How do you fight back when you feel helpless? Anyone who has followed the news in 2016 has likely felt crushed by the weight of loss, and as much as we’d like to stop injustice or tyranny, our fears and anxieties often hold us back. But for Athens poet and musician KyKy Renee Knight, the intimate music she weaves with partner and bandmate Garrett Knighon for Harlot Party has given her the strength to speak up. After growing up immersed in the written word in Nashville, she’s fought mental illness and rallied against racial injustice with just her unflinching poetry and spidery guitar style.
I’ll admit: I’ve never seen Harlot Party live. I only found out about the band in October when I watched KyKy read her powerful poem “Black Heart” at the Ciné. But that was enough to intrigue me: if she could cast a hush over the crowd with verses like that, then surely this Harlot Party of hers had to be something special. And indeed, their debut EP, I Want to Be Recalcitrant, I Am Just Exhausted, is a quiet little killer, all the more braver for its web-like structure that hides none of Knight’s guts. To commemorate the release, I grilled Knight about herself and the EP over email; you can read the whole conversation below.
When did you start writing poems?
My mom used to take my younger brothers and me with her to this coffeehouse called Kajiji’s in Nashville when I was really young. She would read poems she wrote, and it was this place where everyone “cool snapped” when you finished reading. A lot of readings were accompanied by exaggerative percussion, [and there was] a lot of slam poetry. I remember they had really good sandwiches, and my brothers and I were always really excited to go watch my mom perform. She’s an amazing writer, and she would read really heavy stuff about love, heartbreak, poverty, politics, racism, liberation… she is holistically inspiring, and I wanted to write and perform like her, because she would talk about really heavy stuff with a lot of control and ownership. But I think younger me mostly thought her demeanor, and her rhythm of reading was really powerful. My mom encouraged me to write poems and encouraged me to perform, I probably read for the first time at Kajiji’s before I was 10.
What’s always been the goals in your writing?
I am always trying to describe and understand my environment and myself, honestly, critically, carefully, and responsibly. I think to that point, writing is usually a cathartic exercise for me, which comes out of a necessity to succinctly describe my emotional state or characterize my environment. Though, that is not a hardline ‘goal.’ Garrett and I like to just experiment and explore sound-making sometimes, too.
When and how did you begin singing and playing guitar?
My household growing up was very musical and my brothers and I were always encouraged to sing or rap or write poems. My mom would require my brothers and I to perform original music and put on talent shows for her at home often, and I can’t really remember not singing. I participated in choruses, unofficial singing groups, and choirs up through college.
As far as guitar playing, I got a guitar for Christmas when I was 15 and started teaching myself, enough to singer-songwriter my way through talent shows and covers on YouTube. Now, Garrett [Knighon] is my instructor and has shared a lot about guitar playing and performance with me over the past first years, and he introduced me to a lot of techniques and theory that have completely changed the way I write.
As for Garrett, he has been playing guitar for most of his life. He says he seriously picked it up in sixth grade, but he played some before then, and has since played in various bands, projects, and orchestras. He is also classically trained and grew up in a musical household as well. His dad is kind of like a music historian.
Garret Knighon / Credit: Krishna Inmula
Were you in any other music projects before Harlot Party?
We wrote together in a previous project called Blue Hairpin Rebellion with Colton Reeves of Jianna Justice on drums for a few months, and I think we played three shows. That project was mostly Garrett and me trying to force music out to play in a not very conscious or meaningful way, while we were still learning how to write together. It was a mess in my mind. I would get nervous every time we played because I wasn’t happy with the writing and I couldn’t really play it, but we worked really hard on writing guitar parts and practiced a lot, so it was a positive experience in a way, but it wasn’t right. It took us a long time to learn one another as writers and guitarists, but now we influence one another so much that it isn’t constantly a struggle to write like it was in that project. Garrett is also in JUNA, and I did a lot of singer-songwriter, solo stuff before this.
What brought you to Athens?
I came to Athens in 2010 to study at the University of Georgia. I recently graduated with a BA in Film Studies. Garrett also came in 2010 to study at UGA, and received his BA in Music Performance a few years ago.
How did you and Garrett meet?
We met in an 8 a.m. Italian class, which I dropped because I couldn’t make it to class on time, ever. When I dropped the class, I noticed we also happened to work together at the same time at a dining hall. Sometime while working at the dining hall Garrett asked me to come sit in his African drumming class for a performance. I said yes but then I didn’t show up (I overslept a lot in college). Over the course of a few months Garrett and I became work friends, then outside of work friends, and eventually started dating. He forgave me for flaking on his class performance, and we eventually started playing music together.
Talk about the songwriting process for Harlot Party.
Our writing process is really fluid now, I think, because we spend a lot of time together, and we have spent a lot of time learning how we write separately. There are a lot of things I would write alone, and things Garrett would write alone, that we don’t bring into Harlot Party, because at some point we’ve probably already said “no I don’t want to do something like that” or, alternatively, we’ve already said “I would love to do something like this.” It’s helpful and saves a lot of time, because we don’t necessarily write with a certain category or genre in mind. Sometimes we write parts for each other—sometimes we make the other person stop everything and listen to what we have written for them and beg them to play it, because it will only work if they do and we need to play through it right then in the middle of dinner or at 4 a.m. We get a lot of time to go back and forth on ideas. The process varies, but we trust each other to work and write in consideration of the other.
Where did the name of the band come from?
‘Harlot Party’ the band name existed a long time before ‘Harlot Party’ the band. I don’t remember out of what context it came from, but I know we argued a long time over it in a “we need to be called something” session that lasted probably a few years. I haven’t really felt the need to change it, we like it.
Credit: Krishna Inmula
Explain the title of the EP — I Want to Be Recalcitrant, I Am Just Exhausted.
The title of the EP came out of thinking about interlaced themes that run through the songs’ lyrical content, as well as generally about how I felt a lot of the time while I was writing for Harlot Party last year. I wanted to feel like fighting, and progressing; I wanted to feel angry and have all that anger catapult me into doing positive things. I wanted to succinctly point out all the things and people that hurt me or infuriated me and tell them that I was not the one to cross. I wanted to defeat police brutality and tackle racism and save everyone from every bad thing that happened. I wanted to defeat my mental illnesses in one defining blow. I wanted to control all my sadness with poise and grace and defiantly and boldly decry injustice and pain. But I eventually got so sick psychologically that if I wasn’t in the middle of a debilitating panic attack, or completely disassociated from myself, or if I didn’t feel overwhelmed with sadness or anger or worry, then I just felt extremely exhausted and apathetic and afraid and I didn’t feel like I had the capacity to be strong. I feel like the title is saying: “After all of that I wanted to say fuck the perpetrators of bad and pain, I am moving forward, but I’m too tired to do that, so fuck it,” which is how I felt a lot.
You mentioned that you have some mental health issues. Could you expand on that?
I have a dissociative personality disorder, BPD, and severe anxiety.
This past year I began having amplified episodes of anxiety, wherein for sometimes hours at a time I completely lost my ability to form complete thoughts and sentences. I would have spells of involuntarily twitching and kicking, and experience sometimes what felt like a regression to a vulnerable, ‘child-like’ state. Sometimes I would sit and repeat the same word over and over, unable to break this sort of ‘loop’ in my mind, sometimes I would be overcome with a deep, deep feeling of fear and would panic and hyperventilate and try to ‘escape’ the environment I was in. It became difficult for me to understand simple objects, and my environment (my bedroom) and faces (my boyfriend) became unrecognizable. Other times I would feel completely separated from my body and trapped in rudimentary loops of thought.
Feeling totally out of control, and at times feeling very helpless, really affected the way I felt about myself during the worst spells of these episodes. Even now, I would say I am someone who needs control over my environment; I have to know every detail and be able to place the details accordingly. I get really, really frustrated when plans to don’t through or something isn’t done the way I’ve outlined or something doesn’t go the way I’ve planned, because I’m usually triple-checking the details. Feeling completely out of control of not only my environment but my mind jumpstarted a really low, depressive state. And the anxieties and depression would feedback loop.
Towards the beginning of the summer last year, I started going to see a psychiatrist and began taking SSRIs and benzodiazepines, and I experienced marginal relief, but had started to experience a new depression sparked by the financial weight of going to therapy. Mental health treatment is sort of inaccessible in a lot of ways if you are poor, so that was an added stressor. I did find one medicine that helped me in the midst of a full-blown panic attack that was very valuable in helping me calm down, but I felt like my anxiety was gradually building even with the medicine.
Harlot Party was honestly a huge stress reliever and positive stress inducer with all this going on. I think planning and managing and creating content and booking 3 to 4 shows a month for Harlot Party and trying to work on the project to make it more cohesive helped me focus on something other than the weight of my mental illnesses. It was a good distraction and a good goal, a lot of the anxieties I was dealing with before kind of got backlogged by planning and playing. Sometimes I would and still do experience extreme episodes and it feels like too much, but Harlot Party has definitely been instrumental in positively affecting my mental health.
Garrett is and has been instrumental in my journey to deal with and understand my mental health. I can’t say enough how important he has been to my health recovery but he has shown unconditional love, patience, and support. When I began to have extreme panic attacks, he fought to understand everything he could about what might have been going on with me, and would drive me to appointments, sit with me through three and four hour long anxiety attacks providing whatever I needed, and helped me consider financial questions when I started going to psychiatry. He offered the best support that I could have asked for—and I am immensely grateful to him. I think all of this being something we experienced while working on Harlot Party really shaped the way we ended up playing together; I trust him as a bandmate because he’s really fucking good at listening, playing his instrument and composition, but also because I know we are looking out for one another.
Credit: Krishna Inmula
Where does the phone call in “Preemptive Apologist” come from?
It’s a voicemail from my dad from last fall, which I received after writing “Whop” [a song about KyKy’s dad]. I decided to include it because it gave a more holistic look into that relationship. I understand that my dad is a complicated person who has loved honestly and does feel regret. I wanted to show that he is a human, he has a voice, and is not just a caricature or a stock character in a sad story, and at the same time criticize him.
Could you explain the relationship with your dad?
I would rather not say much about it right now except that our relationship is I think kind of in limbo. I hope the EP kind of goes into some of the things I feel about our him as a person, a father, and a husband to my mom. We were really close when I was growing up—he could do no wrong in my mind — but as I grew older I started to see my dad for someone other than who I thought he was as a kid, and in retrospect realized he was always in part a different person than I thought he was then, too. We talk very briefly, very rarely these days and it is always sad and painful to do, but it is also sort of a relief. I like hearing from him but I can’t help but feel like this strain from memory.
How did the “Black Heart” poem/zine come about?
“Black Heart” was a poem I’d written right after Philando Castile was shot and killed, and I felt overwhelmed with the weight of injustice and the countless deaths I’d continually read about. I wanted to hug the families of every black man and woman that had been senselessly killed. I felt frightened, I didn’t want to drive, I didn’t want to speak loudly or endanger myself; I felt like I needed to go be around my brothers at every second of the day to ensure their safety; I felt angry and most of all alone. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, I existed in 100% white spaces save for myself almost all of the time, and I just wanted to shout PLEASE STOP KILLING US, so I wrote the poem, tears streaming, hands shaking, and I shared it to my predominantly white environment, hoping it would be taken seriously.
My friend Will Walton illustrated [the poem] and put it in zine format. Then Avid Bookstore ran a drive in which all proceeds from the zine purchase went to buying a book called Justice While Black, which was to be donated to every local school and library in Clarke and Oconee counties as a resource for black bodies in the community.
How do you see the state of the Athens scene right now?
I’ve met over the past few months a lot of artists in Athens who are working on really cool projects, in a lot of different styles and genres of music, and have been especially warmly welcomed by a lot of women in bands in town. There are a ton of young, new bands working on new music, and I’m seeing more diverse coverage, so I feel like this year is going to see some great things come out of Athens.
What’s next for Harlot Party?
After the EP release, we’ll be making a bunch of merch, playing shows locally in Atlanta and Athens and planning our first tour for hopefully late spring or early summer, as well as incorporating drums into the project. I want to have a full length out by fall—we’ve been writing a lot and have a ton of material and are ready to start working on putting together our next release. Which I think will be hopeful. I feel hopeful.
Harlot Party will celebrate the release of I Want to Be Recalcitrant, I Am Just Exhausted on Sunday, January 15 at the World Famous. They will play in support of T-Rextasy, Free Cake for Every Creature, Jianna Justice, and Scooterbabe. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $5. 18+ to enter.
More Info
Bandcamp: harlotparty.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @HarlotParty
Tumblr: harlotparty.tumblr.com