The Musical Afterlives of Myra Breckinridge
Our author explores musical interpretations of Gore Vidal's book Myra Breckinridge
The afterlives of books are funny things. Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968) was a smash hit upon release. In 1970 there was a disastrous movie adaptation. Decades later, it was still being praised by such luminaries as Harold Bloom. And then, in America at least, it slipped quietly out of print only to reappear in a new edition in 2019, just in time for the eruption of attacks on trans people under the collective grundyism that dominates discussions of sex and gender in the United States. Myra Breckinridge is a trans woman who decides to destroy the concept of gender itself, thus opening the way for a sexually liberated age that decouples sex from reproduction and so saving the human race from overpopulation. Part of her methodology (and this will become important later in this piece) involves raping an acting student named Rusty Godowsky. She does not succeed, exactly; by the end of the novel, she has been forcibly detransitioned and embarks on a new life as Myron Breckinridge, a boring suburban man who works for Planned Parenthood and espouses Christian Science.
This thumbnail sketch should be enough to establish the context for the songs discussed below. I will forego the critical lit review here. The book is, shall we say, problematic. Myra is hardly a triumph of representation. At the time it was released, the famous trans celebrity and activist Christine Jorgensen threatened to sue. Since that time, critics have been split on Myra, with some considering her an objectionable figure while others read her as an expression of camp satire. It is easy enough to find arguments for both sides.
Recently, I have been working on a study of Myra Breckinridge and, on a whim, I loaded up Apple Music and typed in the name of Vidal’s protagonist. There are three songs titled “Myra Breckinridge” on Apple Music. One I will simply mention. It is an instrumental piece by Momenteum Unicore and dissecting it would be above my paygrade, since I am typically a lyrics person. I acknowledge; I move on.
The first song I want to discuss is from a self-titled 2019 album by a group called The Stunt Doubles, a fairly obscure band about which it is nearly impossible to find any information online. They are from Bristol, England, according to Spotify; certainly, their approach to the material--much of which is American--shows a distinctly English touch. Their album is a kind of pastiche of 60s and 70s style; something like the Rolling Stones crossed with glam rock. Thematically, they seem to be drawn to New York of the 1960s and ‘70s; the first song references Andy Warhol and there are allusions throughout the rest of the album to the subcultures of the time, including a mention of Candy Darling, one of Warhol’s last superstars (and a would-be Myra, herself).
It’s in this context that their song “Myra Breckinridge” appears:
I'm Myra Breckinridge, she says Born on a surgeon's knife I'm gonna live my life, you'll see Fulfill my own fantasy
In these lyrics, the writers show a solid understanding of the novel they are referencing. Myra does constantly talk in the novel about living a life in which every single fantasy is indulged. In the second verse, the singer even paraphrases the famous first line of the novel, “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.” But it’s in the chorus that the song’s particular take on Myra becomes apparent: “I’m gonna teach the world just how to fly away from here / I’m gonna bring your men to your knees.” Myra is positioned as a free spirit, but she is hardly a threat. She belongs in the same general milieu as Andy Warhol and Candy Darling: safely in the past, a kind of remote signifier. The song is catchy and I’ve listened to it several times with pleasure (both in preparation for this piece and on my own time, as it were), but it doesn’t pose any sort of danger.
The other song is the more interesting, though it is perhaps less musically accomplished. Mz Neon is a trans artist from Los Angeles who describes her work in an interview with Chummy Press as “a hybridization of punk rock, hip-hop, industrial, and post-genre dystopia.” “Myra Breckinridge” appears on Mz Neon’s EP Queen Hyena, Vol. 2 (2020) along with the songs “Cop Fucker,” “Be My Bitch,” and “Let’s Fuck ‘Til the End of Time.” Notably, “Myra Breckinridge” is the only song that does not feature a guest vocalist. Mz Neon locates in Myra and Myra a radical, almost punk identity. Here is Mz Neon on the song (from the interview quoted above):
“Myra Breckinridge” [...] is a sort of riffing and balls-to-the-wall song I wrote early on while cultivating my writing style. It’s really just a fun, bad girl, bullshit, fuck shit up kind of anthem. The song’s title being a reference to the infamous book by Gore Vidal and subsequent film (starring Raquel Welsh and Mae West) about a transsexual that takes over Hollywood in the 1960s. It utilized aspects of the cut up technique and is a playful & freeform foray of unbridled automatic writing and artistically licensed absurdism.
Mz Neon’s somewhat jumbled syntax leaves vague whether she means the novel or the song in that last sentence. The novel does not, in fact, use a cut-up technique; the movie might, if you count the insertion of clips from classic Hollywood films in the middle of the action. Her song does, however, feel like a cut-up. The lyrics barely contain a throughline beyond her own swaggering braggadocio. The lines are quickly delivered threats and images, creating an idea of the speaker but no clear notion of her narrative.
As might be expected from the surrounding tracks, Mz Neon is more confrontational in her presentation of Myra than are The Stunt Doubles. The song begins with Mz Neon declaring multiple times
I am the next Motherfuckin' Myra Breck Myra Breckinridge
She then launches into a kind of rap about her sexual exploits. She is, she declares, “[t]he bitch that’s hung like a tree.” As elsewhere in the song, the evocation of Myra is more emotive than textual; Mz Neon, though she is clearly familiar with the novel, does not choose to mirror lines or ideas from it like The Stunt Doubles do. Her description is not a description of Vidal’s Myra, who explicitly has had a vaginoplasty and performs her rape of Rusty with with a strap-on dildo. Of course, the singer here is not Myra Breckinridge; she is the next Myra Breckinridge, the improved model, more radical and more transgressive. Mz Neon is interested in particular varieties of trans experience that Vidal himself either would not or could not approach: the experience of someone who identifies as a woman but refuses to have The Surgery. Indeed, this refusal is a particularly strong aspect of her identity: since gender is so closely tied to biological sex in the popular imagination, it is often supposed that a transgender person would want to bring their body into alignment with social expectations. For some this is true; for others, however, it is precisely the (alleged) mis-alignment that is the source of their power:
A woman scorned Will leave you forlorn And a she-male Will send you straight To motherfuckin' Hell Wish you well
Mz Neon uses the transphobic slur “she-male” as a way to destabilize its power. This approach is radical in its own way, because such insults against trans people are generally sexually charged with shame, fear, and desire. Mz Neon seems to be reaching for the paradoxical power of the fetishized, the potential to refuse to be treated as an object. Her music is the revenge of the objectified.
In this way, she is clearly channeling Vidal’s Myra more forcefully than the mere textual faithfulness of The Stunt Doubles. Myra is interesting, not because she is a fetish-object, but because she takes total control of both her own sexuality and her own gender; she is a self-creatrix who desires and pursues both men and women. She is uncontainable:
[I]t is demonstrably true that desire can take as many shapes as there are containers. Yet what one pours into those containers is always the same inchoate human passion, entirely lacking in definition until what holds it shapes it. So let us break the world’s pots, and allow the stuff of desire to flow and intermingle in one great viscous sea.... (189)
In “Myra Breckinridge” and its accompanying songs, Mz Neon seems to embody this love of fluidity and embrace the fact that such a fluidity can be read as a threat to cisgender heterosexual men. But far from bemoaning that fact, she embraces it: the addressed “you” should fear her--both because she is fierce and because, deep down, “you” enjoy it. The revenge of the fetishized on the fetishizer is total domination.
What we have here are two potential afterlives for Vidal’s heroine, both appearing within a year of each other. In spite of its tremendous success on publication, Myra Breckinridge eventually went out of print in the United States, though not elsewhere, and remained so until 2019, when it was reissued with an introduction by Camille Paglia. Coincidentally, The Stunt Doubles released their self-titled album that same year. They treat Myra as a relic, a kind of camp memory of a time in history when grime and glamour existed cheek by jowl. It is not a bad use, as these things go; the song is pleasant and provides an adequate accompaniment to one’s subway ride. It is certainly easier to listen to than Mz Neon’s track. The song is also, however, fairly toothless. There’s no political punch to this song about a woman who claims to want to “bring your men to your knees.”
The other potential afterlife is the one pursued by Mz Neon, and it is to my mind a much more exciting option. Rather than dismissing Myra as a camp artifact or rejecting her as a relic of a less-enlightened time, Mz Neon seizes on precisely those elements that are most problematic in the novel--the sexual aggression, the megalomania--and energizes them so that they become once more an attack on the very systems that Myra herself rails against. If Mz Neon is less accomplished and more offensive than her polite counterparts, she nevertheless seizes on the true spirit (if such a thing exists) of Myra Breckinridge. Swagger and megalomania characterize both the Myra of the novel and that of Queen Hyena, Vol. 2. But so does a kind of revolutionary verve. Myra is here to break things. In Vidal’s novel she is ultimately defeated, but in Mz Neon’s version, she succeeds.
Works Cited
““Artist Q&A with Mz Neon.” Chummy Press, Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.
Vidal, Gore. Myra Breckinridge/Myron. London: Abacus, 2014.
For more work by Nathanael T. Booth, check out Booth’s podcast The Projectionist’s Lending Library, available on most, if not all, podcast platforms.
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