeville number—carnivalesque and theatrical, with real anger underneath. Map of Tasmania lands in similar territory: campy, fun, backed by a music video featuring a crowd of naked women in a field with their body hair intact, and the point is both the spectacle and the defiance. You know exactly what you’re getting and it delivers anyway.
The cultural argument—that hair removal is an imposed norm rather than a genuine preference—isn’t a new one, but Palmer delivers it with enough wit that it never tips into a lecture. There’s a line about the seventies being better that’s deployed with just enough irony to sidestep nostalgia. The whole thing sounds like it was written for a feminist cabaret in 1975 and a Brooklyn loft party in 2011 at the same time. That’s a hard needle to thread and she nails it.
What I appreciate about Palmer in this period—post-Dolls, before the Kickstarter projects started eating everything—is the scrappiness of the releases. Map of Tasmania came out digitally, self-released, slightly chaotic, with a video that has the handmade quality of something she needed to make rather than something she was supposed to make.
I’ve always been drawn to artists who treat sex as content rather than subtext. Palmer has never been precious about it, which means she can write a song about pubic hair that is actually about power, and still have it function as a pop song rather than a pamphlet. The map is the territory.