These Boots are Made For Walking

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G George Arts presents 'These Boots are Made For Walking', Singing after Nancy. With a contradictory reputation as one of the most assured pop fuck you songs, and the seedy celebrity around the songs producer encouraging the 26 year old Nancy Sinatra to sing the song as if she were "a sixteen-year-old girl who fucks truck drivers”, These Boots are made for walking poses a showy, theatrical quandary. As this is a particularly pertinent moment to examine the song in relation to it's sexual politics and use as a protest song (These Boots are Made for Marching), G George reached out to artists to reinterpret the song.  The result is a cacophony. BFF666 and Amber Hanson Rowe's pieces cut through with jangly, defiant, insolence. A collaboration between Eden Mitsenmacher and Rebecca Tritschler undermines the idea of the archetypal "feisty woman scorned" protagonist with wit and pulsating udder-like toes. Katie Tindle also references the pressures imposed by songs of this type, as she struggles both to sing and hold the pose held by Nancy Sinatra on her "Boots" album cover. Finally, Sol King's mocking, languorous cover leaves you unsure of which of these versions is definitive. 

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Curated by G George