Two Years for a Song

Peaches—Merrill Nisker, the Canadian provocateur who’d built a career out of confrontational electro-punk performance—was one of the loudest and most natural voices calling for the release of Pussy Riot after the three women were convicted in a Moscow court on August 17th. Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich had staged a punk prayer protest inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and received two years in a penal colony for it. The charge was "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." Peaches, whose entire body of work is a sustained act of religious, sexual, and political provocation, understood exactly what was happening. She made noise. The right people heard it.