The Dead Betties Confronts Victimization as a Survivor of Rape with "What's A Good Victim Supposed To Say?” Single + Video
NYC’s queer punk legends the Dead Betties have spent their entire career as trailblazers when it comes to ferocious and definitively queer rock music. Their powerful message continues with the brand new Whitey EP due out November 21 via Rotten Princess Records. Featuring lead singer/bassist Joshua Ackley, guitarist Eric Shepherd, and drummer Derek Pippin, Whitey is the latest chapter in the Dead Betties’ constantly forward-thinking career, channelling the righteous fury that anyone with a pulse and a conscience has felt in the last decade and alchemizing it into their most immediate and passionate music to date.
Following the crunchy, driving lead single “Whatever, Anyway,” the band today reveals “What’s A Good Victim Supposed To Say?” – their most personal single to date arriving alongside an official video. With this song, frontman Joshua Ackley speaks openly for the first time about his experience as a survivor of rape—as well as his own complicated feelings about how society plays restrictions and expectations on what victimhood represents for those who experience it.
“It’s an experience that completely upends the rest of your life in ways that you don’t even predict playing out,” says Ackley. “There’s this role as a victim that people in society want you to play, and it seems like it’s getting more dangerous to play that role because people are obsessed with performative authenticity. Victimization matched with the cult of positivity is such a dangerous and repugnant concept. The cult of positive thinking doesn’t make room for people to actually process things that happen in their lives.”
Ackley and the Dead Betties put even more of themselves into Whitey than ever before, self-producing the EP to give it their own personal stamp. “We’re ready to keep doing what we set out to do when we all moved to New York at 19 and we set out to push angry queer music into the public domain,” Ackley says while talking about what this EP represents. “I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to pull off in our career—and now we’re sitting back and looking at what’s happening in the world and realizing that, not only is it really time for us to do what we set out to do, but it’s our responsibility, because we’re the adults now. It’s on us as a society to do better and actually put out the art that we want to hear, instead of sitting back and complaining about not hearing it.”
With Whitey, the Dead Betties continue to shape the world they want to see and cement their legacy as queer rock vanguards, with results that are deeply felt and unforgettable. NYC fans can join the punk rock revolution at their EP release party at Union Pool on November 21.
