This Is It

It's quiet on 17th and Summit. It's the night before Halloween, and the hush that's fallen over this downtown strip is oddly calming. Inside the Your Face gallery, people are talking and laughing, smoking cigarettes and grinding them out on the floor. There is no furniture -- not even a countertop -- so there's no place to put ashtrays. But the gallery is packed, so the odd fact that there's nowhere to politely put out a smoke is the only reason anyone would notice that, aside from people, this room is empty.

Downstairs, the Ssion gets ready to perform. The women -- Erin Zona, Taylor Painter-Woof and Shannon Michaels -- drape narrow strips of knit material over themselves, duct-taping the unraveling strands to their skin to make sure they don't end up doing an accidental strip show. Their ringleader, Cody Critcheloe, is changing into some really short cutoffs. The word COLLEGEhas been written across his ass.

Upstairs, the house lights go down.

A nasal voice permeates the room. I went to New York, I had a dream, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to be a star, I wanted to make people happy, I worked really hard and my dream came true. This bit, recorded on Madonna's Virgin tour, plays on a loop. Finally, the Ssion comes walking up the stairs. It's still dark. Madonna's still talking. A projector kicks on, and the screen behind a platform lights up. Music begins. At the back of the platform, the women raise their arms and move their sparkly hands as though they're in a high-school play. Critcheloe is up front near the audience.

A guitar chord booms, and the performers fall to the ground. The song, "Gonna Faint," is about four anonymous boys of rock tempting Critcheloe to quit school and follow them. Animated video runs on the screen as the singers move crazily through '80s-inspired dance steps. In it, an illustrated Critcheloe is stolen by the Faint. The song concludes, I hate new wave, and I hate the truth/What I want is an ocean view. Everybody cheers. A lot has happened in a few short minutes.

What hasn't happened is the thing you'd most expect. Nobody has played an instrument. Each performer has a microphone and is really singing, but in spite of some serious punk-rock sounds, the music has all been prerecorded.

That's why there's some confusion as to whether the Ssion is a band. Three of the performers are students at the Kansas City Art Institute; the fourth graduated from there last year. Since they aren't playing any music, and they're all artists, it might make more sense to call them performance artists. Bands, after all, are composed of musicians.

It's Critcheloe who blurs the line. He is a musician; he's just not playing live. Critcheloe began playing music with his friend Gary Bobary Carver while they were attending high school in Lewisport, Kentucky. They'd met each other in a crowd, drawn together by their respective T-shirts: Critcheloe was wearing a Hole T-shirt, and Carver had on a Nirvana T-shirt in a town that considered rock and roll the work of a Satanic cult. "As their friendship blossomed and music took center stage in their lives," Critcheloe writes of himself and Carver on the Ssion's Web site, "the community began to shun them, thus they chose to call themselves the Ssion" (which, they noted, was like "mission without the MI and progression without the PRO!"). Soon, Critcheloe met two punk girls in the nearby town of Owensboro. They joined the band, adding the female scream to its sound. The group distributed some tapes they'd recorded on a four-track until Critcheloe graduated from high school. Since moving to Kansas City, he's continued to record with Carver during his summers back home, resulting in the album that the Ssion performed straight through at Your Face: I Don't Want New Wave and I Don't Want the Truth.

Even though Critcheloe has made the music that he and his three friends perform, some people who are part of the underground music scene are quick to call the Ssion performance art, not music. Critcheloe observes that "it's hard to convince anyone that it's valid because so many people are really attached to that idea of getting on stage with instruments. Boys especially. There's this attachment guys have to their guitars."

Critcheloe's history in Kansas City doesn't help his cause. He is known primarily for making zines and stickers labeled "Angry, Young and Rich." Critcheloe also made a video, starring Zona, Painter-Woof and Michaels (among others). It was called I'm Serious, and like "Angry, Young and Rich," it affectionately made fun of people who rigorously adopted the trappings of various subcultures. Throughout the video, he interviews superficial artist-characters about why they're mad and gets them to meet at the end for an apparently pointless revolution. Critcheloe's audience was close enough to this scene to understand the jokes as loving jabs, not vicious blows.

Now his target is music. This time around, Critcheloe's trusted actresses play backup vocalists -- it is important that they not be scenesters themselves. Most of the songs are about being in bands. Others, such as "I Live in NYC and I Am Beautiful," make fun of scene mongers.