But every band needs a narrative, so male music critics became fixated on describing them as hot, fun girls—whose musical skills were secondary to descriptions of how they looked. In this storyline, the girls were presented as fresh-faced and very girl-next-door, but this sanitizing of their behavior stood in great contrast to the reality of their partying, drinking, and drug use, which was on par with—or more excessive than—their male counterparts. While that wild-child rock-star behavior was a story Rolling Stone could tell about Led Zeppelin, when it was time to put the Go-Go's on the cover of their magazine, as shot by famous photographer Annie Leibovitz, the girls were outfitted in virginal white underwear and framed as cute girls any guy could fantasize about. Though the headline scandalously teased, "Go-Go's Put Out," writer Steve Pond concluded, "The Go-Go's are safe, wholesome, and proudly commercial." This was around the same time their infamous "groupie video" was leaked, in which someone taped the very high and drunk members of the band watching a roadie masturbate while they provided running commentary. It's a rock legend as famous as the story of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant ordering a shark from room service to use in a sexual act with a groupie. The episode still comes up in interviews today, but at the time it was verboten to even imply in print that the Go-Go's were anything other than a lighthearted Southern California girl band.
In 1987 Belinda Carlisle told Spin magazine about their infamous cover, "The whole sex thing was uncomfortable for us. [The Rolling Stone cover] caused a lot of shit, but the thing was, we were laughing at the typical way a female band could be packaged. A lot of people thought we were serious about it." The Go-Go's had initially rejected the idea of posing in their underwear, but eventually agreed to Leibovitz's vision. They had never resorted to exploiting their sexuality, either in song lyrics or personal presentation, and yet it still became the lens through which they were portrayed. It's rare that a female musician is able to develop her image in a way that doesn't revolve around her physical appeal to the male population.
With hit singles "We Got the Beat" and "Our Lips Are Sealed," the Go-Go's earned their place next to the biggest acts of 1981, including Duran Duran, the Police, and the Cars. The success of their first album, Beauty and the Beat, was a shock to everyone involved. It stayed at number one on the Billboard album chart for six weeks and was certified gold with sales of 500,000 by the end of the year. It ultimately went two times platinum by 1984, and the Go-Go's became the most popular, best-selling all-girl band in the history of rock music. When Jane Wiedlin quit the band and set out as a solo artist in 1985, the other girls planned to go on without her. They played a big festival in Rio and started writing a new album, but Carlisle and Caffey realized within a few months that their hearts weren't in it, and the Go-Go's effectively disbanded.
While the Go-Go's were going double platinum and slowly coming apart at the seams, the Bangles were rocketing into the girl-shaped hole left behind. Though the band was officially formed in 1981, sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson started their own all-girl garage band in the late '70s and played gigs at small local venues when they were teenagers. Vicki and I discussed this period in her life, and she remembers, "I was in high school when I found out about the Runaways, and I was kind of furious, in a weird way, that somebody had put together this concoction. They were getting all this attention and moving forward when we were playing hideous bars in Redondo Beach."
The Petersons met Susanna Hoffs and formed a band that went through multiple name changes before they eventually became the Bangles. Having had bad experiences in bands with ex-boyfriends, the women wanted to give forming an all-girl band a try. Annette Zilinskas, the band's original bassist, was replaced by Michael Steele, who had played briefly with the Runaways. These women all found each other in L.A. and began the work of establishing their band in a scene known as the Paisley Underground, where the '60s reigned supreme as the influence of choice. Comprised of dedicated scenesters who embraced the style of the '60s during the heyday of new wave and synthesizers, Hoffs describes the Paisley Underground as having a real cult feeling.
In the wake of the success of the Go-Go's, the Bangles had no problem generating interest among record labels. They released their first album, All over the Place, in 1984 on CBS Records. Though the album achieved moderate success, it wasn't until Prince wrote "Manic Monday" for the band, and it was released as the lead single from their second album, Different Light, that the Bangles charted with a hit. "Walk Like an Egyptian" propelled the album to the number-two spot on the Billboard charts, and the album went double platinum within a year.
While the Go-Go's had been able to get away with being their goofy selves, the Bangles weren't so lucky. In the music industry, especially with female stars, looks are a commodity—part of the record label's investment that must be protected. The labels' approach to styling female musicians doesn't always make for a pleasant experience. According to Susanna Hoffs, "It is so not that scene in The Wizard of Oz, that great scene where they're fluffing and puffing and making [Dorothy] up and transforming her. It is so not that. In a sense it was terrifying. When we did our first photo shoot for Columbia [Records] and our first video, all of the sudden it was scary because all these people were coming up to us and saying, ‘Wear this, do this, and here's makeup for you.'" The Bangles had to fight for the right to style their own big '80s hair and look like themselves.
The narratives of the Bangles and the Go-Go's were intersecting from the start, and it became a lazy comparison to mention the Go-Go's every time someone wrote about the Bangles. The ground became so well trod that by the time the Bangles did a cover story for Spin magazine in 1988, the Go-Go's were listed first on their press agent's list of topics to avoid. It is an understandable comparison. Here were two all-girl bands from L.A. who wrote and performed their own songs and achieved mainstream success within the same five-year time period. They had common influences, including the Shangri-La's, the Ronettes, and even the Beach Boys, and mutual admirers, from Rob Lowe to Prince. There was overlap in their back-end support as well, namely Miles Copeland, whose record label released Go-Go's albums and who also managed the Bangles.
These were two hardworking, very real bands. They were not, however, cut from the same cloth the way the music press would have us believe. The Bangles got the short end of that stick. They had to listen to the comparison for the entirety of their career, as if they could never have been successful without the Go-Go's to blaze the trail. Ultimately the Bangles imploded, like so many other girl bands. Female jealousy is potent, and it pulled the Bangles apart when the other members felt Hoffs was getting more press attention. Like Belinda Carlisle, Susanna Hoffs launched a solo career. While her singles didn't chart as high as "Heaven Is a Place on Earth," she had a successful enough career on her own.
After the Go-Go's and the Bangles came Vixen, also from L.A., who had one hit with a song written by Richard Marx. And then girl bands seemed to disappear. There were a number of riot grrrl bands in the early to mid '90s whose modus operandi was to avoid the mainstream in order to maintain control over their image. And there was a Kurt Cobain–fueled resurgence of the Shaggs and the Slits, two great underground girl bands. But it's a long, long way to the underground, particularly for teenage girls, who are often self-conscious. They are not likely to embrace underground culture at that time in their life when fitting in is one of their most important concerns.
I certainly wasn't. I consider myself lucky to have discovered Sassy. In my very small town, Jane Pratt's magazine was my only exposure to a world where high-school football games were not the main attraction. This is why there need to be more Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin–style pairings in the world: it is comforting to see some other ideas of what being cool can look like.
The Dixie Chicks came along at the end of the '90s and became the most-successful girl band of all time. After a political scuffle in the early 2000s lost them the approval of the country-music industry, they became pariahs to their core count
ry fans. Today the great girl bands I can think of (Vivian Girls, Au Revoir Simone, CocoRosie, Dum Dum Girls, Care Bears on Fire, the Like—really the list goes on and on) are hiding in the underground. The utter dearth of successful girl bands is enough to make me wonder: Do women feel they have to remain on the outside because the female voice is not considered universal?
The popular images of women in music we see most frequently today are solo female singers and all-girl singing groups who are glamazoned and processed within an inch of their hair falling off. Often these ladies are singing songs written and produced by men. It's true that many of the teenage girls watching these videos may be unaware of this fact, but that doesn't negate the impact of watching women through the filter of the male perspective. These girl singers become blank canvases for any sort of image or emotion, and they promote the idea that looking pretty and dancing are more desirable than creating. Of course, there are female artists who have railed against this idea, but for the most part they have stayed underground or turned into Courtney Love. My problem with bands that avoid the mainstream is that they're depriving girls whose only cultural barometer is Katy Perry of an alternative point of reference for what is acceptable girl behavior. It's difficult to challenge the norm when you remain so far outside it.
In spite of the successes of the Go-Go's and the Bangles, we're still a long way from seeing a plethora of all-girl bands. Girls are taught to be sexy, and it isn't sexy to be the drummer in a band, as I learned in junior high.
After leaving band during my junior year in high school, I never went back and picked up my drumsticks. Instead I picked up a pen and started pointing out to people how few female singers were in their Top Five, or on their radar at all. I started putting as many underground girl bands as I could into the lineup on MTV2's Subterranean, the music-video show I programmed. I get it: music as a whole is more niche than ever. The underground girls don't want to lose their cred, and the sellouts end up selling us makeup and hair dye instead of great songs. Girl bands have gone quiet for the time being, but I keep hoping for a new set of idols who will convince the next generation of girls to buck the stereotypes and pick drums over the clarinet.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE GIRL BANDS GONE? PLAYLIST
THE GO-GO'S, "Our Lips Are Sealed"
GOLDIE & THE GINGERBREADS, "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat"
THE CRYSTALS, "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)"
THE CRYSTALS, "He's a Rebel"
FANNY, "Butter Boy"
THE RUNAWAYS, "Cherry Bomb"
SUZI QUATRO, "The Wild One"
THE GO-GO'S, "Johnny, Are You Queer?"
THE GO-GO'S, "Living at the Canterbury"
THE GO-GO'S, "Vacation"
THE GO-GO'S, "We Got the Beat"
THE BANGLES, "Manic Monday"
THE BANGLES, "Walk Like an Egyptian"
VIXEN, "Edge of a Broken Heart"
DIXIE CHICKS, "Goodbye Earl"
INTERLUDE
my scrobble, myself
I AM CONVINCED that last.fm is the greatest social network ever invented. The appeal is in the scrobbling. For those neophytes among you, scrobbling is last.fm-speak for uploading a list of everything you've played from your iTunes and iPod and publishing this list on your last.fm profile. If I've ever asked if you have a last.fm account, it's because I want to stalk your music.
In addition to being my own personal music-stalker paradise, last.fm is also one of the best ways to find new music. You can easily check out what your friends are listening to. If you scrobble, then last.fm will recommend bands for you to add to your library that are similar to the ones you've been listening to. In the summer of 2010 my favorite album was by a Swedish band called Club 8. They had been around for a decade, but I had just discovered them. Last.fm politely noted this and recommended another little-known Swedish band called Sambassadeur, offering up a few tracks for me to listen to. I liked what I heard. So I downloaded more from the Hype Machine, a blog aggregator that lets you search for a band's name and then returns links to every blog that has posted their tracks. Now I have one more Swedish indie band in my digital music library. Last.fm is like a kind friend who is slightly more knowledgeable than I am about obscure bands and who manages to be 70 percent right in guessing what else I might like.
It also keeps stats on what I listen to, along with all the people whose music I'm stalking. I can see what artists I've played most in time frames ranging from the last week to the entire known history of my digital music. I can look at my friends' profiles and see what they're actually listening to as well. This eliminates most of the need to ask about their top-five artists—although it's fun to ask anyway, find out what they think they like, and then compare it to what they've actually listened to the most. For example, during the writing of this book I racked up a lot of listens to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Smiths in particular. Elvis Costello, R.E.M., and the Cure follow in short order. Over the course of my lifetime I'm certain I've listened to Elvis Costello far, far more than any other single artist, and if you give it six months, he will likely lap the Smiths in spins. I needed to listen to a lot of Smiths songs while I ruminated in depth on various offensive lyrics, but if you looked at my last.fm profile right this minute you'd think I was some sort of sad-bastard Smiths fanatic. I've now listened to the Smiths enough to satisfy that urge for the next five years.
I also have some bad last.fm behavior. Perhaps you've heard of Facebook stalking? I tend to last.fm stalk men I am crushed out over. Facebook and Twitter status updates pale in comparison to what I can divine about someone's day if I look at their last.fm profile. For example, I met an insanely charming Italian man who lives across the Atlantic Ocean from me. He is as in love with music as I am, and we quickly took to sharing MP3s with each other via e-mail each day. I found it essential to talk him into creating a profile on last.fm ASAP. Now I find myself obsessively stalking his last.fm page to see whether he's gotten my latest track and how quickly he listened to it. I spy on what he's listening to and figure out what sort of mood he's in. For example, I knew the day he listened to the National for six straight hours, he was going to be in a bad mood. Sure enough, his car had been towed that day and we had a little tiff that night when we spoke. Sometimes what he's listening to strikes a chord with me. Like when he has a Velvet Underground day and it occurs to me it would be lovely to hear "Beginning to See the Light." Sometimes his last.fm playlist will register a song I haven't thought about in years and I'll feel compelled to listen to it myself. And when he proposed that we should have a song of our own, I stalked his last.fm hard, scoping out what tracks he was going to put in the suggestion mix we agreed to exchange. In the past I've felt guilty about this behavior, but when I confessed to him what I'd done, he admitted he was doing the same thing. So it can't be that bad.
Statistics, recommendations, and stalking are a beautiful trifecta that makes last.fm indispensable to me. You should scrobble too, if only for the lifetime tally of how many times you listen to unexpected things. How else would I know I've listened to Pulp's "Razzmatazz" forty-one times since 2008?
MAKING OUT WITH ROMEO AND JULIET
EVERYONE CAN EMPATHIZE with the plight of two star-cross'd lovers separated by their families. Or by a popularity gap. Or by a vampiric inclination to suck human blood. Anything beyond their control will do, really. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has been influencing love stories since the sixteenth century, making it one hell of an enduring tale, as well as the inspiration for dozens of tragic teenage love stories. Love is unbearably hard on this hormone-challenged couple, whose affair is an ideal illustration of the boneheaded things kids take part in to get their own way. Teen emotions tend toward the exaggerated; rejection feels as awful as the seventh circle of hell, while love feels like that all-encompassing center of the universe. Where better to look for the soundtrack to your next makeout session than the music of Romeo and Juliet?
The Bard himself did not supply a ready-made set of hi
t songs to accompany his teen angst dramedy, so instead we can look to a trio of modern descendants for inspiration: Valley Girl, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and the Twilight Saga: New Moon.
VALLEY GIRL (1983)
Never was there a tale of more woe than that of a totally bitchin' Val Juliet and her punk-rock Hollywood Romeo. If you tried to make this movie today (and there are rumors of a remake in the works), our two main characters—Randy, as a Sunset Strip emo dude, and Julie, as an aspiring actress from Long Beach—would come off as irritating jerks. In 1983, however, their story launched an unlikely cultural appreciation for Valley-speak and led to thousands of exclamations of "gag me with a spoon!" and "like totally, I'm sure!" The heavy Val-speak dialect in this film is almost as incomprehensible as Elizabethan English. The movie hits all the right Los Angeles notes, from making Randy a student at Hollywood High to sending Julie's crew of friends to scarf down frozen yogurt at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
The conflict for these two young lovers doesn't revolve around meddling parents and feuding families. In fact, we never meet Randy's mom or pop, and Julie's parents are perfect ex-hippies who like to give Julie all the space she needs, which means no curfew and only light judgment on her materialistic lifestyle. No, the conflict here originates with Julie's friends, who don't want her to be with a weird-looking dude who dresses like a punk and isn't from the Valley. This typical conformist teenage behavior is made all the more tragic when it becomes apparent that the guy her friends want her to date is devastatingly boring. In Teenage Land, the battle between popularity and true love is a close call.
Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time Page 4