This week the Republican Missouri US Senate candidate Todd Akin made comments about rape and abortion that many consider bizarre and offensive. He said that the “female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” in the case of what he called ‘legitimate rape’, in other words: she won’t get pregnant (Global Post) unless she wants to. Of course he had to apologize, but he also expressed that he still believes that the rapist has to be punished and not the unborn child. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants him to abandon his campaign for a Missouri Senate, which Akin is not planning to do (The Guardian). Meanwhile of course, most media will not let go of this story. Popular media in particular erupted and many musical comments can be found on the internet. Like the song Legitimate Rape of the duo Bria and Chrissy. Not long ago they started to use humor and political comments in their songs. I asked them some questions about that by email.

by Charlie Crooijmans

Bria and Chrissy are a very proud lesbian couple. Bria Kam comes from from Atlanta, GA. In her daily life she is a cover musician and student. Chrissy  Chambers comes from Clinton, Mississippi and she is an actress, singer and model. They have a YouTube channel with their songs and they can be found on Tumblr as well.

How and when did you get the idea to make songs giving political comments?

Bria- “We put out our first video up on August 1st, so 22 days ago. It was just on a whim, my brother had encouraged us to speak out on political matters that were concerning us, so we did “Money In The Cayman’s” not thinking it would receive a buzz, but a few days later the whole Chick-Fil-A drama took place, and we knew it would be a perfect time to let our voices be heard.”

Tell me about the songs you did so far.

“Money In the Caymans pokes fun of Mitt and Anne Romney, regarding their hidden tax returns and money.
Dear Chick-Fil-A we sing mournfully at the loss of great chicken in our lives, and how we can’t eat it in anymore because we’re homosexuals. (see also this article, CC).
I Have Two Moms addresses having two same sex parents, and how in some ways is better, but really in the end straight parents or gay, we all the same, and our twist is that we are two mom’s to our baby cat, Liam (who makes his youtube debut in this video).
The Rainbow Connection (The classic song, which we changed the lyrics of) pays tribute to the late Jim Henson, and thanks the company for their support towards gay people when they decided to cut their ties with Chick-Fil-A.
Legitimate Rape takes a recent statement of Todd Akin, and twists it in a way, in hopes of enlightening people that this could potentially be a person in power and that scares us.”

I guess you are working very fast on a song, how do you work it out?

Chrissy- “We do work very fast on a song, when we come up with the idea Bria can write the song in about an hour or so. Bria is the primary writer, her brother Bradley and I help with themes and lyrics.”

Do you give concerts as well, or do you just put the songs online?

“We have performed two times together. We are open to it, in fact that is something we hope comes from this, opportunities to perform live to help make a difference. We both have had a lot of stage experience separate from each other.”

How do people react on your songs?

“It’s been very mixed. Thankfully it has taken a more positive turn in the last two days, because the first responses were pretty brutal. Here is an example of some of the things people have said to us: “You guys are just a couple of trash digging f*ggot psychopath, homosexual whores, cool hope you get HIV bitch.” Let’s just say we’ve never read the word skank so many times in our lives. But it’s when we read comments like this, “You two make a beautiful couple and what you’re doing is helping more people than you know. Thank you,” and having multiple people coming out to us on Facebook, that it makes all the harassment worth it.”

Do the songs already get adopted by certain movements?

“We seem to be getting a great response from the LGBT community (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender community, CC), as well as gay teens, people who fight for equality, and women’s rights movements.”

Do you want to get more and more serious, what are your plans?

“Right now we like the formula that we have adopted, which is making light of serious matters, to get our point across. We do plan on releasing a couple videos that are serious, but for the most part we will remain true to our roots. In the near future we will be releasing original pop-electric songs on our page as well. So stay tuned for that! But for now we love that there is a great avenue for our creativity and for our voice! Many many more videos to come!”

Bria and Chrissy are not the only ones who are commenting on Todd Akins stupid remarks on rape. Singer-songwriter Taylor Ferrera from New York posted this song on YouTube.