They Want Us to Make a Symphony out of the Sound of Women Swallowing their Own Tongues

Not my title (I wish), but from the genius mind of Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Le Tigre and Bikini Kill and no stranger to being told to swallow her own tongue – no stranger, either, to vomiting that tongue up again in songs and shrieks that rock the stage and shake the foundations of patriarchy.

The title of Le Tigre's first album sprang to mind as I reverberated to Diamanda Galas' ululations one night this week. (Not familiar with the Armenian chanteuse of "Wild Women with Steak-knives"? See more here: http://www.diamandagalas.com/home.htm). She can hit a seriously sustained high note. But that's the thrill of seeing her, that extremity of passion.

So why did the guy in front of me, who looked worrying like corrupt (and bonkers) scientist-president Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica, keep sticking his fingers in his ears? Ostentatiously. Like a child watching its parents argue. What exactly was his thought-pattern: "Oh yes, I'll go along to a rare concert by the performer who famously said 'My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies' expecting gentle trills"?

While I tried to resist cuffing his head or pouring my drink down the back of his shirt (just to get his elbows out of line of view), I thought about Laura Barton's take on the duende, that mythical force of sorrowfulness that Federico García Lorca identified in Andalusian music. Barton runs through the big boys of duende (Dylan, Cohen, Nick Cave, Bonnie Prince Billy) but alights on the whooping, gravelling voice of "lost" Cherokee folk singer Karen Dalton (whose strange story can be read at: http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2040189,00.htm). At the end of the article, Barton says "To me the fragrance [of duende] is of a less violent mortality, of the less extraordinary deaths that we are likely to meet." Rather than the flash of the knife or the other high colours of (often misogynistic) ballads, tangos, and done me wrong blues, Barton alludes to something more fragile, more vulnerable, but equally devastating.

That's what I hear in Galas' voice, despite all the Catholic theatrics of death that she parodies – it's a radical vulnerability that creates its sound effects endlessly out of pain. Not out of victimhood, but somehow from the wound. I want to say that's something women do. Not have to do, or only women can do. It's not a body power-womb-menstruation-childbirth-earth goddess-Eve thing, because see how that chain starts out good and ends up evil? It's to do with our culture, which calls those who feel and express pain effeminate, which associates woman with wound.

Perhaps it was particularly stark this time around because Galas wasn't singing about the exclusion of AIDS patients (Plague Mass) or the denial of the Armenian genocide (Defixiones: Last Will and Testament) but covering love songs, or rather songs of love lost – with the same force of passion and strength of voice as she brings to her other work. It's the sound of the blues, what Michael Tolliver in Tales of the City refers to as "washing-up music. You know, after you've... and he's... washing up." It's the music, in more ways than one, of being fucked – and embracing it. Radical vulnerability.

That kind of sobbing terror and joy of loss is usually transmuted into the conventions of opera, the politesse of jazz, into pop's irony, or the careworn voice of Tom Waits. But in Diamanda's howls and wails, it's as deadly blasphemous as Plague Mass performed naked in a church (oh yes, she did).

That's what dude is shutting out ineffectively with his childish ear-fingering: not the acoustics but the emotions. And they are terrifying. Her cover of "O Death" convinces utterly in the suggestion that Death is going to hightail out of there after a tongue-lashing from Ms. Galas like the one she gave the WIRE journalist who referred to her as "a Goth Shirley Bassey." Instead of making fun of Bassey, a beloved national institution but something of a comic figure for most, she embraced the comparison by speaking of her friendship with Bassey and her admiration for her. And then she cast the Bond songstress in a whole new light that pointed up a not-so-hidden racism in British music journalism: "How can you get more Goth than Shirley Bassey? A Welsh-Nigerian singer... is she just too dark to be a Goth?"

It's not often enough that we see women in positions of power do that thing where they embrace rather than compete with one another, where they come together despite the media and culture trying to divide and conquer by tokenising them. And when they do speak up, they get called bitch, witch, Goth, gossip. Shrillary. So we swallow our own tongues, silenced by not wanting to see the Man stick his fingers in his ears and shout "Not listening!"

Remember it's because he's afraid. And keep hitting the high notes.