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ON PURGE, HONESTY IS BIF NAKED'S ONLY POLICY.
By Krista Lamb
Stepping onto the small stage, a gray hoodie obscuring her face, Bif
Naked stands in the spotlight and, in an agonizingly passionate voice,
begins an a cappella version of her song ‘Tell On You’. The
song, which details the horror of her own rape, is presented with such
stark agony that each person in the crowd seems both enraptured by the
beauty of the moment and compelled to run on stage and cradle the tiny
singer.
The show, which took place more than six years ago
at a tiny Toronto club, was one of my first experiences with Bif Naked.
The image has stayed with me. At the time, I was in my final year of
high school and dealing with both adolescent traumas and experiences
not quite so teenage. There was something about Bif’s honesty,
her ability to lay bare the painful experiences that shaped her life,
that drew me in. I listened to her records in the years to come, as
she dealt with death, abortion, bisexuality, relationships and the other
assorted horrors and triumphs that shaped her life — and the lives
of so many other women — and always felt a little bit of my own
catharsis in hers.
“I do feel vulnerable before the record comes
out,” admits Bif when asked about the personal nature of her songs.
“You feel kind of exposed, naked and raw, but I really couldn’t
do it any other way.”
Seated at a table in a hotel restaurant, glitter shimmering around her
eyes, Bif is a reassuring presence. She is inexplicably tiny for someone
with such a bold persona and she is unendingly sweet. Our interview
is not a typical one, as it is as impossible for me to be the probing,
intrusive journalist as it is for her to spew out sound bites. It’s
like chatting with a girlfriend, albeit one whose publicist hovers at
the next table with her road manager. But unlike many artists, she really
does seem oblivious to them.
“Someone suggested to me once that I had no imagination,
because I couldn’t write about things that I imagined, I could
only write about things that I knew. I remember at the time he meant
it as an insult and I didn’t take it as one,” she says. “I
find it cathartic. Instead of seeing a therapist, which I probably should
have done a long time ago, I write songs.”
Her new record, Purge, a mix of hooky rock &
roll songs and intense ballads, is certainly as compelling as its predecessors
and as full of potential singles. Bif, however, claims not to worry
too much about how the record does chartwise. At 32, she has learned
to be grateful for the opportunities and not wrapped up in critical
praise or commercial sales.
“After I went to Europe for the first time in ‘95
I could have died happy,” she says. “Since I was 18, playing
in bands, that was all I wanted to do, to be able to go to Europe on
tour, because it was such a big deal. And since I achieved that everything
else has been icing.”
Icing that now includes her first feature film role,
staring in the indie flick Lunch With Charles, as a hippie-esque, free-spirit
who abandons her boyfriend to follow her dream. “The role of Natasha
was something that I really wanted to play because she was so different
than the way that I feel people perceive me,” she explains. She
was not even daunted by the required nude scene, which she felt was
integral for character development. She was happy to be able to display
a real, albeit colourfully decorated, female body. “It was kind
of my own personal socio-political statement about women. A take-me-as-I-am
kind of thing.”
I spend only a short time with Bif for this interview,
she hasn’t eaten all day and, though she tells me she doesn’t
mind putting that off, I feel oddly protective and want her to eat.
I still walk away with far more than I could possibly write. As I get
up to leave she stands too, pulling me into a hug.
“Thank you so much,” she says, and I walk
away with the odd sensation that she really meant it.
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