If you listen to any basic overview of ‘60s-era girl-group pop, you hear a lot of songs about boys who are misunderstood rebels. Nobody loves them except the girl singing the song, and without her, the sensitive heart underneath that rough exterior would wither and die. If you start to dig deeper into the genre, you pick up on a peculiar – and disturbing – subgenre of songs about boys who are not pseudo-dangerous, but actually violent. Given the romantic conventions of girl-group pop, these characters are not exactly depicted from an empowering feminist point of view. Artifacts like these might be a better barometer of the era’s culture by showing us where an average girl might turn for help making sense of what was happening to her in real life. Nobody is pretending to make high art here. These are commercial products, tailored by adults to reflect their best guesses as to what teenage girls might relate to, and thus spend money on.On one side of the coin, you have Joanie Sommers’ “Johnny Get Angry,” which on the surface seems like a celebration of regressive gender politics (“I want a brave man/I want a caveman!”) written by a man (frequent Burt Bacharach lyricist Hal David). As the song tells it, Joanie has played one of those silly teenage-girl games and broken up with Johnny so that he’ll protest angrily and give her lots of negative attention. But the plan backfires when Johnny fails to object, and just goes along with it. Downplaying her own role in provoking the whole mess, Joanie is heartbroken and hurt, and spends most of the song castigating Johnny for being a pussy. She doesn’t want to get beaten up or anything; she just wants “the biggest lecture I’ve ever had,” and someone to “look up to” and be “the boss.” Then Joanie spends the second verse complaining that Johnny never gets mad when she purposely lets other guys cut in at dances. And we realize…this chick isn’t a victim, she is a manipulative, ball-busting drama queen. And we know what Johnny’s future will be like in a few years if he takes her back: Joanie will instigate shit with some random dude at a bar, scream at Johnny “Are you going to let him talk to me like that?!”, and then secretly get her rocks off watching the overt displays of testosterone unleashed in her name, satisfying her own cavewoman instinct to find a man who can protect their offspring, hunt the woolly mammoth for food, and maybe spank her during sex. No, we do not need to worry about Joanie Sommers. And the song seems to know it, sticking an insouciant kazoo solo right in the middle of the orchestral arrangement.
The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” on the other hand, is every bit as downright creepy as the title suggests. It was produced by legendary control-freak psycho and now-convicted murderer Phil Spector, which is a fairly telling connection. But as often as Spector threatened his lovers with guns and imprisonment, it’s important to note that he didn’t write this song – no, the prolific commercial team responsible for this one is Gerry Goffin and future ‘70s heroine Carole King. There’s no intentional provocation we can see in this one; the singer confesses to her boyfriend that she’s seen someone else, and he hits her. Spector’s arrangement – more restrained here than his typical work – still surges dramatically behind singer Barbara Alston as she rationalizes that her man must care about her a great deal, or he wouldn’t have gotten so angry. Lines as stark and simple as “He hit me, and I was glad” and “He hit me, and I knew I loved him” ensured that no matter how skilled the performances or Spector’s production were, radio was not going to touch this record with a 50-foot pole. It’s great artistic technique in the service of something reprehensible, not unlike watching D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. The Crystals themselves reportedly hated the song (go figure), and couldn’t understand why Spector had pushed so hard for them to record it (though, in hindsight, perhaps it does make a bit more sense). Spector would go on to fuck with the Crystals even more, putting their name on records that were actually by non-member Darlene Love, then using the original membership to record an unairable single called “(Let’s Dance) The Screw,” which was designed to screw his former business partner out of royalties from the next Crystals single.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment