. It was 2006 and both the British music magazine and Ditto’s band Gossip were at the height of their powers.
Beth Ditto grew up poor in the God-loving, devil-fearing town of Judsonia, Arkansas. For the record, Ditto doesn’t believe in God, but she is still scared of the devil. “I had lived a very small existence. I was coming fresh off the turnip truck. I had only recently taken my very first flight at 18 years old,” she says, noting that she was both political and pretty naive when Gossip became famous. “I wasn’t aware of the weight things carried or that people gave a shit about what I said.
The stomping rallying cry of “Standing in the Way of Control” is, in Ditto’s opinion, just part of a really sad song. “For years I said of that song: I’m angry because people are pieces of shit and they don’t respect gay people,” she recalls. It took on a tone of a pro-gay marriage anthem, she says, and itbut there was a sense that the song became so big it ran away with itself. “When your existence and your rights are being brought up in the news every day, you have become a fucking target.