Martha Wainwright - “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole”
“You say my time here has been some sort of joke,
That I’ve been messing around,
Some sort of incubating period,
For when I really come around.
I’m cracking up,
And you have no idea”
From a 2005 profile of the Wainwrights in The Guardian:
Martha, who has spent years in the shadow of her pretty and prodigiously talented brother [Rufus Wainwright], has learned to live with it. “He used to tell me that Kate [McGarrigle] wasn’t my mother and that I was an alien,” she laughs.
But her brother’s success has been a useful spur, prompting her to pick up a guitar and enter the family business. She learned the craft by singing with him on stage and in the studio, and they seem close. “I’m going to really miss him tonight,” she says. “But we’ll see each other soon.”
She has a more fractious relationship with her 58-year-old father [Loudon Wainwright III], whom she has described as a man who wrote songs about his children instead of raising them. At concerts she sometimes introduces her visceral anthem Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole with the words, “This is a song about my dad.”
[…]Rufus’s oedipal urges are well documented. On his song Dinner at Eight, a recollection of a particularly acrimonious supper with his father, he describes trying to break Loudon down: “Daddy, don’t be surprised, If I wanna see the tears in your eyes.”
The Wainwrights have always documented their frustrations, fears and family squabbles in song. The resulting soap opera is another reason why they are fascinating: they are a kind of Osbourne family for roots music fans.
When Loudon ran off to Europe with the performance artist Penny Arcade in the early 70s, a pregnant McGarrigle poured her heartbreak into the song Go Leave. Loudon hit back with Rufus is a Tit Man, a ditty about his jealous feelings towards his infant son.
Can you even imagine?
