Kim Bertrand, a punk-rock music artist is making her name in the industry steadily and her latest attempt shows she is here for the long run. The music video for ‘motherfaker’ is getting praise for its stunning visuals and creative direction. We recently had the opportunity to sit for an interview with Kim Bertrand so let’s see what we talked about.
DMR: Welcome to Daily Music Roll, let me start by congratulating you on the successful music video release of ‘motherfaker’. How are you feeling?
Kim Bertrand: Bloated. And thanks. I don’t know if I’d call the video successful, but I certainly succeeded in having kale for lunch three days in a row.
DMR: The music video starts with an image that focuses on a beautiful blue eye from where the viewers notice you in the reflection. This is such a unique concept, to begin with, so tell me is there any symbolism or hidden meaning behind that?
Kim Bertrand: The song and the video are all about appearances – when we’re looking at ourselves in the mirror, trying to mold and shape what’s there into whatever it is we want other people to see. So, you’ll notice when you see me in the eye’s reflection, I’m staring right back at it as though I’m looking in a mirror, checking myself out, adjusting my hair and so on. It’s a visual metaphor for how obvious it is to onlookers when we’re trying to be something we aren’t.
DMR: Throughout the music video, the audience gets to see various visuals that somehow represent what you are feeling as a human. It is so expressive that it makes the audience indulge in thinking, was that your true intent?
Kim Bertrand: I’m not the biggest fan of people thinking. What good has thinking ever done for humanity? If we didn’t think we’d still be banging rocks together, eating mammoth meat. Thinking is why people started eating kale. We were all happy to keep plucking the little wooly hairs out of our pliocene porterhouse until some prehistoric clog decided to go around eating all the plants and compiling a list of the ones that don’t poison you. And every ten years, since the invention of society, people go down that list and pick a random green thing to hype up as the next superfood that’ll make you live longer and regrow your hair and make you better at sex and rainbows leak from your tits. And about ten years ago, they had gone so far down the list that they finally arrived at kale – something I assume Guantanamo Bay was using to extract confessions from any prisoner who still had a functioning tongue. It shouldn’t even be on the list. Did you know Kale has thallium in it? They put the same thing in rat poison. It’s time to amend the Geneva convention. What was the question again?
DMR: What serves as an inspiration behind making this record?
Kim Bertrand: Social media for sure. Everybody – especially women, I think – everybody is feeling that pressure to fit themselves into a marketable box. A lot of my comedy career has been defined by the stuff I used to do on social media and I definitely felt the pressure to portray myself as more successful than I was, better off financially than I was, happier than I was . . . And I’d worked in new media production for years before that. I was there at the very beginning, at the birth of social marketing, back when it was still called “social networking” and pretended to be a tool for staying connected. But I assure you, it’s been a capitalist cream-dream since its inception. Again, we could be banging rocks, stroking our pet sabretooths, and doodling on walls. But we had to go and ruin it all by thinking.
DMR: What did you want to portray through your video and do you think you were successful in that, especially with how the audience is reacting to it?
Kim Bertrand: I won’t know until more people watch it, but the reception has been positive so far and I think people get the overall message about struggling in a culture that rewards authenticity yet demands constant self-promotion. The irony of this – promoting the song here, on my socials, submitting to playlisters, all the necessary evils of trying to get listeners – it isn’t lost on me. But I’m so profoundly irony poisoned at this point that I’m OK with it.
DMR: Besides making music, you are also a working comedian. So which one is that you love the most? Making music or performing as a comedian on stage?
Kim Bertrand: Well, that’s easy. Because I straight up hate doing comedy. I mean, I hate it in the same way a junkie comes to hate heroin, in that I feel amazing after I perform but want to steal a TV from your grandma when I come back down. I don’t know, they’re vastly different pursuits in my mind. Comedy is all about eliciting one singular emotion. It’s very in-the-moment, and if they don’t connect with you in that moment, if you aren’t getting those laughs right then and there, you’re failing as a comedian. For me, music is something I can make and not care what anybody thinks. I want people to listen, of course, but music is far more subjective than comedy. If they don’t connect with it, no loss to my ego. Somebody, somewhere, someday, might love it. That’s enough for me.
DMR: You are currently residing in New York City, does the city serve as an inspiration in your creative life?
Kim Bertrand: I cringe to say so, but that’s one of those cliches about New York that happens to be true. It is a creatively energizing place because you’re exposed to a lot of raw humanity here. You don’t watch a guy sh*t in a box on the W train at eight in the morning on a Tuesday without wondering how the hell we, the collective we, arrived here. I think a lot of New Yorkers get jaded by it and long for the sanitized, live laugh love vibes of suburbia. But there’s more life happening in one New York block than ten miles of sprawl. I don’t think I could ever give that up.
DMR: You like to portray a darker side of yourself through your music. Do you feel like when you are making music, you are in a different world where you can express yourself freely?
Kim Bertrand: Absolutely. There’s so much more I can express, emotion-wise, than I can with comedy. Like comedy can be dark, it can make serious points, but you can never linger on those emotions too long. The point, ultimately, is to uplift. So you’re always twisting negative emotions into a cathartic, uplifting release. But I’m a very moody person. I need music as an outlet, especially for those complex emotions that I can’t articulate in language. Only music can express those feelings language is incapable of expressing. Visual art, maybe, but even that is often processed through a kind of linguistic lens in our minds. Music just bypasses all of that. It’s some rock banging sh*t.
DMR: What made you interested in making music? Any special memories that you want to share with the world?
Kim Bertrand: My uncle Dan played guitar. By any objectively-imposed measure, his life was out-of-sorts. But he was the absolute coolest human being I knew. Just an amazing guitarist with a really unique voice buried under a mountain of self-doubt. He gave me my first Nirvana CD. He gave me a whole case of CDs I had to hide from my parents; Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, Local H, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins. All that great 90s alternative stuff that I love to this day. In a fair world, he’d be listed among those greats. But the world ain’t fair, is it? The world will never know his music, and I eat kale every day as a form of self harm.
DMR: You have a second album coming out in the next month. Do you have any tour planned out for that?
Kim Bertrand: At the rate I’m eating kale, I fear any live performances I do to promote this thing may quickly devolve into 2023’s G.G. Allin reboot. I’ll have to remember to bring a box on the train ride over.
DMR: Who would you like to collaborate with in the future if the opportunity presents itself?
Kim Bertrand: He’d absolutely hate the way my music sounds now, with its naked digital artifacts and maximum sausage compression, but I’ve always dreamed of getting a record produced by Steve Albini. The man is a savant when it comes to utilizing room acoustics. The record he did with P.J. Harvey, Rid of Me, is so intimate and warm. As much as I personally gravitate toward the mid-less sausage, I want a warm and intimate record like that to be the last thing I ever do. Like all the pretense washed away with age and it’s just a raw, honest finale to a habitual bullsh*tter’s career.
DMR: Any special message for your audience?
Kim Bertrand: I know it looks glamorous because all the rock stars do it, but please, please, please, don’t do kale. It isn’t worth your life.
Song Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQSXCy6eK48&ab_channel=KimBertrand
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