Mommy Dearest: An Interview With Be Your Own Pet’s Jemina Pearl (Part I)

Inside the first album in 15 years from the garage-punk goddess and her now-grown still-great band

Be Your Own Pet circa 2023 (Photo by Kirsten Barnett)

Be Your Own Pet was my favorite band of the 2000s; you’d be hard-pressed to find youthful, high-energy guitar music, especially in punk, that was so funny and smart about the desire to be dumb, with such explosive stage presence. They barely recorded for more than five years — from teenhood to drinking age, basically — before becoming victims of some of the industry’s stupidest blunders, like the parent company behind Eminem and Marilyn Manson barring songs from release for violent content. I insist the volcanic Jemina Pearl belongs in the pantheon with Joan Jett and Debbie Harry for completely devouring any room she played in, wailing over garage-glam and headlong hardcore with equal confidence and aplomb.

Her sidemen made great foils too, as she clonked their heads together like Moe at the premature end of “Bummer Time” (“Only one at the end dumb shits”) or corraled them into a Greek chorus chanting “we don’t like Becky anymore” on the Brill Building-esque epic about a friendship with an untimely end. Their cleverness (“My brain is on fire / So piss right in my ear”), irreverence (why not name a messy jam “Stairway to Heaven?”), and foresight to lean into a Buffyesque we’re-playing-teens-on-TV schtick in videos and lyrics (with a one-per-album song about zombies requirement) had no peer.