.Malt Liquor Supernova

The Bay Area has an electrifying Filipino scene, and Golda Supernova wants to transcend it.

On a recent Friday night, a dozen slatternly hipsters smoke cigarettes and drink Two-Buck Chuck outside San Francisco’s Bindlestiff Studios, a warehouse and gallery run by a cabal of Filipino-American artists, musicians, and thespians. Wedged in an alley that bookends the city’s SOMA and Mission districts, Bindlestiff is right around the corner from larger, more glamorous locales, but these artsy kids wear baggy jeans and sneakers instead of spaghetti straps and impossibly high heels; they often roll up with Sector 9 skateboards instead of flashy new Beamers.

Inside, patrons clump together on a black riser stage slapped in the center of the room, next to a table piled high with two-liter soda bottles, sliced pineapple, potato chips, beer, and a Filipino eggroll dish called lumpia. There’s a gauzy curtain hung around the stage, the kind of make-believe garrison a child would build by stringing bedsheets over a couple chairs. Behind it, Oakland-based rock diva Golda Supernova shuffles by, wearing a green camouflage skirt and Hot Topic-style wrist garb — she looks like a feisty Filipino B-girl who somehow learned how to slither like a cabaret singer. Golda is towing a mic stand and two babies: her three-year-old son, Micah (who had a Mohawk up until a couple months ago, and is begging his mother to dye his hair dark blue and buy him a pair of Bruce Lee glasses), and four-month-old daughter, Mahalya, who is snoozing in a portable car seat.

Golda Supernova makes the average hip mama look like a pansy. She once took the stage at West Berkeley’s Pusod Gallery seven months pregnant, but refused to act the part: She arrived dressed, as always, like the head cheerleader for a ragtag softball team, and belted her songs with enough ferocity to rival Angelina Jolie’s character in Girl, Interrupted. Tonight’s Bindlestiff show isn’t any different: Golda steps into the limelight wearing a baseball cap pulled so low you can’t see any distinguishing facial features. Her constantly renamed three-piece band strikes up a loping, three-chord rock tune, and Golda slaps the mic stand a couple times just for being slappable. When she starts singing, her voice pitches from a nah-nah-nah playground warble to a self-immolating vibrato wail as her body careens in every direction. She isn’t a singer who’s trying to tell you something; she’s all about spectacle.

Golda is genuinely pissed off that night, and plays it up with gusto. The singer says she gets “a teenage daughter angst” performing at Bindlestiff because of her “relationship to that space” — it’s a place she helped create, and then had to abandon. The members of the band — drummer Ogie Gonzales, guitarist Brandon Bigelow, and bassist James Gonzalez — come from an older generation of Filipino-American kids who helped build what has become a really vibrant Pinoy cultural scene in the Bay Area. So vibrant, in fact, that Golda likens it to “a real-life MySpace.com.” But now that the scene is taking off, they’re ready to move on.

“Success is the sweetest revenge, and revenge is something that I believe deeply in,” Golda says via cell phone while punching numbers into an ATM, ordering espresso, and running into “derelict rock-star friends,” as she puts it. “I’m political, but I’m tired of politics — it’s fucking pointless. I’m tired of all the PC people because really if you open them up and you look inside the core, there’s all these fears and doubts. They don’t know where they came from.”

Golda has cultivated a small cult of stardom here by running the gamut of tsunami benefits and indie clubs, but she’s ready to see real glamour, and actual paper returns. And frankly, she must be tired of dropping the kids backstage.


Golda Supernova started where all great things start: in the Smoke Room. This was the birthplace of ideas in the original Bindlestiff, a roomier warehouse on Sixth Street demolished in 2004 to make way for low-income housing. After shows, people would come downstairs to smoke cigarettes or blunts, jam on guitars, and talk way into the night. Ogie says the spoken-word troupe Eighth Wonder took shape in the smoke room, which was how Golda — formerly an actress and bedroom hip-hop and soul singer — came up. In the late ’90s, she sang spoken-word poems backed by Brandon on guitar. They recruited James in 2001 (along with a different drummer Ogie replaced in 2003), and cycled through several different names, including Golda Supanova and the Supafrenz, and Golda Supernova and the Comic Book Heroes (unfortunately, there’s already a Comic Book Heroes on the East Coast). They also established a floundering indie label (“kind of a make-believe label,” she admits) called Full Blown Soul, with the help of a bunch of Bindlestiff friends who volunteered their time, mostly to hang around and wait to be discovered.

But the vibe at Bindlestiff changed, and Golda’s crew is hightailing from what Ogie perceives to be a new, by-the-book nonprofit culture. After failing to escape the clutches of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, the organization relocated to its current home on Natoma Street in 2004 and became a bona fide 501 (c) (3) organization, with all the accompanying paperwork and bureaucracy. The Smoke Room was replaced with an office; now the prime ways to kick it at Bindlestiff involve restacking the paperweights or chitchatting by the water cooler. “The idea of the old Bindlestiff was to produce shows to pay rent — now we have to be more organized, and report to the mayor as a nonprofit,” Ogie says, adding that the redevelopment agency “promised we’d get our old theater back if we raised a million dollars.” He scoffs: “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy my own space. Then I wouldn’t have to report nothing to nobody.”

In the meantime, Golda took a job at a feminist bookstore, married the emcee and spoken-word artist Denizen Kane, and started raising a family. Now she’s a full-time mom, eking out a living from her husband’s odd jobs and the paltry sums she makes performing in rock clubs and slinging $5 demos. They save babysitter money by dragging the kids to every show. “We’ve had legit jobs here and there,” she says. “Kinda typical: You gotta quit before you become a drone or something. Some months are really great. When my husband was touring with [slam poetry group] I Was Born with Two Tongues, they were getting some fat checks. We always pay the rent, we always pay the bills, we always have food. I think if you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, the universe will take care of you.”

No one’s quite sure what these people are doing, though. There’s nary an indie band in the world that won’t describe itself as “a blend of influences,” even if most of those influences trace straight to Radiohead, the Pixies, or Bon Jovi. But Golda Supernova’s band really is kind of a hodgepodge of personalities. Brandon is a jazz guitarist who can turn a little lick into a full-fledged melody, but supposedly listens to an illogical combination of Django Reinhardt and R&B slow jams in his spare time. (Golda brags that she rescued him, since “there’s no pussy in jazz.”) James gets all his inspiration from mall-friendly Warped Tour bands like Blink 182, All American Rejects, and Jimmy Eat World; he played with Ogie in a hardcore band that fizzled when he insisted on doing big handclaps and bass-amp leaps and generally “being all jolly and stuff,” as Ogie recalls.

Ogie, meanwhile, started out as a hardcore punk in the Philippines, emigrated to San Francisco with his family in the late ’80s, and hooked up in 1996 with Bindlestiff, where he ended up scoring his friends’ plays. When the drummer was asked to contribute indigenous gong sounds to one production, he got so excited he entered an “indigenous stuff phase” that lasted several years. The living room in his condo is still piled high with instruments for playing a traditional Filipino music style called kulintang: a gong made of stacked bronze, and dabakan, which have goatskin tops and look kind of like congas. During this phase, Ogie also studied under the SF-based kulintang maestro, Danny Kalanduyan, whom he describes as “the James Brown of Filipino indigenous music.” But the drummer never abandoned the bands he dug coming up in the ’80s, from the Cure, the Smiths, and Depeche Mode to Philippines outfits like Sandwich and the Eraserheads.

Then there’s Golda, whose giddy ska-pop vocals and explosive personality set the whole band in motion. Some folks compare her music to Björk, but her proper analogue is Gwen Stefani. Not the cheerleader-ish “Holla Back Girl” Gwen, but Gwen circa Tragic Kingdom, when she was still gluing beads to her forehead and headlining shows at rock clubs with thick nicotine vapors and “what-the-fuck-you-want” types of bartenders. Like Gwen, Golda has a made-for-radio voice and a made-for-TV face (never mind the baseball cap) — the lucky genetic combination that some folks have called “getting money from God.”

But even if she has a nice patina, Golda lets it be known that in real life, she’s no less wacked-out or riled up than what you see on stage — apparently, that’s part of her appeal. “My whole message is this huge middle finger,” she says. “Or a double middle finger.” In fact, she promises to promote that message if she ever gets on the cover of Rolling Stone: “I’m gonna be on there putting up two middle fingers.”


Ogie’s real claim to fame is cofounding the indie music festival piNoise Pop, which started as a showcase of Filipino-fronted bands, but in 2001 expanded to include any passable outfit with at least one Asian member. He spends several months each year with his brother, Jesse, listening to the hundreds of demos that stream in competing for 26 slots. Despite finally winning a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, they’ll still probably shell out a few thousand dollars of their own money to rent the SOMA Arts Center for a couple days and provide decent sound equipment. They also do their own PR — the two recently spent an evening aggressively papering SF’s Haight district with piNoise Pop flyers.

In the car, Ogie plays cuts from Golda Supernova’s forthcoming album, Lava — projected for release at piNoise Pop — which the band recorded over a five-day period at Potrero Hill’s Tiny Telephone Studio with money they’d earned selling demo CDs at shows. On each track the band lays a muted, three-chord rock palette to which Golda adds musical depth and emotional complexity. The album kicks off with a romp through the punk and riot grrrl styles of the ’80s and ’90s, flirts with hard-rock wah-wah guitar on “Blind Eagle,” and hits its zenith with “Legend,” which Ogie describes as “our slow jam.” In fact, “Legend” is a plaintive ballad that Golda sings from the perspective of a woman lamenting her son’s death: She makes it innovative and beautiful by harmonizing with herself on the hook. Finally, Lava closes with “Diamond,” a fast-paced thrash whose last line is a rousing Fuck yo-oo-oo-oo!

Meanwhile, chatting over the phone, Golda herself is distracted by trying to teach Micah why it’s not a good idea to swallow bubblegum. She seems adorably sheepish when discussing the record, marveling that the band “actually did all the shit that you’re supposed to do when you record.” For once, she’s being demure: Golda has high hopes for Lava. She acknowledges that it’s cooler to “be cynical and stay under the radar” than aspire to major-label heights, but adds that being jaded and dissing commercialism “has never been my style.”

As it stands now, Golda doesn’t have a backup plan. After all, she’s too grown-up — and too prodigiously talented — to be satisfied in the obscurist, rarefied world of indie flagwavers. Her Bindlestiff cohorts may sustain moderate success or fizzle out, but Golda wants to be a star.

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