Mandy Whore: I Started a Punk Duo With my Best Friend
How moving to Boston and dating a musician led me to create the sexy and scandalous punk duo, Mandy Whore.
Photo: Mandy Whore
The story of Mandy Whore officially begins when I was 20. More accurately, it may have actually begun when I was 12 and developed an obsession with Mandy Moore, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll start it at 20. I had moved to Boston over a year before and had been dating a musician who does what many musicians do in a relationship: introduced me to their friends, then destroyed my mental and physical health so badly that I dyed my hair pink, got new tattoos, and started weekly therapy (ah, the joys of young love). Although this was one of the darkest periods of my life, it connected me with Xuan, who would later become my best friend in the city and the person who would agree to help me with all of my absurd creative ideas.
Xuan and I met while we were both in college at Boston University, but really we met because the people we were dating at the time were in a punk band together. We would soon find that the friendship that forms between two girls when their partners are bandmates, and when both of those relationships eventually turn sour, is one of the deepest friendships that one can experience, especially in a city as crowded and lonely as Boston can often be.
When my roommates were compiling unreleased songs for a cassette tape to produce and sell at their upcoming shows, I texted Xuan something along the lines of, ‘We should make a song for this!!!’. This may be an empty proposal from most other people, but I am dedicated to every one of my creative ideas to a fault, so I pestered her for weeks until she agreed to make a song with me.
The song that we came up with was I <3 Orgasms, one minute and twenty seconds of nonsensical lyricism, sound effects, and anything that made us laugh during the one night that we spent making it. At the time, we both thought that this would be our only song, but I should have known that the seeds would grow into a slew of ideas for marketing, titles, and lyrics for several other releases.
A couple months later, and completely unannounced, I shared with Xuan pages of notes that I had written about my ideas for where this project could go. From the outfits we could wear in photoshoots and live shows, to concepts for whole albums and album covers. The idea for Mandy Whore quickly became my passion project that I was eager to expand and materialise.
The name Mandy Whore is a tribute to the pop music and romcom icon of the early 2000s and beyond, Mandy Moore. We bonded over our love for her and were heavily inspired by her movies and her music to create our first few songs. We’re like if the vibes of The Princess Diaries and So Real were slutty and messy. Hot pink feather boas paired with lingerie.
Our overall goal with the style and feeling of our music lies in the combination of the early-2000s it-girl and the 90s kinderwhore styles. Kinderwhore is the fusion of younger styles: fashion seen in early-2000s high school movies and more traditionally child-like pieces like babydoll dresses and Mary Janes with knee-high socks and punk/grunge imagery like dark eye makeup, choppy hair, and smoking.
The kinderwhore aesthetic has made a comeback in its sexual implications with today’s pop singers like Sabrina Carpenter, who use this younger fashion and imagery with sexual themes to spark conversation and make jokes about masculinity and relationships.
It might be confusing to understand why Xuan and I would want to add to this conversation or participate in a culture that could be construed as demeaning to us. For this, I turn to our respective bodies of professional work.
Outside of my reviewing of popular albums, I work in music history and research, with a specialisation in American punk music. I’ve written articles about groupie culture and presented to groups of international scholars on punk gender expression and fashion. Xuan spent her college years studying sex and relationship therapy. And, between the two of us, we’ve racked up quite the list of ridiculous stories surrounding the musicians we’ve dated. For both of us, talking about sexuality and scandalous relationships, specifically in music, is what we do in our work and school and what we want to continue to do in our music. Mandy Whore is the language we came up with to pursue our creative aspirations, research interests, and sense of humour all in one.
The music is messy and unserious and made entirely with Xuan’s laptop and a single microphone. It’s a combination of everything that one of us says and the other goes, “Oh my God, that’s so funny; write that down!”. And, it’s the product of two years of love-life turmoil, resulting in two years of consoling friendship.