Thick, scuzzy beats and dancers dressed as giant vaginas lured Saturday-afternoon festivalgoers to Riot Fest’s Riot Stage, where electro-punk artist Peaches commanded the growing crowd. In the space of her first three songs—”Rub,” “Vaginoplasty,” and “Sick in the Head,” all from the 2015 album Rub—she’d already gone through her first costume change and plunged into the audience. She shed an oversize furry costume, half Muppet and half abominable snowman, to reveal an anatomically detailed bodysuit the color of her skin, and she climbed over the security barrier to walk atop her fans, standing on their hands while letting out a ferocious, primal scream.
Unfortunately, Peaches’ commercial success hasn’t matched her artistic success—her NSFW provocations and bitingly witty critiques of gender roles and beauty obsessions have kept her straddling the line between cult and mainstream. She’s a perpetual outsider, a badass gadfly to the saccharine pop world.
