In 1985, ghetto girl began recording ‘songs’ on a 4-track cassette recorder she had bought, using her $39 Casio portable keyboard, a cheap-ass Radio Shack reverb box, a $5.00 microphone, and any other found objects that made sound. During that period, she was much more interested in experimenting with sounds rather than songwriting. Influenced more by Laurie Anderson and Chris & Cosey than by the Beach Boys and the Beatles, she created sonic collages into which she mixed her own acid-damaged poetry as well as found sounds and the marijuana-stimulated ad lib ramblings of her friends. One of her most frequent early collaborators, her friend Mairi Gl’amour came up with the name ghetto girl (no caps, please), which evolved from one of their favorite phrases from that period, “get it, girl!” (from whence came g.i.g. entertainment international). For the next few years, ghetto girl evolved as an artistic entity consisting of herself and anyone else who would let her commit his or her talents to tape. And a definite ghetto girl aesthetic emerged as well: quick and crude, but with all the magic and fleeting brilliance of first takes, twangy out-of-tune guitars laid over a poppers disco beat, and a peculiar lyrical style that paid little attention to gender pronouns or shifts in person. In her willful ignorance of traditional song structure, ghetto girl truly did create some amazingly trippy “music for stoned queers” as she then characterized her music.

The “second era” in ghetto girl’s career began in 1989 when she met Christian Matthews and a whole new world of home-recording possibilities opened up to me. Christian, too, had been recording his own songs and those of his friends since he was nine years old, and was much more technically adept at it than ghetto girl. Furthermore, he was much more of a musical traditionalist, composing perfect pop-ditties, whereas ghetto girl didn’t even know what a “bridge” in a song was! Within a matter of weeks after meeting each other, they were recording together; inspired by Christian’s songcraft, and enraptured by new love, ghetto girl began to move in a more song-oriented direction. Now she was actually writing songs with verses, choruses, and harmony vocals (“All Alone in Her World”, “Full ‘o’ Shit”) and even her songs without a traditional structure at least had a melody (“Again”). Yet key aspects of the ghetto girl aesthetic remained intact, as evidenced by the found sounds in the dance-oriented “I’ll Never Be a Fag” and “Lose Weight Deliciously”, the gender-bending of “Mary-Goes-Round” and “Tranzmergance”, and the all-out freaky aural experimentation of “Give Her a Haldol”. As the years rolled by, she and Chris were able to buy more recording equipment, and as Chris' talent and skills in audio production developed from a hobby into a career, ghetto girl (and many others) reaped the benefits of his growth, resulting in recordings that were nearly professional in quality, yet recorded entirely at home on four tracks (“Doppelganger”, “AZT-3-Day-Illness”). From the very beginning, ghetto girl was conceived as a collective, and although she has had less hands-on involvement in the engineering of the recordings as time has passed, she remains firmly in control of ghetto girl’s artistic vision, and has had to battle with Chris over, for example, whether it is appropriate to write a song about one’s AIDS medications. Ultimately, the music benefits from this collaboration, and ghetto girl has thus far produced four full-length recordings that document this remarkable creative output. (But she's still not sure if she ever wrote a song with a bridge!)