Three of me
Tracy and the Plastics, Wynne Greenwood's video-music trio, is actually a high-concept solo project – but the band still fights behind the scenes.

By Jimmy Draper

TRACY AND THE Plastics isn't just more conceptual than the average electronic act; the Brooklyn, N.Y., group is so cerebral that it doesn't even really exist. The lesbo-for-disco trio – vocalist Tracy, keyboardist Nikki, and drummer Cola – is actually the multimedia multiple-personality disorder of Wynne Greenwood. The project is so innovative, in fact, that it was invited to be part of the Whitney Museum's edgy, prestigious 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibit. Onstage, over sputtering, twitch-inducing beats, the 26-year-old Bard graduate student becomes Tracy while digital videos of her cohorts (also played by Greenwood) are projected onto a life-size screen. Between songs, interactive intra-band drama ensues – theoretical debates, artistic standoffs, banter about the show at hand, etc. – resulting in a performance-art exploration of the creative process that's equal parts Miranda July, Julie Ruin, and Cindy Sherman.

If it sounds a little high-concept, well, that's the point. Greenwood is part of a small, punk-informed group of female and/or queer musicians – also including Le Tigre, Chicks on Speed, and the Ssion – using video to deliberately debunk myths of what constitutes a "real band" as well as to challenge traditional notions of identity, representation, and sound-image relationships. It's not surprising that art critics and academics are interested and that words like performative, deconstruction, and meta are becoming par for the discourse.

Greenwood's art, however, is more than just a tech-savvy dissertation. From the beginning, Tracy and the Plastics has also functioned as one woman's idea of a girl band: on 2001's Muscler's Guide to Videonics and the following year's even better EP, Forever Sucks, both released on Chainsaw Records, Greenwood armed herself with a keyboard, drum machine, and disc sampler to craft surprisingly accessible, carnival-esque dance-athons that proved her stage show was no one-trick intellectual shtick. Her surrealistic, sung-shrieked musings on beards, dogs, teeth, and spines only added to the band's strange allure.

But for all the heady implications of her art, Greenwood insists that it's all about people's willingness to indulge in Tracy and the Plastics' central conceit.

"There's no mystery in what I do," she explains over the phone a few days after the first of her three Whitney performances. "I put on a wig and pretend to be these other characters, my bandmates. Then I videotape it and talk back to it. It's pretty laid out for everyone. But then the magic comes from that suspension of belief, where you are knowing this thing and exactly how it works but allowing yourself to still be caught up in it and still celebrate it."

Greenwood got caught up in the idea of a video band in 1997. After dropping out of school in New Jersey, she relocated to Olympia, Wash., and enrolled in Evergreen State College. Plans, however, quickly changed: four days into the term she ditched academia and formed the duo MeMe America with friend Sally Scardino (currently of San Francisco's Panama) and began exploring ways to incorporate video into their live performances. "I'd make a silent film, and we'd play the soundtrack," she says. "At our shows, we'd stand behind the video so that it was mostly what people were looking at."

When MeMe America called it quits two years later, after West Coast tours with the Need and the Nervous System, Greenwood tweaked the duo's concept for a solo project of sorts. Rather than continue to simply perform music over her films, she made herself the film. "I still wanted a band and thought it'd be exciting to talk to myself on a video," she explains. "It wasn't acting at first, but [later] I began looking at it just as characters that I play instead of extensions of myself. Because, really, I'm a whole person, you know? I can be political, and I can make art that I believe in, and all of those things that [the Plastics] first helped me do."

Performances at museums, universities, and rock clubs followed, as did an invitation in fall 2002 to join the Electroclash Tour alongside W.I.T., Chicks on Speed, and Peaches. Greenwood's participation on the tour, however, baffled many of her fans: If electroclash stood for little more than apolitical, hip-kid posturing and the ironic consumption of '80s nostalgia, how would Tracy and the Plastics – whose feminist and artistic concerns didn't exactly dovetail with those of such a trendy scene, and whose music barely even qualified as electroclash – find a place amid all the asymmetrical haircuts and leg warmers? Shortly after the tour began, Greenwood asked herself the same question when she realized audiences were treating her performances as the sort of vapid music spectacle she was actively critiquing.

"It just felt absurd – and not in a good way," she said. "I love and trust the people who were on the tour, but everything surrounding the tour just wasn't my bag. I didn't wanna be there. I wasn't even being heard. After the tour, I came home and was so disgusted and felt so out of place and kind of empty. I was like, 'Why am I doing this? Why do I want to continue putting out records and my art?'"

In search of a fresh start, Greenwood moved to Brooklyn in January 2003 and began working on her second full-length, Culture for Pigeon (due April 20 on Troubleman Unlimited).

"I was just so ready to start everything over," she said. "For the earlier stuff, I was writing songs more like, 'This is what I feel for – or about – the world.' It was definitely more outside of myself. But this album was kind of everything that was really close to me. I started writing the songs just being like, 'I want this music to be just for my friends, and I want it to be for hanging out in a basement or in a parking lot – no cameras, no audience.' "

The attempt to create a more intimate connection with listeners begat Tracy and the Plastics' darkest, most somber work yet. With drums sampled from Rachel Carns (King Cobra, the Need) and Le Tigre's J.D. Samson assisting with beats and bass loops, the album largely forgoes the herky-jerky, aerobic fury of her previous outings for a far sparser, almost entirely undanceable sound. Indeed, much of the album consists of almost-funereal laments like "Oh Birds" and "Cut Glass See Thru" that, while excellent, aren't nearly as immediate as listeners have come to expect. It's a drastic departure sure to surprise many fans – a response even Greenwood has to the album.

"I'm still like, 'Wow, it's such a weird record,' " she says. "But at the same time I'm like, 'This is the most honest record I've ever made.' "

But if the album sounds different, the accompanying DVD (including a band performance as well as a stand-alone video for the song "We Hear Swooping Guitars") proves Greenwood sticks to the same themes. On the skit "Tracy + the Practice," which offers a fine example of the group's "live" performances, band rehearsal gets derailed by conflicting egos, making explicit the political underpinnings that might not be obvious simply from listening to Greenwood's admittedly obtuse lyrics: "We feel like [the name Tracy and the Plastics] upholds the historical hierarchy of a rock band," Nikki tells Tracy; later, she asks Cola if she's thinking about "the lesbian creature constantly disappearing and/or being something of the past."

The skit, as with the rest of her art, Greenwood said, is intended to draw attention to the process of creation as a way to open dialogue about art.

"I had this realization a month ago, like, 'Oh, right, communication! That is the reason why I make my art!' " she says. "And with Culture for Pigeon, I'm telling people to be powerful, confident, and deliberate in their communication with themselves and with the world. I want them to realize you can talk to yourself, you can know yourself, you can know the world that's outside of you and affect it."

Tracy and the Plastics play, with King Cobra and Paradise Island, Thurs/15, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $10. (415) 621-4455.