Jaguar Jonze: “People Don’t Realise How Much It Takes To Fight”

Content warning for mentions of sexual assault.

Deena Lynch is known for never pulling her punches — but for some time now, she’s been running on empty. Jaguar Jonze, the brash anti-hero persona we hear in her music, has always been a powerful rejoinder to patriarchy and authority — and a source of strength for not just her devoted fans, but the woman herself.

But real life has caught up. In 2020, she was a crucial figure in kickstarting the #MeToo movement within the Australian music industry. Last year, she testified against two music producer perpetrators in a high-profile sexual assault case that ended in a mistrial, set to be reheard later this year. If you haven’t been in her position, it’s easy to praise her for using her artistic platform for activism, for “tirelessly” pushing for systemic change — without realising the toll all of it, even the accolades, can take. As she tells me, “People think of me as a machine. That I have an unlimited resource of energy, and I don’t have emotions.”

“I don’t think people realise how much it takes to fight, and find the strength to keep reliving that trauma.”

victim impact statement, the third Jaguar Jonze EP, sits on a razor’s edge of confession and artistic expression, of exhaustion laced with rage. Stark and acoustic, with an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, its three songs are unlike anything she’s recorded before — but also every bit the flipside of the woman who sang ‘Who Died and Made You King?’. In the accompanying press release, Jaguar takes the first steps to reclaim her image from those who prop up the glass ceiling, and those who’ve put her on an impossible pedestal — which is another form of objectification.

“I am not the poster girl for trauma or #metoo. I am not a parking lot for your mistakes and pain. I am not an educator. I am not responsible for your abuse of power and privilege. I am not the place to collect social credits and tick boxes. I am not my trauma, colour or gender. I am not the sexual assault I never consented to. I am no longer the story. I am one of you.”

Since 2021, Jaguar and I have spoken exactly once a year. The first time, we discovered that we had a similar gift for cutting right to the heart of intense conversations — but just as memorable was her often goofy energy and quirky turns of phrase, that don’t always come through in text form. In 2022, she was poised for a breakthrough with the release of her debut album BUNNY MODE, but the burden of advocacy was already getting to her. Still, she was equally generous with me in a time when I needed it too. As journalists, we don’t often get to interview artists more than once — let alone with such mutual brutal honesty — but we’re both grateful to have a space where we can speak without fear that her narrative will be co-opted or oversimplified. For that reason, this will be one of the only interviews she gives for this EP.

When we finally met in person right after her set at Midsumma Street Party 2023, she was still thrown off by a racist comment a punter had yelled. No one else watching would have felt anything but her complete dedication, but like a rock in her shoe, there was no ignoring it.

This time, she’s determined to get to the root of it all. Sitting within the State Library of Victoria’s grandeur, she’s wearing a 24-hour heart monitor and trying to reschedule an MRI, searching for answers to the burnout and physical trauma she’s been carrying for so long.

 

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Typically, a record release would be a cause for celebration with fans — but Jaguar didn’t write these songs with the intention of being heard by anyone else. They came as a form of poetry, and purging, before she wrote her actual victim impact statement for the courts. “Release week has been grief week,” she explains. “The idea of it going back out into the world was bringing stuff out of me. It’s a lot of grieving for the last five years, because when you come out of survival mode, what happens next? Grief processing, recovering, healing. Endless. So it feels like I’m processing a death. The old me.”

Within the quiet of these songs is a challenge: to look upon her emotional and physical scars, and instead of responding with admiration or pity, to see her as someone telling her story on her own terms. She admits, “I feel like I’m always very intimate and vulnerable. But this EP and the short film were a truly vulnerable place that I think even I struggle to sit in.”

In ‘whiplash’, she sings, “Feel like I’m doing the time for somebody’s mistake/Tired of checking the mirrors and riding the brakes/So I’ll be the flowers they drive past everyday/And they’ll look away…” The lyrical metaphors she often deploys have ceased to be metaphors; they’re simply blunt evocations of the impact of trauma.

In the short film that accompanies the release, Jaguar trades the highly stylised studio clips of the past for “something that was more vulnerable and expressive of my inner child”. Shot in gauzy soft focus, she stares into mirrors, broods in bathtubs and gardens, and cuts vegetables in odd ways in a series of domestic scenes. While the obvious thing to do would have been a stripped-back, makeup-free look, she’s still styled like Jaguar Jonze — just softer. “I wanted to express the facade that we have to perform and live up to with the societal expectations that are placed upon us,” she says.

“That shoot was actually really difficult for me because it was the most feminine version of myself that I’ve ever been in. I don’t express femininity in the way society expects me to, for a male gaze. But I wanted to express that turmoil I’ve had to live up to, through the advocacy, trying to be an artist building a sustainable career. They’re the moments that you see glamour — it’s my version of the expectations that are placed on women.”

In the final song, “full stop”, she falls backwards into a lake — in typical Jaguar Jonze fashion, against the wishes of her entire crew. “I still haven’t told anyone that I could feel a snake by my leg because they were already freaking out. But I was one with nature!” she laughs. (Later, she remembered that it had been eels she felt; not a snake.) “There’s something so symbolic about cleansing yourself and stripping away that facade you’ve had to construct to survive.”

Within both the courts and broader cultural conversations around sexual assault, there’s still an expectation to be the perfect victim at all times. It’s easier for the media to laud her as an advocate than to call out the music industry and legal system for their fundamental structural failures. That position treats the status quo as the default, and puts the onus of change on those fighting from beneath.

In the music industry, there’s a similar expectation that artists must be happy to be there — to always work within the system, go along with the PR narrative, and never commit to a left-of-centre moral or political stance, in order to grow your fanbase. In Australia in particular, there’s a notion that either you’ve “made it” or you haven’t. That you should be thankful if you make any sort of living off your art, rather than critical of the global streaming economy and disproportionately low local arts funding that have made it increasingly difficult. Labour’s $286m federal arts policy, announced last year, is still only 0.6 percent of the annual subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry, despite the fact that, according to VICE, “Australia’s arts sector employs about six times as many people as the fossil fuel sector.”

Even in arts journalism, there’s an unspoken pressure to be optimistic; to frame every part of an artist’s narrative as their next potential success. To always be overcoming challenges, never acknowledging that they can actually break you. But Jaguar story is not a simple narrative of tragedy to triumph, as it’s sometimes been depicted. It’s been a lifelong cycle of healing, seeking shelter, recovering and growing stronger — then having her sense of safety upturned again and again.

And so for Jaguar Jonze, there is no choice other than to be honest. “When I took the risk to speak up, everyone thought I was crazy, that the risk was so high and I was jeopardising my career — and that still could be true,” she says. “But I can’t believe the changes it led to as well. That’s something I find joy in, that my advocacy was hopefully able to create bigger changes within the music industry, society, and in the government. But also it comes at a cost.”

Still, she remains optimistic. “I want to prove that it’s possible to smash the glass ceiling or the bamboo ceiling. And hopefully, for that, to carry on to the next generation of emerging artists that usually aren’t represented in the Australian music industry. That’s why I’ve been holding on and fighting so hard, because if I can just crack a small little hole, then maybe the next person can continue smashing, to the point that we have this beautiful, diverse, multicultural representation of the amazing artistry that does exist in the music industry, but aren’t usually platformed.”

Jaguar Jonze’s collaborator and touring partner-in-crime, the Japanese noise-punk artist Haru Nemuri, has a song on her latest EP called “No Pain, No Gain Is Shit”. I think that says it all. It can be a great gift to create art in response to suffering. But the inciting incidents themselves — they’re aberrations. “You don’t grow from the pain or the things that aren’t your fault. The display of resilience you show, that’s what you grow from,” Jaguar says.

“When you’re in those dark times, you truly confront the truths of what you’re denying, and you make a choice of either falling into it, or making some drastic changes to look after yourself.”

Jaguar Jonze has never been anything less than fully committed. But for now, she’s taking a step back — to stop fulfilling everyone else’s expectations and reclaim herself. If nothing else, she hopes that victim impact statement will “close the chapter for everything that has happened in the last five years”.

As she sings in the EP’s final lines, “this is where I ride off/leave you with a full stop.”

Jaguar Jonze’s new EP victim impact statement is out now.