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At 66 years young, it was much too soon to say goodbye to free-spirited indie singer-songwriter Jill Sobule when she died in a house fire earlier this month. If you’re a child of the 90s and are thinking, “Oh yeah, Jill Sobule had that one hit, right?” Jill would clap back with, “How dare you call me a one-hit wonder! I’m a TWO-hit wonder!!” Those two being her 1995 songs “Supermodel,” from the Clueless soundtrack, and “I Kissed a Girl,” written more than a decade before someone else used the title. While those were her most famous tunes, Jill never stopped creating. At the time of her death, Jill was deep into working on her one-woman musical, F*ck 7th Grade, and was enjoying viral success with a song she penned this year with her girl group the Sugar Tits (Michelle Lewis and Kay Hanley are the other members). What, pray tell, was this hit taking social media by storm? A rhyme-tacular, educational ditty called “J.D. Vance Is a C-nt.” Rolling Stone published a tribute to the artist and her unwitting swan song:
The song really was taking off: As far as “J.D. Vance Is a C__,” Sobule told Westword, a few days before her death, that it was a “really dumb little thing with a lot of words that rhyme with ‘c-nt.’ It’s not radio-friendly. It’s not my best song, but it does get to the point.” In a bittersweet irony, the song — possibly the last one she wrote — was becoming a viral hit when she died. The two-minute video of Sugar Tits singing “J.D. Vance Is a C__” was approaching one million views on Facebook, giving Sobule more public exposure than she’d had in years and thrusting her back into the national conversation in ways she didn’t expect.
Jill was planning more songs of political satire: For another project, Sobule had reached out in February to frequent collaborator, journalist, cartoonist, and musician Bill DeMain. She told him she was working on a group of songs “playfully criticizing people in the new administration,” DeMain recalls. Topical songs weren’t new to Sobule; her earlier “Soldiers of Christ” and “America Back” took aim at Christian conservatism and MAGA, respectively. In this case, Sobule had written one verse for “J.D. Vance Is a C__” but needed a melody, so DeMain devised what he calls a “Harry Nilsson-type tune” that would offset the bluntness of the lyric. “She said, ‘That’s great, because it lightens it but also makes it more, in her word, ‘insidious,’” says DeMain, who also contributed a verse.
There’s an art to writing political songs: “It’s not easy to write political songs without sounding like an asshole or preachy or, holier than thou, and it’s really difficult to do that especially for women,” says Hanley. “But she was so funny, sweet and smart that you just couldn’t be pissed at her. When claws came out for other sorts of liberal activists, Jill seemed to avoid some of that because of the way she was. She was like pixie dust.”
Humor vexes authoritarians: “The fact that the song has struck a chord is maybe because we’re not hearing a lot of songwriters who are brave enough to criticize [the Trump team], says DeMain. “And humor is one of the things that really bothers Trump. It’s why he gets so mad at Jimmy Kimmel or Saturday Night Live, because he doesn’t know how to laugh, so he’s furious. She acknowledged it was just kind of a silly little throwaway thing, but it’s something people will be talking about.”
So sad: In the meantime, her friends, including her occasional bandmates, are wrapping their heads around Sobule’s shocking death. Sobule had planned on returning to Los Angeles to resume writing songs for Sugar Tits posts. “She was going to be staying with Michelle and that was what we had planned for this week,” says Hanley. “Instead, we’re planning a Shiva.”
I love Jill’s Sugar Tits bandmate describing her as “like pixie dust;” that really captures the presence Jill had on stage! A delightful little imp with a twinkle in her eye and a song in her heart. As for the song in question, it is short and salty but with a sweet melody. Part of what makes the piece work so well satirically, is that it sounds like an educational song for preschoolers. Heck, I’m no preschooler but I still learned something in the song — that the host of candid camera was Allen Funt! And then the chorus ends with that decidedly adult lyric, which, if anything, is almost disrespectful to c-nts everywhere. J.D. only wishes he could be as glorious as a c-nt, amirite? All in all, though, I love everything about this story, except for the fact that Jill is no longer here to enjoy it all. If you haven’t listened to it yet, fair warning: another way in which “J.D. Vance Is a C-nt” resembles a preschool-age song, is that it easily gets stuck in your head!